Republicans And Business Groups Unable To Find One 'Job Creator' Who Opposes A Tax On Millionaires
From the article:
NPR put out a request to Republican offices and the business groups that have been lobbying against the surtax to find business owners who'd be affected. Unsurprisingly, Republican leadership and the business groups came up empty:
We wanted to talk to business owners who would be affected. So, NPR requested help from numerous Republican congressional offices, including House and Senate leadership. They were unable to produce a single millionaire job creator for us to interview.
So we went to the business groups that have been lobbying against the surtax. Again, three days after putting in a request, none of them was able to find someone for us to talk to. A group called the Tax Relief Coalition said the problem was finding someone willing to talk about their personal taxes on national radio.
They are probably unwilling to talk about it because it would expose their greed and selfishness. If the number of Millionaires who said they support increased taxes on the wealthy was increased by two, we would be that much closer to reversing the income inequality trend begun under the Ronald Reagan Presidency.
The Treasury Department relied on the recommendations of the Fed to decide which banks were healthy enough to get TARP money and how much, the former officials say. The six biggest U.S. banks, which received $160 billion of TARP funds, borrowed as much as $460 billion from the Fed, measured by peak daily debt calculated by Bloomberg using data obtained from the central bank. Former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson didn't respond to a request for comment.
The six -- JPMorgan, Bank of America, Citigroup Inc. (C), Wells Fargo & Co. (WFC), Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) and Morgan Stanley -- accounted for 63 percent of the average daily debt to the Fed by all publicly traded U.S. banks, money managers and investment- services firms, the data show. By comparison, they had about half of the industry's assets before the bailout, which lasted from August 2007 through April 2010. The daily debt figure excludes cash that banks passed along to money-market funds.
UPDATE: Goldman Sachs and other hedge fund operators were given advance notice of Freddie/Fannie actions by then-Secretary Paulson, a former GS exec - compelling some to see their lawyers immediately. (h/t Kos.)
Ten leading US lenders may have unlawfully foreclosed on the mortgages of nearly 5,000 active-duty members of the US military in recent years, according to data released by a federal regulator. [...]
The data released by the OCC are based on estimates prepared by lenders and their consultants. BofA said it is reviewing 2,400 foreclosures involving active-duty military families to see if they were conducted properly. Wells Fargo is reviewing 870 foreclosures and Citigroup is looking at 700 cases.
Those 3 banks operate in Colorado. Fort Carson, in Colorado Springs, is a primary hub of support for our military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, has an enormous number of service members and their families who live both on base and in local off-base housing.
Would government regulation, something Republicans like Doug Lamborn and Mike Coffman are always complaining about, have helped reduce the amount of money we gave to banks so they wouldn't crash?
More Pepper Spray uses against peaceful Americans by our Hyper-militarized Police forces here, here, here, here, here....h/t FDL, tumblr and the Pepper Spraying Cop.
We are writing to ask you to do the right thing for our country and REJECT ANY Super Committee deal that does not raise tax rates on incomes over $1 million to AT LEAST 39.6%, REGARDLESS of how many deductions are eliminated.
Private jets shouldn't have been tax deductible in the first place.
Thank you,
Patriotic Millionaires and Patriotic Americans
Love it. Poll after poll after poll shows Americans - even Indys and Republicans - agree. The politics of the day say Democrats should pound this message home hourly. But our congressional millionaires, Jared Polis and Michael Bennet have been clearly corrupted by the air in DC and are faint examples of what a Colorado Democrat can be.
Shame on both of them. They are shamed by their Peers in the One Percent: Millionaires who urgently want to preserve the Middle Class, Millionaires who can afford and want to pay more taxes so everyone in America can participate and thrive within a democracy that could be the most wealthy nation in history.
Last night, Ohioans soundly turned back an assault on worker's rights, defeating Issue 2 with 61% of the vote, and repealing the anti-labor SB 5. And they did it with a broad coalition, which points to a total reversal of the voting bloc that brought Governor John Kasich to power in 2010. It could have long-lasting implications for 2012 and beyond.
Guy Molyneux of Hart Research did polling last night for the AFL-CIO on Issue 2. And he released some eye-popping numbers on a conference call. Independents favored No on 2 by a 57-43 margin. This group voted for John Kasich in 2010, according to exit polls, by a 59-41 margin, a reversal of 32 points. And the numbers were even starker among working-class white voters. They went No on 2 with 61% of the vote, the same share as the overall electorate. In 2010, that group voted 57-43 for Kasich, a 36-point difference. White working class voters only give Kasich a 41% approval rating. Overall, 66% of Ohioans favor collective bargaining.
