I truly agree, while Obama has not been as progressive as I would like (as progressive as I am) he is still going to fight for and protect the values I believe in much better that Mitt Romney would ever.

theweekmagazine:

Yunte Huang:

If [young progressives] truly care about the left-wing ideals they espouse, they ought to mobilize for the man who — while hardly an ultra-liberal standard-bearer — is still likely to defend many principles held dear by progressives. The Republican, on the other hand, will dismantle them. Obviously, Obama has disappointed the Left. He is, after all, a politician. But he’s hardly the worst politician the Left could imagine. And come November, liberals ought to remember that.

Read the full column.

(via truth-has-a-liberal-bias)

This is something to seriously take into account for any undecided people out there.

Thanks to Mother Jones for getting the truth about Romney out - apparently all old, poor and sick people in America (approx 47%) are just lazy and can’t get off their butt long enough to take care of themselves (aka move up the class ladder at record paces in a crap economy thanks to GW Bush) and therefore no longer be old, poor or sick.

For the full transcript of the Romney fundraiser where he made this appalling (and hopefully election swinging) statement and many other gems: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/09/full-transcript-mitt-romney-secret-video

List of Companies Supporting Right-Wing and Tea Party Causes and Candidates to Boycott

As we discussed in our recent article, 4 Effective Ways to Fight the Tea Party, there are many things we can do to combat their agenda.  We can work to advocate truthfulness, avoid television stations that air conservative Super PAC propoganda.  WE can support candidates facing elections against Tea Party candidates…

And we can boycott boycott boycott companies whose products and services help fund the Tea Party agenda and candidates.

For your convenience, here is a list of but a few of those companies we should avoid.  Be sure to share with your family and friends. This is by no means a fully comprehensive list, but it is a good beginning.

Also, change.org has a petition you can sign telling “Cannon Pharmacy, Quicken Loans, Angie’s List, & 37 Limbaugh Sponsors – We’re Not Buying”.

FOR FULL LIST (including companies owned by the Koch brothers) CLICK HERE: http://samuel-warde.com/2012/07/list-of-companies-supporting-right-wing-and-tea-party-causes-and-candidates-to-boycott/

The Real Welfare Problem: Government Giveaways to the Corporate 1%

by: John Atcheson

While Romney and Ryan lie about welfare (and just about everything else), and Obama and the Democrats demurely mumble objections, there is a real welfare horror story going on in America.

But it’s not about welfare queens vs hard working whites; its not about race or ethnic divisions; it’s not about any of the standard Republican bait and switch, divide and conquer BS.

It’s about handouts to the uber-rich and the corporations.

Bottom line: if you’re a Fortune 500 company or a member of the wealthiest 1%, you’re getting welfare, and a hell of a lot of it.

If you’re one of the dreaded entitlement crowd – which, if you include social security and Medicare, is the vast majority of the remaining 99% — you’re getting chicken feed, and the Republicans want to take even this meager sustenance away.

Let’s run the numbers.

Corporate Subsidies: We spend $59 billion on social welfare programs, but more than $92 billion on corporate subsidies.  According to the Environmental Law Institute, fossil fuel industries alone get more than $70 billion in subsidies, with most going to the oil and gas sector.  Yeah, we certainly can’t afford to deprive Exxon of its record profits just to give money to needy kids.

Sheltering Off-Shore Profits: Corporations are given $58 billion a year in tax breaks for “deferred” taxes for off shore profits.  Yep.  Sure want to encourage US companies to hide profits off-shore. Can you say “job creators?”

Capital gains: Rich folks make the majority of their money in the form of dividends and capital gains, which are taxed at only 15%.  This allows them to avoid some $59 billion in taxes per year.

Carried interest: Hedge fund managers avoid at least $2.1 billion in taxes a year.  This sweet deal – not available to the ninety-nine percenters, by the way – lets hedge fund managers and other selected fat cats take what amounts to ordinary wages and have them taxed as if they were capital gains.  So instead of being taxed at 35% (39.5% if we eliminate Bush’s tax cuts for the rich) it’s taxed at 15%.  Ayn Rand would be proud. Thomas Jefferson, not so much. This amount – $2.1 billion – is roughly equivalent to the entire budget for the Administration on Aging. Wouldn’t want to deprive millionaire and billionaire hedge fund managers of their windfall just to help a lot of old geezers.

Bank Bailouts:  Then there’s the $700 billion bank bailout – to rescue banks from problems they themselves created.  Yes it got paid back; and yes, we had to do something.  But the reason this money was little more than welfare was because the banks got to do what they wanted to with it.  It could have come with strings – we could have insisted that they write down mortgages to market value or allowed refinancing at lower interest rates or longer amortization periods. We could even have given the money directly to stressed homeowners, instead of the banksters who caused the problem. Any of these approaches would have prevented defaults, slowed – or even reversed – the precipitous declines in real estate values, and given low and middle income consumers some ability to consume, which, at the end of the day is the real “job creator.”  And we most certainly could have insisted that banks  money loan out the money to small businesses and home buyers.

But we did nothing like that.  Instead, we allowed the banks to play a high stakes game of pump-and-dump – complete with flash trading – with our money. Instead of loans designed to jump start the economy, we got risky investments underwritten with our tax money that paid off only the Wall Street elite.

Talk about welfare.  Talk about your welfare kings and queens.  It doesn’t get any more obscenely selfish and opportunistic than this.

$9 Trillion in Low and No Interest Loans from the Fed:  And now for the mother of all welfare programs, how about $9 trillion loaned at below market rates – some  of it as low as .5%.  Here again, this money disappeared into the money vaults of the select few, rather than benefiting the common good.

