Saturday, December 2, 2017

Tyranny Of The Takers

The Party of Trump is pressing on with their extremely unpopular “Tax Cuts For The Rich And Screw Everyone Else” legislation. Every time the corporate media call that rapacious violation of the public interest “tax reform” I want to throw a brick at the TV.

The Republican Kleptocracy is kicking in, while kicking the little guy in the gut. Is there any other way they operate? I was planning on having a nice relaxing day today, so I’m going to let a few other people’s tweets convey the reality based perspective on the Party of Trump’s fleecing of America:

==

Jared Bernstein: Media and everyone else: From here on in, the GOP can NEVER credibly say "we can't afford X because it will raise the deficit!" Their support for their deficit-financed tax plan once-and-for-all, permanently takes that (always BS) argument off the table.

David Roth: Say what you will about needlessly making the lives of millions of Americans harder and worse so that 135 rich sociopaths never have to pay taxes on their private airplanes, but it is A WIN.

Joshua Holland: They don't expect him to win a second term and don't know when they'll have unified control again. It's the politics of looting the place while you still can.

Steve Schmidt: The United States Senate has gone completely off the rails. Lobbyists are writing the bill in secret and duly elected Democratic US Senators have no idea what's in it. The corruption of what used to be the world’s greatest deliberative body is a tragedy.

Ben Wikler: Until now, your income that paid for public schools (via state & local taxes) wasn’t taxed by the federal government. GOP bill ends that. Instead, they’re now creating a tax break for *private* school tuition.

Kevin Kruse: A 479-page bill, with major ramifications, rushed through with no hearings and no testimony, with the text not even printed up and only released hours before the vote. I'm trying to think of a historical precedent for this, but I'm coming up completely blank.... So, no, this mad rush with the GOP tax cut is nothing like the ten-month process behind Obamacare. Anyone who suggests so is admitting they don't know the first thing about either of these events. ..The Affordable Care Act took ten months from start to finish, with endless debate, discussion, congressional hearings, town halls, public meetings, and even a full formal presidential address devoted to explaining the details.

Kurt Eichenwald: For the MAGA guys who don’t understand: the people handwriting the tax bill don’t give a damn about them or this country. They are $1,000 Gucci shoe-wearing lobbyists who get pols to sell us all out, again and again, because you LET THEM by falling for the GOP con.... When the MAGA voters find their retirement age up at 70 and Medicare crippled because of this tax bill of sociopathic greed, will they FINALLY understand they’ve been conned? Or will they just wait for Fox to figure out some way to blame democrats?


Andy Richter: So it’s been proven. There’s a 99% chance that the GOP doesn’t give a shit about you.

==

Thanks to all of the above. They saved me a lot of typing and seething.

I’ll let our Last American Prophet make the point, as only he could:

You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land, they own and control the corporations, and they’ve long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the State Houses, and the City Halls. They’ve got the judges in their back pockets. And they own all the big media companies so they control just about all the news and information you get to hear.

They’ve got you by the balls.

They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want; they want more for themselves and less for everybody else. But I’ll tell you what they don’t want—they don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking. 

They don’t want that, you know what they want?

They want obedient workers, obedient workers. People who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork and just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it. 

- George Carlin


Welcome to Con-servative America, folks.

Here's my humble take:

The far Right aristocratic plutocracy of economic elites has Taken our government. Now they are writing laws that increase THEIR Take, proving THEY are the Real Takers. And they are Taking FROM us, and Taking us down. Their wealth has spoken,Taking the right of "free speech" into the exclusive domain of the elites. Their efforts to Take control of voters and hinder voter registration and poll access also sends their message. Democracy has been Taken from the people. 

In case you missed the point, the greedy elites of the Right are the Real Takers, 

The economic elites have won their revolution. (You thought the revolution was that of the people rising against the powerful and corrupt? Sadly, no. It was the other way around all along.) Their revolution against our democratic representative republic has succeeded. Their corruption of our politicians, laws, and courts is more complete than ever. We are now under domination and rule by the tyranny of the Takers.

