Occupy Oakland's Seaport Shutdown Makes Case For Industrial Action

Oakland, California, San Francisco's grittier East Bay neighbor, Wednesday briefly became the epicenter of the global 99% Occupy Movement when tens of thousands of activists, students, teachers, working class laborers, and middle class families marched through downtown streets, rallied before megabank branches, and shut down the night shift at the nation's fifth busiest seaport.

Showing solidarity with Seattle longshore workers who were in a labor dispute, some 10,000 peaceful protesters blocked access to the Port of Oakland, and its giant cranes ground to a halt. A long line of semi tractor-trailers queuing to pick up containers bearing the outflow of globalization idled outside the sprawling facility. Some honked their horns in support of the protesters.

"Maritime operations are effectively shut down," Port of Oakland Executive Director Omar Benjamin told KTVU News at the height of the demonstration.

Longshore workers at the container facility had not called a strike themselves, but had warned they would not cross a well-organized community picket line.

Most of the crowd dispersed after 11 p.m., and by Thursday afternoon, the port was back in action.

The General Strike Occupy Oakland organizers called in response to the October 25 police beat-down that sent Iraq War veteran Scott Olsen to Highland Hospital with a fractured skull showed protest demonstrations in the U.S. could draw the numbers seen in more activist Europe. While police estimates claimed the crowds numbered around 4,500, reputable media counts ranged nearer 10,000, with some estimates as high as 100,000.

More importantly, shutting down the Port of Oakland revealed the demonstrations had some muscle. The model could prove useful in getting the haughty one-percenters' attention. Large numbers of fed-up masses marching on major industrial operations could be the best way to storm the plutocrats' ivory towers.

General strikes of yore staged by the nascent labor movements of another era helped usher in America's greatest period of prosperity, and won for Americans a social contract today's one-percenter plutocrats have eagerly broken. Industrial actions could again address economic imbalances and injustices reminiscent of the 1930s.

Just as labor shut down seaports and factories in the past, today's 99% could march on the core institutions that propel the global economy. Far more effective than chanting in front of a local bank branch, mass demonstrations aimed at ports, transportation and energy infrastructure would deliver protest to the doorstep of the plutocrats' most vital engines.

In Europe, protesters have shut down major highways and blocked access to nuclear plants. Railway strikes were common occurrences.

In America in the first decades of the twenty-first century, the lifeblood of the global plutocracy was the titanic fossil fuel industry.

The beating heart of this beast was in south Texas. A shockingly small handful of massive refinery complexes formed the vital core of a fossil fuel processing empire strung along the Gulf Coast from Corpus Christie to the Louisiana bayous.

Fully 40% of America's oil refining capacity resided in the giant refineries arrayed along a swath of south Texas and Louisiana. Half of that refining capacity was clustered around Houston, Texas City, Baytown, Port Arthur, and Beaumont. Within an hour-and-a-half drive. Traffic permitting.

The U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserves resided nearby. Pipelines for gas and oil criss-crossed the region. Fort Hood, America's premiere Army base, wasn't in Texas for the weather.

Moreover, as the Northeast and West Coast were also home to sizable chunks of America's refining capacity, the refineries in and around Houston represented much of the gasoline, diesel, kerosene and jet fuel needed to negotiate a wide swath of the middle of the country.

Industrial action in this beating heart of global plutocracy would shake ivory towers from Houston to New York to London to Beijing. Industrial action in the core of America's energy infrastructure would force capitalism itself to stare mortality in the face. Thousands of feet tramping toward the gates of those giant refineries and gas distribution heads would be walking over globalizations' grave.

Angry masses bearing down on those refineries would be marching on the heart of global economic life. Townsfolk storming the castle with pitchforks and torches. Well, perhaps not with torches. Torches didn't mix well with facilities so catastrophically inflammable workers were barred from wearing steel-toed boots. Refineries didn't prohibit cigarette smoking because the proprietors were obsessed with lung disease.

The traditional accessory for pitchforks notwithstanding, masses bearing down on the refineries would give the local constabulary, to say nothing of security authorities all along the food chain, headaches no one could use. In an increasingly flattening world featuring increasingly asymmetrical warfare challenges, those security authorities already had enough to fret over in a neighborhood where a handful of dedicated partisans with, say, a half-dozen ordinary infantry mortars, and, say, a half-dozen ordinary pickup trucks with sand-filled inflatable kiddie wading pools in their beds for firing platforms could give money moguls in corner offices from Boston to Bangkok the worst day of their lives.

While angry townsfolk mightn't march with torches, and candlelight vigils were probably off the table as well, law enforcement's options would likewise be limited.

Tear gas would be a no-no. Flash-bang grenades were absolutely out of the question. Probably, use of any sort of gunpowder-driven weapon system would be strongly frowned upon.

Scott Olsen might have been better off picketing Exxon Mobil's Baytown refinery than Oakland's Frank Ogawa Plaza.

The refineries in Texas and Louisiana were the critical blocks at the bottom of the global financial jenga pile, the aces at the base of the multinational house of economic cards. Huge refineries were spread all along the region, but many of the biggest were clustered around Houston:

• Baytown Refinery (Exxon Mobile), 560,000 bbl/day capacity
• Beaumont Refinery (Exxon Mobile), 348,000 bbl/day.
• Houston Refinery (Lyondell), 270,000 bbl/day.
• Houston Refinery (Valero), 83,000 bbl/day.
• Independent Refinery (Stratnor), Houston, 100,000 bbl/day.
• Sweeney Refinery (Conoco Phillips), 229,000 bbl/day
• Texas City Refinery (BP), 460,000 bbl/day.
• Texas City Refinery (Marathon Oil), 72,000 bbl/day.
• Texas City Refinery (Valero)  210,000 bbl/day.
• Deer Park Refinery (Shell Oil), 334,000 bbl/day.
• Pasadena Refinery (Petrobras), 100,000 bbl/day.
• Port Arthur Refinery (Total), 174,000 bbl/day.
• Port Arthur Refinery (Motiva), 285,000 bbl/day.
• Port Arthur Refinery (Valero), 325,000 bbl/day.

The fourteen refineries clustered around Houston and Port Arthur accounted for 3.5 million of the United States' 17.6 million barrel-per-day refining capacity. That was 20% of America's total capacity.

Fortunately for the plutocrats and oligarchs, the heart of the fossil fuel beast beat in the reddest center of Redsylvania, among folks who figured Rick Perry and George W. Bush were the best possible choices for chief executives in all creation. Thus, the ivory towers would remain safe and inviolate forever and ever.

Or not.

Wall St. Protesters Re-Occupy Oakland, But Empire Strikes Back Daily Nearby

Tents and protesters had reclaimed Oakland's Frank Ogawa Plaza, the site of Tuesday's police tear-gas attack that left Iraq war veteran Scott Olsen bloodied and focused international attention on Occupy Wall Street's Northern California franchise.

Nearby, at the Port of Oakland's massive container facility, giant container ships disgorged the outflow of globalization. The ships that sailed into San Francisco Bay and awaited their turn at Oakland's container port daily added to the economic imbalances the Occupy movement decried.

Manufactured goods from Asia. Produce from South America. Tax-free profits for multinationals.

The American economy's dire straits put thousands of fed-up protesters on the streets. In cities and towns across America, Occupiers protesting economic injustice camped out in mini-Hoovervilles. In Oakland, phalanxes of armored riot police from several agencies Tuesday zealously tore into a peaceful demonstration as the whole world watched on social media.

Under calmer conditions, Oakland Mayor Jean Quan attempted Thursday night to address the crowd that had reclaimed Frank Ogawa Plaza, and was booed off the stage as she queued for the microphone.

In a video Quan posted on her Facebook page, she said Tuesday's crackdown "was not what anyone hoped for, ultimately it was my responsibility, and I apologize for what happened." Quan had been on a lobbying trip to Washington, D.C. when police barricaded the streets, cleared the Oakland encampment, and launched a barrage of tear gas into a crowd of a thousand demonstrators who had marched from the downtown library.

Ex-Marine and Iraq War veteran Olsen was struck in the head. As a group of protesters gathered around him to render aid, an additional device lobbed from the assembled law enforcement ranks landed among the clustered protesters, and burst next to Olsen, a KTVU news video revealed. Olsen suffered a fractured skull.

"I shared my outrage and grave concern about the police brutality in Oakland directly with the Mayor," Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA) said in a statement issued Thursday. "My thoughts go out to the injured and especially Scott Olsen." Lee's office stated the Congressmember had offered assistance to Olsen's family.

The 24-year old veteran, who'd served two tours in Iraq and was a member of Iraq Veterans Against the War, Friday remained in Oakland Highland Hospital's intensive care ward. His condition was upgraded to fair, although he might require surgery to relieve swelling to his brain.

