How wealth is really distributed

Most of you have already seen this video.  I’m reposting it here for those of you who lurk here from the right.

Wealth *is* being redistributed in this country.  It’s going to the people at the top.  ”Oh, sure”, you say, “that’s just statistics and you can make statistics lie and stuff.”  Now, you’re beginning to sound like Stephen Colbert.

The point of this video is not to attack wealth.  The point is that it is concentrated in the hands of too few people to the detriment of everyone else.  A corporate CEO does not work 380X harder than his accountant and even garbagemen deserve a living wage. For too many people, a living wage is not a reality.

To the Phones

Smaug makes his opening bid

Following Atrios at Eschaton, Call the White House, your Senators and your House members to say no to proposed cuts to Social Security via the Chained CPI.  They *are* cuts.

This is what the 1% have been waiting for.  This is why the bankers and well-connected have been strangling the money supply for the past 4 years and holding the economy hostage every time there is an expiration of their tax rates.  They need for us to feel enough pain so that we will give up something that is very important to us.

It has never been about the deficit.  It has always been about weakening and then eliminating the social insurance programs and using the chained CPI to calculate Social Security benefits is their first blow.  Don’t let them get away with it without a fight.

Say “NO!” to the Chained CPI.  But don’t just stop there.  I’ve always believed that you shouldn’t oppose a law or proposal without a working counter proposal.  Don’t just complain.  So, tell your elected officials that you would like to strengthen Social Security by raising the payroll tax on higher income earners.

Here’s who to call:

White House

202-456-1111

Your Senators

Your House Members

We didn’t share in the prosperity, why should we share in the austerity?

Spread the word!

Maybe this is not the best time to bring this up…

… but the circumstances surrounding the Krim children murders in New York City involve *two* families.  The nanny’s actions may be the stuff of Halloween nightmares and maddeningly inexplicable, a horror that the childrens’ mother should never have witnessed. It’s natural that we empathize with the parents over the loss of their well-loved children. But the nanny also has relatives and an adolescent son and they are as mystified and horrified as the victims’ family.

I wish that the people who are keeping the Krims in their thoughts had considered how insensitive that might sound to the family the nanny left behind.  At some point in the future, we should have a discussion about whether it was the shock of the murder itself or the socio-economic chasm between victims and perpetrator that caused the thought keepers to forget the pain, grief and confusion of the nanny’s family.

Maybe that’s something the 1% should spend the weekend thinking about.

Chrystia Freeland and Matt Taibbi say that Obama is one of the 1%

We’ve been trying to tell the world that since 2008.  ”He is one of them.” (about minute mark 40:50)

Check out this interview Freeland and Taibbi do with Bill Moyers.  It’s unsettling.  Freeland points out that progressives have to get the band back together and do something.  The problem is that Obama was the guy who broke us up in the first place and during the last year, progressives did NOTHING to scare him.