Elizabeth Warren Vindicated as Fox News Use Argument That Rich Don't Make It On Their Own

Elizabeth Warren Vindicated as Fox News Use Argument That Rich Don't Make It On Their Own

Last fall, right-wing pundits at Fox News and elsewhere savaged Elizabeth Warren, the Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate in Massachusetts, after video circulated of the former Obama administration official explaining that because business moguls take advantage of infrastructure and education funded by taxes, "[t]here is nobody in this country who got rich on his own." This morning, an unlikely group offered up comments strikingly similar to Warren's: the hosts of Fox & Friends Sunday.

During a segment on wealthy Americans who renounce their citizenship to avoid paying taxes, Clayton Morris offered up this advice to such persons: "Get out of here. But the point is, you've made all this money on the backs of the infrastructure, taxpayers that got you there, the roads that taxpayers pay so you can drive back and forth to work to get rich on a regular basis, and now you're going to leave so you're not going to pay taxes."

Alisyn Camerota added, "[A]re they just greedy? I mean, are they just -- after this country allowed you the entrepreneurial spirit, the freedom to make all this money, now you're going to leave it? I mean, that does send the message that you care more about your money than you do about your country."


Compare their comments to those Warren made during a campaign stop in August while pushing back against claims that asking the wealthy to pay more in taxes is "class warfare":

    WARREN: There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there -- good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn't have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory and hire someone to protect against this because of the work the rest of us did. Now look. You built a factory, and it turned into something terrific or a great idea -- God bless! Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.

There are some differences, of course. Fox & Friends being what it is, the segment concludes with the hosts determining that "the answer" is to "be part of the solution" by "stay[ing] here and... fight[ting] for better tax laws," followed by a series of jokes about European toilets. But both make the case that the private sector success of the wealthy is driven by government investments funded by the public. Fox, of course, has long been a chief promoter of the very claims of "class warfare" Warren criticized.

In October, Fox News' Andrew Napolitano responded to Warren's comments by labeling her a "crazy lady." Reason magazine editor in chief Matt Welch called them "the best advertisement I've seen in a long time for limiting the size and scope of government" and "terrifying." Other right-wing commenters termed her remarks "dunderheaded" "piffle" that made her sound like a "guileless, fevered Marxist."

It remains to be seen whether the right will similarly target the "Marxist[s]" on Fox & Friends' curvy couch.

The least Fox News could do is send Warren a check for co-opting her speech. But like your average conservatives, the Fox News propaganda channel tends to take what it wants, earning it or creating something themselves would just be too much work.

It's Not About the Damn Ponies

It's true that Romney makes most of his annual income off of dividends and capital gains he earns by investing his fortune. But he made $374,327.62 in 2010 on speaker's fees alone. That's a figure, by the way, that Romney characterized as "not very much" money. Kathleen Parker thinks people are just hating on the Romneys' success out of some kind of pony-envy, but we're really appalled about something completely different. We're appalled that he wants to cut way back on programs to help the poor and middle-class survive and advance in our society at the same time that he wants to hand out a $250,000 annual income tax break to millionaires. Over a four-year presidential term, that would be a million dollar tax break to everyone who made a million dollars a year for those four years. You can't make a proposal like that when you are worth a quarter of a billion dollars and then complain about the budget deficit and call for massive cuts in social spending, and then think you'll be above criticism.

As for Ann Romney's horse, Ms. Parker doesn't get into the specifics for a good reason. Apparently, the Romneys formed a corporation to deal with this horse, and they declared a $77,000 loss in 2010 for that corporation. If the corporation ever makes any money by, for example, breeding this Olympic-performing horse, they can write off those losses. And you thought the Olympics were about amateur sports!

Romney says our taxes - the lowest they have been in fifty years - are too high. Yet here we are subsidizing Romney's expensive hobby. Mitt and Ann are welfare queens, simple as that.

If they gave Olympic Gold Medals for lying, Mitt Romney would have a mansion full of them. Character does matter. Romney says he is a man of character and morals. When can the American people start to see some of that character and morality? After the election will be too late.

The Koch Brothers Anti-American Agenda Exposed and They're Not happy About It

The Koch Brothers Anti-American Agenda Exposed and They're Not happy About It

With my new film Koch Brothers Exposed set for release, the billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch are doing everything they can do hide their behavior. First they got their lawyer to fire off a menacing letter that all but threatened news organizations that dare to cover the film’s content. Now they’re insisting — get this — that there’s nothing to debate anyway.

That’s right. In response to my offer to a debate or public discussion, the Koch brothers, hiding behind their attorney, wrote, “We are confused about what there is to debate.”

Perhaps the Kochs have not seen what my team and journalists such as Lee Fang, Adele Stan, and Jane Mayer have uncovered. What we’ve found is that Charles and David Koch are using their vast fortune to buy the political and legal process. They are corrupting democracy in ways that are harming the 99% while serving their own economic interests.