Across the bay in San Francisco, Mayor Ed Lee, eager to avoid the public relations black eye Quan suffered, postponed plans to clear Occupy SF's Justin Herman Plaza camp.

Rumors of San Francisco's impending police crackdown Wednesday night only bolstered the Occupiers' ranks with several hundred reinforcements, including city Supervisors David Chiu and John Avalos, and State Senator Leland Yee. All three were Lee's rivals in the upcoming Nov. 8 mayoral election.

By Thursday morning, the ragtag assemblage of core Occupy SF stalwarts and indigenous homeless camped at Justin Herman Plaza had swelled to 50 tents and 300 protesters, as office workers and tourists joined partisan activists.

With Lee promising "dialoguing" with Occupy SF representatives, the sort of heavy-handed police crackdown seen in Oakland appeared unlikely at least until after Nov. 8.

Like a parade of gigantic hobby horses, enormous cranes lined San Francisco Bay at Oakland. Huge container ships piled with cargo containers sailed through the Golden Gate bearing the outflow of Asia's manufacturing juggernaut, as well as components from Europe and produce from South America. Globalization that was sold as a boon for American exports proved only to be a boon for the transnational plutocrats who'd lobbied for globalization.

In the end, the only thing America exported was jobs. And waste paper, which was America's biggest export product to China.

Instead of creating jobs in America, tax and economic policies coddling the wealthy and their multinational corporations only encouraged offshoring and outsourcing. Low taxes incentivized gratuitous profiteering, so instead of selling American products overseas, companies shuttered American factories and opted for cheap foreign labor. Cheap foreign labor and lax foreign regulation fattened bottom lines with profits that could be skimmed off without a progressive tax penalty.

Companies could slash manufacturing costs while charging the same prices for their products, and the tax structure enabled the rich to pocket the difference.

American labor suffered. Foreign labor, automation, mergers, and layoffs idled millions. Money flowed from labor to capital. The American economy collapsed.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce loved it, and their recent open letter outlining their jobs plan asked Congress and the President to get them more of the same.

The ultimatum big corporations' and their Congressional Republicans now delivered to America was: If America wanted more jobs, America had to suspend all business and industry regulations, lavish the rich with more tax breaks and subsidies, and hand over all the money set aside for pensions, Social Security and Medicare.

Baring that, the multinationals and their Republican allies would keep strangling America, and anyone who stood in the way would get his skull cracked like Scott Olsen.

Oakland police continued to insist they didn't use flash-bang grenades, rubber bullets, or bean bags Tuesday night but hedged that officers from several other agencies had been present. A spent bean bag projectile was reportedly recovered near the spot Olsen had been injured. Oakland police claimed demonstrators "began throwing paint or other hazardous material at the officers who deployed tear gas as a defense tactic."

Rep. Lee countered, "The reaction was not appropriate. These are peaceful protesters who have a right to petition their government."

Scott Olsen's petition was rejected with a blast to the head.

One Month In, Media, Pols Still Don't Get Occupy Wall Street Protests

Flip any TV onto any one of the sixteen gazillion channels of its banal, mindless offerings, and you'll see the one percenters. There'll be one percenters pretending they're cops. There'll be one percenters pretending they're nerds, even if they're the best-looking nerds anyone's ever seen. There'll be one percenters pretending they're sex-crazed suburbanites, all nipped and tucked and botoxed and collagen-injected and personally-trained into that creepy faux-thirty look so prevalent at Republican conventions.

There'll even be one percenters pretending they're journalists.

The mass media, lamestream and otherwise, were of, for, and by one percenters. The mass media's banal, mindless content, lamestream and otherwise, was created by one percenters, green-lighted by boardrooms filled with one percenters, produced by one percenters, and featured photogenic one percenters hawking some other one percenters' goods and services. And, it was all dedicated to generating bottom lines that tickled one percenter fancies.

Most everyone you'd see, or hear, or read about or hear about in the mass media were one percenters. Performers, politicians, and pundits; newsreaders and novelists; even carpenters and cooks were one percenters. Utility infielders for Major League Baseball teams were one percenters.

Little wonder the one percenters' mass media were baffled by the Occupy Wall Street protests that have spread across the nation and the world, and marked their first full month with their biggest demonstrations yet in the capitols of Europe last weekend.

NBC News anchor Lester Holt Sunday acknowledged the Occupy Wall Street movement had galvanized thousands, but wondered, "toward what end?"

"It's not a middle class uprising," one well-heeled bank exec whined to the New York Times. "It's fringe groups. It's people who have time to do this," he said, likely unable to comprehend that 'middle class' didn't mean folks making only five or ten mil a year.

"For the most part, there just doesn't seem to be a coherent message," Tea Party Sen. Pat Toomey (R-FL) derided the movement Monday on Pennsylvania radio station WKOK.

"I am not sure this movement is going to last if it doesn't have some reasonably clear and cogent purpose and message and so far I haven't seen that," Toomey snorted dismissively.

The few 99 percenters anyone ever saw on the one percenters' mass media were usually being subjected to some sort of degrading hazing ritual to win the kind of prizes one percenters understood: money; notoriety; a brand new car!

The few 99 percenters anyone ever saw on the one percenters' mass media were being made to shed weight, or complete humiliating tasks, or sing or dance or otherwise win the approval of one percenters to be granted some cash reward, or a makeover, or, most splendid of all, admission to the ranks of the one percenters themselves.

The only other 99 percenters anyone ever saw on the one percenter's mass media were wearing orange jumpsuits doing perpwalks.

Thus, it was no surprise that Holt and Toomey and Wall Street Financiers were plaintively asking, "What did the Occupiers want?"

Did they want a break on student loans? Did they want a makeover? Did they want a free trip to a Super Bowl party with Deion Sanders and Britney Spears? Did they want a brand new car?

What did Occupiers out in the streets of more than a hundred American cities and in the capitols of Europe demonstrating against economic injustice want? What could scruffy young people and laid-off web designers and grannies on Social Security marching and carrying signs decrying economic injustice possibly desire? What could a global backlash against economic injustice possibly be demanding?

What did the thousands gathered in New York and Tucson and Orlando protesting economic injustice want? What could countless marches and rallies in Phoenix and Sacramento and Richmond and Los Angeles and Chicago and countless other American cities denouncing economic injustice hope to accomplish? What could the massive demonstrations in London and Rome raging against economic injustice possibly have in mind?

A month into the protest, and the one percenters still didn't get it. A month of rallies and marches and demonstrations, and, with all their money, the one percenters still couldn't buy a vowel to get a clue. A month of outrage and exuberance spilling onto the streets of the world, and you still had to go full-on Charlie Sheen to get through: Duh, an end to economic injustice!

The Holts and the Toomeys and the Wall Street tycoons and all the one percenter mass media moguls couldn't imagine that the 99% wanted to stop the one percenters treating the entire planet as a plutocratic one percenter fiefdom. The Holts and the Toomeys and the tycoons and the moguls couldn't get that the 99% were fed up with one percenters preening and pontificating and plundering and pilfering and pillaging and polluting as though hitting the blind-luck, talent-and-brains-and-hard-work-had-nothing-to-do-with-it fame and fortune lottery somehow entitled them to wreck a whole civilization and demean an entire human species and degrade a whole planetary ecosystem so they could wallow in unlimited gold-plated, private jetting, ice sculpture-festooned decadence twenty-four-seven-three-sixty-five-except-in-leap-years-when-it's-three-sixty-six.

The one percenters couldn't rub their brain cells together and figure out the Occupiers didn't give a fig about a makeover, or a Super Bowl party with Deion and Britney, or a brand new car.

The Occupiers and 99% of everyone wanted a world where everyone - everyone, not just one in twenty-seven million with a chance to win - could find meaningful work that was valued and respected, and provided a decent, dignified life, with promise for the future and a chance for their kids to get on, and the chance to put aside a little - a little - for a comfortable retirement. The Occupiers and 99% of everyone wanted a world where everyone could get decent health care, and a decent education, and live in a decent home that wasn't underwater because so many right-wing opportunists in so many rip-off financial services institutions sliced and diced and repackaged so much debt until it all collapsed, then came and demanded mo' money, mo' money, mo' money to do it all over again.

The Occupiers and 99% of everyone wanted a world where all the tax and economic policies and banking and financial rules and regs didn't concentrate 84% of America's wealth into the hands of 20% of the wealthiest. The Occupiers and 99% of everyone wanted a world where all that wealth wasn't concentrated into so few hands, giving the rich free reign to bludgeon everyone and everything with the blunt instrument of lobbyists and lawyers and bought-and-paid-for politicians to make sure the champagne kept flowing and the private jets kept jetting and Deion and Britney kept grinning and grinding in some luxury suite at the Super Bowl.

"Some of them are pretty radical," Toomey complained about Occupiers. To vilify and demean, he said, "You see the occasional sign that says 'Karl Marx was right.'"

