Bad Deeds for 10-15-2010

Rick Perry Puts Up “For Sale’ Sign on Texas – The former director of Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s technology fund office has joined with a controversial beneficiary of the fund to seek meetings with current and former state officials about an alternative fuels venture. A state representative, a former land commissioner and the head of a state board all said Thursday that they have talked with Alan Kirchhoff and David G. Nance within recent months about a business arrangement the two were proposing.

Kirchhoff is the former director of the Texas Emerging Technology Fund. Nance is a major Perry campaign contributor whose company, Convergen Lifesciences Inc., was awarded $4.5 million from the fund in August despite bypassing a critical step in the approval process. Perry approved a $4.5 million award to Nance’s company from the tech fund even though the company failed to win the endorsement of a regional screening board. More than $16 million from the tech fund has been awarded to companies whose directors or investors are large donors to Perry.

Rick Perry is always “Open for Business.” (JLV)

Republicans Trying to Fool You With Fake Hicks – A Republican ad that shows a couple of regular-looking guys commiserating in a West Virginia diner turns out to have been shot with actors, from a script, in Philadelphia. But not just any actors: “We are going for a ‘Hicky’ Blue Collar look,” read the casting call for the ad, being aired by the National Republican Senatorial Committee. “These characters are from West Virginia so think coal miner/trucker looks.” “Clothing Suggestions” included jeans, work boots, flannel shirt, denim shirt, “Dickie’s type jacket with t-shirt underneath,” down-filled vest, “John Deer [sic] hats (not brand new, preferably beat up),” “trucker hats (not brand new, preferably beat up).”

Fox News Host Says ‘All Terrorists Are Muslims’ – Fox News host Brian Kilmeade claimed Monday morning that “all terrorists are Muslims.”

In a follow-up discussion to Bill O’Reilly’s appearance on “The View” Thursday — in which Whoopi Goldberg and Joy Behar walked off the set after O’Reilly claimed “the Muslims killed us on 9/11” — the “Fox & Friends” co-host both dismissed the “View” debate as elementary and made the shocking claim.

How to Earn $900,000 an Hour While Unemployment Soars – Wouldn’t you like to rake in a cool $900,000 for one hour’s work? Hang in there for a month, and you’ll pull in $256.5 million. And in one year? Well, you’ll be earning what the top ten hedge fund honchos each averaged in 2009 — $1.87 billion.

You must be able to live with the knowledge that while you were making $900,000 an hour, more than 29 million other Americans had no job at all or were forced into part-time work. Also you’ll have to live with the uncomfortable fact that your sector — high finance — crashed the economy, leaving eight million Americans jobless in a matter of months.

You’re obviously good at math so you’ll be able to calculate that it will now take 22.5 million new jobs to bring the economy back to full-employment (an unemployment rate of 5 percent or less). That’s the equivalent of creating 630 new corporations the size of Apple Corp. (35,000 employees each).

A few tiresome critics will keep pointing the finger at you, saying that the financial sector crashed the economy. Ignore them and put the blame where it belongs – somewhere else – like Americans who bought homes that bankers said they could afford (They should have known better!).

Assert with the utmost confidence that it’s Wall Street billionaires who make our system the envy of the world. And say that regulation of your activities is bad.

Will our millions of unemployed workers eventually get fed up? Will the middle class finally get angry at the plutocrats who stole their dreams? Or will our anger continue to focus on government regulations, social spending and taxes instead of on our financial plutocrats? Eventually we’ll have to choose or the choice will be made for us: Do we want a $900,000 an hour Valhalla for the few? Or a prosperous America for the rest of us?

Wall Street Hopes to Use Republicans to Re-Purchase Congress – Much of the conventional wisdom in Washington assumed that the Wall Street reform bill would be watered down into thin gruel by the massive army of lobbyists they sent to do battle on the Hill. Wall Street spent almost a half-billion dollars lobbying to stop Wall Street reform. But the bill actually got tougher and tougher as the battle went on.

That was because Progressives held political ground so high on the issue that even the most “moderate” members of Congress were terrified to stand up for the Wall Street elite.

But this November, the Wall Street Empire plans to strike back.

The thing that is especially galling about Wall Street’s approach to politics is that it so brazenly plays upon the fears of the very people who are often the biggest victims of their greed.

It is no small irony that the very people whose recklessness caused so many everyday working class families to lose their jobs – who have systematically skimmed off a larger and larger portion of our national product and left smaller and smaller pieces of the pie for everyday Americans – are now stoking the anger caused by their own actions and directing it toward Democrats who have brought them to account.

In the Tea Party fantasy world everyday Americans are oppressed by bureaucrats with eyeshades who go to work on the Washington Metro. They are abetted by crunchy academics who spend their days dreaming up “social engineering” schemes in their offices at Yale or Harvard. And their oppressive regime is supported by liberal news anchors and the nihilistic denizens of Hollywood who spend their nights in hot tubs surrounded by Playboy Bunnies. That is the Tea Party version of class warfare; everyday Americans versus these “elites.”

This is a very convenient mythology for Wall Street. It ignores the existence of the real “elites” in America. They aren’t the bureaucrats who go to work on the Metro but rather the men and women who go to work in chauffeur-driven limousines, jet around the country in Gulfstream G-Vs, and make more on the first day of the year, before lunch, than a minimum wage worker makes all year long.

The gang on Wall Street wants normal Americans to forget that they — and the top one percent of the population — control 34.6% of net assets, compared to only 15% for the bottom 80%.

They want you to ignore that 42% of the financial wealth is controlled by the top 1% of the population, compared to only 7% controlled by the bottom 80% — or that 62% of the business equity that controls corporations is in the hands of the top 1% compared to only 7% for the bottom 80%.

Remember all of the reckless speculation in financial securities that sunk the economy? Well 61% of financial securities are owned by the top 1% — and just 2% by the bottom 80%.

And when it comes to income, the share going to the top 1% had grown from 12.8% in 1982 to 21.3% in 2006 while the percent going to the bottom 80% shrunk from 48.1% to 38.6%.

I know a guy who trades on Wall Street, call him George, who is absolutely disdainful of ordinary Americans. He thinks that anyone who can’t get rich, like he is, must be a chump. He’s happy to exploit anyone and anything to make money for himself.

Don’t let George make us all into chumps. Don’t let Wall Street use the anger caused by the economic disaster that they themselves caused, to elect Republicans and take back control of Congress.

Regards,

Jim