That is a sea change in electoral politics in the course of just one year. Labor took over 90% of Democrats and 30% of Republicans in their broad coalition, along with 57% of independents.
This should be a object lesson for local Democrats who have been rejecting their base in Colorado.
Ohio should be a very clear reminder of that very recent history for elected Democrats who have gotten elected on base Democratic principles - yet forgotten them once sworn in to office.
If there was any doubt in your mind to just how indifferent the 1% is to the needs of the 99%, or whether Bloomberg sees Occupy Wall Street as a mere nuisance, I think this news will clear that right up:
New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg will host an intimate dinner at Gracie Mansion on Sunday night that brings together a bipartisan group of senators, Xerox chief executive Ursula Burns and other business and labor leaders to discuss how to pave the way for the Super Committee to "go big" and cut $4 trillion in federal spending, according to a source familiar with the dinner.
The Washington contingent includes Democratic Sens. Michael Bennet and Mark Warner and Republican Sens. Bob Corker, and Saxby Chambliss, among others. The meeting will be a much smaller, more strategic affair -- 10 to 20 people -- than a similar dinner Warner threw at his home in September, which had a guest list of 60.
The records of the meeting should be released to the public immediately and Bennet should come clean on everything that goes on there. Michael Bennet continues to be disgusting failure as a representative of the people of Colorado.
Maybe a Tea Party senator wouldn't have been so bad after all - at least they laid their cards out up front.
According to exclusive reporting from Reuters the Democrats on the Super Committee are offering to cut Medicare and Medicaid benefits as part of a roughly $3 trillion grand bargain, which would well exceed the $1.2 trillion minimum goal the committee is tasked with meeting. From Reuters:
It calls for between $200 billion and $300 billion in new economic stimulus spending that would be paid for with lower interest payments from reducing deficits.
It also seeks around $400 billion in Medicare savings, with half coming in benefit cuts and the other half in cuts to healthcare providers. Details of that proposal were scant but tackling the popular Medicare program is always politically risky for politicians.
It is unlikely this specific deal being offered by the Democrats on the committee will be accepted by Republicans, because it calls for tax increases and more stimulus, but it still puts our social safety net in danger. It is another instance of the Democratic party steadily moving towards the official position of saying Medicare benefits can and should be cut.
Both our senators are still afraid to do that's truly needed to fulfill their oaths and fix our budget mess. They are in mortal electoral fear of Grover Norquist's idiotic pledge and its adherents and the constant rhetorical war Republicans wage on common sense. And they do almost nothing to fight either.
Sales of single family homes worth $1 million or more increase in September
Forty-seven homes including 42 single-family homes and five condos sold in September in the Denver metropolitan area for $1 million or higher, according to real-estate analyst Gary Bauer.
...
Bauer said of the 42 single-family homes sold in September, the highest price was for a 9,694 square foot home with four bedrooms and seven baths. It sold for $3.8 million.
The average selling price in September for single-family homes in the $1 million or more category was $1,478,593.
The active inventory for single-family at the end of September was 799 units and 84 condo units.
Bauer said that of the 395 single-family homes sold so far this year, the highest price was $8.2 million for a 12,298 square foot home with five bedrooms and nine bathrooms.
Of the 31 condos sold this year, the largest amount paid was $2.47 million for a 2,691 square foot three bedroom and three bathroom condo.
For Mike Rosen: I don't begrudge anyone a nice fat salary and the ability to buy a beautiful house. It still is the American Dream. But the 1% don't need any more help achieving it, and it would behoove us all if they pitched in a bit more to re-establish the middle class and rebuild our infrastructure so they can continue to thrive in this economy.
WetherDem noted Jon Caldara's lies passed on by The Denver Post in a recent article about Occupy Denver. Caldara gets off several obfuscations in just a few sentences that the Denver Post writer dutifully cut and pasted from Caldara's press release.
Probably the clearest explanation for the Occupy Wall Street protests has been coming from Jesse LaGreca who also blogs at Kos as Ministry of Truth. Here he is again explaining how the interests of Wall Street are systematically crushing the lives of Middle Class Americans -- the 99% of us who don't have Lobbyists or the cell phone numbers of our leaders -- and how big-time media types like Caldara, Mike Rosen, Rosen enlisting a dick army, and reporters at The Post don't yet have a clue (or pretend not to) about the reasons for the growing national protest:
Caldara has many platforms from which to spread his lies, either as the President of the Conservative-Corporate-funded Independence Institute (nice MySpace page, dude!), or as a long-time employee of the largest beneficiary of the FCC's generosity with our Publicly Owned airwaves via Clear Channel radio. The Post gave him a free pass once again, but we should all know that if Caldara's saying he's against it, then it's probably good for our Democracy and good for the 99% of us who don't fit into Caldara's world view. And, if the Post doesn't bother to check it, it's probably full of lies.
