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Hey Megan, in a word? Yes. They are, and particularly those who made their big fat bonuses by trading bogus securities in a bogus market where the only tangible item was devastating loss to the little guys. You betcha, Megan. But readers, I will put the question to you and let you answer. Here is one of her examples:

And yet, some of the difficulties that people are complaining about are genuinely, well, difficult. Yes, your kids have been absurdly privileged, getting to attend expensive private schools with lots of amenities. On the other hand, all my parent friends seem to think that it's actually really hard on kids to yank them out of school and move them somewhere else, particularly in the middle of a school year. I doubt that it gets any easier because your parents used to be able to afford stratospheric tuition.

Let's not forget that these are kids we're talking about--we shouldn't take joy in uspetting them, even if their parents happen to make a lot more money than we do.

Likewise, when middle class people take out a mortgage that's perfectly affordable on the income they've been enjoying for years, and then lose the house because they suddenly saw that income cut in half, we don't feel a delicious sense of joy because they finally got what was coming to them. We recognize that this it is really terrible to be forced out of a home where you've built loads of happy memories and dreams--and not incidentally, to possibly be forced to yank your kids out of the aforementioned schools.

Why are people supposed to shrug off the exact same thing because they're rich? It's still really awful to lose your house. I hardly think it's whining to worry about this when your income drops and your fixed expenses don't.

Well, how about this for starters? High-end properties foreclose at a far slower rate, giving those rich folks an opportunity to actually catch up on their mortgage or sell their house before the banker comes and boots them out. Generally they get six or so more months than the schmo on the other side of town who finds himself homeless, jobless, and struggling to keep his kids in public school, much less private school.

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Ryan Chittum points us toward a piece written by Bloomberg's Max Abelson in which he recounts many inadvertently funny quotes from the 1 percent, bemoaning the fact that they get no respect:

Today, Abelson has one of his best yet, reporting on how some of the super-elite are on the attack against the 1 percent meme.

What makes this story very good is that Abelson has found some of the least self-aware people you can imagine and got them on the record, either himself or via others’ interviews. Take Blackstone multibillionaire Stephen Schwarzman, whom he quotes from Bloomberg TV bemoaning the fact that poor and lower-income people don’t pay federal income tax (almost all of them do federal payroll taxes and the like). That was in response to a question about whether he, who Abelson points out surely pays just a 15 percent tax rate on much or most of his income, should pay more taxes.

The quotes alone make this piece worthwhile, but Abelson’s attention to detail makes it even better. He sits down with Ayn Rand-loving former BB&T CEO John Allison, who has co-founded something called the Job Creators Alliance that gets lots of airtime on Fox News and Fox Business, and who is aggrieved by the provision of Dodd Frank that requires companies to disclose its CEO-to-median-employee pay ratio. He calls something that could be done with an Excel spreadsheet and an hour or two “incredibly wasteful.” The point, of course, is that forcing such disclosure might help keep executive paydays, which are incredibly wasteful to shareholders (the owners of capital), down.

Abelson is also good to track down Leon Cooperman, the hedge fund manager who wrote the open letter to President Obama about how his feelings were hurt or something:

Cooperman, 68, said in an interview that he can’t walk through the dining room of St. Andrews Country Club in Boca Raton, Florida, without being thanked for speaking up. At least four people expressed their gratitude on Dec. 5 while he was eating an egg-white omelet, he said.

Then there’s Home Depot co-founder Ken Langone, speaking forthrightly from his Manhattan dressing room:

“I am a fat cat, I’m not ashamed,” he said last week in a telephone interview from a dressing room in his Upper East Side home. “If you mean by fat cat that I’ve succeeded, yeah, then I’m a fat cat. I stand guilty of being a fat cat.”

And the billionaire founder of Paychex Incorporated with his thirty-something ex-tennis star (Monica Seles) girlfriend who wants to vomit when he hears about paying his “fair share” is fun stuff.

John Boehner, FOX News, the Tea Party and all of the GOP continue to make the claim that the Obama administration is almost entirely responsible for what they consider to be America's debt problem.

