Me and my sign. :D

From the rally outside of the Waldorf Astoria $2,500 dollar-a-plate Romney lunch protest today.

(In b4 ad hominem witticisms, “BUT OBAMA…”, perjoratives about my joblessness, perceived laziness, how much my clothing costs, etc.)

See how much money your country’s 1% have as a share of your nation’s total GDP.

Be warned though, these are done using tax returns, and the rich love to cheat on their taxes. 

From the Bloomberg posting:

The “upper class,” as defined by the study, were more likely to break the law while driving, take candy from children, lie in negotiation, cheat to increase their odds of winning a prize and endorse unethical behavior at work, researchers reported today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Taken together, the experiments suggest at least some wealthier people “perceive greed as positive and beneficial,” probably as a result of education, personal independence and the resources they have to deal with potentially negative consequences, the authors wrote.

While the tests measured only “minor infractions,” that factor made the results “even more surprising,” said Paul Piff, a Ph.D. candidate in psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and a study author.

One experiment invited 195 adults recruited using Craigslist to play a game in which a computer “rolled dice” for a chance to win a $50 gift certificate. The numbers each participant rolled were the same; anyone self reporting a total higher than 12 was lying about their score. Those in wealthier classes were found to be more likely to fib, Piff said.

“A $50 prize is a measly sum to people who make $250,000 a year,” he said in a telephone interview. “So why are they more inclined to cheat? For a person with lower socioeconomic status, that $50 would get you more, and the risks are small.

For anyone convinced that a welfare-state is destroying the American economy, I’d refer you to this article. 

As if to concede that there is no Social Security crisis in the near future, Klein engages in three intellectually dishonest maneuvers typical of right-wing propagandists. First, he talks about medium-term and long-term problems as though they were present-day emergencies. Second, he blurs the distinction between Social Security’s long-term fiscal challenges, which are minor, and those caused by rising healthcare costs, in order to make Social Security seem worse off than it is in reality. Third, he implies that “the growing debt burden” of the United States is primarily caused by Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, ignoring tax cuts, wars and the effects of a near-depression. 

And remember folks, big government doesn’t only mean social programs, it means huge domestic surveillance programs too!

(HERE’S LOOKING AT YOU, PATRIOT ACT!)

Perry wins the award with a tax cut for the richest 1 percent that is 270 times larger than his middle class tax cut, while Gingrich’s is 190 times larger. Santorum and Romney pull up the rear with tax cuts for the rich that are 100 times larger than the cuts for the middle class, while CTJ did not analyze Jon Huntsman or Ron Paul’s plans. (CTJ uses a current law baseline, rather than a current policy baseline, to calculate its cuts. Using a current policy baseline, millions of middle class families would see a tax increase under Romney’s plan.)

In 1984, one in five House members had zero or negative net worth excluding home equity, according to the disclosures; by 2009, that number had dropped to one in 12.

“For the 887 policy questions on which well-off and poor Americans disagreed by eight percentage points or more (top panel of figure 2), outcomes are fairly strongly related to the preferences of the well-to-do (b = 1.92, p = .000) but wholly unrelated to the preferences of the poor (b = 0.04, p = .92).”

Work harder, earn less.
Repeat after me: I am free. 

300 Economists support #OWS

For the terrible insight to take away from news that the Department of Homeland Security coordinated a violent crackdown is that the DHS does not freelance. The DHS cannot say, on its own initiative, “we are going after these scruffy hippies”. Rather, DHS is answerable up a chain of command: first, to New York Representative Peter King, head of the House homeland security subcommittee, who naturally is influenced by his fellow congressmen and women’s wishes and interests. And the DHS answers directly, above King, to the president (who was conveniently in Australia at the time).

In other words, for the DHS to be on a call with mayors, the logic of its chain of command and accountability implies that congressional overseers, with the blessing of the White House, told the DHS to authorise mayors to order their police forces – pumped up with millions of dollars of hardware and training from the DHS – to make war on peaceful citizens.

But wait: why on earth would Congress advise violent militarised reactions against its own peaceful constituents? The answer is straightforward: in recent years, members of Congress have started entering the system as members of the middle class (or upper middle class) – but they are leaving DC privy to vast personal wealth, as we see from the “scandal” of presidential contender Newt Gingrich’s having been paid $1.8m for a few hours’ “consulting” to special interests. The inflated fees to lawmakers who turn lobbyists are common knowledge, but the notion that congressmen and women are legislating their own companies’ profitsis less widely known – and if the books were to be opened, they would surely reveal corruption on a Wall Street spectrum. Indeed, we do already know that congresspeople are massively profiting from trading on non-public information they have on companies about which they are legislating – a form of insider trading that sent Martha Stewart to jail.

Since Occupy is heavily surveilled and infiltrated, it is likely that the DHS and police informers are aware, before Occupy itself is, what its emerging agenda is going to look like. If legislating away lobbyists’ privileges to earn boundless fees once they are close to the legislative process, reforming the banks so they can’t suck money out of fake derivatives products, and, most critically, opening the books on a system that allowed members of Congress to profit personally – and immensely – from their own legislation, are two beats away from the grasp of an electorally organised Occupy movement … well, you will call out the troops on stopping that advance.

So, when you connect the dots, properly understood, what happened this week is the first battle in a civil war; a civil war in which, for now, only one side is choosing violence. It is a battle in which members of Congress, with the collusion of the American president, sent violent, organised suppression against the people they are supposed to represent. Occupy has touched the third rail: personal congressional profits streams. Even though they are, as yet, unaware of what the implications of their movement are, those threatened by the stirrings of their dreams of reform are not.