During the campaign, many people expressed outrage over Mitt Romney’s statement concerning the fact that almost fifty percent of the public do not pay pay income taxes. I well understood the anger, but I am a bit surprised that a video by the California Federation of Teachers has not produced the same outrage over its unfairness and frankly crudeness. The video shows a wealthy person urinating on the poor as part of a “Tax the Rich: An Animated Fairy Tale.” I readily admit that I am in the minority on our blog in opposing some of the tax increase proposals in this country and abroad as economically unwise. However, the demonization of the wealthy in this country has gone a bit far when a video of this kind is released by a major organization.
Real Clear Politics and a few sites ran a story on the urination scene, but the video below has the sound but not the image of actual urination. It is not clear if someone added the yellow image to the video or the producers removed the image. When you now hit on various sites that showed what they said was the image of the urination, a sign pops up that this is now a “private video.” I am unsure of what that means since the union reportedly put the video out to the public. However, there is no mention of the controversy that I could find on the union site.
The eight-minute video was written and directed by California Federation of Teachers’ communications director Fred Glass with voice over by Ed Asner. The mythical land describes rich evading taxes by investing in “Wall Street” — not quite mythical. “Don’t worry. This is good for you, too. Because it will trickle down from us to you.” You can still hear the sound of the rich man “trickling down” on the poor.
Viewers are urged to email their elected representatives to tell them to raise taxes on the wealthy in order to fund public services.
I happen to agree with the premise of raising revenues (though I oppose some of the tax proposals in this country and abroad). I am a long and vocal supporter for increasing funding for schools and teachers. However, I view this video as unfair and hyperbolic even without the yellow stream. The wealthy do pay considerable taxes and many support public programs and public causes. They also do pay the vast majority of taxes. Should they pay more in this economy. Yes, but it is grossly unfair to engage in this type of vilification. The video for example states that after the housing market crash the government printed money for “rich people” but they didn’t give any to “ordinary people whose houses and jobs were broken by the crash.” The video also states that after the collapse that rich people “love their money more than anything in the world.” That is simply outrageous. What would be the reaction to a business group releasing a video stating poor people do not care for other people and do not want to work? There would be justified anger and outrage, but the reaction to this video seems to be muted from the left. It is not enough to simply shrug and again blame the other side triggering such responses. Whatever the excesses of the other side of this debate, it does not relieve adults of being the obligations of accuracy and decency. As an educator myself, I am embarrassed to see any teacher’s organization engage in such attacks.
I am interested in whether the union did include the even more offensive image and removed it or whether it is claiming that conservative groups hacked their video. If it is the former, I do not believe that they have served the interests of teachers who generally strive to engage in reasoned and respectful debate. If it is the latter, I would love to know who added the yellow image and left the appearance that it was in the original video. The union itself has thus far said little on the controversy. [UPDATE: the original video is posted here and shows the yellow image. It would appear that the union has altered its own video though I cannot find any statement from it on this controversy].
The current video is shown below.
Elaine,
I think I had posted that Sunday or there about s….. Just got a notice that firefighters and police are exempted…. Is this de ja vue….. Seems like I saw that before in WI….
Feemeister, the top one percent are only millionaires, not trillionaires. The reason I know them is that I used to work for doctors and lawyers, and among those, I worked only for the most successful and would only work for the really smart ones. They tended to be very wealthy but still not conscience-free individuals, so I have ended up, at age 65, knowing a lot of them!
They are not uniformly against the higher taxes, especially not against a higher tax-rate! Although I must say that I don’t speak with about a third of them, the ones that I still maintain relationships with are generally to the left of Obama and would not balk at a 40% tax rate for the top one percent. ALL OF THEM put a lot of money into tax-sheltered savings. They all take advantage of every benefit the very wealthy have, but if the legislation changed and they didn’t have these benefits, they wouldn’t be STOPPING their businesses or FIRING their lowest-paid employees or throwing themselves out of windows or leaving the country.
