Over the past 200 years, the stock market's steady upward march occasionally has been disrupted for long stretches, most recently during the Great Depression and the inflation-plagued 1970s. The current market turmoil suggests that we may be in another lost decade.
The stock market is trading right where it was nine years ago. Stocks, long touted as the best investment for the long term, have been one of the worst investments over the nine-year period, trounced even by lowly Treasury bonds.
Sharply reduced standards of living for America's seniors, due to significantly reduced investment returns during a crucial decade, will be another of the major long-term effects of the Bush-Cheney administration, its tax policy, its wastefulness, and its insane adventure in Iraq.
It is also worth noting that during the eight years of the Clinton administration, the Dow Jones industrial average and the S&P 500 went up over 300 percent. Neither of these indexes includes major amounts of Internet stock like the Nasdaq, so the Internet "bubble" didn't affect them as much.
It doesn't matter if you look at the president as the metaphorical or literal portfolio manager of the American economy. The choice is clear. Another Clinton is running for president this year: that's who I want in the White House.
Five years ago the White House was evidently expecting company in the thousands, when they built twenty-three state of the art autopsy stations: "WASHINGTON, Oct. 29, 2003 – Military officials this week opened a new $30 million mortuary at Dover Air Force Base, Del."
"The mission of a mortuary is to prepare remains with dignity, care and respect," [Meg Falk, director of the Defense Department's Office of Family Policy] added. "If we expose that process to the media we lose that."
Really, Meg? A hell of a lot more than dignity, care and respect has been lost. With all due respect to the extremely difficult work of the mortuary workers, the least you can do is name the place after the people who will keep it populated well into the foreseeable future.
Add another institution to those getting squeezed by America's economic crunch: soup kitchens.
Across the country, groups that provide food to people in need are scrambling to make up for a loss of government-provided surplus items as commodity prices have soared. Surpluses have dropped as some commodities, like corn, are being turned into alternative fuels and others are going overseas as the weak dollar makes U.S. exports more palatable to other countries.
At the same time, food banks and soup kitchens say that people struggling with mortgage woes, rising gas prices and layoffs are increasingly turning to them for help. [...]
When his family ran out of food last week, Daniel Wheelus went to Prodisee Pantry, in Spanish Fort, Ala., for the first time. He received a full shopping cart, including a ham, that he said would last a week for himself, his wife and three children, ages 16, 12 and 10.
"They even gave my boy some clothes for school," he said. "They really, really helped."
Mr. Wheelus, 39 years old, earns $13.60 an hour working in an oil field 45 miles from his home. But it costs him $30 a day to fill up the Dodge Dakota pickup he drives to work. His utility bills have doubled to $400 a month from last year, he says. He says he lost his house in October after missing mortgage payments following knee surgery and now owes back taxes.
Permit an all-oil, all-war, all-crony agenda in the White House and Congress, and this is what you get.
The truth, however, is that Spitzer's biggest, most lasting impact came in the [mutual] fund industry, and in a lot of ways that ordinary investors don't think about and fail to appreciate. Moreover, by uncovering the fund scandals when he did, he saved Wall Street from a much larger problem that, in hindsight, would appear to have been an inevitable consequence of the bad behavior that was happening in the fund world.
You mean Spitzer was preventing the kind of bad behavior that is ruining the world economy? Why would we want anyone like that working on our behalf?
Evidently we would rather have the pot-smoking, bridge-playing CEO of Bear Stearns and his criminally negligent management team rewarded while Spitzer's career goes up in smoke. Sex is such a vivid distraction from the nitty gritty of "privatized gain, socialized loss" — also known as GOP welfare.
All of these Wall Street CEOs — Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, UBS, Goldman Sachs — were staunch and generous Bush-Cheney supporters. So who do you think will pay for their unforced errors?
You, if you're an American middle class taxpayer. The Republican position is to let them off the hook and bail them out no matter how stupendously they fuck up the entire economy. This smells a lot like the climax to the sequel of Neil and Poppy's S&L Crisis, Son of the WASP: The Legacy of the Turdblossom.
Meanwhile, Republican CEOs run wild and free, financial watchdog Spitzer is out of office for bedding a hooker, and Mary Ann from Gilligan's Island has been duly chastised by law enforcement for her pot smoking, in direct contrast to the public pot smoking of Bear Stearns's CEO James Cayne. The Republican perversion of justice marches on!
