Category: Class War

78%

~ susie ~ 4 Comments

Dear California’s rich people: Taxes — or pitchforks?

Think the budget negotiations are dead? Get ready for something that could contribute to a Plan B: Tax the rich.

We just got our hands on a new poll due out Friday that shows blow-the-roof-off support for something that has only been mumbled about in the most progressive corners of the Dome: Increasing taxes one percent on Californians making more than $500,000. It would raise $2.5 billion towards the state’s $26.6 billion deficit.

We explored this issue weeks ago, but few would talk it up then. But now, they might.

How high is the support? Try a whopping 78 percent. Even 60 percent of Republicans and 79 percent of independent and other voters backed it, too.

“Those are the highest numbers I’ve ever seen. On a tax scale — that’s pretty much a perfect score,” said Lenny Goldberg, executive director of the California Tax Reform Association.

The poll, conducted by Democratic pollster Ben Tulchin and sponsored by the California Federation of Teachers, is opening eyes as part of a potential Plan B for solving the budget deficit with its bi-partisan support.

The survey found that 53 percent of the 800 likely California voters surveyed strongly support the tax. Overall support cut across racial, age and geographic boundaries.

“There is a populist anger out there that cuts across all lines,” Tulchin told us. Many voters felt it was unfair that the wealthiest Americans got their Bush-era tax cuts extended last year.

“The see that these (state) service cuts would affect middle-class and lower-class people and they want rich people to pay their fair share,” Tulchin said.

The enforcer

~ susie ~ 6 Comments

Jim Messina, the asshole who’s heading Obama’s reelection campaign:

“It was a major harbinger to me, when Obama hired him, that we were not going to get ‘change we can believe in,’” says Ken Toole, a former Democratic state senator and public service commissioner in Montana. “Messina has a lot of talents, but he’s extremely conservative in his views on how to do politics. He’s got a tried-and-true triangulation methodology, and that’s never gonna change.” The Democratic National Committee declined to make Messina available for an interview.

[…] After the 2010 election, Messina spoke at the winter meeting of the Democracy Alliance, a group of wealthy progressive funders. He gave two PowerPoint presentations, including one on the administration’s accomplishments—the stimulus, the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, healthcare and financial reform. The other was on what was still to come—immigration reform, the START treaty, repealing DADT. “Jim, you’re missing a word,” one donor told him during the Q&A.

“What word?” Messina responded.

“The word ‘jobs,’” the donor said.

“Messina got a lot of tough questions from people who used to love him,” says one person who was in the audience. “It was like a room of scorned lovers.”

Go read it, be prepared.

Humanitarian flashback

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

From David Swanson’s book War Is A Lie:

The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia found that NATO’s bombing may have increased, rather than diminish, the war crimes it was justified by — most of which occurred during and not prior to the bombing.

In the June 14, 1999, issue of The Nation, George Kenney, a former State Department Yugoslavia desk officer, reported:

“An unimpeachable press source who regularly travels with Secretary of State Madeleine Albright told this [writer] that, swearing reporters to deep-background confidentiality at the Rambouillet talks, a senior State Department official had bragged that the United States ‘deliberately set the bar higher than the Serbs could accept.’ The Serbs needed, according to the official, a little bombing to see reason.”

Jim Jatras, a foreign policy aide to Senate Republicans, reported in a May 18, 1999, speech at the Cato Institute in Washington that he had it “on good authority” that a “senior Administration official told media at Rambouillet, “under embargo” the following: “We intentionally set the bar too high for the Serbs to comply. They need some bombing, and that’s what they are going to get.”
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