The award-winning journalist and documentarian has a point. Add to it that, amid back and forth mudslinging regarding the US budget, the veterans who do our politicians’ dirty work are only getting mired in shit.
The Article: The 5 creepiest things about how the Koch brothers engineered the shutdown by Robyn Pennacchia in Death And Taxes.
The Text: This weekend, The New York Times revealed how the Koch Brothers and Reagan Attorney General Ed Meese engineered this here shutdown we’re dealing with right now, and how they’d been planning it ever since Obama was reelected. I wasn’t especially shocked by it, myself. Hell, half of the Tea Party people in the House actually campaigned on it. Which is why I have been annoyed as hell with the whole “Oh, well, it’s really both parties at fault here!” line of reasoning that some people have been trying to take.
Anyway, in case you’re not hep to it, months and months before the shutdown happened, Freedomworks, one of the fake astroturfing groups set up by The Brothers Koch, with the assistance of Reagan Attorney General Ed Meech, created a blueprint for how it was all supposed to go down. They also created a “tool kit” for dealing with it. And they had the chutzpah to actually post these things online, in plain view of god and everyone.
In the eyes of Robert Shiller, the biggest issue facing our economy is not the financial crisis–it’s income inequality. We’re not talking about it, and we only stand to lose from that. This is from an interview in 2009. Things have only gotten worse since then. Solution? Index the tax system to measure income inequality and raise taxes on the wealthy after it passes a specific threshold.
If institutions are mere clothing unfit for worship, then the Tea Party is the mildewed fanny pack.
The Article: Carter: Middle Class Today Resembles Past’s Poor by in The Associated Press.
The Text: Former President Jimmy Carter said Monday that the income gap in the United States has increased to the point where members of the middle class resemble the Americans who lived in poverty when he occupied the White House.
Carter offered his assessment of the nation’s economic challenges Monday at a Habitat for Humanity construction site in Oakland – the first of five cities he and wife Rosalynn plan to visit this week to commemorate their three-decade alliance with the international nonprofit that promotes and builds affordable housing.
The recent economic downturn revealed that families living in even comparatively well-off, but expensive regions like the San Francisco Bay Area are economically insecure, he said.