That's exactly how I felt about Enron, FISA, Iraq, subprime credit, Katrina, the national deficit, Halliburton, stop-loss, Diebold, the firing of US attorneys, Valerie Plame, social security privatization, the crashing dollar, the tripling of gas prices, and Rumsfeld's handshake with Saddam Hussein. That's excluding the other obvious GOP-related sex scandals of Larry Craig, Vitter, Jeff Gannon, etc.
All of these topics are so tricky to explain to children. And so selective of Yahoo to frame the headline in quite that way.
Kenneth Langone, the target of former New York State Attorney General Eliot G. Spitzer's lawsuit regarding the hefty compensation package for former NYSE chairman Dick Grasso, felt little remorse for the Empire State's embattled governor, who is charged with having dealings with a prostitution ring.
"We all have our own private hells," Mr. Langone said in an interview with CNBC television on Monday night.
"I hope his private hell is hotter than everyone else's."
When asked if Mr. Spitzer should be forced to resign, Mr. Langone, a former director of the New York Stock Exchange and co-founder Home Depot, said: "Absolutely. He is a hypocrite. He destroyed reputations of people with good reputations and deserved reputations."
Well, gosh, that sounded sincere, until you realize that Langone was defending his role in giving former NYSE chairman Dick Grasso $187 million, about which Spitzer had made the wild claim that it wasn"t "fair and reasonable."
Governor Sex Fiend Spitzer made powerful enemies and is paying the price for it. Senator Sex Fiend Larry Craig, meanwhile, is free to go about his business of enacting the Republican agenda because he refused to resign over a trifling airport men's room blowjob.
Wall Street has bigger priorities than fighting Al Qaeda, despite its having attacked their clubhouse in lower Manhattan. They have grudges, you see, and payback is obviously a higher priority than security.
According to a survey by Russ Alan Prince, president of Connecticut-based wealth-research firm Prince & Associates, in his book “The Sky’s The Limit,” a sizable percentage of the super wealthy use escorts. He surveyed 661 people who owned private jets. It found that 34% of males and 20% of females had paid for sex.
The most popular reason was “unique experiences” (71%), followed by “higher quality experiences” (57%). Conventional wisdom says that the rich visit escorts to avoid messy break-ups or extra demands for cash. But the study shows otherwise: “No strings attached,” ranked last as a reason.
“With the wealthy,” Mr. Prince says “it’s all about power and control and new experiences.”
Over one-third of male private jet owners admit to hiring escorts for "power and control and new experiences.”
Such beautiful motives! Let's give them more tax breaks — pronto! After all, somebody's got to wiretap Democratic governors, and it might as well be private jet owners and their Republican employees in the White House, on Capitol Hill, and on Wall Street.
Thanks to a global explosion of wealth over the past 10 years or so, the number of U.S. households with $1 million to $25 million in net worth has more than doubled. Households with $500 million and up have roughly tripled. [...]
True, only a tiny portion of all Americans meet our definition of rich: Just 0.20% of households have net worths of $25 million or more. But in absolute numbers, the group is considerable. If one representative from each of the 175,400 households filed into an NFL stadium at the same time, they wouldn't all find seats. In fact, they would have to go in two shifts -- and even then, some 15,000 would be left in the parking lots, tailgating in their Bentleys. [...]
WITH A NET WORTH OF $500 million or more, "You can buy whatever you want" in Manhattan real estate, says Mason. Or you can buy anywhere else. Some members of this group buy $20 million homes "all over the world," says Gary Gold, realty broker to the rich at Hilton & Highland in Los Angeles. He's been as surprised as anyone by the growing number of people who qualify for the Champagne & Caviar class. Five or 10 years ago, he says, "you'd know who they are. Now, they can have vast wealth and you don't know who they are."
Leslie Mandel, chief executive of the Rich List, a marketing company, contends there are now more than 2,000 Americans with net worths of a $1 billion or more, far more than the 400 who appear on Forbes' annual list (the cutoff for that is now $1.3 billion). Some bankers figure the number of billionaires is closer to 500, but either way, it's up remarkably from the 170 of 10 years ago. [...]