One area of excessive influence is energy policy. The Kochs own Koch Industries, one of the top 10 polluters in the nation, which means they have a strong interest in eliminating or preventing environmental regulations. The Kochs have given over $500,000 to members of the U.S. House of Representatives’ Energy and Commerce Committee, which proposes environmental regulations and is supposed to hold polluters accountable. Indeed, as our film reveals, the Kochs are the oil and gas industry’s single biggest donor to that committee. Is it any wonder that Congress won’t pass bills to curb climate change or tackle other environmental problems?

In fact, the Kochs frequently have secret summits where they host wealthy right-wing donors as well as federal policymakers to talk strategy and fundraising. Participants have included U.S. Rep. Eric Cantor, R-Va., and Supreme Court Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. Those two justices recently increased the Kochs’ power by voting in the Citizens United case to allow unlimited corporate money into politics. And just last week, the justices heard a case challenging the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act — a bill that the Koch-founded and -financed group Americans for Prosperity has been pushing to overturn. Should our system permit such a conflict of interest, enabling the Kochs to wield influence that virtually no other citizen can match?

This influence also extends to the state level. The Kochs have given at least $1 million to the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a group that writes pro-corporate laws that are often passed nearly verbatim in state legislatures across the country. Among these laws are onerous voter ID restrictions (to reduce the number of votes from the young, the elderly, the poor, and people of color) and various bills that undermine workers, consumers, and the environment.

Moreover, the Kochs have been propping up Wisconsin’s anti-union governor Scott Walker, who recently rammed a bill through his state legislature to gut the rights of public sector unions. AFP ran attack ads and organized a bus tour to stymie the union members opposing Walker’s power grab. Although the Kochs’ lawyer tries to distance his clients from all of that unpleasantness, he cannot take back what David Koch recently told a reporter: “We’re helping [Scott Walker], as we should. We’ve gotten pretty good at this over the years…We’ve spent a lot of money in Wisconsin. We’re going to spend more.”

Why won’t the Kochs debate these things? What are they hiding from? The fact is they have an undue, indeed corrupting, influence on our democracy, and they don’t want anyone to notice. After all, true democracy isn’t just a process where the rabble get to enter a voting booth every couple of years while the rich guys fund the candidates, think tanks, media campaigns, and on-the-ground organizations that set the parameters of public debate. Democracy is supposed to be a vibrant, participatory process where every citizen can have an impact on how the country is governed and narrow interests can’t commandeer the process for themselves.

Surely, that’s something worth debating.

Some days it is as though real life has become an episode of the Twilight Zone. We have proto-fascist like the Koch brothers and their bought and paid for puppet conservative politicians actually trying to end our democratic republic, all the while accusing President Obama, Democrats and anyone to the left of Mussolini of being dangerous.

My 14 Year Old Son Has Brain Cancer - Without Obamacare, We May Have Been Dropped By Our Insurance Company

The GOP’s nuke-dump donor. Another Koch brother type, Harold Simmons has given the most money to Republicans this election. Could his nuclear-waste dump be the reason? It has become as easy to buy a conservative Republican as it is to buy a loaf of cheap white bread. Simmons and the Koch brothers are the kind of people that Scott Brown (R-MS) calls his friends.

RNC chairman reflects on women, caterpillars

Welcome to Conservative America Where Wealth is Rewarded and Work is Punished

Welcome to Conservative America Where Wealth is Rewarded and Work is Punished

The Wall Street Journal noted this week that CEO pay lagged behind profits and productivity last year, mirroring a trend that has been occurring with workers’ wages for decades. But even that slight modicum of moderation regarding executive compensation evidently didn’t extend to Bank of America, which gave CEO Brian Moynihan a $7.5 million pay package — six times as much as he made in 2010 — following a year in which the company’s stock plummeted:

    Bank of America gave its CEO a pay package worth $7.5 million last year, six times as large as the year before. It happened while the company’s stock lost more than half its value and the bank lost its claim as the biggest in the country.

    The package for CEO Brian Moynihan included a salary of $950,000, a $6.1 million stock award and about $420,000 worth of use of company aircraft and tax and financial advice.

For those keeping score, Bank of America’s stock dropped 58 percent in 2011 and the bank surrendered its title as the nation’s largest to JP Morgan Chase. A good chunk of the stock award was actually given to Moynihan for the bank’s 2010 performance, when it lost money.

In addition to seeing its stock tank, Bank of America has also been, according to a whistleblower suit, intentionally blocking troubled homeowners from receiving mortgage aid. The whistleblower alleges that BofA misled borrowers about their eligibility for federal mortgage aid programs and that “the bank and its agents routinely pretended to have lost homeowners’ documents.” (But remember, Bank of America will modify your mortgage as long as you erase all the mean things you’ve been saying about it on Twitter.)

