There is very little evidence that MLK would have anything good to say about today’s Republican Party. Indeed – for many folks today’s Republican have gone about as low as you can go.
Here is a mash up of points by MLK and “Willard” Romney…
It is becoming ever more painfully obvious that the Republican Tax Giveaway to the Rich is a major element in the country’s finances being in freefall. The Chamber of Commerce has increasingly become noting but a propaganda arm of the Republican Party, much like Faux News.
Michael Teahan, like his father, mother, and uncles before him, is a small business owner. The 52-year-old has spent most of his adult life running his own businesses: a restaurant, a coffee bar and various companies involved in the espresso machine business.
“I was the only person in my family to go to college, because that’s not what we did — we all opened up businesses,” Teahan says. “For some people, that’s a big hurdle … for us, it was like having lunch.”
Teahan currently operates Espresso Resource, a company that imports espresso machine parts from Europe to sell to U.S. restaurants and coffee shops. And he’s doing very well for himself: The two-man operation clears about $1 million a year in total sales, Teahan says — enough to secure himself annual income in excess of $250,000.
That makes Teahan one of the few small business owners to actually benefit from the Bush administration’s tax cuts for the wealthy. He says the cuts save him about $12,000 a year, compared to what he paid before they were enacted. But as debates over the federal budget deficit have intensified, Teahan has found the political discussion increasingly divorced from the reality of his experience as a small business owner.
Tax cuts for the wealthy, according to Teahan, will do nothing to bolster his firm. They won’t affect his hiring decisions, they won’t encourage him to buy new equipment or help him move into a bigger warehouse. He says all of those decisions — the nuts and bolts of actually running a small company — depend on the his customers’ economic conditions, not his personal tax rate.
“What we do in business, how we spend our money, how we allocate our resources — that has very little to do with tax policy,” Teahan says. “I map my business based on my customers, and what my customers want to buy, and what they can afford to buy.” (more…)
Interviews of Warren Buffett, Bill and Melinda Gates, and Ted Turner -
This group are pretty much on the same page. I think it would be interesting to add the Koch brothers into this mix, and perhaps have a roundtable. The Koch brothers are among the principal financiers of the Tea Party, and right wing in this country.
My personal belief is that the economy will not come back until two things happen:
First, we have to somehow defeat and eliminate the culture of corruption which infests Wall Street, the Banks, corporations, and Congress. Until you get a handle on that, there just isn’t any reason to believe the system isn’t gamed to the advantage of the already rich, and the corrupt – driving the small investor who is the backbone of the economy out.
The next thing is to get back to the metaphorical economic relationship of the car to the windshield wipers. The car is what drives the market. The windshield wiper is an accessory, which wouldn’t exist without the car. You don’t build a car around a fancy new windshield wiper design – it’s the other way around. The economic mavens in this country have spent far too much time and money investing in technologies which can only be described as windshield wipers – while pawning the ability to make cars to China.
Until you get back to owning th car – there won’t be another American Bill Gates, whose operating system has been the vehicle for which countless accessories dance the tune.
Back when the real estate bubble began to bust, conservatives, and their coonservative lackeys were all over the media announcing that it was the borrowers fault for taking on loans they couldn’t possibly afford. Stories of black people, in particular lacking financial savvy and making bad decisions abounded. Ergo – the meltdown was the responsibility of the feckless dishonest home buyer…
Well folks, as I have been predicting here for over a year – the REAL mortgage crisis is in high end homes. Not only were home prices jacked up during the mortgage Ponzi, but the number of high end homes skyrocketed far beyond what the income levels of the population in a given area could support.
What this means is that there are a whole bunch of multimillion dollar homes out there…
No need for tears, but the well-off are losing their master suites and saying goodbye to their wine cellars.
The housing bust that began among the working class in remote subdivisions and quickly progressed to the suburban middle class is striking the upper class in privileged enclaves like this one in Silicon Valley.
Whether it is their residence, a second home or a house bought as an investment, the rich have stopped paying the mortgage at a rate that greatly exceeds the rest of the population.
More than one in seven homeowners with loans in excess of a million dollars are seriously delinquent, according to data compiled for The New York Times by the real estate analytics firm CoreLogic.
By contrast, homeowners with less lavish housing are much more likely to keep writing checks to their lender. About one in 12 mortgages below the million-dollar mark is delinquent.
Though it is hard to prove, the CoreLogic data suggest that many of the well-to-do are purposely dumping their financially draining properties, just as they would any sour investment.
“The rich are different: they are more ruthless,” said Sam Khater, CoreLogic’s senior economist. (more…)
