First Command, last resort. The editorial geniuses at National Review Online have published an article by a certain Patrick A. Swan, "a former First Command agent and current First Command client" who -- surprise! -- is unhappy with the New York Times's portrayal of First Command Financial Planning as less than salutary.
Ken Lay, former Enron officer, is unhappy with what's said about Enron, too. That doesn't mean what's said is wrong.
What's really at stake, a point Mr. Swan neglects, is the financial health of our soldiers. First Command and its predatory practices are unethical -- if not in law, than in the spirit of taking thoroughly discredited forms of fifty percent loads (sales commissions) from Americans who are willing to make a sacrifice of their lives in the service of their country. The financial abuse of soldiers held captive by First Command was noted in the mainstream personal financial press, notably in Kiplinger's Personal Finance Magazine last year.
The fake patriotism of the political right wing has never been so threadbare. NRO should be ashamed to publish the words of someone who approves of bilking US soldiers out of their savings with punitively high sales commissions.
Idiots, each and all. Why did they kowtow to Eastwood and his piece of shit? Perhaps we'll never know.
All the scenery-chewing (note especially Sean Penn and Tim Robbins), based on the fraudulent deck-stacking of the script and direction, added up to nothing because there were no characters in the movie, only Pavlovian responses to a barrage of directorial manipulations. Kevin Bacon is "seething"? No, he's drawing a blank because the director was too lazy to give him a part to play that resembled anything approaching a human being. Off and on for two hours Bacon's "character" speaks on his cell phone to a pair of lips that are supposed to represent his damaged emotional life. What the lips represented instead was Eastwood's utter inability to direct a scene.
Bad, bad, bad. Any critic who suggests that this lazy-ass, inept filmmaking is anything but ignorable would have been killed off in a better murder mystery.
Willfully deaf. As Fred Kaplan points out in Slate, 9-11-01 was not a "failure of imagination" so much as willful deafness on the part of those in decision-making capacity. It was a failure of responsibility and accountability and a triumph of privilege and complacency, as has been its aftermath.
Bush and his principal advisers had all received briefings on terrorism, including Bin Ladin. In early September 2000, Acting Deputy Director of Central Intelligence John McLaughlin led a team to Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Texas, and gave him a wide-ranging, four-hour review of sensitive information. Ben Bonk, deputy chief of the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center, used one of the four hours to deal with terrorism.To highlight the danger of terrorists obtaining chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear weapons, Bonk brought along a mock-up suitcase to evoke the way the Aum Shinrikyo doomsday cult had spread deadly sarin nerve agent on the Tokyo subway in 1995. Bonk told Bush that Americans would die from terrorism during the next four years.156 During the long contest after election day, the CIA set up an office in Crawford to pass intelligence to Bush and some of his key advisers.157 Tenet, accompanied by his deputy director for operations, James Pavitt, briefed President-elect Bush at Blair House during the transition. President Bush told us he asked Tenet whether the CIA could kill Bin Ladin, and Tenet replied that killing Bin Ladin would have an effect but would not end the threat. President Bush told us Tenet said to him that the CIA had all the authority it needed.158
In December, Bush met with Clinton for a two-hour, one-on-one discussion of national security and foreign policy challenges. Clinton recalled saying to Bush,"I think you will find that by far your biggest threat is Bin Ladin and the al Qaeda." Clinton told us that he also said,"One of the great regrets of my presidency is that I didn’t get him [Bin Ladin] for you, because I tried to."159 Bush told the Commission that he felt sure President Clinton had mentioned terrorism,but did not remember much being said about al Qaeda. Bush recalled that Clinton had emphasized other issues such as North Korea and the Israeli- Palestinian peace process.160
In early January, Clarke briefed Rice on terrorism. He gave similar presentations —describing al Qaeda as both an adaptable global network of jihadist organizations and a lethal core terrorist organization—to Vice President–elect Cheney,Hadley, and Secretary of State–designate Powell. One line in the briefing slides said that al Qaeda had sleeper cells in more than 40 countries, including the United States.161 Berger told us that he made a point of dropping in on Clarke’s briefing of Rice to emphasize the importance of the issue. Later the same day, Berger met with Rice. He says that he told her the Bush administration would spend more time on terrorism in general and al Qaeda in particular than on anything else. Rice’s recollection was that Berger told her she would be surprised at how much more time she was going to spend on terrorism than she expected,but that the bulk of their conversation dealt with the faltering Middle East peace process and North Korea. Clarke said that the new team,having been out of government for eight years, had a steep learning curve to understand al Qaeda and the new transnational terrorist threat.162
"Another product heavily promoted to military people is a type of mutual fund in which 50 percent of the first-year contributions are consumed as fees, a deal considered so expensive that such funds all but disappeared from the civilian market almost 20 years ago," a tragedy we posted about here 11 months ago, the last time the former governor of Texas took his month-long vacation. I wrote at the time, "These are our soldiers they are bilking. The words 'unfair,' 'severely tilted playing field,' and 'lying, scheming scoundrels' come to mind."
