Here’s Proof Fox News and Rush Limbaugh Have Dumbed Down the Republican Base

By now, everybody with half a brain has figured out that the rich are parasites that get richer by draining the rest of us dry via legislation, such as deregulation and free trade “income redistribution” treaties. Even dogs and cats intuitively know this. However, 44 percent of Republicans and 8 percent of Democrats don’t believe reality, real reality. What that means is simple. There are a lot more brain dead Republicans than there are Democrats.

There is something even more amazing about the statistics below. Even as the income and wealth divide between the 99 percent and the 1 percent have grown wider since 1987, even as the 1 percent has stolen 93 percent of aggregate US income growth over the last two years, even as the 1 percent has increased their share of the total national income from about 8 percent in 1980 to roughly 25 percent today, the percentage of Republicans who believe “the rich get richer and the poor get poorer” has declined from 62 percent in 1987 to 56 percent today.

Does that mean that Republicans have been massively dumb downed by Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and the corporate news media? Or does it mean they’ve become stupider? Or is it a combination of both? These are good questions because Republicans today are clearly stupider on average than they were in 1987.

From the Pew Hispanic Research Center:

“The belief that the “rich just get richer while the poor get poorer” has remained stable across income groups since 1987. Those in the lowest quartile of family income –$20,000 a year or less in the current survey – continue to be somewhat more likely to agree with this sentiment than those in highest income quartile ($75,000 or more) (85% vs. 70%).

But the partisan gap in these attitudes is large and growing. The percentage of Democrats agreeing that the “rich get richer” (92%) is as high as it has ever been and has increased by eight points since the previous political values survey in 2009. Nearly three-quarters of independents (73%) agree that the rich get richer, while a much smaller majority of Republicans (56%) do so.

Partisan differences on this measure have never been wider. In the first political values survey in 1987, 84% of Democrats said the rich got richer and the poor got poorer, compared with 74% of independents and 62% of Republicans.”

Related storiesIncome inequality and the dumbing down of Republican America

The Fox Propaganda Network and the Dumbing Down of Republican America

The One Percent Has Stolen 93 Percent of Total US Income Growth from 2009 to 2011

Read Full Post »

Another Study Shows That the Fox Republican Party Propaganda Network Dumbs Down It’s Viewers

By now, everybody with the exception of dumb downed Fox News Viewers knows the truth of the headline of this story. But there is something that is probably less well known. Here it is; all of the corporate news media do the same thing, only the difference between them and Fox News is a matter of degree and not of kind. That’s why we need to go to the Internet, to truthout.org, to the Guardian of England, to Al Jezeera, to the BBC, to find the real news.

In 1904, the brilliant economist Thorstein Veblen wrote in Theory of Business Enterprise, “The first duty of an editor is to edit and omit all news stories with a view to what the news ought to be.” The corporate news media, including the New York Times, continues to follow this rule. Veblen also wrote, The second duty of an editor is to not offend advertisers.

Wall Street, Goldman Sachs, Nike, Microsoft, Apple and hundreds of other corporations rely heavily on redistributing income from the 99 percent to the one percent via free trade treaties. The difference between the old wages here and the new lesser wages over there are redistributed to the one percent via higher corporate profits, rising dividends and increased share prices. The losers of those jobs may get unemployment insurance if they are lucky.

So don’t expect any stories from any corporate media outlets about how free trade treaties have redistributed income, and wiped out much of the tax base that supports our schools and local government services. The same is true of deregulation and other methods of redistributing income and wealth from the 99 to the one percent. And you certainly won’t find any stories about how thirty plus years of tax cuts for the one percent have brought about all of the above, but also corrupted our government and courts, especially the corrupt corporate wing of the US supreme court.

Click here for the story about Fox News and the Dumbing Down of Its Audience

Read Full Post »

The Fox Propaganda Network Continues to Blame the Democrats for the Economy

The Koch Brothers Fox Republican Party of the 1 percent Propaganda Network is up to it again. They’re trying to blame Democrats for the mess we’re in. While there is some truth to it, such as President Clinton signing NAFTA, most of the responsibility lies with the Republicans and their ideas.