BofA has also been tied up in the foreclosure fraud scandal, and just a few months ago paid $335 million to settle charges that its subsidiary discriminated against minorities in its lending. If this is how much Moynihan gets after that sort of year, what will he receive if the bank actually has a good one?

While financial reform passed by Democrats and President Obama does not micro-manage businesses to the point where reform can limit CEO pay, it does address regulation of some of Wall Street's worse abuses like defrauding regular working Americans. This would be the financial reform that conservatives have pulled every obstructionist trick to stop from being implemented. Why? Because they see CEOs like Brian Moynihan as their base of support. Conservatives figure if they protect the financial elite the financial elite will look out for them.

CEOs like Moynihan are the people that Sen Scott Brown(R-MA) considers his best friends.

Why Does Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA) Hate America and The Middle-class

Why Does Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA) Hate America and The Middle-class

In his public resignation letter in today’s New York Times, former Goldman Sachs executive Greg Smith said that one of the fastest ways to get ahead with the firm is to persuade clients “to invest in the stocks or other products that [the firm is] trying to get rid of because they are not seen as having a lot of potential profit.” He lambastes a firm culture where colleagues openly boast of “ripping their clients off.”

The sad thing is, this sort of shady might well have been on the way to being curtailed if not for the actions of Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA). After Brown was elected to the senate in 2010, he threatened to join a Republican filibuster of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, using that threat to significantly water down the bill. Among the industry-favored concessions he extracted was weakening of the “Volcker rule,” which was meant to curb risky speculative investments that do not benefit customers.

Thanks to Brown’s maneuver, the final bill upped the amount of risky trading big banks like Goldman could engage in, increasing the amount of gambling they’re able to do by billions of dollars. Since then, financial industry lobbyists have been hammering away at the the rule in an attempt to render it completely meaningless.

The financial sector, of course, has repaid Brown with a flurry of campaign contributions. Between contributions from the firm’s leadership PAC and contributions from company employees, Brown has already received more than $40,000 in campaign cash from Goldman Sachs this cycle.

Brown hates the USA. he hates average Americans - consumers, small investors and middle-class families. he changes course according to which way the wind blows. he stands for nothing except making sure the powerful elite stay in power while the middle-class and working poor struggle. What Brown wants is for the USA to be the Pottersville in the nightmare part of Its a Wonderful Life. Brown and his radical conservative pals have no morals, no vision for America except taking more of what average Americas work hard to earn. he and his unhinged conservative elite want to continue to redistribute most of America's Gross Domestic Product upward to the 10% who work the least.

No, Obamacare’s Cost Didn’t Just Double. Sigh.

Sorting through the deceptive attacks on health care reform gets old, even for me. But on Wednesday the Republicans and their allies made a claim so obviously misleading that they, and the media outlets parroting them, must have known they spreading false information.

The basis for the claim is the Congressional Budget Office’s latest projections for the Affordable Care Act, which critics (and I!) like to call Obamacare. When Congress first passed the law, in the spring of 2010, CBO made official estimates of how much the law would cost, how many people would get insurance as a result, and so on. It updated that estimate one year later and has, now, updated it one more time.

The CBO distributed its report in the morning and, by 11 a.m., Republican offices on Capitol Hill were spitting out press releases about it. According to the Republicans, CBO had discovered that Obamacare was going to cost $1.76 trillion over the next ten years. “The CBO’s revised cost estimate indicates that this massive government intrusion into America’s health care system will be far more costly than was originally claimed,” Tom Price, chairman of the House Republican Policy Committee, said. Within a few hours, both Fox News and the Washington Times were carrying online stories making the same claim. According to the Fox News account, CBO was “showing that the bill is substantially more expensive—twice as much as the original $900 billion price tag.”

If CBO had truly determined that health care reform’s cost will be twice the original estimates, it would be huge news. But CBO said nothing of the sort.

To figure out the cost of health care reform, CBO looks at each of the law’s component parts and, for accounting purposes, groups them into different categories. It calls one category “gross cost of coverage expansions”—that’s the amount of money the federal government will spend to help people get insurance, mostly by offering Medicaid to more people or giving people subsidies they can use to help offset the cost of private insurance. Last year, CBO estimated that the gross cost of coverage expansion from 2012 through 2021 would be $1.445 trillion. Now CBO thinks the gross cost will be $1.496 trillion. The number shifted, in part, because the CBO has changed its projections for economic growth. (MSNBC’s Tom Curry has a nice explanation of this.) But, in the context of such a large a budget projection, that’s barely any difference at all.

In the this latest estimate, CBO extends its projection out one more year, to capture the expenses from 2012 to 2022, in order to capture a full decade. In 2022, CBO says, the gross cost of coverage expansion will be $265 billion. Add that to the $1.496 and you get (with rounding) the $1.76 trillion—the one in the press releases and the Fox story.