"Karl Marx had it right," Nouriel 'Dr. Doom' Roubini, the New York University economist who'd accurately predicted the 2008 financial meltdown recently told the Wall Street Journal. "At some point, capitalism can self-destroy itself. That's because you can't keep on shifting income from labor to capital without not having an excess capacity and a lack of aggregate demand."

If Marx and Roubini were too radical for Toomey, Marriner Eccles, Chair of the Federal Reserve Board from 1932-1948, said:

"A mass production has to be accompanied by mass consumption. Mass consumption, in turn, implies a distribution of wealth....Instead of achieving that kind of distribution, a giant suction pump had by 1929-30 drawn into a few hands an increasing portion of currently produced wealth. This served them as capital accumulations. But, by taking purchasing power out of the hands of mass consumers, the savers denied to themselves the kind of effective demand for their products that would justify a reinvestment of their capital accumulations in new plants."

By the time Eccles stepped down from the Board in 1948, massive government spending on an alphabet soup of Roosevelt Administration stimulus programs and exponentially more massive government spending on thousands of ships, tens of thousands of tanks, hundreds of thousands of aircraft and artillery pieces, millions of trucks and rifles and machine guns and uniforms and boots and shovels and flashlights and bandoliers and bandages during World War II had finally jump-started the greatest economic expansion in history.

The period after World War II saw the greatest growth in middle class prosperity ever. Abroad, the U.S. government funded the rebuilding of Europe and Japan. At home, the U.S. government funded the education of an entire generation of Americans with the G.I. Bill, as well as the building of the Interstate Freeway System, dams, bridges, schools, libraries and even a few rocket ships to the moon.

There was just one little thing about taxes. Throughout that period of unprecedented growth, the top income tax rate never dipped below 70%.

Then, the money moguls and oil barons and corporate tycoons decided taxpayers should stop funding a decent life for the 99%, and start funding a spectacular life for the one percenters. To that end, they promised everyone that slashing taxes for corporations and the rich would make everything much, much, much better.

They didn't mention it would only make things better for themselves, and much, much worse for everyone else.

What the 99% wanted wasn't a makeover, unless it was the making over an entire dysfunctional global economic and financial system that concentrated wealth from the many to the few. What the 99% wanted wasn't a brand new car, unless it was part of a decent life with a good job, and a secure future, and universally accessible health care, and a dignified retirement.

What the 99% wanted was a world remade for the benefit of everyone, not just for the greedy, narcissistic few who gloated over their power and taunted and cheered for the deaths of those who couldn't afford health insurance.

If the one percenters ever figured that out, they could send it gift-wrapped to the 99% at that Super Bowl party with Deion and Britney. If, as was much more likely, the one percenters never figured it out, the 99% would just have to crash that party.

And that was what the 99% wanted.

Unpopular Congress Nixes Popular Obama Jobs Plan

While Occupy Wall Street demonstrators railed against corporate greed and the injustices of a system that coddled the rich and debased everyone else, while real unemployment rose to 18.41%, while Americans from sea to shining sea gathered glumly around barren kitchen tables, a despised and disgraced Congress increasingly disconnected from its constituents and increasingly obsessed with wallowing in piles of K-Street lobbyist cash summarily dismissed President Barack Obama's popular jobs legislation.

By a 50-49 Tuesday vote in the Senate, Obama's $447 billion jobs package fell far short of the 60 votes needed to proceed. In a sign of how wretched this Congress was, no on was surprised the measure was defeated.

Two Democrats, Sen. Ben Nelson (NE) and Sen. Jon Tester (MT), joined every Republican in the Senate to defeat Obama's bid to fix 30,000 schools, hire teachers and firefighters and cops, extend a payroll tax holiday for middle class Americans, and slap a 5.6% tax surcharge on millionaires and billionaires.

It was no wonder a new Gallup poll revealed Congress continued to match its lowest-ever 13% approval rating, again tying a record for disgrace attained only twice before, in December 2010 and August 2011. Fully 81% disapproved of the job Congress was doing.

It was also no wonder that a new Washington Post/ABC News poll found the American people now trusted Obama to do a better job of creating jobs than Congressional Republicans, 49% to 34%. Just one month ago, Obama and Congress had been tied, 40% to 40%.

"If voting against another stimulus is the only way we can get Democrats in Washington to finally abandon this failed approach to job creation then so be it," crowed Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) Tuesday, denigrating the sort of stimulus every economist not getting fat checks from Rupert Murdoch and Fox News agreed the nation needed.

Republicans were only interested to coddling corporations and their wealthy cronies with more and bigger tax cuts and subsidies, empowering more and bigger mergers, acquisitions, layoffs, outsourcings, and offshorings. Republicans were only interested in compounding the supply-side, trickle-down, voodoo economics that had already concentrated 84% of America's wealth into the hands of 20% of America's wealthiest, and created the economic boom in their beloved China.

The 103,000 jobs the economy added in September failed to keep pace with the growth in the nation's workforce, which increased by 200,000. The official unemployment rate remained at 9.1%, while some measures of U-7 unemployment, which included full-time job seekers, a portion of part-time job seekers, the underemployed and discouraged workers, rose to 18.41% from 18.26%.

The number of people unemployed for 27 or more weeks rose from 6.03 million to 6.24 million.

Republicans were doubtless delighted, as they likely viewed a moribund economy as their ticket into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in 2012. Republicans had an apparent vested interest in prolonging the nation's economic misery.

"Their strategy is to suffocate the economy for the sake of what they think will be a political victory," Obama campaign manager Jim Messina said Tuesday. "They think that the more folks see Washington taking no action to create jobs, the better their chances in the next election."

The jobs plan Senate Republicans defeated had been a popular one among America's voters:

• 85% had approved of Obama's proposal for small business tax cuts and hiring incentives.
• 75% had approved of additional funds for more teachers, cops and firefighters.
• 73% had approved of tax incentives for hiring the long-term unemployed.
• 72% had approved of additional funding for public works projects like fixing up the 30,000 schools.
• 56% had approved of extending unemployment benefits. 

And, of course, 66% had approved of raising taxes on those making $200,000 or much, much more a year. 23 polls conducted between December, 2010 and August 2011 showed roughly two-thirds of Americans wanted the rich to pay higher taxes to pay down national debt, close deficits, and shore up Social Security and Medicare. And, since August:

• The Economist/YouGov Poll of Sept 24-27 revealed 68% favored raising taxes on families making $1 million or much, much more a year.
• The CBS News Poll of Sept 28-Oct. 2 found 64% favored raising taxes on millionaires to lower the deficit.
• The Harrison Group/American Express poll of Oct. 4 found 65% favored raising taxes on those earning $1 million or unspeakably more a year.

Now, Gallup found 81% disapproved of Congress even before they knew the Senate had rejected Obama's jobs bill and it's millionaire/billionaire surtax.

Apparently, by rejecting taxing the rich, the single most widely favored item on the checklists of the people they professed to represent, Congress was shooting for a perfect 100% condemnation.

Gaffe-Prone, Science-Bashing Right-Wing Derides Occupy Wall Street

Tea Party darling House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) called them a "mob." New York Mayor and sometime-Republican Michael Bloomberg sicced his pepper spray-wielding cops on them and bemoaned their besieging of poor, defenseless banking giants. Right-wing chatrooms and bloggers derided them as "even dumber than first thought."

A right-wing obsessed with black helicopter plots, bashing climate change science and decrying evolution denounced Occupy Wall Street, the grassroots movement fed up with big-money plutocrats subjugating middle America.

"If you read the newspapers today, I for one am increasingly concerned about the growing mobs on Wall Street and the other cities across the country," Cantor opined Friday at the annual Values Voter Summit in Washington, D.C., the Politico reported. "And, believe it or not, some in this town have actually condoned the pitting of Americans against Americans."

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) was unimpressed. "I didn't hear him (Cantor) say anything when the Tea Party was out demonstrating, actually spitting on members of Congress right here in the Capitol. And, he and his colleagues were putting signs in the windows encouraging them," she told ABC's This Week.

Tea Party Express chair Amy Kremer complained the demonstrators, "don't even know why they're out there protesting on Wall Street," but that their goals were "completely unrealistic." Kremer did not explain how a group that didn't know why they were protesting could have goals, unrealistic or not.

Right-wing talk radio's Sean Hannity, under the guise of interviewing an OWS participant, launched into a hysterical tirade, deriding his guest as a "Marxist," and screaming "you don't believe in liberty, you don't believe in freedom."

Tea Party zealots alternately whined that Occupy Wall Street was being lavished with media coverage, and shrieked that the Occupy Wall Street movement was nothing like their own.