This should work out swell. If not, liberals will be blamed.

17 comments:

ArchieBunkerNYC said...

Good News everybody!

The Senate passed the Tax Reconciliation Act last night!

There is a good chance ObamaCare may be repealed! As Joe Biden once said "That's a big f*cking deal"! amirite?

MAGA!

Dave Dubya said...

Arch,

In reality, it's not good news for everybody. The funny thing is, it's NOT good news for the vast majority of duped Trump voters. They will pay more, or lose something down the road from the “Tax Cuts For The Rich And Screw Everyone Else” debacle.

It's great news for greedy spoiled brats like Ivanka and Don Jr. Luckily for them, lawyer fees won't dent their untaxed inherited wealth.

Also great news for the greedy authoritarian Kochs, Adelsons, Waltons, Sinclairs, Mercers, and other big Republican doners.

Corruption pays well, and Mammon is devoutly served, by the Party of Trump.

The Big Con has even duped enough simpleminded low-information voters to allow the elites to pick their pockets. That's not great news. Health care costs and the number of uninsured will rise when Trumpcare replaces Obamacare. That's not great news, either. Some unlucky ones will likely die. That's really not great news.

How many more MAGA hats will be burned when they figure out they've been conned?

Is adding a $trillion to the debt so the rich get richer really good news, or what? Welcome to the "Debt and deficit Hypocrites Club".

Thanks for showing your "values" to us again, Arch.





Infidel753 said...

It's "tax reform" in the sense that dropping a turd in the punchbowl is "culinary reform". And no, deficits only matter when a Democrat is President.

The erosion of Trump's poll numbers suggests that some of the less committed are waking up. As for the hard-core Trumpanzees, maybe some of them never will. They're motivated -- they don't want to face the humiliation of recognizing that they were conned and that the despised liberals who warned them about Trump were right all along.

But elections are won at the margins. We don't need all of them. What one session of Congress destroys can be restored by the next. And remember that right up until the revolutions in France and Russia, the wealthy oligarchies that dominated those countries felt secure in their power too.

ArchieBunkerNYC said...

Fidel,

Trump wasn't going to last 1 year as President!

Trump wasn't going to beat Hillary!

Trump wasn't going to win the GOP primary!

Just as many Democrats are millionaires as Republicans in Congress.

Look at the net worth of Nancy Pelosi before and after entering Congress. Only fools like you believe she cares more for the little guy than filling her pockets with mammon.

ArchieBunkerNYC said...

"Anybody who doesn't believe it was an inside job is either a fool or a liar."

Thanks JG for exposing your mental illness on Tom's blog. Even Tom is not foolish enough to believe it was an inside job.

ArchieBunkerNYC said...

Dave,

Do you defend the waste of skin Mexican National who killed Kate Steinle?

Dave Dubya said...

Infidel,
I wish I shared your optimism. For every step we take to the left, we take two to the right. That pendulum is broken.

The Right proves again and again what their true con-servative value$ are. Democracy and equality are to be suppressed. And they have succeeded.

I don’t hold any hope for legislative change. Too many Democrats are bought and paid for, and too few of the rest have the nerve to stand for the people. 2009 showed how impotent a Democratic majority was. Obama’s executive orders may as well have been written on water. His moderate legacy is being erased and replaced by the Right’s agenda.

While we see greater social acceptance of minorities and the LGBTQ community, the bigotry remains well mobilized. Trump won White America. The Right will have a lock, or enough to block progress, until white Americans become a minority. They whole social/economic system could very well collapse before that happens. And this is what many feel must happen for the system to change, for good or ill.

Unions have been demonized and crushed politically. Liberals and educators are smeared relentlessly. The war on journalism is also paying off for the Right. Their Big Lie of “liberal media” has resulted in Murdoch and Sinclair winning a huge propaganda victory. Far Right media will continue to grow and dominate discourse. FOX has tilted the country irrevocably to the Right, and Sinclair will finish the job as they seize an expanding share of local news outlets. The Right has won the war of words and unilaterally defines terms.

