Month: October 2012 (Page 2 of 3)

Not for the first time, I heard today that Obama (aside from being a secret Muslim socialist from Kenya) only does things to help “the blacks.” It is often said, without a hint of irony, by people who are neither wealthy, nor Anglo-Saxon, nor Protestant, nor male.

It’s simply true that a number of people consider any attempt to arrest the decline of the poor is “giving my hard-earned money to those filthy negroes.” Rick Santorum said it best when he informed supporters in Iowa, “I don’t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them someone else’s money.” Of course, Santorum said that he had been misunderstood and that what native speakers of English had heard as “black” had actually been a verbal stumble resulting in something like “blah.”

Shorter out-group-members-that-suck-up-to-right-wing-overlords:

“I feel better about being pissed upon if someone else is being shat upon.”

That’s what is sometimes referred to as relative comfort. Indeed, for those poor benighted also-screwed, they will share the fate of their peer in the peasantry of the Middle East. Each will accept as an article of faith that some third party is at fault for his state of affairs. How different is a South Carolina neo-Nazi from a Yemen bedouin really? Each is a religious asshole that blames his own sad situation on a third party on the word of a person that lives on a grand estate.

If your complaint is that the current president is “helping” the second worst-off racial group (native Americans have been the biggest screwee for a century), then remind yourself as to whether or not you would voluntarily change places with a member of that group in order to improve your condition. If so, I have a couple of bridges to sell you.

In a meeting today, I hear the usual raging assholes going on and on about Obama. It was somewhat telling that they all shut up when a black man walked in.

One thing that had been missing from the Limbaugh talking point excreta: Not one thing was said in support of Romney. The dog whistles, they were a whistlin’, but nary a word of acclaim of the Republican candidate. I almost laughed out loud at a particularly buffoonish individual with the crazy old man rant in a perfect smoked-three-packs-a-day since the Nixon Administration voice. He had referred to Obama as a “Neville Chamberlain” and as a “goddamned communist.”

I thought it was funny, that is, until I realized that these people vote. Despite the fact that that clown sounds like he will soon be on bottled oxygen, through his incoherent rants (he didn’t even bother to address policies, preferring to stick to tried-and-true schoolyard argumentation) failed to acknowledge that the government would soon be subsidizing his self-induced medical difficulties.

David Frum’s column I mentioned a couple of days ago said exactly what is demonstrably true. The upper middle class and the ordinary rich will be burdened with increased taxation strictly to ensure that the filthiest of filthy rich have a far lower tax rate than the filthiest of the filthy poor. I only wish the easily-duped-into-voting-against-their-own-interests (’cause look! gay muslin negro abortions!!1!!eleven!1) only injured themselves and not the nation as a whole.

I have been ranting about this to passersby for years now, but only when a credentialed journalist gets addresses an issue is it heard.

Yesterday, former Bush, Jr. speechwriter and current Daily Beast contributor David Frum had a piece on one of my pet peeves. It is wonderfully titled “Upper-Class Warfare: How Romney Would Screw the Ordinary Rich.” Frum is able to address this from the perspective of a member of the class on whom the class warfare is being waged:

You see, the top 1 percent has its own top 1 percent—the richest of the rich—and those lucky enough to count themselves within its ranks would be the big winners from a cut in the top rate of income tax to 28 percent—and they’d be even bigger winners from Romney’s proposal to extend indefinitely the present 15 percent rate on capital gains and dividends.

Meanwhile the lower 99 percent of the top 1 percent—and the next 2 percent after them—will lose much more from the removal of the tax deductions than they will gain from lower rates.

Many Americans fail to understand where they fit in the economics of all out class warfare being waged by the ultra wealthy. Come to think of it, it is less like a war than a massacre. The real victims (at least those who understand of what they are victims) are without recourse. Even before the outright legalization of bribery with the Citizens United decision, campaign contributions decided elections. Really, the change in the graft was simply in manner: from discrete to overt. Money had already been a big part of any campaign, and those with the most discretionary spending available for such trivia as elections are those with the most period. The nonchalance with which the court dismissed a decades old Montana law written in response to the literal purchase of a Senate seat by an obscenely rich asshole.

…but I digress…

This is where the tax cuts proposed by Romney really go:

In other words, a big tax cut of greatest value to those earning more than $500,000 a year (the people who pay the top rate on the majority of their income) will be offset by a tax increase that will fall most heavily on those who earn between $100,000 and $300,000 of taxable income.

People in the $100,000–$300,000 group are likely to think of themselves as “middle class.” They’re wrong about that: $100,000 of adjusted gross income puts you into the top 20 percent of taxpayers; at $300,000, you are richer than 98 percent of your fellow Americans. You might call people in the $100,000–$300,000 range the “lower upper class.”

So what this comes down to is that the large majority of working professionals will be the ones hardest hit by new tax regulations. Those least affected will be trust fund babies and their ilk.

But Frum’s last sentence really hits home:

Mike L., the software engineer, says that this country has never resented the successful.

That’s true. But nowadays it sometimes seems that the very most successful resent everybody else—starting first with the people occupying the rungs of the ladder immediately below their own.

As the silver spooners see it, all peasants are stupid, and it is the god-given right of the superior (read:rich) to exercise dominion over the inferior. Unfortunately for Jaguar salesmen and anesthesiologists, they are among the latter. If only it were possible to convince them of this using only the abundant and obvious evidence…

I have recently mentioned how much difficulty I am having with accepting the extent to which the digital world attempts to figure out who I am. Well, now I’m really finding it disturbing. I guess I should explain a little:

A few days ago, I received a jury summons. Apparently, this will take up an entire quarter. I was rather shocked. I have a lot of travel planned in the next few months, including chairing a national conference out of state and some international travel for work. So, of course, I googled “Killing in the Name of” to get a little Rage on. The right margin of any YouTube video shows related videos. As often happens, I followed those videos down the rabbit hole. Within a few videos of Rage Against the Machine, I found a Marilyn Manson version of Tainted Love. That brought to mind the Soft Cell version (one of the biggest hits from my high school years). As well when you play YouTube videos, there is often an advertisement on the bottom. I pulled up the video of Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love.” In this case, the ad asked, “Looking for gay men?” along with the gayest list of 80s tunes imaginable running the length of the right margin. Wow. I found that I actually like most of those songs.

So based on my traffic, teh Google must think I am a gay right-wing white supremacist with an unhealthy obsession over the American Civil War.

Update: As I continued down this path, the ads came to say such things as “Online Geek Dating.” Weird.

Apparently, presidential debating has appreciably lower truth standards than high school debate club debating. I’m sure the Romney handlers give their deepest thanks to Duane Gish. It’s a brilliant tactic. If you consider “infantile” and “brilliant” as synonyms, then it is brilliant. But it works with the mouthbreathers, so I guess it’s OK. (Caveat: If your annual salary is greater than $250,000, you can be excused for failing to understand that you are still among the filthy peasantry when it comes to who is on the “screwer” and “screwee” side of the equation. It would take actual effort on your part to notice otherwise.) Just FYI, though, here is your Jesus-cursed-the-lesser-races-with-dark-skin Messiah’s tax plan, worked out so even the laziest of lazy fucks can get it:

Step 1: Cut revenue (tax increases for the wealthy)
Step 2: Increase defense spending
Step 3: Cut no benefits (or only trivial ones, such as Big Bird)
Step 4: ?????
Step 5: Balanced Budget!!!

Sounds legit…