In fact, Occupy Wall Street was very different from the Tea Party. Occupy Wall Street was a spontaneous, grassroots movement, which, unlike the Tea Party, wasn't organized and funded by media mogul Rupert Murdoch and coal magnates Charles and David Koch. Occupy Wall Street didn't ride into town on air-conditioned buses chartered by Americans for Prosperity and Club for Growth. Occupy Wall Street wasn't shilling for, well, Wall Street.

Right-wing chatrooms and blogs were filled with anti-Occupy Wall Street hate, decrying the movement as "even dumber than first thought."

However, San Francisco PBS affiliate KQED's This Week in Northern California found Occupy SF protesters, the local Occupy Wall Street group, remarkably well-informed and eager to discuss arcane details about the fractional reserve banking system. "This is not your grandfather's protest," reporter Mark Calvey said.

Nonetheless, a right-wing that denied climate change science, declared vaccines caused autism, and rejected evolution to maintain a supernatural justification for white supremacy said Occupy Wall Street was deluded.

A right-wing, whose champion, Sarah Palin, said Paul Revere warned the British; told disgraced racist talk show host Laura Schlessinger "don't retreat, reload!;" and said, "obviously, we have to stand with our North Korean allies!" derided Occupy Wall Street as dumb.

A right-wing, whose presidential aspirant Michele Bachmann (R-MN) said HPV vaccine caused mental retardation; lethal carbon dioxide wasn't a harmful gas; John Quincy Adams was a Founding Father at age nine; swine flu outbreaks occurred during the Carter Administration instead of the Ford Administration; and actor John Wayne was from Waterloo IA, although he was from Winterset, IA, and the John Wayne from Waterloo was the serial killer John Wayne Gacy, ridiculed Occupy Wall Street as ignorant.

A right-wing, whose presidential candidate Texas Gov. Rick Perry called Social Security a Ponzi scheme, and orchestrated his state's infamous pay-for-play influence peddling regimen, but dipped in recent polls for being soft on immigrants, denounced Occupy Wall Street as anti-American.

A right-wing, whose American Family Association leader Bryan Fischer claimed gays caused the Holocaust; wanted Muslims banned from military service; and said freedom of religion didn't apply to Mormons, decried Occupy Wall Street as divisive.

A right-wing, whose Dallas First Baptist Church pastor Robert Jeffress Friday introduced Perry to the Values Voters crowd as "a genuine follower of Jesus Christ," then went outside and called the Mormon Church a cult and said rival candidate Mitt Romney "was not a Christian," mocked Occupy Wall Street's values.

A right-wing, whose Tea Party minions would abolish Medicare, Medicaid and even employer-sponsored health care benefits, then cheer for the deaths of the uninsured, dared to insinuate Occupy Wall Street, or anyone or anything else alive on the Earth, was more repugnant, more despicable, more irredeemably evil than themselves.

Republicans, Tea Party zealots and the right-wing were schoolyard cliques of jocks and cheerleaders, inanely obsessed with their nipped, tucked, siliconed, botoxed, collagen-injected Stepford appearances, deriding anyone outside their clique.

Republicans, Tea Party zealots, and the right-wing, seemingly obsessed with taking off their clothes whenever possible, reigned over social conservative legions of schoolyard goons and toadies that coveted approval while indulging their own hatred of foreigners, immigrants, persons of color, gays, science, and followers of non-evangelical faiths.

Together, they devoted themselves to currying the favor of the rich, lavishing them with more and bigger tax cuts, breaks and subsidies, while scheming to pay for that largess by dismantling vital health care entitlements, plundering Social Security, and slashing all the services and oversight all Americans depended on.

That Republicans, Tea Party zealots and the right-wing denounced Occupy Wall Street proved Occupy Wall Street was on the right side of history

Obama OK With Millionaire Surtax, Americans OK With Taxing Millionaires

Urging Congress to pass his $447 billion jobs legislation, President Barack Obama Thursday told reporters that he was "comfortable" with Senate Democrats' proposal to pay for his plan with a 5.6% surtax on millionaires.

The American people were probably comfortable with such a scheme as well, as poll after poll has consistently revealed that about seven in ten favored raising taxes on the wealthy and big corporations to pay the nation's debts or bolster Medicare and Social Security. The other three in ten were Republicans, who favored coddling the rich and big corporations with bigger tax cuts, breaks and subsidies paid for by slashing services everyone depended on.

A CBS News poll released Monday found 64% of all respondents wanted to raise taxes on millionaires to lower the federal deficit. 30% figured millionaires should get a pass. 83% of Democrats and 65% of Independents favored hiking taxes on millionaires, while 54% of Republicans wanted to let them skate.

An American Express/Harrison Group poll released Tuesday likewise found 65% of respondents supported raising taxes on millionaires.

Meanwhile, Senate Republicans quickly moved to vote on Obama's jobs bill without the millionaire surtax, hoping to be able to claim the legislation, which in its original form was expected to be defeated by a wide margin, was unpopular with both parties.

Obama told reporters, "We're still going to need to reform this tax code to make sure that we're closing loopholes, closing special interest tax breaks," pushing for implementation of his 'Buffet Rule' to assure the wealthy paid taxes at least at the same rates as the middle class. "But in terms of the immediate action of getting this jobs bill passed, I'm fine with the approach that they're taking," he added, supporting Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's (D-NV) proposal for the 5.6% millionaire surtax.

Republicans were quick to dismiss any notion of making their wealthy cronies pony up. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-OH) said, "Democrats would rather talk about partisan legislation that they know won't pass than about actually passing legislation we know would create jobs."

Apparently to McConnell, the wishes of 65% of the American people were deplorable "partisan" harangues.

McConnell and the GOP were only interested in lavishing more tax breaks and subsidies on big corporations and their wealthy cronies, along with dismantling Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and abolishing all business and industrial oversight to allow their cronies unfettered plundering.

Americans, meanwhile, were beginning to understand that slashing taxes for the rich had simply concentrated 84% of the nations wealth into the hands of just 20% of the nation's wealthiest, while 40% of the nation's poorest had to make do splitting just three-tenths of one percent of the nation's wealth. Americans were beginning to understand slashing taxes for the rich and big corporations simply encouraged mergers, consolidations, layoffs, union-busting, outsourcing, and offshoring.

Americans were beginning to understand slashing taxes for the rich empowered billionaires to use their accumulated fortunes as blunt instruments to bludgeon the American policy-making process with their armies of lawyers, lobbyists and fawning politicians. Coal magnates Charles and David Koch had $50 billion to fund their Americans for Prosperity schemes. Media mogul Rupert Murdoch had $7 billion to funnel into the Tea Party.

Which was why poll after poll revealed Americans wanted millionaires to pay more in taxes.

• A Gallup Poll from September 20 found 70% favored increasing taxes on corporations by eliminating certain tax deductions, and 66% favored increasing income taxes on those making $200,000 or much, much more a year.
• The Economist/YouGov Poll taken Sept. 24-27 found 68% favored raising taxes on families making more than $1 million a year, and 55% favored raising taxes on families making more than $250,000 a year.
• An Aug. 9 Marist poll found 68% of Americans favored raising taxes on those making $250,000 or much, much more a year, and 60% favored eliminating subsidies for oil and gas companies.
• A CNN/ORC poll released Aug. 10 found 63% believed Congress should raise taxes on businesses and higher income Americans.
• A Washington Post/ABC News poll taken July 14-17 found 72% favored raising taxes on those making $250,000 or much, much more a year to reduce the national debt.

Former Reagan Administration advisor and George H. W. Bush Treasury official Bruce Bartlett recently compiled a list of 23 polls conducted between Dec. 12, 2010 and Aug. 10, 2011 that all found Americans wanted the wealthy to pay higher taxes to address the nations debts, and to fund Medicare and Social Security.

Just as slashing taxes for the rich in the years leading up to the Great Depression of the 1930s caused wealth to accumulate in the hands of the few and choked off economic growth, thirty years of slashing taxes for, and lavishing subsidies on, the rich sequestered vast sums of American wealth in arcane financial instruments and choked off economic activity.

"Karl Marx was right," New York University economist Nouriel Roubini ruffled feathers recently. "At some point, capitalism can self-destroy itself. That's because you cannot keep on shifting income from labor to capital without not having an excess capacity and a lack of aggregate demand."

Of course, any economist not getting fat paychecks from Rupert Murdoch and Fox News understood businesses weren't hiring in America because Americans weren't buying enough goods and services to warrant putting on extra shifts or building new plants. Americans weren't buying because they were tapped out from decades of stagnating wages and unemployment, mountains of consumer debt, and having to pay more for things that used to be free: Parking, tolls, museums, school supplies, personal security.

And, as demand wasn't coming from consumers, any economist not getting fat paychecks from Rupert Murdoch and Fox News understood the government should be acting as the consumer of last resort, and kick-starting demand by fixing the $2 trillion in infrastructure that needed fixing, or building a high-speed rail network, or bringing broadband access to all Americans, or putting solar panels on everyone's roofs.

