Republicans are using the T-word – taxes – to attack the Obama healthcare program. It’s a strategy based in a lie.
A very small niche of America’s uber-wealthy have pulled off what may well be the biggest con job in the history of our republic, and they did it in a startlingly brief 30 or so years. True, they spent over three billion dollars to make it happen, but the reward to them was in the hundreds of billions – and will continue to be.
As my friend and colleague Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks pointed out in a Daily Kosblog recently, billionaire Rupert Murdoch loses $50 million a year on the NY Post, billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife loses $2 to $3 million a year on the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, billionaire Philip Anschutz loses around $5 million a year on The Weekly Standard, and billionaire Sun Myung Moon has lost $2 to $3 billion on The Washington Times.
Why are these guys willing to lose so much money funding “conservative” media? Why do they bulk-buy every right-wing book that comes out to throw it to the top of the NY Times Bestseller list and then give away the copies to “subscribers” to their websites and publications? Why do they fund to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars a year money-hole “think tanks” like Heritage and Cato? Read More »
More and more we are seeing a looser grip on Marijuana laws, mostly because the war on drugs is failing. Without regulation, it is being sold to kids on school playgrounds and on the streets, and billions are spent every year to house prisoners who are only guilty of smoking a joint. We could turn this around by legalizing marijuana and taxing it. Instead of there being billions going out to prisons, we could have billions coming in from sales. Instead of drug dealers selling to kids, we could take their business from them and sell to adults, legally from a pharmacy or other means. You don’t see people selling booze to kids as a means of making income, it’s always about being the ‘buddy’, and you can’t do anything about that, there will always be losers who need to feel important. Marijuana has never killed anybody, but we have all heard of alcohol poisoning. Here’s a video of Bill Maher at a NORML convention…
As the world population grows, and as technology makes the world smaller, a global economy is inevitable. You might ask ‘what does this do to the United States?’ There are many opinions out there on the subject, but if you look at the facts you will find the obvious answers. Globalization will eventually equalize all local economies through the common denominator of the labor market. As corporations grow and sell their wares around the world, they will always have the work done in the cheapest place possible to maximize profits. This means bad things for the U.S. labor force but the stock market will be in great shape. When U.S. labor competes with countries where there is a lower standard of living, U.S. labor looses. People who live in a mud hut with a hole in the ground for a toilet don’t need $50,000 a year to maintain that lifestyle, and therefor can work for much less than comparable labor in the States.
This is not a sustainable situation though, because eventually there will be nobody with any money to buy those goods in the U.S. at those prices, and the market will eventually either right itself (not likely) or collapse altogether and give way to small business and local economy once again.
The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism — ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or any controlling private power — Franklin D. Roosevelt