The Rich Get Richer, The Poor Get Poorer

Thanks to right wing policies over the last two decades, the middle class have been systematically destroyed. So the wealthiest can gain even more profit while shipping jobs out of the USA.



Tax rates on the top tax bracket:
1918 77%
1921 73%
1923 56%
1924 46%
1925 28%
1929 24%
Great Depression
1945 94%
1955 91%
1965 70%
1975 70%
1980 70%
1982 50%
1987 38%
1993 38%
2003 35%
2008 Great Recession
2011 "Effective" tax rate--17% and still declining.
2012 Great Depression II?

Similar Point of View:
http://pushedleft.blogspot.com/2010/12/rich-get-richer-poor-get-poorer-and.html

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"If A Democrat Said The Sun Rises In The East Republicans Would Say It's A Job Killing Sunrise!"

Political strategists have chosen it as the Word of the Month.

Whenever you hear a Republican say 'Job-Killing' remember that he doesn't actually mean Health insurance reform.  It's pure political rhetoric.

Unfortunately, many voters find politics confusing so they latch onto particular words as if they were flotation devices in the ocean.

A better approach for voters would be learning how to think.

Allowing politicians to manipulate you with magic words.

A private sector job is not dependency.

'Dependency' is yet -another- phony Republican magic word. It has no connection to reality.

When a father has no job and has no insurance because of Republican policies, THAT'S dependency. When Obama strengthens the economy and that father gets a private sector job and when insurance reform makes health insurance for his family affordable . . .

Republicans form a new plot to rig the 2008 election

Last updated November 30, 2007 4:32 p.m. PT
By JOHANN HARI
GUEST COLUMNIST

In the long, hot autumn of 2000, the world was shocked by the contempt for democracy shown by the Republican Party. They knew their man had lost the popular vote to Al Gore by half a million votes. They knew the majority of voters in Florida itself had pulled a lever for Gore. But they fought -- amid the confetti of hanging chads -- to stop the state's votes being counted, and to ensure that the Supreme Court imposed George W. Bush on the nation.

Today, that contempt for democracy is on display again. In California right now, there is a naked, out-in-the-open ploy to rig the 2008 presidential election -- and it may succeed.

To understand how this works, we have to roam back to the 18th century and learn about the odd anachronistic leftover they are trying to use now to thwart democracy. Back then, America's Founding Fathers decided not to introduce a system where U.S. presidents would be directly elected, with the votes totted up in Washington, D.C., and the winner being the man with the most. Instead, they chose a complex system called the Electoral College.

This stipulates that American citizens do not vote directly for a president. Instead, they technically vote for 539 statewide "electors," who gather six weeks after the election to pick the president.

The founders designed it this way for a number of reasons. They wanted the smaller states to have a say, so they gave them a disproportionate number of Electoral College votes. They also believed that, in a country that was largely isolated and illiterate, voters wouldn't know much about out-of-state figures and would be better off picking intermediaries who could exercise discretion on their behalf.

It is the worst part of the Constitution, producing perverse results again and again. On four occasions there has been such a big gap between the national popular vote and the state-by-state Electoral College votes that the guy with fewer real supporters in the country got to be president. It happened in 1824, 1876, 1888 and -- most tragically for the world -- in 2000.

Today, the Republicans are trying to exploit the discontent with the Electoral College among Americans in a way that would rig the system in their favor. At the moment, every state apart from Maine and Nebraska hands out its Electoral College votes according to a winner-takes-all system. This means that if 51 percent of people in California vote Democrat, the Democrats get 100 percent of California's electoral votes; if 51 percent of people in Texas vote Republican, the Republicans get 100 percent of Texas' electoral votes.

The Republicans want to change this -- but in only one Democrat-leaning state. California has gone Democratic in presidential elections since 1988, and winning the sunny state is essential if the Democrats are going to retake the White House. So the Republicans have now begun a plan to break up California's Electoral College votes and award a huge chunk of them to their side.

They have launched a campaign called California Counts, and they are trying to secure a statewide referendum in June to implement their plan. They want California's electoral votes to be divvied up not on a big statewide basis, but according to the much smaller congressional districts. The practical result? Instead of all the state's 54 Electoral College votes going to the Democratic candidate, around 20 would go to the Republicans.

If this were being done in every state, everywhere, it would be an improvement. California's forgotten Republicans would be represented in the Electoral College, and so would Texas' forgotten Democrats. But by doing it in California alone, they are simply giving the Republicans a massive electoral gift. Suddenly it would be extremely hard for a Democrat ever to win the White House; they would need a landslide victory everywhere else to counter this vast structural imbalance against them on the West Coast.