There are a myriad of reasons given for the current state of the economy, but the only one that is factual is a tremendous amount of income and wealth has been redistributed from the 99 percent to the 1 percent during the last thirty years. The one percent now receive about 25 percent of the total national income compared to 7 percent three decades ago. The result is stagnant demand, which has resulted in weak housing and jobs markets. The Republicans had the ideas and the desires and they and their Democratic sympathizers are behind this, and that includes the Clintons.

click here for the full story

Read Full Post »

US economy creates 200,000 jobs in December! Just in Time for the Elections

200,000 US jobs appeared in December, marking the sixth month in a row of gains, and dashing the hopes of Republicans and ruining their “keep the economy destroyed” reelection plans .

The rise in jobs was much more than expected. Analysts had forecast an increase of about 150,000 jobs. Republicans had hoped for a decline of one million or more, thereby increasing their presidential reelection chances. The folks at the Fox Fake News Network were probably horrified to learn the unemployment rate dropped to 8.5%, which was the lowest level in nearly three years, from a revised 8.7% in November, the Labor Department said.

Large job gains were seen in retail, manufacturing, transportation and warehousing and healthcare.

For 2011 as a whole, some 1.6 million jobs were created, which was the highest since 2006. That number historically sucks. Back in the President Jimmy Carter era, it was normal for three million jobs a year to be created, and with rising wage rates. That was with an economy two-thirds the size and two-thirds population of the current one. Nowadays, any inkling of mediocre economic news is hailed as wonderful by the Democrats, and as a total disaster for Republican Party hopes and dreams.

Republicans should be ashamed of the news since there was negative job growth under the Bush administration, something predicted by me in my book, The Rigged Game. Republican economic policies are a disaster for working people. On the other hand, the Democrats aren’t much better for working people since their also corporate drones for the most part.

Employment in the private sector rose by 212,000 in December and by 1.9 million over the year.

Government employment was little changed in December but was down by 280,000 over the year.

The unemployment rate had remained stubbornly high at about 9% for several years, peaking at 10.1% in October 2009. But December marked the fourth month in a row that it had fallen, after routine updates were made to previous months’ data at the end of the year.

However, November’s figure was revised up slightly from 8.6% to 8.7%.
‘Showboating’

The euro, which has fallen sharply against the dollar in recent days, continued its decline after the better-than-expected jobs report.

Marcus Bullus, trading director at MB Capital, said the data would “cheer everyone bar Republican spin doctors”.

“The Obama administration could be forgiven for showboating over this convincing evidence that America’s economy is pulling away from Europe’s,” he said.

But he added: “From a market perspective, strong US data like this will add to optimism, but nobody doubts the considerable downward pressure the eurozone will continue to place on the global marketplace during 2012.”

Read Full Post »

The Effects of Global Warming: The disappearing island in the Chesapeake Bay

Tangier Island is 92 miles southeast of Washington D.C. It’s in the middle of the Chesapeake Bay, or rather it will be for a while longer, but not much longer. And, no, the island isn’t packing up and moving to the mainland, although the numbskull corporate drones at the Fox Fake News Network will have you believe this. This small piece of land and its 500 residents are barely above sea level, and pretty soon the residents are going to be sleeping underwater and riding sea horses since the island is going to be located below sea level. The island isn’t sinking. The sea level is rising.

First settled in 1686, the island at times had over 1,200 residents and during the War of 1812 it served as a staging area for British soldiers.

Now fishing restrictions, erosion and rising sea levels have resulted in most of the younger members of this tightly knit community looking for opportunities elsewhere.

The BBC’s Franz Strasser went to Tangier Island to see how the remaining islanders are coping with a difficult future.

Click here for the rest of the story

Read Full Post »

The Fox Propaganda of the One Percent Fake News Station Launches Savage, Lying, Assault Against the Girl Scouts And Calls it “News”

Fox News on Thursday teamed up with a former Girl Scout to warn that the organization was conspiring to “promote a clear liberal ideology.”