And paying for it by taxing the millionaires, billionaires and big corporations Republicans kept referring to with hallowed reverence as Job Creators, but who weren't actually creating any jobs.

Rove's Crossroads To Pour $240 Million Into GOP Races

The ragtag gathering clustered around the folding tables in Lower Manhattan's Zuccotti Park, which they referred to by its pre-2006, pre-corporate name of Liberty Square, were an amorphous bunch protesting the overwhelming power of the trans-national corporate megaliths that reigned over Western Plutocracy.

Occupy Wall Street wasn't yet an army, despite inspiring parallel protests in Boston, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Occupy Wall Street's supporters managed to raise $8,000 for pizzas to feed the mostly-young stalwarts.

Meanwhile, the big money powers Occupy Wall Street were arrayed against had hundreds of millions of dollars at their disposal. The money those Goliaths funnelled into just one Super PAC, American Crossroads, and its affiliate, Crossroads GPS, a 501(c)4 group whose donors remained anonymous, aimed to flood the 2012 elections with $240 million for their right-wing Republican candidates.

The Crossroads groups spent $70 million in 2010 to put Republicans in control of the U.S. House of Representatives. They figured $240 million should be enough to defeat President Barack Obama and take over the U.S. Senate in 2012. The U.S. Supreme Court's 2010 Citizens United ruling that anonymous corporate donors could pump unlimited amounts of cash into elections cleared the way for Crossroads' donors to bludgeon the American electoral process with the blunt instruments of Mammon.

"I believe that I am not represented by the big interest groups and the big money corporations, which have increasing control of our money and our politics," OWS participant Elise Whitaker told The New York Times.

"Now, the energy, intensity and money is flowing to Republicans and to promote conservative causes," American Crossroads' Jonathan Collegio told The Politico. "Understandably, the left is anxious."

When 84% of America's wealth was concentrated into the hands of 20% America's wealthiest, a political process fueled by money was, for the vast majority, hardly a democratic one.

"This is what the Citizen's United decision has brought us to," said former Florida Democratic Rep. Alan Grayson, who lost his seat in 2010 after Republican money moguls spent millions to defeat him. "All of those Democrats are going to need to be prepared for the onslaught."

Former George W. Bush mastermind Karl Rove helped set up Crossroads in 2010, which has lately enlisted another of the GOP's most prolific fund raisers, Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour.

"Both Gov. Barbour and Karl Rove are prodigious fund raisers and brilliant strategists," said Crossroads president Steven Law. Barbour raised $115 million for the Republican Governors Association between 2009 and 2010. "We are reaching high in our fundraising goals because we believe this is going to be a destiny shaping-election for our country."

The destiny Crossroads and the GOP planned to shape for America was one in which tens of millions would be denied access to health care, in which seniors and future seniors would be denied Social Security and retirement pensions, and in which only the sons and daughters of the privileged elite could afford higher education. Not that any of those privileged sons and daughters would do anything at a university except drink and vomit and spend trust fund checks.

Crossroads and the GOP were eager to implement their Rep. Paul Ryan's (R-WI) retooled scheme to dismantle Medicare, Medicaid and even employer-sponsored health insurance benefits, forcing everyone to buy expensive private insurance policies, and pawning everyone off with scant aid from limited 'premium support' tax credits. That way, the rich could enjoy nice taxpayer-funded discounts off pricey private insurance plans they were going to buy anyway, while most Americans would become uninsured and be frozen out of health care completely. Crowds of Tea Party zealots waited their chance to taunt and chant "let them die."

Crossroads and the GOP were eager to plunder all the money in the Social Security Trust Funds, and hand the cash to their Wall Street cronies to pile onto the roulette wheel of international equity markets while pawning Americans off with nothing at all. While the money changers always got their rake, nothing at all was what anyone who'd spent the last ten years buying shares in an S&P 500 index fund got, seeing how the index was at 1,147.39 on October 1, 2001, and closed today at 1,123.95.

The destiny Crossroads and the GOP planned for America was one in which the wealthy and the big corporations got even fatter and surlier as ever more and bigger tax cuts, tax breaks, and tax subsidies transferred ever more of the nation's wealth from the many to the few.

America had once been a country where progressive income taxes created a nation for the middle class, where ordinary people pooled their money and acted through government to provide for themselves public schools, freeways, affordable health care and pensions for the aged, and the promise of a better life for all.

Crossroads and the GOP preferred a country where tax cuts, breaks and subsidies gave the rich a free ride, while anyone who couldn't pay top dollar was consigned to misery, squalor and death.

And, the Crossroads Groups were just two of many groups funded by the torrents of cash trans-national plutocrats siphoned out of America and funnelled into their coffers. Coal magnates Charles and David Koch, with $50 billion between them, would hardly miss a billion or two should it vanish between the seat cushions over at Americans for Prosperity. Rupert Murdoch, a pauper with just $7 billion, could still throw a Tea Party or three.

The ragtag assemblage milling about the folding tables at Liberty Square weren't yet an army. For democracy to stand a chance, they would have to become one.

Occupy Wall Street Offers Hope For American Autumn

Finally, finally, a few have stepped forward.

From the Lower Manhattan base camp they called Liberty Square, the original name for Zuccotti Park before it was rechristened in 2006 after a corporate CEO, Occupy Wall Street's marchers Saturday fanned out onto the Brooklyn Bridge, tying up traffic for a couple hours and declaring that the three-week old protest against the effects of rampant plutocracy had truly arrived.

Organized through social media as had been the Arab Spring, the originally tiny gathering mustered enough support to get 700 protesters arrested on John and Washington Roebling's noble neo-Gothic edifice.

Occupy Wall Street protests have spread to Boston, Los Angeles and San Francisco, and were shooting for Memphis, TN, Allentown, PA, Hilo, HI, Mason City, IA, Mobile, AL, Little Rock, AR, and Santa Fe, NM.

The group, spawned by Adbusters and US Day of Rage, Thursday issued it's Declaration of Occupancy through it's self-proclaimed General Assembly, including a pretty comprehensive list of grievances. The General Assembly promised a list of demands would be forthcoming, although horizontally-organized organizations tend to be disorganized enough they often didn't follow through in any organized way.

Hopefully, that list of demands would bear in mind the engine of the massive disequilibrium that has destabilized civilization was the massive concentration of wealth into the hands of the very few. As New York University's Nouriel "Dr. Doom" Roubini recently pointed out, "Karl Marx had it right. At some point, capitalism can self-destroy itself. That's because you cannot keep on shifting income from labor to capital without not having an excess capacity and a lack of aggregate demand."

Roubini's frightening the natives and earning himself a right-wing lambasting for mentioning Marx notwithstanding, the economist who predicted the '08 market crash was just stating what most economists not getting a paycheck from Rupert Murdoch knew.

The present social and economic catastrophe reflected in OWS's list of grievances was apparently what capitalism looked like as it self-destructed. Whenever the tipping point occurred, it was apparently around the time 84% of America's wealth ended up in the hands of 20% of its people. More importantly, it was apparently around the time the poorest 40% of Americans ended up having to get by splitting three-tenths of one percent of the nation's wealth.

For thirty years, America slashed income taxes on its wealthy and its big corporations, over-incentivizing bottom line profits, leading to cost-slashing mergers, acquisitions, staff and plant consolidations, union-busting, outsourcing, and offshoring. Corporations became less interested in making and selling things than in trading proprietary investment portfolios.

In the past, businesses needed American workers to operate their plants and offices, and needed American consumers to buy their products. Changing tax structures over-emphasized profits and eliminated the consequences of eroding indigenous skill-sets and buying power. Production and profits were plentiful over the horizon, as companies incrementally combined operations, slashed payrolls, moved operations first from union-friendly states to right-to-work-states, then overseas to a Japan, then a Taiwan, then a Thailand, then an Indonesia, then China.

"As mass production has to be accompanied by mass consumption, mass consumption, in turn, implies a distribution of wealth...to provide men with buying power equal to the amount of goods and services offered by the nation's economic machinery. Instead of achieving that kind of distribution, a giant suction pump had...drawn into a few hands an increasing portion of currently produced wealth...By taking purchasing power out of the hands of mass consumers, the savers denied to themselves the kind of effective demand...that would justify a reinvestment of their capital accumulations," said Marriner Eccles. Eccles wasn't a Marxist pinko, but the Federal Reserve Board's chair from 1934 to 1948. And, he was referring to the Great Depression. Which explained the sexist reference to men's buying power.

In 1926, the top income tax rate went from 46% to 25%, creating Marriner Eccles' giant suction pump.

In the 1980s, the Reagan administration created their giant Suction Pump 2.0 by slashing the top tax rate first from 70% to 50%, then from 50% to 28%.