Greed and Debt: The True Story of Mitt Romney and Bain Capital
How the GOP presidential candidate and his private equity firm staged an epic wealth grab, destroyed jobs – and stuck others with the bil
By Matt Taibbi
AUGUST 29, 2012
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/greed-and-debt-the-true-story-of-mitt-romney-and-bain-capital-20120829
Excerpt:
Last May, in a much-touted speech in Iowa, Romney used language that was literally inflammatory to describe America’s federal borrowing. “A prairie fire of debt is sweeping across Iowa and our nation,” he declared. “Every day we fail to act, that fire gets closer to the homes and children we love.” Our collective debt is no ordinary problem: According to Mitt, it’s going to burn our children alive.
And this is where we get to the hypocrisy at the heart of Mitt Romney. Everyone knows that he is fantastically rich, having scored great success, the legend goes, as a “turnaround specialist,” a shrewd financial operator who revived moribund companies as a high-priced consultant for a storied Wall Street private equity firm. But what most voters don’t know is the way Mitt Romney actually made his fortune: by borrowing vast sums of money that other people were forced to pay back. This is the plain, stark reality that has somehow eluded America’s top political journalists for two consecutive presidential campaigns: Mitt Romney is one of the greatest and most irresponsible debt creators of all time. In the past few decades, in fact, Romney has piled more debt onto more unsuspecting companies, written more gigantic checks that other people have to cover, than perhaps all but a handful of people on planet Earth.
By making debt the centerpiece of his campaign, Romney was making a calculated bluff of historic dimensions – placing a massive all-in bet on the rank incompetence of the American press corps. The result has been a brilliant comedy: A man makes a $250 million fortune loading up companies with debt and then extracting million-dollar fees from those same companies, in exchange for the generous service of telling them who needs to be fired in order to finance the debt payments he saddled them with in the first place. That same man then runs for president riding an image of children roasting on flames of debt, choosing as his running mate perhaps the only politician in America more pompous and self-righteous on the subject of the evils of borrowed money than the candidate himself. If Romney pulls off this whopper, you’ll have to tip your hat to him: No one in history has ever successfully run for president riding this big of a lie. It’s almost enough to make you think he really is qualified for the White House.
The unlikeliness of Romney’s gambit isn’t simply a reflection of his own artlessly unapologetic mindset – it stands as an emblem for the resiliency of the entire sociopathic Wall Street set he represents. Four years ago, the Mitt Romneys of the world nearly destroyed the global economy with their greed, shortsightedness and – most notably – wildly irresponsible use of debt in pursuit of personal profit. The sight was so disgusting that people everywhere were ready to drop an H-bomb on Lower Manhattan and bayonet the survivors. But today that same insane greed ethos, that same belief in the lunatic pursuit of instant borrowed millions – it’s dusted itself off, it’s had a shave and a shoeshine, and it’s back out there running for president.
Mitt Romney, it turns out, is the perfect frontman for Wall Street’s greed revolution. He’s not a two-bit, shifty-eyed huckster like Lloyd Blankfein. He’s not a sighing, eye-rolling, arrogant jerkwad like Jamie Dimon. But Mitt believes the same things those guys believe: He’s been right with them on the front lines of the financialization revolution, a decades-long campaign in which the old, simple, let’s-make-stuff-and-sell-it manufacturing economy was replaced with a new, highly complex, let’s-take-stuff-and-trash-it financial economy. Instead of cars and airplanes, we built swaps, CDOs and other toxic financial products. Instead of building new companies from the ground up, we took out massive bank loans and used them to acquire existing firms, liquidating every asset in sight and leaving the target companies holding the note. The new borrow-and-conquer economy was morally sanctified by an almost religious faith in the grossly euphemistic concept of “creative destruction,” and amounted to a total abdication of collective responsibility by America’s rich, whose new thing was making assloads of money in ever-shorter campaigns of economic conquest, sending the proceeds offshore, and shrugging as the great towns and factories their parents and grandparents built were shuttered and boarded up, crushed by a true prairie fire of debt.
Some rich fellas using their money against workers:
GOP, Koch Brothers Sneak Attack Guts Labor Rights in Michigan
John Nichols on December 6, 2012
http://www.thenation.com/blog/171641/gop-koch-brothers-sneak-attack-guts-labor-rights-michigan
Excerpt:
In the state where workers sat down in Flint General Motors plants seventy-five years ago and emboldened the industrial labor movement that would give birth to the American middle class, Republican legislators on Thursday voted to gut basic labor rights.