I took a break to enjoy the holiday, as I'm sure many of you did, but my inbox kept busy, and on Friday came a doozy, courtesy of the Washington Post.
You remember that little bit of a banking crisis we had a couple of years back, where banks around the world might have possibly, maybe, just a little, conspired in a giant scheme to package toxic mortgage loans into Grade A, investment-ready securities instruments, which then blew up in everyone's faces to the tune of a whole lot of taxpayer bailouts?
Well all of a sudden, it looks like an agency of the Federal Government is looking to do something about it, in a real big way.
Last Friday the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) announced they're suing 17 firms (I'll give you a list, bit it's pretty much all the usual suspects); depending on who you ask the Feds are seeking an amount as high as $200 billion.
As Joe Biden would say, it's a big...well, it's a big deal, anyway, and that's why we're starting the new week with this one.
(If Sen. Udall votes to "spread the pain" to the Big Three, will Democrats re-elect him? - promoted by WeatherDem)
Colorado Senator Mark Udall complained on the senate floor late last year about the nation's short-term memory loss wrt our budget situation. This was about the time Bush's tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires were extended at the behest of a hostage-taking Republican Tea Party:
"We are suffering from the worst possible case of collective short-term memory loss. During the past decade, tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans didn't lead to job creation and instead helped cause a skyrocketing deficit. Why would we believe it will be any different this time around? As I've said many times, instead of borrowing more money to pay for tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires, we should focus our attention on reducing our national debt, stabilizing Social Security for the long term, and finding common-sense ways to create jobs."
That's real purty, and the fact this statement was meant for public consumption goes with the inclusion of contacts for Udall's spokes-ghost* Tara Trujillo at (303) 650-7820.
I'm thinking Udall is counting on our memory loss to have us forget he actually had the proper answer for our budget problem. By now the Esteemed Senator has changed his tune on Social Security and is prescribing "pain" for all of us that will come in varying forms: the pain for Udall would be undoing the Udall legacy while having to read some nasty blog posts about how he has lied to Colorado's citizens; the pain for us would be in the cuts to Social Security and Medicare that he now feels are absolutely necessary but which will won't fix a thing but how Lawrence Kudlow thinks of Mark Udall. I would describe the pain as more like a medieval treatment with leeches.
As many of us know, Colorado House Democrats lost their majority after the 2010 election by one member. Among other goals for 2012, regaining the majority in the House is a priority. I want to do my part in helping Democrats regain the majority and one way to do that is to work with my House District to elect a Democrat. House District 29 has a Democratic challenger to a Republican incumbent: Tracy Kraft-Tharp. My intention in this post is to introduce the Democratic activist community to Tracy - an introduction that is real, not rumor. I will do so by writing about topics I discussed with Tracy earlier this week.
Tracy's message is simple: she is running so that HD29 has someone representing everybody. Her focus will be on supporting the community. She has experience crafting solutions with multiple stakeholders in a number of jobs and endeavors. She is familiar with the legislative process. Tracy is well situated to start making a positive impact early in her role as a Representative.
I have not been talking about the insanity around the debt ceiling and debt and deficit and the efforts of Republicans to drive us all off the cliff, but I am today - and I'm going to do it by allowing you to grab ahold of this problem and see for yourself just how unbelievably bad this manufactured crisis is going to be.
You will hear a lot of conversation about the consequences from others; today, however, you are going to get the chance to be both the President and the Secretary of the Treasury, and you will get to decide for yourself exactly what bills the Federal Government should and should not pay as the cash runs out if a deal is not made by the time borrowing authority runs out.
At that point you'll be able to see what's coming for yourself - and once you do, you won't need me to tell you what ugly is going to look like.
(FNS - Washington, New Germany, April 17, 1947) America's new Führer, Adolf Hitler, announced today that his official War History would in fact acknowledge that one of the biggest contributing factors to the defeat of the Allies was the insistence of the former United States of America on sticking to its Balanced Budget Amendment, which left them unable to fund the wartime conversion of the US economy for the benefit of the Alliance.
"All those ideas Mr. Roosevelt spoke of", said Hitler, "Lend-Lease, modular shipbuilding, War Bonds, secret weapons...in the end, all of them were just words, since the Americans' Congress was never willing to allow the country to fully fund its war effort."