The tragedy is the American people are far more in favor of progressive ideas, but vote for Republicans anyway. The fact Trump won the White House shows the system has degraded to the point of no return. The Republicans have captured our elections in most states through gerrymandering and voter suppression.

While the quarter of our population with authoritarian personalities is a minority, they are louder and more active than the majority. They have more of the wealthy elite supporters whose money speaks louder than anything in our politics.

Revolutions of the past were against royal monarchies. Today we are under a far more tenacious corporatocracy by inverted totalitarianism that has no figurehead. Democratic representation has been eroded to near irrelevance. There will be no Lexington Green or storming of the Bastille. What awaits is Orwellian one Party rule, with their own Ministry of Truth, Ministry of Peace, and eventually Ministry of Love.

As long as “Proles and animals are free”, “Ignorance is strength. War is peace. Freedom is slavery.” Orwell understood propaganda and the dominant authoritarian nature of humans. And he knew it is the tragic inherent flaw of mankind. Wars, oppression, and injustice will always be their curse on humanity, until they destroy everything.

Former Nixon lawyer John Dean wrote an excellent book on authoritarians called, "Conservatives Without Conscience". (Thanks to Arch for providing the object lesson on their utter lack of conscience and regard for truth.)

What we need before anything can happen is a revolution of consciousness and conscience in the non-authoritarian majority. We need to target authoritarians as they have targeted liberals, unions, educators, minorities, and the press. Until we expose them, they will be the man behind the curtain pulling the levers.

Many of us are working on exposing them, despite the odds against us. The majority has become the voice in the wilderness. That needs to change.

For now, FOX, Breitbart, Limbaugh, etc. are succeeding beyond their wildest dreams. Trump and Roy Moore are proof of their propaganda victory. They are now dictating the course of our country.

I'm afraid more darkness awaits.

Dave Dubya said...

Arch,
Only fools like you believe she cares more for the little guy than filling her pockets with mammon.

Nobody here expressed that belief, of course. But your beliefs about The Party of Trump and mammon says IOKIYAR, amirite? Nice try. We understand you need straw men to avoid addressing the points made.

Is it your con-servative indoctrination that tells you to believe I would "defend the waste of skin Mexican National"? We have a court system for that, but your choice of descriptive words tell us a lot about you. Prosecutors failed to make their case for premeditated murder or manslaughter. You conveniently forget liberals also don't want him to have a gun. He's still going to prison, where he belongs.

Neo-Nazis and white nationalists are as mad as you are about that. Hmm.

So tell me, why no outrage about the deliberate maiming of anti-Nazi protesters and the killing of Heather Heyer? You're not so angry about that, are you? This also tells us a lot about you.

Seems to me we need a "Heather's Law" more than a "Katie's Law".





Jefferson's Guardian said...

"...businesses will not spend their tax cuts as Republican economists predict: America’s leading companies have been explicitly assuring their shareholders that the Trump tax cuts will not trickle down (or, rather, not trickle down below them)."

and...

"Supply-side theory may be snake oil — but the GOP tax bill is straight-up sewer water. Which is to say: There is no economic theory that justifies the tax bill currently moving through the Senate, not even the 'trumped-up trickle-down' kind."

America's become a morbid corporatocratic wasteland. Very soon there will not be anything to defend. That will be the day that revolution will ensue. It has already begun within the minds of millions.

Jefferson's Guardian said...

ArchieBunkerNYC, alias "Majormajor" and "Chuck Morre", and many other monikers too numerous to relate here, is angry with me because I called him out on his defense of the mainstream media regarding their omissions in their coverage of 9/11 evidence and since-then revelations. Of course his defense drops when his dear leader Donald Trump becomes smeared by the same media outlets he was all too quick to defend. You see, Chuck wants his cake and also wants to eat it. ;-)

It's quite humorous, really, to see him squirm and twitch when I point out his obvious lack of natural world understanding -- in particular the immutable laws of physics and its unchanging truth. He lacks sufficient understanding, so cannot provide an appropriate response without resorting to personal attacks or other means of defamation. It's Chuck's way of acknowledging that he has lost the debate, without losing face.