Fifteen-year-old Sydney Volankski, who left the Girl Scouts in 2010 to write about their “pro-abortion mindset” on her blog, has now discovered that a guide published by Girl Scouts of the USA (GUSA) advises scouts to check media facts through a number of sites including Media Matters, which Fox News host Steve Doocy called “clearly a lefty blog.”

Click here for the rest of the story

Read Full Post »

Too Big to Fail is a Big Lie. That expression is a euphemism for “Too Rich to be allowed to look like a stupid failure”

By John Hively

No business is too big to fail. That’s a lie. Okay, here’s reality. In the United States, the super rich are not allowed to fail, no matter how incompetent. That’s means if they have their money invested in large enough amounts in a business or a market, then that business is not allowed to fail because that would mean the rich have been allowed to fail. The same thing is true with the failure of markets.

Let’s take the mortgage securities market as an example.

A few decades ago, some commercial banker got the idea to sell off his banks mortgages to Wall Street investment firms, like Goldman Sacs. The sale of mortgages together as a group is called “bundling.”

The investment firms issued bonds to mostly rich investors backed by the bundled mortgages. The home owners made their payments, which went to service the loans, with a large amount of the payments going to the bondholders, i.e. the rich.

This was profitable to say the least. All along the way, there were fees to be had. Billions of dollars worth of fees. There was no government oversight since Wall Street investment firms had ensured that people friendly to them were placed in government oversight agencies, such as the Securities and Exchange Commission. And so in time the quality of the home loans gradually decreased to the point where mortgages were given to people who had minimum or near minimum wage jobs, or no jobs at all. The banks immediately sold the mortgages to Wall Street, who sold the bonds to the wealthy. Since mortgage providers and investment banks didn’t hang on to the bonds for more than a few months, and the investment banks told the bondholders the bonds were of the finest quality, nobody was concerned that homeowners might not be able to pay their mortgages beyond the first few months. That is why the standards for home loans were lowered. Contrary to Fox Fake News, this crisis had nothing to do with the civil rights group called ACORN. It was all about big money and giant profits.

Some of these affluent investors decided to buy insurance on their mortgage backed bonds. These insurance policies were known as credit default swaps. You did not have to own any mortgage backed bonds to insure them. Think of it this way. It was like being able to buy insurance policies on the houses of your neighbors. That means the value of the total number of insurance policies were greater than the total value of all the mortgage bonds, and by a wide margin. If you wanted to make a killing, you bought insurance on the mortgage backed bonds that homeowners weren’t likely to pay. You could’ve had hundreds of people owning insurance policies on the same bad mortgage backed bonds, and none of these people needed to own the bonds. All you had to do was take out a $10 million policy on the mortgage backed securities owned by another person, make your 3 percent yearly payment of $30,000, and when the market collapsed, an insurance company owed you $10 million with virtually no risk to you.

The executives of one company in particular were dumb enough to insure these mortgage backed bonds. Those were the wizards of AIG. And I use the word “wizards” in the most sarcastic way possible. They were really idiots, except they may have figured the government was going to bail them out.

When the housing market toppled, the total amount of insurance policies on mortgage backed securities were somewhere between $32 and $58 trillion, more or less, depending on who was doing the counting. Yes, that’s trillion. AIG couldn’t hope to pay all that it had insured. That meant rich investors were going to lose their shirts and their underpants, and be forced to walk around naked. They’d need to get a real job, like being a clerk at the local Seven Eleven, which may have been the only thing some of these people were qualified to do. Oh, no! Heaven forbid! The government couldn’t allow that to happen. Those guys had already paid the politicians in congress, the senate and the white house a ton of money to bail them out. And so that’s why the government bailed out AIG. That allowed AIG to pay the super rich, especially Goldman Sacs, the money they owed them on their insurance scams, or rather policies.