In his 2007 book about the wealth explosion, Richistan, Wall Street Journal writer Robert Frank tells the story of an 11-year-old girl who asked her father for a ride on a commercial airline even though the family owned its own jet. "I want to ride on a big plane with other people," the girl said.
Why didn't she or her siblings say, "I want my health insurance claims to be denied like other people," or "I want to know what real financial uncertainty feels like, just like the employees Daddy screwed out of their Enron 401(k) plans," or "I wish I knew what it felt like to be young and black and living in New Orleans's Third Ward during Katrina," or "Gosh, I wish I knew what it felt like to fight and become an amputee in Iraq or Afghanistan."
Think of this level of wealth as class warfare with a smiley face. Or no face at all. That's why we need true progressive income taxation, higher capital gains taxes, and estate taxes that kick in around $5 million.
The ultra-rich got everything they wanted from the most billionaire-friendly president in modern history and America is still shit dragging the heel of the global economy. Now it's our turn to tax the people who have profited so spectacularly from all the covertly calculated Republican carnage, both in dollars and in working-class blood, carried out in the name of faux family values and phony crusade-wars conducted with a costume cowboy hat.
Saturday, 8 March, 2003 - The White House asked if President Bush could address the European Parliament, Baroness Williams revealed on BBC One's This Week show on Thursday. But, she said, Euro-MPs were told there was a condition attached to him making the speech: a standing ovation should be guaranteed. The speech has never taken place.
No standing ovation, no speech! Unlike Europeans, why didn't Americans think of not yielding to his infantile needs six years ago?
General Motors Corp. gave Chairman and Chief Executive [George] Rick Wagoner a 33% raise for 2008 and equity compensation of at least $1.68 million for his performance in 2007, a year for which the auto maker reported a loss of $38.7 billion.
Once again, needless to say, this extremely accomplished loser is a proud Republican, giving generously to both Bush in 2004 and Romney in 2007.
Even reality show contestants have to do something worthwhile to win their payday. But not in the Republican Party of the United States of America, where colossal incompetence is treated like the birthright of kings.
The nation's top 400 taxpayers reported a total of $85.6 billion of income on their federal income-tax returns for 2005 -- an average of $213.9 million apiece, according to Internal Revenue Service data obtained by The Wall Street Journal.
Just to make the cutoff to join this exclusive club, you had to report income of at least $100.3 million, up sharply from $74.5 million the previous year. The average income among the top 400 in 2004 was $172.8 million.
Indeed, the top 400 taxpayers have greatly increased their share of individuals' income since the mid-1990s. The group accounted for 1.15% of total income in 2005, up from 1.02% the prior year -- and more than twice as large as its 0.49% share a decade earlier. It's the highest percentage since the early 1990s, which is as far back as the IRS data go. [...]
The average federal income-tax rate for the group was 18.23%. That's up from 18.16% the prior year, but lower than in any other year since 1992 -- and well below the average income-tax rate of nearly 30% back in 1995, when Bill Clinton was in the White House. [...]
Under current law, the basic federal estate-tax exemption, now $2 million, will soar to $3.5 million next year. In 2010, the tax is scheduled to disappear entirely -- but only for that one year. President Bush has long called for total elimination of what its opponents call the "death tax." But those efforts have fizzled in Congress. A likely compromise might include making the exclusion somewhere around $3.5 million to $5 million and cutting the top estate-tax rate, which is currently 45%.
The IRS numbers might also prompt calls for higher taxes of some kind on the super-rich, such as possibly a higher capital-gains tax rate for those making megamillions a year.
That $213.9 million apiece is for their annual income, not their overall net worth. Their "salary and wages" account for only 8.6 percent of their annual haul — the rest is dividends and capital gains and such, which are taxed at much lower rates than your paltry salary or your tiny wages.
So the ultra-rich are pulling in more than twice the money they used to, while paying two-thirds of the taxes they were under Clinton. Meanwhile, we borrow zillions from China to give tax stimulus checks to every American, whether they borrowed from a crooked subprime-pushing bank or not. It all makes perfect sense. In hell.
At least these rich people have only until 2010 to die tax-free. As I've predicted before, my guess is that 2010 is the year George H. W. Bush will die, because Junior wants his daddy's Saudi-CIA allowance untainted by something as working-class as taxes.
