A former Goldman Sachs VP named Peter Simonyi (who previously worked for the SEC) ended up working as a top staffer for Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) on the Oversight Committee under the name Peter Haller. He went on to argue against regulations on Wall Street. The Young Turks host Cenk Uygur breaks it down.
Slang words like fauxgressive can, if they take hold, affect the public conversation. Loaded with socially charged meaning, being quick and fun to use, and serving as a banner word for a social movement, these types of words have the potential to be socially influential memes.
The conviction that taxation is intrinsically evil has achieved a sadomasochistic fervor in conservative circles—producing the Tea Party, their Republican zombies, and increasingly terrifying failures of governance[…] Conservatives view taxation as a species of theft—and to raise taxes, on anyone for any reason, is simply to steal more.
Read more . . .
Yet more empirical evidence that private/religious schools perform no better than public schools. Private school vouchers are little more than another private sector scheme to transfer public funds into private coffers. [MSH]
[S]tudents in Milwaukee using vouchers to attend private and religious schools perform no better on standardized tests than their counterparts in public schools.
I have worked with investors for 60 years and I have yet to see anyone — not even when capital gains rates were 39.9 percent in 1976-77 — shy away from a sensible investment because of the tax rate on the potential gain. People invest to make money, and potential taxes have never scared them off. And to those who argue that higher rates hurt job creation, I would note that a net of nearly 40 million jobs were added between 1980 and 2000. You know what’s happened since then: lower tax rates and far lower job creation.
With an unprecedented sum of wealth held within the top one-tenth of one percent of the US population, we now have the most severe inequality of wealth in US history… Given modern technology and wealth, American citizens should not be living in poverty. The statistics demonstrate that we now live in a neo-feudal society. In comparison to the wealthiest one-tenth of one percent of the population, who are sitting on top of tens of trillions of dollars in wealth, we are essentially propagandized peasants.
The final jackboot on the neck of the working classes was the second coming of George W Bush with a brain – the presidency of Barack Obama, thought by the deluded to be a resurrected FDR. For a brief credulous period during his campaign of “hope and change” he was thought to be the last, best chance for a transformative federal government, but now revealed as a total fraud and the ultimate in cynicism and futility.
By Madison S. Hughes (05.21.2011)
Within the distorted noodle of vulgar corporatist thought government appears as a specter; antithetically, the constellations of the erudite progressive mind exposes the corporation as the monolith it is.
[…] Republicans can generally be trusted more than Democrats to do what they say they are going to do. He won the Presidency by a healthy margin and had overwhelming popular support. He had the backing of 60 Democrats in the Senate and a similarly strong contingent in the Congress. Furthermore, he had the people and the facts on his side on so many fronts.
Always Question Authority 