Between the Roosevelt and Reagan years, America jumped its top income tax rate first to 63%, then 79%, then over 90% for the war, then down to 70%, and saw history's greatest period of growth and prosperity. Certainly, the Right loved to go on about how Roosevelt's alphabet soup of economic stimulus programs, from the CCC to the TVA to the WPA, didn't pull America out of the Great Depression, and how it was World War II that finally hauled the economy out of the doldrums. But, the Right hated mentioning that World War II didn't curtail government stimulus, but put it on steroids.

Roosevelt didn't cut government spending because Dubya Dubya Two interrupted tonight's episode of The Shadow. Instead, the federal government went out and bought 297,000 aircraft, including 12,731 B-17s and 18,482 B-24s. They went out and bought 86,000 tanks, including 49,234 M-4 Shermans. They bought 193,000 artillery pieces. They bought two million trucks.

They bought 23 aircraft carriers, and 200 submarines, and 300 destroyers, and 600 PT boats, and 1,000 Landing Ship Tanks, and 3,200 Liberty and Victory ships.

They bought rifles and mortars and machine guns, light and heavy. They bought ammo clips and ammo belts and ammo cans. They bought bandoliers, panniers, flashlights, combat boots, and cool leather jackets for pilots and bomber crews. They bought uniforms, shoulder patches, helmets, bayonets, parachutes, backpacks, duffle bags, frying pans, lip balm, camoflage paint, c-rations, k-rations, and dog tags. They bought bullets and shells and bombs and mines and rockets and torpedoes, many of which could only be used once.

They bought a whole Manhattan Project to invent and build nuclear weapons.

Then, seeing how World War II had trashed the global neighborhood, the federal government rebuilt Europe and Japan, and sent an entire generation of Americans to college or vocational training on the GI Bill. They built the Interstate Freeway System, plus state highways, county roads, suburban interchanges, city streets, bridges, dams, levees, schools, libraries, city halls, opera houses, museums, and urban redevelopments (some of which ended up pretty nasty). They bought polio shots and lunches and band classes and gym classes and driver's ed for another whole generation of kids.

The federal government ponied up cash to develop the technology that created computers, cell phones, and the Internet. They bought a whole National Aeronautics and Space Administration to put human beings on the moon.

And, the 70% income tax rate didn't keep anyone from looking good on Mad Men.

Instead, the 70% tax rate kept jobs in America, and created value in every Americans' work. Factory workers, warehouse workers, longshoremen, cooks, bartenders, clerks, secretaries (not yet admins) and stewardesses(not yet airline flight attendants) enjoyed middle class lives promising home ownership, two cars, college for the kids, and tickets to lower stand box seats at Yankee Stadium, all without going into hock up to their eyeballs for all eternity.

People didn't even need credit cards until the seventies.

Then, Ronald Reagan earned the adulation of plutocrats eveywhere by destroying everything America had created in exchange for unlimited executive compensations, and the ice sculptures and corporate jets that came with them.

It was slashing the progressive income tax rates that concentrated the all the wealth and destroyed the manufacturing base and busted up the middle class. It was dismantling progressive income tax that enabled the very few to buy up all the lawyers and lobbyists and politicians and crushed all opposition to their omnipotent reign.

It was destroying progressive income tax that destroyed a democratic America built for the many, and replaced it with a plutocratic America coddling the few.

And renamed Liberty Square for a corporate CEO.

Poll Finds Obama Deficit Reduction, Jobs Plans Popular

The deficit reduction and jobs plans President Barack Obama recently proposed, dead long before arrival among Republicans focused on obstructing anything except more tax cuts for their rich cronies, at least appeared popular with ordinary Americans.

One of the most popular items among proposals that sought to trim $3 trillion off the federal deficit while kick-starting the economy was the so-called Buffett Rule, which aimed to guarantee millionaires and billionaires paid taxes at least at the same rate as everyone else.

A new Gallup poll released Tuesday found that 66% of respondents favored the President's plan to raise taxes on those making $200,000 or much, much more a year, in line with nearly two dozen previous polls that found most Americans wanted the rich to pay their fair share to reduce the nation's debts or shore up entitlements. Another 32% of respondents turned out to be Republicans.

Even more popular was Obama's proposal to increase taxes on corporations by closing loopholes. 70% favored that idea, while 26% were opposed. A chunk of Republicans apparently didn't understand the question, probably because they couldn't imagine anyone asking whether corporate loopholes should be closed. It was GOP intransigence on adjusting the depreciation rate for corporate jets - not eliminating the deduction for corporate jets, as any sane person would demand, but just making it take longer to write them off - that scuttled deficit reduction talks during the debt ceiling hostage crisis.

Those polled favored five of six other Obama proposals:

• Tax cuts for small businesses, including hiring incentives, was favored 85% to 13%.
• Providing additional funds to hire teachers, cops and firefighters was favored 75% to 25%.
• Tax breaks for hiring those unemployed longer than six months was favored 73% to 26%.
• Additional funding for public works projects, including fixing up 30,000 schools, was favored 72% to 27%.
• Extending unemployment insurance benefits was favored 56% to 41%.

Only reducing Social Security taxes for both workers and employers was narrowly opposed, 49% to 47%.

Even Republicans among the respondents favored five of the eight proposals, rejecting only the tax hikes on those making $200,000 or much, much more a year; the extension of unemployment benefits; and reducing Social Security taxes.

65% of those polled figured Obama's jobs plan would help create more jobs at least a little, including 27% who believed it would help a lot. 60% felt Obama's jobs plan would help the economy at least a little, including 23% who felt it would help a lot.

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) was exasperated. "Unfortunately, what we've seen now is the president has made a decision that he's going to go into full campaign mode now, 14 months before the election," he sputtered Wednesday as a reporter for the Hill scribbled down his whining.

God forbid the President of the United States advocate the wishes of the American people.

The Politico reported the so-called moderate intelligentsia was up in arms as well, claiming Obama had abandoned his centrist position and caved in to the left. First off, 'moderate intelligensia' was an oxymoron, and secondly, Obama hadn't come anywhere near, let alone caved in to, the left.

In fact, in a right-of-center nation, Obama was clearly espousing a right-of-center position, thus nailing the two-thirds nodding thoughtfully. The so-called moderate intelligentsia and their self-styled centrism appeared actually to be somewhere to the right of Louis XVI, who himself was to the right of Louis XIV. To be precise, the so-called moderate intelligentsia appeared more like the fawning courtiers brown-nosing and toadying up to Louis XVI. Their concept of centrism appeared to consist of protesting symbolically before caving in to whoever had 85% of all the wealth, then letting them add another hundred rooms and six hundred fountains to their Versailles.'

Republicans, meanwhile, appeared politically somewhere between Genghis and Kublai Khan.

While Obama's proposals fell far short of doing all the right things in all the right ways, he at least took a couple baby steps in the right direction. Although Obama failed to raise taxes on the rich enough to pay off everything that needed paying off, and failed to cut the unconscionably high taxes on the poor and middle classes (see sidebar), he at least acknowledged the rich ought to pay at least a little more. Although Obama failed to put forth plans to fix the $2 trillion in infrastructure needing repairs, or even to plug the $1 trillion hole in the nation's economy, he at least tried to get some potholes filled and get a few classrooms brought up to code. Although Obama failed to call for the kind of revenue recirculation and spending the nation really needed to haul it out of the doldrums, he at least proposed a few measures incenting business to hire a few more unemployed.

You can't get much more right-of-center than that.

The Christian Science Monitor's calculator-and-spreadsheet gang figured out that Obama's plan didn't reduce the deficit by as much as the President claimed, as the $1.6 trillion in additional revenue the Buffett Rule and other tax hikes on those making $200,000 or much, much more a year was actually being counted after renewing all the Bush tax cuts as well as Alternative Minimum Tax relief, which were both deficit-financed.

Doing nothing and just letting the Bush tax cuts expire at the end of 2012 would have reduced the deficit more.

However, the CSM figured it was a darned sight better than anything Republicans wanted, which was more tax cuts, tax breaks and tax subsidies for the very, very rich paid for by exterminating all Americans through dismantling health care (axing Medicare, Medicaid, and, eventually, employer-provided insurance, because, why the heck should they bother?), eliminating old age pensions (raiding Social Security and anything a union or employer might provide, because why shouldn't the rich plunder anything they could plunder?), and reducing the nation to a toxic wasteland (nixing the EPA and abolishing cumbersome "job-destroying" regulations).

Republicans still weren't going to pass anything the President proposed anyway, unless the President was ready to be "serious" by Republican standards, which meant lavishing more tax cuts, tax breaks and tax subsidies on the very, very rich, allowing them to plunder Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, and requiring everyone to burn as much fossil fuel as inefficiently as possible.

Thus, so long as Republicans weren't going to allow the President do anything anyway, Obama might as well go into full campaign mode. As the real right-of-center candidate.