Chuck, don't bring up the subject if you can't debate the facts.

Dave Dubya said...

Arch is not debating. Debate requires mutually accepted definition of terms, reason, logic and evidence. He offers none of those elements of debate or discussion.

He is spewing Republican far Right propaganda, like a good authoritarian follower. He's "just doing his job".

Nicht Wahr, mein komrad? Ach, so!

Orwellian squalor is the final solution for the Right. It is the only end possible. The people will accept it because Oceania has always been at war with East Asia. And Goldstein is the enemy of the Party.

Note how much Arch loves Big Donald. And devotion to the "two minute hates" extended 24/7 on FOX.

ArchieBunkerNYC said...

Good News people!

The creepy clown Al Franken is leaving the Senate!

Don't let the door hit your arse on the way out Al.

Dave Dubya said...

Arch,

I’m glad you’re tickled by Democratic moral accountability. What a strange concept for cons, isn’t it?

You do understand Dems asking Franken to resign will be their example of Democratic family values and basic decency, to be contrasted with Republicans embracing predator sex offender Trump and pedophile Roy Moore?

Not only would Franken be replaced by a Democrat, next election will force Republicans to defend their Bible thumping, anti-First Amendment, molester of young girls. Do you see yourself as good a Christian as Roy Moore and Trump, old sport? I bet you are.

You'd better hope the country drinks the koolade as much as you and the Alabama hypocrites and dupes. I bet they won’t.

On May 6, 2016, the Alabama Judicial Inquiry Commission (JIC) forwarded a list of six charges of ethical violations by Roy Moore to the Alabama Court of the Judiciary.

1. disregarding a federal injunction.
2. demonstrated unwillingness to follow clear law.
3. abuse of administrative authority.
4. substituting his judgment for the judgement of the entire Alabama Supreme Court, including failure to abstain from public comment about a pending proceeding in his own court.
5. interference with legal process and remedies in the United States District Court and/or Alabama Supreme Court related to proceedings in which Alabama probate judges were involved.
6. failure to recuse himself from pending proceedings in the Alabama Supreme Court after making public comment and placing his impartiality into question.

On September 30, 2016, Moore was found guilty of all six charges and suspended for the remainder of his term.

More of Moore’s “values” and respect for the Constitution, amirite, Arch?

Of course we know only Republicans can flaunt “unwillingness to follow clear law” and be supported by their cult. All their talk of “law and order” is for locking up non-Republicans, of course.

IOKIYAR after all. Satan himself would be impressed with the lies, hypocrisy, and moral rot. Good job!

Meanwhile, criminal Flynn will be rolling over to finger more of his fellow criminal Trump Family Cartel.

More good news, amirite?

Jefferson's Guardian said...

I just returned from a trip down south, which included some time in Alabama. I couldn't help but notice one of those cardboard political signs stapled to a wooden cross and stuck in a lawn which read: Roy Moore -- Putting Children First!

Now, that's honesty in politics! ;-)

Dave Dubya said...

Maybe it's time we returned General Lee's surrender papers to the Confederacy and let them go. If the bigots and hypocrites love pedophiles and sex offenders so much, and hate equality and democracy so much, they shouldn't be a part of the United States.

We could reopen the Underground Railroad to liberate minorities, educators, scientists, and journalists from the racist hate and ignorance of the Red South.

The Red State leeches (More Takers) sucking wealth from Blue States needs to end. They are dragging us down.

Let them suck on their damn Confederate flag, and leave the rest of us alone. It's what they really want anyway.

Jefferson's Guardian said...

I agree, Dave, it's time. It's probably long overdue.

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