Bloomberg News did just a little digging and reports what we've been claiming all along. These Republicans are all a bunch of hypocrites. The same Republicans that are so outraged by the deficit voted to help put it there in the first place:

“In Washington, more spending and more debt is business as usual,” the Republican leader from Ohio said in a televised address yesterday amid debate over the U.S. debt. “I’ve got news for Washington - those days are over.”

Yet the speaker, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell all voted for major drivers of the nation’s debt during the past decade: Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts and Medicare prescription drug benefits. They also voted for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP, that rescued financial institutions and the auto industry.

Together, a Bloomberg News analysis shows, these initiatives added $3.4 trillion to the nation’s accumulated debt and to its current annual budget deficit of $1.5 trillion.

Obviously a few Democrats helped Bush out, but Boehner, Cantor and Paul Ryan have done their best to vote for bills that spend, spend, spend.

Bush Tax Cuts

The 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, which lowered tax rates on income, dividends and capital gains, increased the federal budget deficit by $1.7 trillion over a decade, according to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, a non-partisan left-of- center group in Washington that studies fiscal policy.

The two-year extension of those tax cuts that Obama signed will cost $857.8 billion, according to the Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation.

Boehner has defended the tax cuts, arguing that they didn’t lead to the deficit.

“The revenue problem we have today is a result of what happened in the economic collapse some 18 months ago,” he told reporters on June 10, according to The Hill newspaper.

The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have cost almost $1.3 trillion since the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, according to a March 29 analysis by the Congressional Research Service. Operations in Iraq have cost $806 billion, and in Afghanistan $444 billion. The analysis shows the government has spent an additional $29 billion for enhanced security on militia bases and $6 billion remains unallocated.

Medicare Drug Benefit

The 2003 Medicare prescription program approved by President George W. Bush and a Republican-dominated Congress has cost $369 billion over a 10-year time frame, less than initially projected by Medicare actuaries.

Nine Senate Republicans, including Nebraska’s Chuck Hagel, along with 25 Republicans in the House, voted against the bill. Hagel argued that it failed to control costs and would add trillions in debt for future generations.

“Republicans used to believe in fiscal responsibility,” Hagel wrote in a 2003 editorial in the Omaha World Herald. “We have lost our way.”

TARP, the $700-billion bailout of banks, insurance and auto companies, has cost less than expected. McConnell, Boehner, Cantor and Ryan all voted in October 2008 for the program, which stoked the rise of the Tea Party movement.

Many institutions have repaid the government. The latest estimated lifetime cost of the program is $49.33 billion, according to a June 2011 report by the Treasury Department. That figure includes the $45.61 billion cost of a housing program which the administration never expected to recoup.

Rank-and-file Republicans are eager to pin the blame on Democrats, frequently pointing to the economic stimulus signed by Obama in 2009. The total cost of the stimulus will be $830 billion by 2019, according to a May 2011 Congressional Budget Office report.

That’s half the cost of the Bush tax cuts and less than two-thirds of what has been spent on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.</blockquote>
But of course there was a Republican president at the time, so as Dick Cheney famously said, deficits don't matter. The new GOP leaders are as guilty as sin and are fooling only the beltway media establisment.

Thank heavens, this part of the mess is over. But reports from the Gulf seem to indicate BP's abandoned cleanup efforts:

BP Plc started pumping cement into the top of its crippled Gulf of Mexico well, moving closer to permanently plugging the source of the world’s biggest accidental offshore oil spill on record.

“We’ll create a significant milestone and make a major step forward, probably by tomorrow when the cementing is done,” National Incident Commander Thad Allen told reporters today in Washington. “We can all breathe a little easier regarding the potential that we have oil in the Gulf ever again.”

BP pumped mud into the top of its Macondo well earlier this week, pushing back the flow of oil and gas and making the cementing possible. The cement will cure in 24 to 36 hours, and then the company will resume drilling a relief well that aims to permanently plug Macondo from below.

BP temporarily sealed the well on July 15 through a valve stack placed atop Macondo, stopping a leak that spewed 4.9 million barrels of crude since an April 20 drilling-rig explosion, according to a government estimate. The relief well near Macondo will take at least five days to finish drilling its final 100 feet (30 meters).