Cantor Nixes Auto Jobs To Boost Virginia Aid

GOP Raids Job-Growing Advanced Technology Vehicle Manufacturing Program for Disaster Relief Money

Drunk from their succession of hostage-taking victories, smug in their certainty that every dollar in America should end up in their grasping manicured hands, the GOP Tea Party kicked plundering America into an even more unconscionable high gear.

During Monday's CNN/Tea Party Republican presidential grandstanding, Tea Partisans hooted and cheered when Wolf Blitzer asked Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) if an uninsured person needed intensive care, whether society should "just let him die."

Two days later, Tea Party hero House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA), standard-bearer for the push to offset hurricane and earthquake spending by plundering other programs, moved to ax $1.5 billion in so-called Section 136 loans from a successful Bush-era program that funded new plants and retooling to build energy-efficient cars so he could hand the money to his wealthy home-state cronies.

Cantor figured the best thing for America was to dismantle a program that had already created more than 40,000 American manufacturing and construction jobs so his hooting, cat-calling Tea Party constituents could add lavish extensions to their Virginia McMansions.

"By introducing a plan to gut Section 136 loans, House Republicans have shown that they don't care about manufacturing jobs in places like the Greater Detroit Area," said Rep. Gary Peters (D-MI). "We should fund recovery efforts in Eric Cantor's district, but not at the expense of programs designed to address the economic disaster that hit Michigan and other manufacturing states."

Obviously, a Tea Party movement eager to plunder Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security and abandon millions to misery and death outside the locked doors of hospital emergency rooms wouldn't bat an eye to plunder a successful jobs program that put food on the tables and roofs over the heads of those same millions they'd already condemned to misery and death.

And, as though that were not outrage enough, Cantor and his Tea Party minions sought to cancel out $1.5 billion in loans to the auto industry to fund permanent giveaways to themselves.

"It's outrageous that House Republicans are pushing a plan that would drive advanced technology jobs overseas, and that they are trying to ram it through by attaching it to disaster relief," Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) told the Detroit News.

The $1.5 billion Cantor and his cronies would devour was nearly half of the $4.1 billion remaining out of $25 billion originally slated in 2008 to rebuild the American auto industry so it could manufacture the fuel-efficient cars and trucks competitive in the 21st century. The money, among other successes, moved production of the Ford Focus from Mexico to Michigan, the Nissan Leaf from Japan to Tennessee, and helped launch Tesla.

And, on top of creating tens of thousands of jobs, rebuilding an American component supply chain industry, and revitalizing a moribund manufacturing base, the auto industry was paying back the loans with interest.

When Cantor and his Tea Party cronies got through with the ten-million-dollar makeovers stacking extra stories and stables and tennis courts onto the Virginia McMansions of 1,500 of their closet friends and contributors, Cantor and his Tea Party cronies weren't about to repay American taxpayers for their largess. Cantor and his Tea Party cronies weren't going to return the Carrera marble counter tops or the gold bathroom fixtures or the solid Tanzanian Mpingo-wood decks.

Cantor and his Tea Party cronies were going to deport the Spanish-speaking wage-theft victims who rebuilt their McMansions, close the gates, and sic the dogs on any uninvited Americans who might venture near their wrought-iron fences.

Behind those wrought-iron barriers, Cantor and his Tea Party cronies were going to sip champagne from their Baccarat crystal flutes and revel in the unprecedented opulence bought at the expense of tens of thousands of American jobs. In a double win-win, Cantor and his Tea Party cronies were going to shriek and howl that President Barack Obama had yet again failed to create jobs. In a double win-win, Cantor and his Tea Party cronies, having killed a government program that had been creating tens of thousands of jobs, were going to scream and shout that there was no such thing as a government program that created jobs.

And, Cantor and his Tea Party cronies were, once again, going to tell Americans the only way America was going to revive its moribund economy was by electing more Tea Party cronies and lavishing them with more tax breaks, subsidies, giveaways, McMansion expansions, Carrera marble and gold fixtures, solid Tanzanian Mpingo-wood adornments, and Baccarat crystal amenities.

And Americans, poor, stupid, gullable and unwaveringly dedicated to the hypnotically-implanted conditioning applied by so many GOP-trained evangelical brainwashers that square-jawed, blow-dried, botoxed, collagen-injected right-wing populists flashing empty capped-tooth smiles were their saviors, and that scruffy, long-haired, nerdy, tie-dyed, city-dwelling, Nobel Prize-winning, often non-white progressives were evil godless witches and trolls, would robotically vote Republican and march lockstep to their collective doom as Cantor and his Tea Party cronies laughed and jeered them on.

Cantor and his wealthy, indolent Virginia Tea Party cronies shouldn't get a single thin, red cent to pile extra bathrooms and tennis courts and swimming pools onto their lavish estates. The Tea Party zealots that incessantly, obsessively espoused Ayn Randian Objectivist self-sufficiency seemed to always be the ones incessantly, obsessively, plundering taxpayers to fund their opulent lifestyles.

The Eric Cantors pillaging job-creation funds for McMansion expansions and the Michele Bachmanns (R-MN) pillaging Medicaid and farm subsidies to fund facelifts and tummy tucks seemed incapable of making money in any way except by stealing it from taxpayers or bilking brainwashed sycophants who shelled out for their mind-numbing books and DVDs and t-shirts and bumper stickers.

Such was the nature of Tea Party denizens who would destroy American jobs and the American economy for personal gain. Such was the nature of Tea Party zealots who would condemn millions to sickness, misery and death to plunder Social Security and Medicare.

Such was the nature of evil.

Boehner Regurgitates Big GOP Lie: Tax Breaks For Rich Creates Jobs

Right on cue, House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) reared up on his hind legs before the Economics Club of Washington and Thursday perpetuated the Big Lie that the way to economic recovery was more tax cuts, tax breaks and tax subsidies for the GOP's wealthy cronies and patrons.

A house packed with wealthy GOP cronies and patrons cheered and applauded.

Attacking President Barack Obama's jobs bill, Boehner spouted the standard GOP blather that the wealthy needed more tax breaks and subsidies, and free reign to cheat their customers, bilk their suppliers, despoil the environment and Ponzi-scheme their way to even more ill-gotten riches.

Creating jobs was the excuse du jour, although thirty years of lavishing the wealthy with tax breaks and subsidies, and free reign to cheat their customers, bilk their suppliers, despoil the environment and Ponzi-scheme their way to ill-gotten riches hadn't created any jobs yet. Except, perhaps, at lobbying firms, where GOP lawmakers could rotate between government positions collecting graft and private positions doling out graft.

"Last week, the President put forth a new set of proposals. The House will consider them, as the American people expect," Boehner prevaricated from the start.

"Let's be honest with ourselves," Boehner apparently liked irony. "The President's proposals are a poor substitute for the pro-growth policies that are needed to remove barriers to job creation in America."

To the GOP, "pro-growth" meant concentrating an ever greater proportion of everyone's money into an ever shrinking pool of the richest plutocrats on Earth.

"It's a very simple equation," Boehner warmed up to spout the GOP's biggest, most pernicious self-serving lie of all. "Tax increases destroy jobs."

Of course, when Boehner said "tax increases destroy jobs," he wasn't talking about tax increases on the poor and middle classes. Boehner and the Republicans didn't give a fig about increasing taxes on the poor and middle classes. Boehner and the Republicans hated expanding the middle class payroll tax cut from 2% to 3.1%, and instead wished they could cancel the existing 2% tax break altogether.

When Boehner said "tax increases destroy jobs," he meant tax increases on big corporations and the rich.

And that was the Big Lie.

GOP tax cuts for the rich have already concentrated 84% of America's wealth into the hands of the richest 20% of Americans, without creating any jobs in the process. Republican tax cuts for the rich concentrated 84% of America's wealth into the hands of the richest 20% of Americans, while eliminating, outsourcing, and offshoring millions of jobs.

GOP tax cuts for the rich have left middle-class wages stagnant. Not only that, GOP tax-slashing policies caused the S&P 500's growth to stagnate as well. Even the rich suffered under GOP tax-slashing fervor.

Reflecting on the Great Depression of the 1930s, Marriner Eccles, Federal Reserve chair from 1934 to 1948, said, "a giant suction pump had by 1929-30 drawn into a few hands an increasing portion of currently produced wealth.... By taking purchasing power out of the hands of mass consumers, the savers denied to themselves the kind of effective demand for their products that would justify a reinvestment of their capital accumulations in new plants."

In 1926, the Coolidge Administration slashed the top income tax rate from 44% to 25%. But 1929, conditions were such that Marriner Eccles would later fret over them. Even Herbert Hoover realized what was up, and raised the top rate to 58% in 1932. Too late. The damage was done.