You can see this partisan agenda if you look at who is behind the campaign. It was set up by Charles "Chep" Hurth III -- a Republican donor to Rudy Giuliani. It was drafted by Tom Hiltachk -- a Republican attorney. Its signature drive was coordinated by Kevin Eckery -- a Republican consultant.

Its funds were provided by Paul Singer -- a Republican billionaire and one of Giuliani's biggest donors. Its chief fundraiser is Anne Dunsmore, who went there straight from her post as national deputy campaign manager for Giuliani.

Seeing a pattern yet?
Full story: Republicans form a new plot to rig the 2008 election

Ethics Cloud Over California Republicans

By Erica Werner
The Associated Press

Saturday 09 June 2007

Washington - Hollywood party girls don't have a monopoly on trouble in California. A disproportionate number of the state's congressional Republicans are facing ethics questions that threaten to sink their careers and their party's political fortunes too.

Of 201 House Republicans, at least six are known to have attracted the attention of federal investigators - and four are from California. Their woes come in the wake of the lurid corruption scandal that sent ex-GOP Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham of San Diego to prison last year for taking $2.4 million in bribes.

Although their situations have a few common threads, some analysts attribute the cluster of California cases to coincidence, plus the state's large size and district lines drawn to protect incumbents.

"When your seat is so safe that you're not concerned about perception, you become too wedded to Washington and you lose touch with your constituency, and you lose touch with your real purpose," said Karen Hanretty, a Republican strategist and former California Republican Party spokeswoman.

Rep. John Doolittle, a nine-term Northern California conservative under investigation in the influence-peddling scandal around jailed GOP lobbyist Jack Abramoff, has his own theory about why federal corruption investigations seem to be concentrated in California.

"I think it's part of this manufactured culture of corruption that the Democrats have come up with and they decided to, given what's happened with Duke Cunningham, they decided that California Republicans on the Appropriations Committee would be a great place to start," said Doolittle, who plans to seek re-election next year.

The ethics cloud is discouraging the party faithful who've already watched the GOP shrink to minority status in California. And they add to the dilemmas of Republican strategists aiming to retake Congress next year following election losses blamed partly on GOP ethics problems.

"There is a sort of feeling among Republican activists who work hard to elect Republicans of, 'What the heck is going on here?'" said Los Angeles GOP analyst Allan Hoffenblum.

Republican Rep. Richard Pombo was chairman of the House Resources Committee when he lost in a GOP-leaning Central California district last November amid questions about his ties to Abramoff.

That reduced the number of Republicans in the nation's largest congressional delegation to 19, the lowest since their numbers shrank from 24 once district lines were redrawn after the 2000 census.

There are 33 Democrats from California, led by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco, and none are known to be facing active FBI scrutiny. A 34th California Democratic seat is vacant after the cancer death in April of Rep. Juanita Millender-McDonald.

The GOP hopes to take back Pombo's seat next year. The districts of the four incumbents with ethics issues are heavily Republican, and will probably stay in GOP hands.

But their problems make them less valuable allies for Republican presidential candidates looking to compete in California's primary, newly advanced to February. And the ethics clouds discourage a GOP base already chafing at moderate Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's constant compromises with Democrats.

"This is presenting a huge distraction from the debate over ideas that really needs to happen in terms of who's going to control Congress," said Jon Fleischman, a GOP activist in Orange County. "It creates a degree of cynicism that is certainly real."

Besides Doolittle, California Republicans with ethics problems are:

_Rep. Jerry Lewis, now in his 15th term and chairman of the Appropriations Committee last year when federal prosecutors in Los Angeles began investigating his ties to a lobbyist with clients in his district.

_Rep. Gary Miller, in his fifth term, who's drawn scrutiny over a tax deferral strategy he used in a profitable real estate sale to a Southern California town outside his district.

_Rep. Ken Calvert, in his eighth term, who denies any conflict over pushing federal funding for a planned freeway interchange 16 miles from property he sold at a profit. The FBI pulled Calvert's financial disclosure forms a year ago, but he says there's no evidence he's under active investigation.

The four deny wrongdoing, and it's not clear that Miller, Calvert or Lewis are in immediate legal or political jeopardy. Not so with Doolittle, who barely won re-election last year in one of the most heavily Republican districts in California.

Many local officials still publicly back him, but some Republicans in Doolittle's district are starting to say they can't risk having him as their nominee.

"The fact of the matter is John Doolittle will be defeated by a Democratic candidate in an overwhelmingly Republican district because of the ethical morass of his own creation," said Steve Schmidt, a former White House adviser who backs a potential primary challenge by Eric Egland, a former Doolittle supporter.