By filling the well from top to bottom, pushing cement into the oil and gas reservoir, London-based BP will eliminate any possibility of a leak, Allen said. The well is located about 40 miles (64 kilometers) off the Louisiana coast.

Apparently our president doesn't begrudge the Wall Streeters for making big bonuses. After all, Derek Jeter makes a lot of cash too.

The lead story on Bloomberg right now contains excerpts from an interview with Business Week which tells us:

President Barack Obama said he doesn’t “begrudge” the $17 million bonus awarded to JPMorgan Chase & Co. Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon or the $9 million issued to Goldman Sachs Group Inc. CEO Lloyd Blankfein, noting that some athletes take home more pay.

The president, speaking in an interview, said in response to a question that while $17 million is “an extraordinary amount of money” for Main Street, “there are some baseball players who are making more than that and don’t get to the World Series either, so I’m shocked by that as well.”

“I know both those guys; they are very savvy businessmen,” Obama said in the interview yesterday in the Oval Office with Bloomberg BusinessWeek, which will appear on newsstands Friday. “I, like most of the American people, don’t begrudge people success or wealth. That is part of the free- market system.”

The point is that these bank executives are not free agents who are earning big bucks in fair competition; they run companies that are essentially wards of the state. There’s good reason to feel outraged at the growing appearance that we’re running a system of lemon socialism, in which losses are public but gains are private. And at the very least, you would think that Obama would understand the importance of acknowledging public anger over what’s happening.

But no. If the Bloomberg story is to be believed, Obama thinks his key to electoral success is to trumpet “the influence corporate leaders have had on his economic policies.”

We’re doomed.

Apparently Obama wanted to make sure the CEOs know he's on their side too. I mean, the poor CEOs have had their itty-bitty feelings hurt so much lately. Will you shed a tear with me in honor of the hard work these Wall Streeters do for the country even if we have to bail them out when they screw it up on a cataclysmic scale?

Apparently the Goldman Sachs management is starting to connect the dots? Alice Schroeder from Bloomberg writes:

Dec. 1 (Bloomberg) -- “I just wrote my first reference for a gun permit,” said a friend, who told me of swearing to the good character of a Goldman Sachs Group Inc. banker who applied to the local police for a permit to buy a pistol. The banker had told this friend of mine that senior Goldman people have loaded up on firearms and are now equipped to defend themselves if there is a populist uprising against the bank.

I called Goldman Sachs spokesman Lucas van Praag to ask whether it’s true that Goldman partners feel they need handguns to protect themselves from the angry proletariat. He didn’t call me back. The New York Police Department has told me that “as a preliminary matter” it believes some of the bankers I inquired about do have pistol permits. The NYPD also said it will be a while before it can name names.

While we wait, Goldman has wrapped itself in the flag of Warren Buffett, with whom it will jointly donate $500 million, part of an effort to burnish its image -- and gain new Goldman clients. Goldman Sachs Chief Executive Officer Lloyd Blankfein also reversed himself after having previously called Goldman’s greed “God’s work” and apologized earlier this month for having participated in things that were “clearly wrong.”

Has it really come to this? Imagine what emotions must be billowing through the halls of Goldman Sachs to provoke the firm into an apology. Talk that Goldman bankers might have armed themselves in self-defense would sound ludicrous, were it not so apt a metaphor for the way that the most successful people on Wall Street have become a target for public rage.

Common sense tells you a handgun is probably not even all that useful. Suppose an intruder sneaks past the doorman or jumps the security fence at night. By the time you pull the pistol out of your wife’s jewelry safe, find the ammunition, and load your weapon, Fifi the Pomeranian has already been taken hostage and the gun won’t do you any good. As for carrying a loaded pistol when you venture outside, dream on. Concealed gun permits are almost impossible for ordinary citizens to obtain in New York or nearby states.

In other words, a little humility and contrition are probably the better route.

Until a couple of weeks ago, that was obvious to everyone but Goldman, a firm famous for both prescience and arrogance. In a display of both, Blankfein began to raise his personal- security threat level early in the financial crisis. He keeps a summer home near the Hamptons, where unrestricted public access would put him at risk if the angry mobs rose up and marched to the East End of Long Island.