And here again, we could have insisted that public money be used to serve the public good.  But instead, it was given as white-collar welfare – a freeby to the real welfare kings and queens – the financial sector and the fat cats they serve.

To the extent conservatives acknowledge these facts, they justify it with a neo-Reaganomics logic that the wealthy and the corporations who receive this largess are the “job creators.”

But here’s the deal.  As long as the middle class is in debt and feeling insecure, no company in its right mind will invest in expanding or any other type of job creation.  Why on earth would they?  If people aren’t buying your service or product now, how will making more of your product or expanding your capacity to provide your service make them do it?  And Paris Hilton, Mitt Romney or Paul Ryan and other millionaires can only buy so many yachts; so many second, third, fourth or fifth homes.  They simply don’t have the numbers to lead to an economic recovery.

The proof of this is in the numbers.  Corporations are sitting on over $2 trillion in profits.  What job creation is occurring is happening overseas in China, India and other low wage countries.

So the next time some conservative comes up to you praising the power of the free market and bemoaning the welfare state or our slide into socialism or some other mindless talking point, make a deal with them.  Tell ‘em we’ll agree to cut welfare by 90%, but we get to decide whose welfare gets cut.

am not a tweeter but this is FABULOUS - check out @PaulRyanGosling on twitter !!!

We are the 99% - Check out this video and Chuck Collins’ great book

99 to 1: How wealth inequality is wrecking the world and what we can do about it

“Businessmen” Spend $16K On Two Bottles Of Wine At 21 Club

“…Two “businessmen” spent more on two bottles of wine at the 21 Club than the annual income of a couple on the poverty line…”

for income inequality resources check out:

- Chuck Collins book 99 to 1: How wealth inequality is wrecking the world and what we can do about it - http://www.bkconnection.com/ProdDetails.asp?ID=9781609945923

- Institute for Policy Studies - program on Inequality and the Common Good -  http://www.ips-dc.org/inequality

- Mother Jones inequality charts and article - http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/02/income-inequality-in-america-chart-graph

- Recent Pew Research study on the lost decade of the middle class - http://bit.ly/Oz1VWf

- and for some great alternatives check out David Korten’s book AGENDA FOR A NEW ECONOMY - http://www.davidkorten.org/agenda2

http://owsposters.tumblr.com/

I wish this was a joke but it’s not. This is ACTUALLY FROM MITT ROMNEY’S WEBSITE!

I thought it would take more reading between the lines to get to the heart of his pro-corporate, pro 1% agenda, but NO its right there on the front page.

Remember in all this political blustering… dig deeper, think critically and question the meaning behind the rhetoric. The ‘job creation’ theories that Mitt bases his claims in are proven not to work - Bush era deregulation, tax cuts to corporations and pro unfettered free market greed is what got us in to this mess, how can anyone honestly think that Mitt Romney, with ever more regressive views, will get us out of it? 

Highlights:
- Eliminate regulations destroying the coal industry (more dirty coal profit for big companies)
- Approve Keystone XL (again, more dirty profit for big oil company execs)
- Create a Reagan Economic Zone… FREE TRADE - exploit the producer, and the consumer while pulling in record high profits. (http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/08/03/1116404/-Romney-finds-something-to-slap-Reagan-s-name-on)
- Immediately reduce non-security discretionary spending by five percent (CUTS in education, healthcare, social programs etc.)
- Reduce taxes on job creation through individual and corporate tax reform (More tax cuts for the wealthy, based on the idea that trickle down economics work, WHICH THEY DON’T)
- Stop the increases in regulation that are tangling job creators in red tape (deregulate corporations, allowing them to further exploit the producer, consumer and the natural environment for profit)
- Protect workers and businesses from strong-arm labor union tactics (!!! Can I just ask, workers ARE the labor union, who are you protecting workers from… themselves?)
- Replace Obamacare with real health care reform that controls cost and improves care (I wish he meant a public option but am sure this is a privatized voucher system)

I can think of legitimate reasons why you might want to have a company in Belize with a bank account in Switzerland and fake Latvian shareholders. Maybe you don’t want your competitors to know what you’re up to or maybe you’re a large business operating across borders. It’s easier to do business when you have accounts offshore.

But what is striking about all the offshore services available is that while they are totally legal, the system seems to make it easy to get away with things that are not legal.

In the end, it took a week and a half and fair bit of paperwork to get our Belizean company registered. I had to fax a notarized passport. To get our bank account, I needed a reference letter from my bank, an accountant and a lawyer.

Jason Sharman studies tax havens at Griffith University. He says all that due diligence is relatively new. Lately, he says big, rich countries have gotten together to crack down on tax havens.

“In the rest of the world the United States is seen as taking a very robust and aggressive line towards tax havens, ” says Sharman.

The way an academic like Sharman studies tax havens, is by doing exactly what we did. He’s been in touch with hundreds of providers in many different countries, and he says his experiences were all very similar to ours, with one big difference. Sharman says there was one country where he was almost never asked for documentation: the United States.

“The easiest place in the world to register a business anonymously is definitely the United States,” say Sharman.

So of course, we had to try. We wanted to see if registering a company in Belize was different from registering a company in the United States. It was. Compared to the process in Belize, registering a company here in U.S. was easy.

Registering Planet Money’s Delaware company took one day and three emails. The company that set it up for us asked for absolutely no documentation. I gave them my real name, but I could have been anybody from anywhere in the world.

…

Right now, the team here at Planet Money are the proud owners of two companies. Unbelizable Inc., in Belize City, and Delawho?, right here in the United States. We have a packet of incorporation documents and a lot of questions about what exactly people do with these kind of companies. Our plan is to find out.