Union leaders warned that, if organized labor can be so battered in the union heartland of Michigan, it can—and may—be attacked anywhere. And the national significance of the move was highlighted by a statement from the Obama White House, which said:
President Obama has long opposed so-called “right-to-work” laws and he continues to oppose them now. The President believes our economy is stronger when workers get good wages and good benefits, and he opposes attempts to roll back their rights. Michigan—and its workers’ role in the revival of the US automobile industry—is a prime example of how unions have helped build a strong middle class and a strong American economy.
But, while the president carried Michigan by a 54-44 margin on November 6, neither he nor his fellow Democrats were calling the shots Thursday.
After Republican leaders announced Thursday morning that they intended to enact so-called “right to work” legislation—which is always better described as “no rights at work” legislation—the Michigan state House voted Thursday afternoon to eliminate basic union organizing and workplace protections that generations of American workers fought to establish. Several hours later, the Michigan state Senate did the same thing, as part of a bold anti-labor initiative launched in coordination with a Koch Brothers–funded Americans for Prosperity project to “pave the way for right to work in states across our nation.”
As the Republicans launched the attack on unions and their members, Americans for Prosperity—a group developed and funded by right-wing industrialists and billionaire campaign donors Charles and David Koch—was in the thick of things. AFP recruited conservatives to show up at the state Capitol in Lansing to counter union protests and prepared materials supporting the Michigan initiative, including a fifteen-page booklet titled “Unions: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: How forced unionization has harmed workers and Michigan.” Within minutes of the announcement by Michigan Governor Rick Snyder that Republicans would ram through the “right to work” legislation, AFP was hailing the move in formal statements “as the shot heard around the world for workplace freedom.”
WOW! I’ve tried over 12 times to post this and keep getting kicked out! The cyberworld doesn’t want this one out!
Meet some of your taxes here. And this doesn’t I believe, include occupational licensing fees. In our state many of them are required at sometimes state, county and/or city levels. Just one I happened to think of!
http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/show-this-to-anyone-that-believes-that-taxes-are-too-low
This is for people who think we aren’t paying enough in taxes, by the way!
Teachers are like all other people. There are good ones, great ones and terrible ones. Some are underpaid, some are overpaid, some are well paid, and some shouldn’t be paid at all. There are good associations and bad ones. Some of them devote their life’s blood, and some don’t give a crap. Some are in it for the money, others are in it for service. Just like all other occupations, pretty much. You can’t just generalize about them, because they are all over the map, just like everybody else. Just like doctors and lawyers and Indian chiefs. And chefs and pharmacists and architects and state workers. And there is even ONE good politician out there. But unfortunately he is retiring and Congress will be going to Sheol in a handbasket.
OH! I forgot a big one! Cops! There are WAY too many bad, evil ones, and there are some really wonderful ones. How could I forget them in my harangue on occupations! Pretty much all of us, good and bad, are being peed on and shat on. Just learn exactly who is responsible. Dig for it!
nick,
Sorry for the delay in my reply. I was out most of the day.
“Well, Elaine then why didn’t you just ask me again. It was chickensh!t but nobody here fesses up to anything..you’re like politicians and convicts. 4 years. And I know you did it longer, but that’s not actually a positive. Many of the hard working teacher like myself get the hell out of the union hellhole. Some stay. And, as you should remember, my take on you is you were hard working. God Bless you for that.”
*****
The hardworking teachers I taught with stayed in the profession. They were dedicated to children and to public education. I do think that being an educator for thirty-six years was a positive for me. The longer I taught the more I learned about children and teaching…about working with children who learned in different ways…about different techniques and approaches and educational programs and new ideas…about adapting programs for special students. I learned from my mistakes. I also learned from the dedicated and talented teachers that I worked with.
I don’t know where you taught. I did not have a bad experience with our teachers’ association that fought for good working conditions for teachers, safe and healthy schools for children and staff, smaller class sizes, etc.
Malisha, A sincere thanks. You have a good and generous heart.
Nick S, if there are ways you think I can help with the brainstorming, let me know about it. Or meet me on the “corrections” thread if that’s more appropriate. I can’t offer any time or money but ideas are always cheap.