Of course, not all rich people had insurance on their mortgage backed securities. When the market collapsed, the Federal Reserve printed money and began buying those now worthless bonds, but not at their real value. The Fed paid the wealthy the face value of their worthless bonds. If the affluent had paid $10 million for bonds now worth a nickel, the Fed bought the bonds for $10 million. The rich made off like bandits, because they were, and are.

And what happens if you’re not rich? And you can’t pay your mortgage because you lost your job? The government will do virtually nothing for you. There’s a reason for this. If the government established an agency that renegotiated home loans with home owners, like what occurred under the Franklin Roosevelt administration, they’d need to renegotiate the home mortgages down at least to the level of current value. Let’s face it. The bubble has burst. Home prices are still dropping. That means rescuing homeowners is a big problem if you’re rich, or the owner of those worthless bonds, like The Federal Reserve Bank.

If homeowners are paying less for their mortgages, the value of mortgage backed bonds will wilt even more because the return on investment (i.e. the mortgage payments) will be less. In other words, helping average citizens to stay in their homes during this economic crisis will reduce the value of the wealth owned by the richest and dumbest parasites in the United States. These are the people that Republicans like Congressmen Paul Ryan and John Boehner (pronounced “Boner”) are beholden to. The same is true of liberal Democrats like President Obama, Senator Ron Wyden and Congressman Earl Blumenauer.

On the face of it, this is remarkable. Currently, the 1 percent own 84 percent of the total wealth of the United States. Apparently, your government doesn’t think this percentage should be reduced to help the 99 percent. That tells you all you need to know. Your government stands against you if you’re a member of the 99 percent. However, if you’re as dumb as a brick or as stupid as steaming fresh dog poop, but happen to be rich, you’ll be rewarded when the government bails you out.

There are two other things. Many of these idle rich people would’ve been in complete financial ruin if their government hadn’t saved their financially destroyed hides. The government in this case is the taxpayers. And on whose behalf have Republican politicians been fighting tooth and nail against any increase in their taxes to help pay for the bailouts? The idle rich, of course. People like the Koch Brothers. Apparently, they’ve decided their inherited wealth makes them worthier citizens than the bulk of the American people. These people actually think their taxes should be decreased.

That means one thing. Too big to fail is a lie. That expression is a euphemism for “too rich to be allowed to fail and look stupid in the process.”

The second thing is that the rich are using their immense financial clout to bribe politicians. The principal favor they seek is to redistribute income from working people to the rich. They’re successfully doing this all the time. For example, well bribed congress persons (like Earl Blumenauer) and senators (like Ron Wyden) voted a month ago to off shore US jobs via free trade treaties with Colombia, Panama and South Korea. The difference between the old wages here and the new lower wages there will go to the rich, year after year after year. That means our congressional representatives and president voted to once again redistribute income to the rich from us, as well as to diminish our tax base, pauperize our schools, social services, police and fire departments.

Our political system is completely corrupted by big money, and that includes the corporate wing of the supreme court.

Fight back. Join the Occupy movement. Get involved. Take your government back. Also, take a look at the video below. You’ll see guys like former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson lie to congress. It’s worth a look.

Read Full Post »

The Occupy movement is growing; it can’t be sprayed away

The Occupy movement is here to stay. It isn’t going away. The movement is growing as more and more people learn how their livelihoods, money and futures have been redistributed to the 1 percent by the federal government over the last thirty years. Fox Fake News can’t will it away. Click on the link below for the story.

The Occupy Movement Can't Be Sprayed Away

Read Full Post »

Thousands of Patriotic Citizens Turn Out to Fight For Occupy Portland

Perhaps as many as seven thousand patriotic citizens of the United States converged at the last hour to lend their support in defense of Occupy Portland.

A few days ago, Mayor Sam Adams had given Occupy Portland until 12.01 am Sunday morning to leave the two parks they occupy in downtown Portland, just across from the justice building. When the police arrived in force, so did thousands of patriots to block their attempt to destroy Occupy Portland. And justice was served.

The patriots were mostly young, under thirty years old, but there were plenty of older people there, too. Some appeared to be in their sixties and seventies. As the police looked on, at different times our citizens chanted “Our Park,” “Our street,” and “Our Police.”

