Mitt Romney in an Interview with Hugh Hewitt on Obamas health care reform.
I can tell you one thing. If I’m the godfather of this thing, then it gives me the right to kill it.
As liberalsarecool.com states correctly:
Kill it. Not replace it. Or improve it. What a complete waste of a human. Offensively proud of hurting the lives of millions.
We already knew he is a serial killer.
John Stoer wrote an excellent piece on AlJazeera lately, which contains some great insighty into the US system we would like to share here.
Income inequality isn’t just about justice; it’s about freedom, too. One view of freedom minimises the state’s role in an individual’s life and maximises markets so that individuals are free to risk whatever they want to risk to be whatever they want to be. Another view sees the obligation of the state to hedge against the risk of the marketplace so that individuals can feel secure enough to be what they want to be. Obviously, the libertarian view favours someone who can afford risk; the socialist view favours someone who can’t. One view has confidence in the market while the other is skeptical. One view sees income inequality as natural while the other sees it as politically oppressive.
One can’t summarize current American politics better. However, its not only about socialism and confidence its also about simple democratic rights, which do not exist any more. Moreover, income inequality may lead to a financial crisis, even if the rich do not suffer from it.
Occupy protesters aren’t just facing local police; they are facing an entire system bent on breaking dissent and protecting the status quo. How can you play by the rules when the 1 per cent writes, and keeps rewriting, the rules? The only way to fight back is to fight back against the entire system.
Old Rome or Arab spring, the truth of this statement shows how the current system is not sustainable. Wake up, USA!
One of the first posts in this blog featured a documentary from AlJazeera, about the financial crisis. The Economist blog Free Exchange posted an interesting article how income inequality can lead to the financial crisis.
Whether or not you support the Occupy movement, it’s stomach-turning to think about the NYPD ripping up camp sites, spraying mace and manhandling the disenfranchised, while the mayor dines with a Wall Street CEO who not only bet against U.S. homeowners in the mortgage meltdown but structured deals for his favorite billionaire clients, only to shaft investors on the other side of the deal.
— David Weidner, Goldman, Bloomberg and crony capitalism
(via americawakiewakie)
We talked so much about inequality on this blog. About household income, the effects of Citizens United, Wall St bonuses. How did we get so far? Is this all just the result of a free market?
Look at the graph above provided by CBBP. Actually, the politics did a quite well job on cutting the spending in the US. If one looks more closely in the report, even the wardefense budget decreased in percent of GDP. Great! If there were not these lousy costs for social security and medicare. Why are these so high?
As you can see from the graph the average cash bonus paid fell accordingly to the events of the financial crisis. So is Wall St also paying for the financial crisis they provoked? You know it already, of course not! The average pay is still 5.5 times higher than for other private-sector workers in News York. But there is even more…
And here we are again talking about, guess what, SuperPACs. We already talked about how they deeply undermine the democratic process. As you can see in this graph by The Economist there has been already a huge increase in outside spending via SuperPACs etc. in the campaigns this year:
Where does this money go?