Malisha, do you REALLY know people in the 1 percent? How many trillion do they have? THESE are the people that are the problem! Not the normal rich people!
They are already getting WAY too much tax money from us and are wasting it on garbage! And they want every last farthing we have!
Now they need to make a NEW cartoon, and in this one show the presidential family pooping on the county in Maryland that can’t get any FEMA money, and would like the president to send the $4,000,000 they will use for their Hawaiian vacation to get Somerset county Maryland back on it’s feet after Hurricane Sandy. THIS SOUNDS LIKE A PLAN TO ME!!!
http://www.whitehousedossier.com/2012/12/07/wh-petition-demands-obama-cancel-hawaii-vacation/
mike spindell:
this table is interesting:
http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxfacts/displayafact.cfm?Docid=205
Mike, You’re still not getting it. Coaches ARE teachers, whether they worked in a classroom or not. Free youself from the box, it’s wonderful outside it.
mespo,
The comment contained in your post yesterday @ 10:39 pm, “Show me a full teachers’ parking lot at 6:00 p.m. like I see at business offices around Richmond. ” rankled a bit. I was going to let it go as a touch hyperbolic used in support of your position but its emotional tinge used as a support to “Cold hard facts always control over emotion” still sat at a precariously tilting angle in my mind.
I have been intimately involved with the education of 7 children. True that education has all taken place within the same excellent school system but never, not once, have I encountered a teacher, even one of the mediocre ones, who wasn’t eagerly ready to meet with me to discuss an individual child’s situation. They have come in early, stayed late, given up their lunch hour … even met me on a Saturday morning at the coffee shop. Also, and even more importantly, never once in all the years that I shepherded children through the school system did I ever encounter a teacher who wasn’t willing to set aside her/his own time to help a child grapple with a math concept, science experiment, term paper, etc. A few of the teachers those 7 kids encountered were mediocre in their skills but every dam one of them were dedicated to helping a child who needed it and was willing to accept it.
Gene H:
I have no desire to return to the 50’s socially or otherwise.
MIKE SPINDELL:
I am interested in knowing how much capital, as a percent of GDP, was taken out of the economy during the 50’s.
Also what is your opinion as to how much the war devastation of the rest of the industrial world helped our success.
“I am interested in knowing how much capital, as a percent of GDP, was taken out of the economy during the 50′s.”
Bron,
I don’t believe in economic metrics any more than I believe economics a science. That doesn’t mean I don’t understand numbers, balance sheets and accounting. I do. I was even the Director of contracts for a large sub-agency and managed contracts that totaled over $100 million. I just this that economics itself is more about opinions and less about scientific evidence.
As far as how much of the 50’s prosperity came due to WWII, perhaps there was some effect. The reality was WWII proved than when businesses were mobilized for the common good, with a good deal of profit entailed, businesses can work wonders. That capability carried through the 50’s and 60’s. By the 70’s, however, the bankers and the brokers began to take over and the emphasis went to profits, rather than building a strong firm. Today the capitalistic essence has gotten away from material production and turned into monetary production via schemes that the Mafia would find inspiring. It’s funny that some here think me a socialist. I like capitalism, providing it’s under regulatory control and the notion of “Corporate Personhood” is rejected.
You know the odd thing about NickS is while he blows a lot, he also does a lot. Anybody here who does more personally from an ideal position?
“As an alternative let’s have a return to the tax rates of the 1950′s and America’s greatest era of prosperity.”
Yeah, Mike. It’s funny how the same people who often want to return to the 50’s socially don’t want to return to the 50’s for taxation purposes.
Malisha, Thanks a lot. Using the Patrick website I found the National Resource Center for Children and Families of Incarcerated. They look like strictly an informational agency but I will contact them.
Nick S, check out the Patrick Crusade on-line. Your ideas for kids to be able to see their incarcerated parents is a very good one and maybe they have some ideas about where to go with it.
That Shano, he won’t let personalities get in the way of discussing the true horror here. The TPP and its similar modifications to previous trade pacts.
Free Trade. indeed! And whose welfare gets traded? The common man’s, the heterogenous farming system. All for profit for the rich.
Good show Shano.
Happy Saturday night alive to all.