This, from House Democratic Caucus Chairman John Larson is decent, but rare:
"The American people get it. They are weary of the theater and the political drama because they understand that it is their pensions, their savings, their mortgages and their 401Ks that the Republicans are playing with. This shouldn't be about who's going to be the next President or who's going to control Congress, it should be about who's going to protect their savings, their mortgages and their 401Ks in this crisis. Republicans continue to hold in disregard Americans true needs: jobs and financial security.
"For the sake of the nation, it's time to forget the politics and vote a clean debt ceiling increase, as was done seven times for President Bush."
The sheer incompetence of our employees on our side is staggering. It adds insult to injury, and I hope it leads to a massive refudiation of the Democratic Party Establishment, because they are failing massively before our very eyes.
Like Lucy taking the football from Charlie Brown's poised kicking toe, Republicans have once again punked Democrats on the budget process. Will our side ever learn that they are congenital liars and that Republican leaders cannot be trusted to negotiate in good faith?
House Majority Leader Eric Cantor pulled out of bipartisan negotiations to raise the nation's debt limit, according to multiple reports.
The Wall Street Journal reports that Cantor indicated an impasse over taxes prompted his exit from the budget discussions for now. A GOP aide close to the talks told The Huffington Post that the disagreement could only be settled by President Barack Obama and House Speaker John Boehner.
The aide said that Cantor was open to returning to the table, but that they've come to an impasse over "not so small tax increases" that Democrats are insisting on. "We can't go there, so until Boehner and Obama resolve that, it doesn't make much sense for Eric to keep going to the meetings."
Here again Democrats have demurred on making the case for fairly taxing the rich and corporations to resolve current budget and deficit issues. Cowards like Michael Bennet continue to neglect the fact that taxes are the lowest in generations, and those who aren't paying their fair share are banking trillions of dollars as our economy continues to piddle.
Democrats had better go on the offense, had better figure out how to make tax increases an inevitable occurrence and prepare themselves for the onslaught of lies until the economy turns around.
President Obama could lead the way to sound progressive policies on the budget "crisis". He will certainly have to change some of his assumptions and tactics. Senator Bennet might have the nerve to follow. But now the issue is being kicked down the road again thanks to another strategic win by Republicans and the continuing inability of Democrats to propose common-sense solutions that the public wants and needs. In order to truly kill this ongoing recession - a recession and debt that Republicans are mostly responsible for - Democrats will have to take the heat during the next election cycle and do what's right, maybe even fight for some "not so small" tax increases........something they've been unwilling to do even after given a clear mandate in 2008.
After taking control of the House of Representatives last November, congressional Republicans came up with a surefire way to cut government spending and shrink the federal deficit - ban earmarks.
U.S. Rep. Doug Lamborn, who represents Colorado Springs, wrote an editorial supporting the ban, and targeted what he called "an important first step toward fundamentally changing the way taxpayer dollars are spent in Washington."
By the time he threw his support behind the ban, Lamborn had requested at least $156 million in earmarks, much of it for military bases in his Colorado district, but also tens of millions in contracts for companies that had donated to his campaign.
From the 2008 through 2010 fiscal years, Lamborn got the second-highest amount of earmark money of the 10 Colorado House members who served during those years, including three who were in the House for a part of that time - Reps. Marilyn Musgrave, Tom Tancredo and Sen. Mark Udall.
It's never a surprise to me that Republicans can lie about, and get away with, their love of family values, their hatred of earmarks, their concern about the (Democratic) debt, their disgust with (Democratic) wars. Dougie-boy says he's a good Christian. In Colorado Springs that means funding a perpetual war machine to make sure we can kill our enemies, sending our young off to fight at a moment's notice, and making sure our major corporations never want for a profit.
Forty-nine percent of registered voters said they would choose Romney over Obama if the election were held today, compared to 46 who would reelect Obama, the poll found. While that lead was small enough to be considered within the margin of error, the pair are still tied at 47 percent among all Americans.
The president's political weakness appears to be driven by Americans' dissatisfaction over the state of the economy. On Monday, veteran Democratic strategist James Carville warned the president's reelection could be "very rough" if job growth doesn't rebound. And to that end, dissatisfaction with Obama's handling of the economy and the federal budget deficit is at an all-time high in the ABC/Post poll.
Barack Obama has done this to himself: his vow to look forward, not back, has let Republicans off the hook for a multitude of bad policies and most of our Trillion$ of debt; his willingness to nogotiate with himself, then let Republicans drive the debate even further to the right, has left Americans feeling he has not upheld his quite clear campaign promises and his electoral mandate.
President Obama might be proud of disasters averted or incremental improvements, but Americans are in no mood, nor position, to reward such meager accomplishments; 2010 should have told him at least that.
As Mario always says, the election isn't being held today. But all this equals one thing, at least, for now:
