One of the richest men in the country, ranking in the 0.006 percent of Americans, likes to accuse the President of creating an “entitlement society.” Mitt Romney, the heir apparent, next in line GOP nominee … is against entitlement.

When I hear “entitlement society” I think, “country club.” But When Mitt uses that phrase he doesn’t mean rich guys like him, given all the advantages of wealth, who are now enjoying its comforts – he means the rest of us. Yes, Mitt is against an “entitlement society” because that involves too many people and not just him and his ilk. It’s not the “entitlement” he contests – it’s the entire “society” part.

At the Monday Florida debate last week Mitt noted that under Gingrich’s tax plan Mitt would pay no taxes at all. Gingrich responded with, “Well, if that -- and if you created enough jobs doing that -- it was Alan Greenspan who first said the best rate, if you want to create jobs for capital gains, is zero.”

So rich people whose money makes their money (it’s literally capital gaining) are so fortunate they get to hire other people to pay taxes for them? Rich people with their alleged mythical power to create jobs even get to outsource their tax obligations to poor saps working for a living?

This is the prosperity gospel as a Super PAC-funded marketing blitz. Money is next to godliness and poverty is the fault of the poor for not being better people.

It’s as if Jesus were a CEO and the Romans job-killing communists.

“Contrary to the President's constant disparagement of people in business,” former George W. Bush budget director Gov. Mitch Daniels said in his State of the Union response last week, “It's one of the noblest of human pursuits.” This is one of those phrases you (usually) will only hear in business school (funnier if it was one of those rip-off for-profit colleges). Business is one of the noblest of human pursuits? Noble as in aristocratic? That phrase, “noble pursuits,” is usually applied to an avocation not paying much but rewarding in other ways: teachers; firefighters; nurses; foster parents; soldiers; community leaders; social workers; mentors; rescue workers; care givers; farmers. Or to anyone who’s honest, shows up every day and works hard. That’s a noble pursuit.

Are the wealthy really so sensitive they need Mitch Daniels to make them feel better about themselves in a spiritual sense? What they’re doing not only pays off with privilege and cash – it also has to be venerable from a moral perspective? How much reward does one group need? They own everything and they also need to be thanked?!

The rich are not just over-paid – they’re over valued. And generous welfare recipients.

As Senator Tom Coburn points out in his damning Nov. 2011 report, “Subsidies of the Rich and Famous,” we are a wealthfare state. It reads, “This reverse Robin Hood style of wealth redistribution is an intentional effort to get all Americans bought into a system where everyone appears to benefit.” In other words: We subsidize the rich by telling the poor to pay their fair share.

It’s been a strange three years under the Obama administration. First the GOP was against empathy. Yes, the party had to vehemently opposed seeing the plight of your fellow human beings because Obama was for it. Now their new hot button word? Fairness. Obama used the word fairness in his third State of the Union. And now the GOP has decided to be against fairness and celebrate inequality as being the thing that makes America great.

It’s as if Jesus were a CEO and the three wise men were shareholders.

The prosperity gospel is not America. It’s not democratic. It’s not even Christian. It’s greed warped into being a virtue by the greedy.

The rich aren’t better, they’re just richer.

Mitt Romney’s hurdle in winning the love/respect/admiration/fear of his party can be summed up in one photo: It was taken by his son, Tagg (doesn’t Sarah Palin have a kid with that name?) and put on Twitter this week. It’s of Romney and his wife Ann, presumably in a hotel basement, side-by-side pouring detergent into washing machines. Mitt is, of course, wearing a starched button up shirt and jeans, which is what people who never do laundry think people would wear when they do laundry. (Personally, if I have a clean starched shirt and jeans that’s an indication I don’t need to do laundry yet.) “Nothing like the glamorous life on the road,” the intermittent front-runner’s son tweeted with the pic.

This photo comes in the same week as Romney’s tax return where we learned Romney doesn’t actually work. He is in fact, as he’s claimed, unemployed. His money…makes his money. Millions and millions. He pays a tax rate of 13.9 percent – far lower than your average laundromat owner.

Which leads me to ask: Why is Mitt being photographed doing his laundry? Were there no Dukakis tanks available?

Apparently pleased with his Average Joe “real street” cred, Romney happily explained the image to NBC News, “We do our laundry at least once a week, because we’ll be on the road for 30 straight days. Who else do you think is going to do our laundry?”

When you are a multi-multi-millionaire, I can think of millions of people who could do your laundry. Isn’t Romney taking away jobs by washing his own clothes? First he outsourced American jobs, destroyed companies while the CEO at Bain Capital – now his quirky down-homeness is denying a gig to a professional fluff and folder.

When you don’t actually think about the plight of working people, you can assume you’re connecting to their “kitchen table” concerns by saying you have to do laundry at least once a week. We all do our laundry that much. Mainly because if you’re middle-class (or the former middle-class), you don’t have weeks worth of clothes; therefore you wash clothes all the time. It’s like saying you pay your bills at least once a month. Or you fill up your car with gas at least once a week. Or you worry about money at least once every other day. For normal people, this goes without saying, but for a candidate trying to appear normal, well, let’s just say it doesn’t wash.

Speaking of which, does one really, as the GOP-dubbed “vulture capitalist” with holdings in the Cayman Islands and some Swiss bank accounts want to have oneself associated with the word “laundry”? If you’re admittedly doing accounting tricks to pay as little U.S. taxes as possible, don’t you want to avoid a word synonymous with rich guy malfeasance? “I pay all the taxes that are legally required, not a dollar more,” said Romney at the NBC debate on Monday night in Florida.

Right: Millionaire plus laundry equals accidental editorial cartoon.

What’s next for this guy? Dressing up as a pirate and walking through foreclosed neighborhoods?

Also do you really want, as a Mormon candidate, to open up a conversation about separating whites from colors?! Gah!

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The late great Molly Ivins famously wrote of George W. Bush, "He was born on third and thinks he hit a triple." Well, it looks like the same goes for Willard.

There was no mention of “pink slips,” but Mitt Romney on Monday was already trying to counteract the perception that he was out of touch when he said that there were times he feared getting fired.

A copy of a “pink slip” the Democratic National Committee is handing out at GOP presidential hopeful Mitt Romney’s campaign events in New Hampshire. (WSJ Photo by Danny Yadron)
On Sunday, Mr. Romney told a crowd in Rochester, N.H. , “I know what it’s like to wonder whether you’re going to get fired. A couple of times I wondered if I was going to get a pink slip.”

Speaking at a Nashua Chamber of Commerce breakfast Monday, Mr. Romney began by noting he did not always hold high-level positions. Rather, he said he started off “at the entry level.”

Ah yes.

Willard started out like every other slob -- whose father happened to be the CEO of the American Motors, governor of Michigan and held a cabinet-level position in the Nixon administration. Who grew up in one of the five wealthiest cities in the U.S. and who attended an exclusive prep school -- then went to college at Stanford and Harvard. Who, at the height of the Vietnam War, spent two and a half years running around in France.

Yep, he's a real-life Horatio Alger character, that Willard.

All this makes Willard's "equal opportunities" BS even harder to swallow.

(h/t David at VideoCafe)

It's common meme among (primarily) Republican supporters: "Let's get a successful CEO in office to show us how to efficiently run the government just like that profitable business." Hell, there are candidates who use that "outsider" status to persuade they are the right person for the job. But are they really?

Being the CEO is an entirely different skill set than being a politician and rarely do the twains meet. Fareed Zakaria spoke with Steve Rattner, the so-called "Car Czar" that oversaw the reorganization of the American auto industry. As someone with both public and private sector experience, Rattner had a little insight into that particularly persistent meme:

ZAKARIA: Do you think he should appoint somebody who has real business experience to succeed Larry Summers?

RATTNER: I think it's a little bit of a red herring in the sense that is he very plugged in to the world. He has his Economic Recovery Advisory Board that consists of a number of very distinguished businessmen, including Jeff Immelt and so forth, from General Electric. He reads voraciously.

So, maybe simply -- simply to get rid of this one criticism of him, he could put somebody from the business community in there. But I would say somebody from the business community would find working in the White House and Larry Summers' job an extreme culture shock.

ZAKARIA: What do you mean?

RATTNER: Because you're going from being a CEO, running a company, saying this is what we're going to do, to a very complex organization that operates very much by collaboration, consensus, bringing in opinions from all over the government. It's basically a staff job. It's a very important staff job, but you're working for the president and the other senior staff members.

It's very different from being a CEO. I think it would be a tough adjustment for most CEOs.

ZAKARIA: Would do you it?

RATTNER: Well, I'm not -- I'm not a CEO, and I'm -- I'm selling my book at the moment, but -- so it's not -- not something I'm thinking about..

Here in California, we have two candidates--Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina--specifically using their experience as corporate CEOS to push their candidacies. In Fiorina's case, it's all that much more ridiculous, given that she was essentially pushed out of two executive positions (at Lucent and HP) for her inability to run the companies well.

But in both cases, I think it's a valid question to ask exactly which skills at CEO are transferable to a career in politics and learning how to build consensuses and compromise to knock out legislation.

From Tyler Durden over at Zero Hedge, this absolutely riveting post:

Who needs a wartime nuclear exchange when you have peaceful countries nuking the gamma rays out of their own sovereign territories - now that the environmental theme is rather popular, the following video by Isao Hashimoto shows all the nuclear "tests" conducted by the world in the period between 1945 and 1998.

Based on public data, the world's peaceful countries have already nuked themselves at least 2,054 times, with the US nuking the state of Nevada and its immediate neighbors about one thousand times. And keep in mind - the fallout does not just miraculously "disappear." Feel free to consider that next time you look at bargain properties on the strip.

Anyway, as Idealist asks, "How would your life be different if you were taught in school a small nuclear war already took place?" One thing is certain - Congress would be stunned and appalled, and the disgraced CEO of Nukes R Us, Inc., who previously gave trillions in campaign contributions to every Congressional critter, would be facing a very unpleasant and theatrically televised day.

Remember the CEO of LifeLock who always gave out his Social Security number in their ads? Surprise, surprise - his identity has been stolen at least 12 times over the past few years! From Wired:

Apparently, when you publish your Social Security number prominently on your website and billboards, people take it as an invitation to steal your identity.

LifeLock CEO Todd Davis, whose number is displayed in the company’s ubiquitous advertisements, has by now learned that lesson. He’s been a victim of identity theft at least 13 times, according to the Phoenix New Times.

Buyer beware. Open thread below...

There was a guest piece in the Times business section years ago, and it was about the ethical problem presented by a CEO or manager who set unreasonable goals and said, "Don't bother me with the details, just get it done." The author said that was an inherently immoral position, because it forced employees to either quit - or cut ethical corners in order to meet their numbers. I also remember the piece concluded that the real ethical violation was that of the management who set the goals in the first place, without taking responsibility for the consequences that inevitably follow.

I've never forgotten that. It's a handy rule of thumb, and I've actually used that story to argue with managers about their decisions. (Sometimes it even worked.)

What happened at the Massey mine in West Virginia is a textbook example of that kind of warped managerial thinking. (Although they made noises about it after the mine explosion, the board of Massey Energy still has no problem with Don Blankenship.) The NY Times today takes a look at two non-union mines (I suppose to prove that you can be non-union, yet still observe safety standards). It's a good read, and I recommend that you check out the rest. But this is the part that made my heart ache for those men:

Like so many other workers across the country, the day-shift miners at Upper Big Branch had an early-morning commute. Every workday, a dozen or so piled into a covered vehicle called a mantrip and caught a half-hour doze as the car followed a track three to four miles into the side of a central Appalachian mountain.

The car would come to a stop in a world where the ceiling was less than seven feet high, the floor puddled with water, and the air cool, breezy and faintly musty. As loud fans helped to move the air, the mining machine would grind back and forth about 1,000 feet across the wall, slicing coal to be carried away by conveyor belt.

Down there, fresh air could not be taken for granted.

Well before this month’s fatal explosion at Upper Big Branch, the country’s worst mine disaster in 40 years, the lack of proper ventilation had been a continuing concern among its miners. The fear of methane building while oxygen dropped preyed on their minds.

“I have had guys come to me and cry,” said the veteran foreman. “Grown men cried — because they are scared.”

But workers in the mine said they did not dare question the company’s safety practices, even when asked to perform a dubious task.

“It was all about production,” said Andrew Tyler, 22, an electrician who two years ago worked as a subcontractor on the wiring for the coal conveyer belt and other equipment at Upper Big Branch. “If you worked for them, you didn’t ask questions about whether some step like running a cable around the breaker was a smart idea. You just did it.”

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(via CNBC)

Remember Rick Santelli's rant that put the bow on the tea party movement for FOX News? The media seems to willfully forget how important this rant was to mobilize them and shift the blame for the mortgage crisis from Santelli's Wall Street fat cats to the working class. The poor under-appreciated mortgage lenders and CEO's were the victims of people who couldn't afford to pay for a mortgage because they were too stupid to understand the legal documents, but got themselves a house anyway.

CNBC had one of their talking head panels with Larry Kudlow at the helm which focused on financial reform and the Consumer Financial Protection Agency. Once the idea of predatory lending comes up the CNBCers get their freak on and blamed the uneducated poor people for all the destruction the housing bubble caused during the Bush administration as usual except for Janet Takakoli.

Matt Taibbi takes the lead:

Look at about the 5-minute mark of this video — Janet Tavakoli debating Rick Santelli about predatory lending. You basically have a whole panel of CNBC goons pooh-poohing the idea that predatory lending took place, setting up the inevitable revisionist history that the 2008 crash was caused by individual homeowners borrowing beyond their means.

My favorite part of this comes roughly at the six-minute mark. Tavakoli has just deftly explained how a lot of the predatory practices worked — people with limited financial literacy were presented with long and complicated mortgage deals, and told they would have a fixed payment in perpetuity or a guaranteed re-finance, or were nailed by fraudulent appraisals. Then she mentioned the big one, the fact that investment banks then took all these mortgages and with eyes wide open securitized them and sold them off as worthy investments to suckers on the other end of the chain.

While she’s saying all this stuff, Santelli, who is one of the fathers of the Tea Party movement, is shaking his head furiously, video-scoffing at everything she’s saying. When he finally does get a chance to speak, this is what he says:

Here’s my problem with this. It takes two to tango. You can’t cheat an honest man.

You can’t cheat an honest man? What the f*&k does that mean? This whole scene sort of encapsulates what’s wrong with the Tea Party movement

Amen, brother Taibbi. Not many people watch these CNBC programs, but this is the narrative that Santelli and his brethren like Melissa Francis have helped to propagate into the main stream.

Digby caught Taibbi's post and observes Santelli at his circus clown best:

The Fox/CNBC types have very cannily latched on this narrative to rewrite the history of the financial crisis. They know that Tea Partiers will go for any narrative that puts blame on poor (and especially poor minority) homeowners, because the idea of poor blacks and Hispanics borrowing beyond their means fits seamlessly with their world view. But this is a situation where poor minorities were really incidental to a much larger fraud scheme that culminated in a welfare program — the bank bailouts — that dwarfs the entire “entitlement” infrastructure. But the millions of people who are actually in the Tea Party movement seem to have absolutely no idea that their so-called leaders, the Santellis of their world, are shilling for tax cheats and crooks and welfare bums of the sort they would despise (perhaps even more than their black and Hispanic neighbors), if they could actually see them.

Unfortunately all the elites, political and otherwise, have a vested interest in keeping the rubes focused on the blacks and browns so it's hard to see the mechanism by which they will be revealed. And that's the whole purpose of right wing populism.

Anyone who has taken out a mortgage knows how complicated the paper work is and you depend on the mortgage broker to be honest with you. That's not what happened when the money was flying around and these predators were sucking on the economy like Vampires in heat. Only they didn't stop with their usual victims (the American people) because of their blood lust and they sucked on it all the way through their own system as Taibbi points out until it crashed and burned.

Bill O'Reilly decided to bring in Fox's newest big-name hire, John Stossel, to help buck up his annual pledge drive in the War on Christmas.

And Stossel -- who is no innocent in the ways of ideological reporting himself -- actually seemed embarrassed by it all -- mainly because O'Reilly was stooping to the lowest reporting methods possible to make his point.

Namely, he was citing as somehow authoritative ("I trust the folks") an online poll from an outfit called "StandForChristmas.com". Stossel briefly mentions that it actually was run by another group, and O'Reilly talks over him and emphasizes that it's "StandForChristmas."

Of course, "StandForChristmas" is actually run by the religious-right cranks at James Dobson's Focus on the Family. So there's an obvious bias built into the poll and its potential viewers in the first place. And then to treat the results of any open online poll as meaningful in any real sense is just palpable nonsense.

Stossel obviously understands this, and mostly tries to work his way around O'Reilly's insistence that the poll means something by just repeating its results.

But the whole thing goes completely off the rails and into another universe when O'Reilly tries to claim that corporate chiefs telling their employees what to say is "just fascist":

O'Reilly: But my point is, that I thought it was fascist -- fascism, which offends a libertarian like you -- for a CEO or a store manager to tell their employees, 'You better not say Merry Christmas' -- even though the reason we're selling stuff is because of Christmas. Isn't that fascism?

Stossel: No, it's ownership. He built the business, if he says, 'Stand on your head and sing when people come in,' you don't have to work there, you can quit, it's his business.

You realize from exchanges like this just how long it's been since Bill O'Reilly has had anything even remotely like a real job. Because in most people's real jobs -- especially in the retail biz -- employees are instructed all the time in exactly the kinds of things they're supposed to say. That's not fascist, it's just business.

Indeed, Bill O'Reilly has himself on numerous occasions demanded that people in various positions be fired for saying things he believes reflect badly on their employers -- remember his attacks on Rosie O'Donnell? Guess that makes him a fascist, by his own definition.

What would Christmas be without a warm cup of Bill O'Reilly hypocrisy?

ginandtacos: 'Democrats-as-socialists' comments are particularly lame coming from someone like the CEO of Coca Cola. Dirt-cheap, subsidized corn sweeteners, anyone?

Scott Horton: Republican Gomorrah - Six Questions for Max Blumenthal

Pacific Views: Act in haste, repent at leisure

Danger Room: Inside Bob Gates' Overhaul of the Pentagon

Eschaton: Atrios has news...

Consortiumblog: Neocon judge's history of coverups