Yves has more.

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On This Week with George Stephanopoulos, a discussion of the political machinations around the public option:

On the Roundtable, Bloomberg’s Al Hunt says that a health reform package can’t pass without the support of Sen. Olympia Snowe. She provides cover for moderates like Sens. Ben Nelson and Mary Landrieu and may pull over a couple of Republican votes.

HUNT: "Olympia Snowe, I think, thinks privately that in the end the trigger will be the compromise everyone has to rally around and give a little bit of face-saving to liberals and she and a few other republicans can go for it."

They really don't get it, do they? They're so out of touch with reality that they don't understand the kind of serious harm they're doing to the Democratic brand with this bait-and-switch routine on the public option.

A trigger? A frackin' trigger? How much longer do we have to wait to get relief from the predatory practices of the insurance industry? And how much more obvious does it have to be that the priority in the Senate is incumbency protection?

The truth may set you free, but not if you're a Republican and the subject is taxes. After all, 95% of American families as promised received a tax cut from the Obama stimulus package. And while three-quarters of Americans support President Obama's proposal to roll back the Bush tax cuts for those earning over $250,000 to their Clinton-era levels, it turns out that affluent voters, too, chose Barack Obama over John McCain. Making matters worse, a Gallup poll Monday revealed that Americans' "views of income taxes among most positive since 1956."

So as their furious followers head off to their April 15th orgy of tea-bagging, the leadership of the GOP and its amen corner in the right-wing media have instead turned to tall tales on taxes.

Here, then, are 10 Republican Tax Day lies:

1. President Obama will raise taxes on small businesses.
2. The estate tax devastates small businesses and family farms.
3. 40% of Americans pay no taxes.
4. Tax cuts always increase revenue.
5. The GOP is the party of fiscal discipline.
6. Ronald Reagan was the greatest tax cutter of all time.
7. FDR caused the Great Depression, or at least made it worse.
8. Obama's cap-and-trade plan will cost each American family $3,100 a year.
9. Obama's tax proposals will undermine charitable giving.
10. The rich pay too much in taxes already.

For the details behind each of the GOP's Tax Day deceits, continue reading.

Continue reading »

Bloomberg:

June 7 (Bloomberg) -- Taser International Inc., the largest stun-gun maker, lost a $6.2 million jury verdict over the death of a California man who died after police shot him multiple times with the weapon. The defeat is the first for Taser in a product- liability claim.

A San Jose, California, jury yesterday said Taser had failed to warn police in Salinas, California, that prolonged exposure to electric shock from the device could cause a risk of cardiac arrest. The jury awarded $1 million in compensatory damages and $5.2 million in punitive damages to the estate of Robert Heston, 40, and his parents. The jury cleared the police officers of any liability.

His parents sued Taser, alleging failure to warn of the dangers of the weapon, and Salinas police officers, claiming excessive force. The jury ``exonerated the police because they said the police didn't know repeated exposures could kill someone,'' Burton said. Read on...

I understand that law enforcement officials have difficult jobs and often find themselves in life or death situations. There are times where the use of these alternative weapons can save lives, but it seems, as in this case, as with others, if improperly used or in the wrong circumstances, they are deadly. Amnesty International has laid out some recommendations for the use of tasers, which I quite agree with; law enforcement agencies should treat them as deadly weapons:

Amnesty International calls on all governments and law enforcement agencies to either cease using TASERs and similar devices pending the results of thorough, independent studies, or restrict their use to situations where officers would otherwise be justified in resorting to deadly force where no lesser alternatives are available. Read on...

naked capitalism: Bear Hearings: A Charade

Threat Level: U.S.funded search engine, run by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, is blocking searches containing the word "abortion."

Sensen No Sen: A Gulag by any other name...

Opinions You Should Have: A NYT/CBS poll has found that a lousy future has soured the public's view of the future.

Danger Room: al Qaeda #2: We'll attack Iran

Facing South: NOLA public housing advocates bid good riddance to G-Dub's disgraced HUD chief. Heckuva job, Jackie!