Oct. 20, 2013 – The Weekend Line - Thomas Friedman Shills for the Billionaires

10/20/2013 3:17 PM

Whew, dodged that shutdown..uh-oh, here comes another one, over the Budget, due December 15th…

”No new taxes” versus “We will only negotiate if new revenue is on the table.”
And none of that ‘lower taxes raises federal income’, Laffer Curve crap. That’s how we ended up with this national debt to begin with. A wonderfully appropriate name for a provably bad theory.

The Republicans have had a two-plank platform for over thirty years: “Cut Taxes. Cut Regulations.” Honestly, the simplicity sells but the reality is the destruction of the United States. Yet these simpleton slogans show up everywhere. They added a third plank on Jan 20^th, 2009. It added a different ‘N’ word to their platform.

Thomas Friedman needs to ask his billionaire-family wife (oh, you didn’t know?) how much ‘income’ she would get each year if corporate taxes were cut to zero, as he recommended in his column last week.

“Golly,” Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan, would  soon say, “I only make $40,000 a year. Sure, I wear Savile Row suits, always eat out, live in a huge apartment in a tower on Manhattan when I’m not at the corporate home in the Hamptons, and have a limo and a driver wherever I go, unless I’m flying somewhere in a Gulfstream. But, those are all JPMorgan’s business expenses for having a $13Billion-dollar loser like me be the CEO. None of that is my income.”

And not only would the corporation pay no taxes, as Friedman recommends, but Jamie Dimon wouldn’t either, cause he'd have hardly any income. And neither would any of the Wal-Mart billionaires, and neither would the Kochs, or any other corporate executive.

Just another reason I have zero respect for Friedman.

Meanwhile, the strange thing about those CEO salaries is that making them public almost guarantees they’ll get paid more. 

Sure, they already make almost 300 times what their lowest company employee makes. Sure, that spread is over ten times as wide as it was in the early sixties, when the American economy was booming.  Of course it’s obscene, demoralizes workers, creates an entire class of people who have no idea what real life is for 99.9% of America. Which is why the SEC created a new disclosure rule that corporations, especially their CEOs, hate.

But apparently, the psychology is that no one wants to hire a cheap CEO. So if they keep salaries secret, it becomes the social crime it’s been, and if their incomes become public, it turns into a seller’s market and the price goes through the roof.

And soon, with that ever-increasing income for those titans of industry (really?), these swelled heads will be able to bid to own their own politicians. At least, if the Supreme Court rules the same way they ruled in Citizens United. That is, in favor of the fantasy that “money = speech”.  

Personally, I’d like to dig up the rotting corpse that carried the rotten, racist mind of William F. Buckley, whose case of Buckley v. Valeo started the disaster that is the current “Candidate For Sale” market. Buckley’s zombie ideas of racism, “I got mine”, supply-side economics,  and the idea that, well, that conservatives have any new ideas, are wonderful icons for the TeaBagger edition of the zombie show “The Walking Dead”:

“What do we want?”

“Brains!”  

“When do we want them?”

“...Brains!”

So sad, their complete lack thereof. (and thanks, Al F.)

Speaking of TeaBaggers (and until they call my party by its name, the Democratic Party, I’ll call them by the name they first called themselves: “TeaBaggers.” Oh, yes, they invented it. Note that’s a National Review link.) Anyway, can’t tell the loonies without a scorecard, so definitely review this piece in today’s NYTimes, especially the accompanying graphic maps of which factions from where voted for funding the United States of America. (Hint: It wasn’t the TeaBaggers.)

I had a lot of other stuff to vent about, but in a fit of cleanliness I threw out that stack of newspapers for the recycling, so I’ll have to stop here. 

On a lighter note, two good friends and I went to the ‘Music and Comedy Festival Supreme’ yesterday on the Santa Monica Pier. And combining music and comedy, Monty Python’s stylings and punk’s ‘White Wedding’, I shot this to remind us, “Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life.”

10/20/2013 4:35 PM

10/20/2013 4:42 PM