But there is nothing new or surprising about this. It’s only slightly more money than the previous year’s outlays. The ten-year number seems to jump only because the time frame for the estimate has moved, dropping one year, 2011, and adding another, 2022. Obamacare has virtually no outlays in 2011, because the Medicaid expansion and subsidies don’t start up until 2014, which means the shifting time frame drops a year of no implementation and adds one of full implementation.

Still, doesn’t that just validate what the law’s critics have always said, that the administration was playing games to hide the program’s true impact on the deficit? Hardly. Remember, this is just the raw cost of expanding insurance coverage we’re talking about here—in other words, the money the federal government is sending out the door. The new law also calls for new revenue, in the form of taxes and penalties. It also reduces spending, mostly through Medicare, to help offset the cost of the coverage expansion. When the Affordable Care Act became law, CBO estimated that the net result of all these changes, taken together, would be to reduce the deficit. Now, with this revised estimate, CBO has decided the law will reduce the deficit by even more money.

Yes, you read that right: The real news of the CBO estimate is that, according to its models, health care reform is going to save even more taxpayer dollars than previously thought.

The above picture is yet another example of conservative desperation. Nowhere in his speech does Holder say the word brainwash. Conservatives must lie and lie often to win any debate - read more here, ZombieBreitbart.com Presents: Eric Holder — The Vettening and here, Right-Wing Media Uncover Holder's Plot To Discourage Lawbreaking

Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA) Freedom Hating Sleaze Bag of the Week - Brown Event Hosted By Anti-American Plantation Owner Where Workers labored 12-hour days to earn just $2 a day.

Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA) Freedom Hating Sleaze Bag of the Week - Brown Event Hosted By Anti-American Plantation Owner Where Workers labored 12-hour days to earn just $2 a day.

Locked in a tight re-election battle, Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA) has been doing a lot of travel lately to expand his already sizable war chest of money from wealthy special interests. But one recent, little-noticed Florida fundraiser was hosted by a highly controversial sugar magnate.

On February 22, Brown attended a Palm Beach luncheon featuring Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL). One of the official hosts for the event was José “Pepe” Fanjul, the vice chairman, chief operating officer, and president of Fanjul Corp. and Florida Crystals Corporation, two Fanjul-family-owned sugar production companies (subsidiaries include the Domino sugar company).

Who is Pepe Fanjul?

He and his brother has been called the “Koch Brothers of South Florida” for their long record of political involvement and lobbying against industry regulations. A 1998 Time magazine article by legendary reporters Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele called the Fanjul’s “the First Family of Corporate Welfare,” with more than $60 million in corporate subsidies benefiting their companies annually from the federal government.

But most disturbing are reports about the Fanjul’s Dominican Republic operations. In January, the Palm Beach Post reported that Wikileaks documents revealed the Fanjuls and their companies “muscled” lawmakers to kill the Central American Free Trade Agreement, which might have increased competition. A lawyer for the family dismissed any allegations of illegal or inappropriate lobbying as “chatty gossip.”

Big Sugar, a 2005 CBC documentary raised an even bigger concern. According to their investigation, workers for the Fanjul-owned Central Romano plantation work 12-hour days to earn just $2 a day. The workers go hungry in conditions that have been compared to slave labor. In a 2001 Vanity Fair article, attorney Edward Tuddenham called the treatment of sugar cane pickers under the Fanjul’s “modern-day slavery.” Their treatment of workers and the Florida everglades has been heavily questioned. Pepe Fanjul and his brother denied being barons, denied harming the everglades, and denied receiving subsidies in a 1997 New York Times letter to the editor. And in the CBC documentary, he said Centro Romano is the “most progressive employer in the Dominican Republic.”

Fanjul also made news in 2010 when the New York Post reported that his executive assistant is the ex-wife of former KKK leader David Duke and current wife of the former KKK grand wizard who runs a white-supremacist website. A company spokesman told the paper “While we may not agree with someone’s politics, we wouldn’t terminate them for that.”

Florida Sugar Company did not respond to an email requesting comment for this story.

When he kicked off his re-election campaign, Brown boasted, “Once again I won’t have the political establishment behind me – not the one on Beacon Hill, and certainly not the one on Capitol Hill.” Now we see it is the Florida GOP establishment he has in his pocket. But even with more than $750,000 in political contributions over the years, mostly to Republicans, one still has to wonder why Brown would risk aligning himself with a figure like Fanjul.

Time for the Anti-American smiley faced fascists like brown to retire from politics. Brown and his ilk should not be allowed to be anywhere near the public policy of the USA.

Smearing Sandra Fluke wasn't enough, misogynists move on to Anti-Semitic attacks on her boyfriend

Conservative Catholic Bishops threaten women's health and religious freedom in the USA.