The police had formed a line along third avenue. It looked as though they were trying to keep the street open. The patriots and the police conversed all along the line and many of our men and woman in blue were smiling. Then things got a little ugly.

The police, of course, were just doing their jobs as tools of the one percent. The chief propaganda organ of the one percent in Oregon is the Oregonian newspaper, which had been a bitter critic of Occupy Portland and of middle class America in general. The newspaper has been a primary supporter of legislation to outsource middle class jobs via free trade treaties, which redistributes income from working Americans to the mostly idle rich of Wall Street.

When I arrived just before midnight, there were thousands of middle class patriots prepared to do battle against the agents of the one percent, the rich people that want to turn the United States into a banana republic by destroying the middle class.

Patriots stood along both sides of Third as cars passed by honking horns in support. Patriots also huddled on Main Street, which separated the two parks in which Occupy Portland was located.

The police brought in horses on Main, formed them into a line, and then like an ancient Macedonian phalanx, they pushed forward against the crowd with grim determination. The patriots stood their ground in the street, and they held firm.

Then the police retreated. By 3:00am, two thousand or more patriots still defended Occupy Portland, but the majority of police had left.

The video below shows the attack of the horses and the refusal of the patriots to budge. It also shows the police in retreat. Sadly, the video is from the Oregonian newspaper, the primary propaganda agent of the one percent in Oregon. It’s as if their editors take their orders from the Koch Brothers, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce or Rupert Murdoch. Some of their editorials appear to have been stories written by one of those anonymous sources often cited by Fox News as a credible news source, but which is most likely created by a low paid fiction or fantasy writer sitting in a Fox News cubicle. On behalf of the one percent, the Oregonian editors claim that treaties that outsource jobs, destroy our tax base, pauperize funding for schools, libraries, roads and police; that diminish our wages, pensions, benefits and salaries and raise unemployment, while redistributing income from working Americans to the rich is good for working Americans. They actually want us to believe that. That’s why the Oregonian newspaper is a simple propaganda tool of the one percent.

It’s also why so many people are taking to the streets. It’s why Occupy Oregon is here to stay. The working people of this country have had enough of seeing their futures and livelihoods redistributed to the rich by corrupt government at all levels, including the corrupt corporate wing of the supreme court.

Read Full Post »

The Latest Threat Against Occupy Wall Street

Written by Danny Schechter. Originally published at Al Jeezer.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg is talking tough again, darkly hinting that he may have to take action to shut down Occupy Wall Street. He now claims that the community in Lower Manhattan is upset by the occupation of Zuccotti Park and he must heed their wishes.

The problems: there have been cases of urination and defecation. The drumming is too loud. There is a seeming fear of violence from the street people and homeless the park seems to be attracting.

So it appears that his honour has found a new pretext to send the police in to clear the park. He has already sent his cops to arrest alleged law breakers in the encampment, accompanied by headlines urging “get tough”.

In the eyes of much of the press, the endgame is in sight because the protesters just don’t know how to act, how to be responsible. The New York Times reports in a Friday page one report: “Demonstrators Test Mayor, a Backer of Wall Street and Free Speech.” Even some Democrats have joined in calls for a crackdown in the name of keeping the upper class neighbours safe and sound.

As in many stories, however, what’s not said is often what’s most important.

First, after the last merry-go-round with a top city official who claims to support free speech – but perhaps in some other city – Occupy Wall Street met with community groups. They cleaned the park thoroughly. They cut back the hours of drumming to two. They set up a liaison to respond to complaints and enunciated a “Good Neighbour Policy”.

Sanitation issues

As for the expulsion of bodily waste, the Occupation has offered to rent “porta-potties”, those mobile toilets that are used in all public events. The City and the real estate company that owns the park has said no. Don’t you think they know what happens when people have nowhere to go, as the weather gets colder? Maybe they feel the need to encourage more waste and chaos?

The Occupation also suggested that the City Sanitation Department move some dumpsters into place in the park. Again, the answer was no.