It almost goes without saying that First Command, like Halliburton and Enron, is a Texas company.
With the U.S. economy expanding and the labor market improving, it isn't clear how well the Democrats' message of a divided America will resonate with voters this fall. But many economists believe the economic recovery has indeed taken two tracks....
Upper-income families, who pay the most in taxes and reaped the largest gains from the tax cuts President Bush championed, drove a surge of consumer spending a year ago that helped to rev up the recovery. Wealthier households also have been big beneficiaries of the stronger stock market, higher corporate profits, bigger dividend payments and the boom in housing.
Lower- and middle-income households have benefited from some of these trends, but not nearly as much. For them, paychecks and day-to-day living expenses have a much bigger effect. Many have been squeezed, with wages under pressure and with gasoline and food prices higher. The resulting two-tier recovery is showing up in vivid detail in the way Americans are spending money.
[...]
At high-end Bulgari stores, meanwhile, consumers are gobbling up $5,000 Astrale gold and diamond "cocktail" rings made for the right hand, a spokeswoman says. The Italian company's U.S. revenue was up 22% in the first quarter. Neiman Marcus Group Inc., flourishing on sales of pricey items like $500 Manolo Blahnik shoes, had a 13.5% year-over-year sales rise at stores open at least a year.
By contrast, such "same store" sales at Wal-Mart Stores Inc., retailer for the masses, were up just 2.2% in June. Wal-Mart believes higher gasoline costs are pinching its customers. At Payless ShoeSource Inc., which sells items like $10.99 pumps, June same-store sales were 1% below a year earlier.
[...]
"To date, the [recovery's] primary beneficiaries have been upper-income households," concludes Dean Maki, a J.P. Morgan Chase (and former Federal Reserve) economist who has studied the ways that changes in wealth affect spending. In research he sent to clients this month, Mr. Maki said, "Two of the main factors supporting spending over the past year, tax cuts and increases in [stock] wealth, have sharply benefited upper income households relative to others."
[...]
Mr. Maki of J.P. Morgan Chase estimates that in terms of dollars saved, the top 20% of households by income got 77% of the benefit of the 2003 tax cuts, and roughly 50% of the 2001 tax cuts. And of stocks held by households, roughly 75% are owned by the top 20% of those households. That made them prime beneficiaries of last year's stock-market rally, although also big sufferers from the stock carnage from 2000 to 2002.
The affluent also benefit more from stock dividends, on which the federal income-tax rate was cut last year retroactive to the start of 2003. Total dividend payments have risen 11% to $3 billion since the end of 2002, estimates Berkeley's Mr. Saez. Higher-income households also are larger beneficiaries of the surge in corporate earnings, which helps to drive dividend and stock returns. The level of corporate profits has risen 42% since the last recession, which ended in the final quarter of 2001. Wage and salary income is up just 6.3% in that time. Meanwhile, housing values have appreciated fastest in the most affluent regions during the past three years, according to research by Fiserv CSW Inc., which tracks home prices.
Many economists say the lopsided recovery is now at a critical juncture. The impetus from new tax cuts has largely passed, and the stock market has lost momentum, two factors that could slow the pace of higher-income people's spending in the months ahead. As a result, the time has come for the recovery either to broaden out to more-modest income groups -- or possibly lose momentum.
[...]
Many in this [lower- and middle-income] group are also getting squeezed as health-care costs rise and companies seek to shift the burden to workers. From 2000 to 2003, employees' average annual out-of-pocket expenses for family medical premiums rose 49% to $2,412, according to an employer survey by Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonprofit research group in Menlo Park, Calif.
A 49 percent increase in average family medical premiums from 2000 to 2003, at the same time the uppermost income tier received 50 to 77 percent of the tax "relief"?
I am not anticapitalist, but these statistics are rooted in punitive policies. Why is the American upper class punishing the lower classes for having less?