It wasn't until Franklin Delano Roosevelt started throwing an alphabet soup of stimulus projects at the economy that green shoots began to appear here and there. But, as every Republican loved to point out, the economy didn't really right itself until World War II bailed out the vaunted job creators of the private sector.

Well, World War II, a 94% top tax rate, and unprecedented government stimulus in the form of orders for 12,731 B-17 Flying Fortresses, 18,482 B-24 Liberators, 5,288 B-26 Marauders, 13,738 P-40 Warhawks, 10,037 P-38 Lightnings, 15,686 P-47 Thunderbolts, 16,766 P-51 Mustangs, and 12,571 F4U Corsairs, just to name a few of the combat aircraft, without even starting on the 49,234 M-4 Sherman tanks, or the 193,000 artillery pieces, or the two million trucks, or any of the other ocean-spanning convoy-fulls of material. C-rations. Combat boots. Uniform pants. The occasional top-secret project to build an atomic bomb.

Stimulus spending indeed.

Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) whined that Obama's modest spending proposal to kick-start the economy was "venture socialism," demonstrating the incessant GOP penchant for turning catchy phrases to justify selling their country out to international plutocrats.

"There are a number of Democrats...and this is the scariest thing of all, who really believe that government spending is the major part of our economy," DeMint pontificated to Fox News' Greta Van Susteren.

DeMint clearly would have preferred to spreche Deutsch, instead of making the rich cough up a 90% tax rate and saving the world.

And that 90%+ tax rate kept America humming until the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations closed a bunch of loopholes and reduced the top tier to a plutocrat-coddling 70% in the sixties. During that time, the private sector somehow managed to bump along while America rebuilt all of Europe and Japan, and built a whole new America with an Interstate Freeway system, a GI Bill, and a whole raft of new schools and libraries and highways and byways and dams and bridges and the occasional space program that sent humans to the moon.

Now, America didn't have a human space flight program, but Richard Branson did.

Tax breaks for the rich, indeed.

The fact remained that unless taxes on the rich kept money flowing around a capitalist system, money tended to accumulate into the few unconscionably lucky, greedy, and brutally selfish hands Marriner Eccles fretted over.

The fact remained that despite John Boehner's and Republicans' lies to the contrary, cutting taxes on the rich never created jobs. The fact remained that every tax cut, tax break and tax subsidy Republicans lavished on the rich was a job-destroying defacto tax hike on everyone else. Republicans destroyed jobs every time they slashed services and handed the savings to their rich cronies, forcing everyone else to shell out cash for services that used to be free. Republicans destroyed jobs when the cash everyone had to shell out for formerly free services was diverted from the marketplace, crippling demand: Health care; parking; museums; transportation; school supplies.

Most importantly, raising taxes on the rich not only didn't inhibit job creation, it was an absolutely essential component of job creation.

Taxing the rich kept money from disappearing into arcane fiduciary instruments. Taxing the rich kept money circulating among the middle classes, who spent it, driving demand and encouraging investment in plants and equipment.

Giving big corporations and the rich more and bigger tax breaks just encouraged cost-saving mergers, acquisitions, layoffs, outsourcing and offshoring to artificially pump up a bottom line for bigger tax-free profits. Giving big corporations and the rich more and bigger tax breaks just encouraged locking away more and more tax-free profits into an ever-expanding menagerie of money-sequestering creative financial instruments. Giving big corporations and the rich more and bigger tax breaks just encouraged making money by trading money, instead of by making and selling things.

Giving big corporations and the rich more and bigger tax breaks was what people did when they cared more about big corporations and the rich than they did about America.

While GOP Rails Against Social Security, Corporate Giants Are Real Ponzi Scams

GOP Presidential rabble-rouser Gov. Rick Perry and other Republicans of his ilk ranting and raving that Social Security was a Ponzi scheme ought to look up what a Ponzi scheme really was.

For the benefit of those who hadn't had the time to cruise Wikipedia or watch a couple of TV crime dramas, a Ponzi scheme was a scam wherein a con artist got a bunch of marks to give him all their money by promising a big return on their investments, and got everyone to believe him by paying off some of the earlier marks with money collected from later marks. Then, when the scammer figured he'd gotten a big enough haul, he dashed with the cash.

Social Security, despite Perry's and the GOP's ravings, was solvent for another twenty years, and with minor tweaks to payroll taxes, namely by having Perry and his ultra-rich cronies kick in their fair share of scoots, would remain solvent until genetically engineered pigs rocketed through space, at which point Social Security would be the least of eveyone's problems.

For real Ponzi schemes, one need look no further than the trans-national plutocracies greasing the political wheels. For real scams and ripoffs, one need look no further than the trickle-down, supply-side voodoo economics corporate scammers that call the shots.

Perry and Republicans of his ilk want to plunder the Social Security trust funds and hand all the money to their Wall Street cronies. After all, the big money tycoons were running a bit short having blown all the money everyone pumped into 401Ks and mutual funds. The S&P 500 closed on September 14 at 1172.87, a whole eighty-some-odd points above where it closed on September 14, 2001, when it closed at 1092.34. That was a whole lot of nothing for however much folks pumped into the S&P 500 over those ten years. Well, a whole lot of nothing minus the appropriate fees and carrying charges bankers, brokers, hedge fund managers and assorted wannabes and hangers-on deducted for booze, hookers and that fleet of Cessna Citation Xs.

Which was why Perry and his GOP brethren figured doing away with Social Security and handing all of eveyone's money to those same big money tycoons was just the trick to secure everyone's retirement, or at least the big money tycoons' retirements, less the appropriate fees and carry charges for booze, hookers, and another fleet of Cessna Citation Xs. Or XIIs. Or whatever Roman numeral Cessna would be up to by that time.

Because who wouldn't want to hand all her money to the likes of Bank of America, one of the nation's Big Four banks? Or whatever number Big banks America was down to nowadays.

Not that Bank of America was really Bank of America, the venerable San Francisco fiduciary institution founded by Amadeo P. Giannini that, thanks to a wise investment in fireproof vaults, was up and running behind an plank set on a couple of barrels while the ruins were still smoldering from the 1906 earthquake and fire.

Because Bank of America was really NationsBank, the ignoble North Carolina pyramid scam that bought out and leveraged and merged with about a gazillion other banks, including Bank of America, which by then was also leveraging and buying out about a gazillion banks itself, until they leveraged their cakeholes into buying out Countrywide and Merrill Lynch and collapsed the whole teetering pile of cards.

Now, that was a Ponzi scheme if ever there was one.

Now, B of A, or whatever the seething den of Enronian inequity was calling itself nowadays, announced Monday it was going to have to add another 30,000 poor slobs to the legions of unemployed queuing for the dole, as they might say in Jolly Old. Now B of A, or whatever the heaving pile of private-sector plutocracy-in-action was calling itself nowadays, was going to have to combine even more operations and close even more offices to keep the champagne flowing and the caviar doing whatever caviar did in the boardrooms and corporate suites and aboard all those Cessna Citation Roman numeral whatevers.

Not that any of that was going to help B of A, as when a Ponzi scheme collapsed, it really, really collapsed.

"I think this is rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, actually," economist Simon Johnson, late of the International Monetary Fund and current MIT nabob told the PBS Newshour. "Our biggest bank has got itself into terrible trouble. Remember, they bought Countrywide at a crazy price. They bought Merrill Lynch at an even more crazy price. They need to unravel this mega-bank. It's too big to manage at this point."

Countrywide, for the benefit of those who'd been neglecting to fill in their scorecards, was the banking scam that went from lame to fame by pumping piles of cash into the housing bubble, then crashed all the way to left-hand-to-the-forehead loser when the boom went bust in 2008.

Now, thanks to B of A's braniacs from the Charlie Ponzi School of Business and Elocution, B of A, Countrywide notwithstanding, owned more bad paper than all the settling tanks in all the sewage treatment plants in America.

"The big uncertainty for Bank of America is how much...are all their other mortgage problems going to cost them?" said Bert Ely, monetary policy wonk, as though the bad paper itself wasn't a big enough problem. "They're facing lawsuits in the billions, maybe several tens of billions of dollars."

When asked whether B of A was down for the count or was going to make it to a neutral corner, Ely made a throat-clearing sort of noise and said, "It's going to be a long hard slog for them to do so."

That would be a "no."

And, as far as corporate America's money mavens went, B of A was the First Team. Top Dog. Cock of the walk. If-you-could-make-it-there-you-make-it-everywhere, "A" foam-finger Number One.

Exactly the sort of folks Rick Perry figured should be in charge of everyone's money, instead of bumbling, stumbling old Ponzi-scamming Uncle Sam, who everyone and his or her brother, sister, and third cousins twice-removed and put back three times was shovelling mountains of cash at because all the equity markets everywhere in the world were making like the Cyclone at Coney Island.

Ponzi scheme indeed.