So two of the most cited problems have solutions that officials reject.

As for homeless people, Occupy Wall Street security has reported that city correctional officials and some welfare officers have actively encouraged homeless people to go to a park where they will be fed and can sleep.

Occupy Wall Street has strict rules against drug use and alcohol use. But they can’t always enforce them against people who have been encouraged to go to the park to, among other things, cause trouble.

In other words, city officials, who are expressing so much agitation are actually exacerbating the problems, and then pointing to them as a reason the occupation must be forced to end. The cops also have spies in the park and are monitoring developments closely. They had repeatedly refused to protect the park from the presence of predators – who they now blame on the protest.

Unfortunately, many media outlets are not interested in probing for the causes of problems and just focus on the effects.

Fox News is hostile to the protests, and so can be counted on to throw out every negative they can find. Earlier efforts to stigmatise the protests as anti-Semitic failed. Now they are stoking fears of more chaos.

Politics is what is driving the increasingly hard-line opposition, not pride in civic improvement.

Forced to take drastic ‘action’

A day before the mayor indicated that he may just have to “take action”, he criticised the protesters for focusing on Wall Street. Congress is to blame, he insisted, politicians not financiers. Few media outlets noted that Bloomberg made his fortune on Wall Street and his news company serves its customers. This conflict of interest is blatant, but rarely noted.

That the one per cent which protesters are denouncing are sticking together is not surprising. The mayor is demonstrably on their side.

An earlier mayor, Ed Koch, who has turned more conservative in his later years than even the Republican Bloomberg, is not quite so willing to let Wall Street off the hook.

The NY Daily News reported him saying: “I do believe in punishment.” Koch then went on to blast the SEC for only fining Wall Street titans such as Goldman Sachs and Citigroup for their financial misconduct. “What the hell do they care? That’s the cost of doing business,” Koch said of the banks. “I want to see somebody – some CEO, some CFO – punished criminally.”

The reason Bloomberg doesn’t like Occupy Wall Street is because he likes Wall Street (especially while his police are occupying the place).

He believes in punishment too – punishing protesters.

“I want to see somebody – some CEO, some CFO – punished criminally.”

- Ed Koch, former Mayor of New York City

Fox News carried a complaint about the excessive (and expensive) police uber-presence there because a restaurant owner says it is keeping business away and forcing him to close. Fox went on, of course, to blame the occupiers for the restaurant’s decision to lay off workers.

After all, you couldn’t have so many cops, if there weren’t so many protesters.

And around and around we go

Many New Yorkers seem obsessed with the protests. As the comedy channels satirise it, a New York Times business editor noted that an article the newspaper carried on the latest financial fraud drew ten comments from readers before anyone tried to blame the problem on Occupy Wall Street – the latest whipping boy in the financial crisis.

In other cities, there have been violent attacks on the Occupy Movement. Activists in Oakland, California, called for a general strike to defend their right to peacefully and non-violently protest.

Musician Boots Riley who is part of the organising effort said: “We’re ushering in a new phase in organising. It’s a one-day general strike. It’s a warning shot. It’s beyond saying that ‘we are the 99 per cent’. This is showing that the 99 per cent can be organised, that we won’t be limited to the rules and regulations that unions have confined themselves to in the last 60 years.”

The general strike, as a tactic, has not been that successful in the United States – because it requires a major organising effort, far more than appeals on the internet or in press releases. Noam Chomsky was sympathetic but cautioned protesters “to build and educate first, strike later”.

Many in the Occupy movement are criticising violent incidents in Oakland that counteract their policies of non-violence.

If the Occupy movement had not been as successful as it has been in broadening the national conversation to include the issues of economic equality, it would not be drawing as much hostile flack from the press or politicians.

Many Democrats fear an activist movement can hurt their re-election prospects by focusing on unsolved problems. Others see it as a direct challenge to months of debate on the need to cut deficits and impose austerity.

To date, this movement has survived snowstorms and police attacks. Its tougher challenges may have just begun.

Read Full Post »