VIDEO: Bill Maher's excellent commentary on income inequality 1MAR14

HE may be rude and crude but he calls a spade a spade in this "new rule".....

Sat Mar 01, 2014 at 08:00 AM EST

Bill Maher's excellent commentary on income inequality

by BruinKid

http://youtu.be/pcKMd49wDRk 

Last night, Bill Maher delivered an excellent final New Rule on how some of the 1% are whining about feeling persecuted.

Did you know that during World War II, FDR actually proposed a cap on income that in today's dollars would mean that no person could ever take home more than about $300,000?  OK, that is a little low.  (audience laughter)  But wouldn't it be great if there were Democrats out there like that now, who would say to billionaires, "Oh, you're crying?  We'll give you something to cry about.  You don't want a minimum wage?  How about we not only have a minimum wage, we have a maximum wage?"  (audience applause) That is not a new idea.  James Madison, who wrote our Constitution, said, "Government should prevent an immoderate accumulation of riches."  Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton, they all agreed that too much money in the hands of too few would destroy democracy.

Video and full transcript below the fold.

And finally, New Rule: Someone must tell me what is with this new trend of people who have all the power acting like they're the oppressed ones?  Heterosexual Christians under siege from gays.  White people complaining that reverse racists are trying to strip them of their right to shoot unarmed black men.  And most bizarre, the recent wave of billionaires sobbing that they're being demonized and under attack.  And the thing is, it's not just having all the money in the world that's getting them down, it's that the rest of us don't often enough look at them and say, "You are the most brilliant industrious person on Earth.  Can you teach us how to be more like you while we buff your cock with this fine Sham-Wow?" You know, I used to think Hollywood egos were the neediest, but these Masters of the Universe?  More like babies on a plane.  Stock trader Steve Schwarzman — net worth $8 billion — once said that Obama raising his taxes 3% felt like when Hitler invaded Poland.  Sounds like something Sarah Palin would tweet after huffing paint thinner.  (audience laughter)  But with the super-rich it's becoming a meme.  Now we have Tom Perkins — net worth $8 billion — saying the richest 1% are so persecuted in America, they feel like Jews in Nazi Germany.  Which is why just to be safe, last week Tom built a panic room inside his mansion that's a full-size replica of Anne Frank's house.  (groaning audience laughter)
Is it really that hard out there for a pimp with $8 billion dollars?  You know, even when your shady financial tricks tanked the economy, nothing happened to any of you.  Nobody went to jail, nobody went broke, Justin Bieber didn't even egg your house.  You just got richer while everybody else got poorer.  The Oxfam committee released a report this year on global inequality, and the 85 richest people — 85 — owned more than the bottom 3 1/2 billion put together, which is half the planet.  This is a real problem, and not just for when they go halfsies on a wedding present.
And not that that Nazi/Jew analogy deserves to be taken seriously, but the Jews didn't do anything to deserve the hate they got.  But America's super-rich?  In the last 30 years, even though worker productivity went up 90%, income only went up 8%.  If I was working twice as hard, and someone else was reaping almost all the reward, I'd hate them.  And I'd also want to know, how could that happen?
Well, billionaire Sam Zell knows the answer to that.  He said the rest of America should stop bitching about the 1%, and realize they are the 1% because they work harder.  OK, now we do need to come after you with pitchforks.  (audience laughter and applause)  Is talking on the phone in a comfortable office really more degrading than working in a slaughterhouse, or a sweatshop, or on a reality TV show?  With just one real estate deal last year, Sam Zell made a thousand times what this guy makes.

Did he really work a thousand times harder?  By the way, that's a coal miner, not John Boehner.  (audience laughter)
Did you know that during World War II, FDR actually proposed a cap on income that in today's dollars would mean that no person could ever take home more than about $300,000?  OK, that is a little low.  (audience laughter)  But wouldn't it be great if there were Democrats out there like that now, who would say to billionaires, "Oh, you're crying?  We'll give you something to cry about.  You don't want a minimum wage?  How about we not only have a minimum wage, we have a maximum wage?"  (audience applause)
That is not a new idea.  James Madison, who wrote our Constitution, said, "Government should prevent an immoderate accumulation of riches."  Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton, they all agreed that too much money in the hands of too few would destroy democracy.
What can you buy with $2 billion dollars that you can't buy with one?  You couldn't spend that kind of cash if you lived forever and your money manager was MC Hammer.  (audience laughter)
And you know, there are some billionaires today who get that.

And that's why they give most of their money away.  (massive audience applause)
As Warren Buffett once said, "I should write a book on how to get by on $500 million, because apparently there's a lot of people who don't... know how to do it."

Originally posted to BruinKid on Sat Mar 01, 2014 at 08:00 AM EST.

Also republished by Electronic America: Progressives Film, music & Arts Group. 

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/03/01/1281312/-Bill-Maher-s-excellent-commentary-on-income-inequality?detail=email 

Buffett's latest hypocrisy & Berkshire Hathaway Buys $3.45 Billion Stake In Exxon Mobil 8&14NOV13

I used to admire Warren Buffett because of his expressed views on taxing the rich more and the poor and working and middle classes less. That, and what I had read and heard about him seemed to make him out to be someone who understood the economic struggles of the 99% and who might have social justice tendencies. But this from SumOfUs shows how wrong I was about Buffett and what a hypocrite he really is. Here he has $3.45 billion to invest in exxon mobile but is threatening to fire hundreds of employees at the rail yard he controls in Chicago if they attempt to unionize because they can not live on their wage of $9.00 an hour! What, is he taking business management tips from mitt romney??? Please sign the petition demanding Warren Buffett honor his employees by respecting their rights to organize and to pay them a living wage. This from SumOfUs and HuffPost.....

"We don't need to have the extremes of inequality that we have. The people at the bottom end should be doing better.”
That was superstar investor Warren Buffett, and statements like that have made him a progressive icon. But Buffett doesn’t exactly walk the walk: he’s threatening to throw nearly 200 workers onto the street just for trying to lift themselves out of poverty.
Buffett, one of the world’s wealthiest people, owns a huge railroad company, but the workers in a major Chicago rail yard his company relies on are barely scraping by on $9 an hour. They’ve come together to form a union, Buffett’s company says that they’ll all lose their jobs if they try to fight for better pay.
Tell Warren Buffett to stop bullying rail yard workers. Practice what you preach and respect their right to organize.
The rail yard workers are organizing with Warehouse Workers for Justice, the same group that organized workers in Walmart’s warehouses outside Chicago. All these workers are part of the same fight -- warehouses and rail yards once provided good, middle class jobs, but in the era of Walmart, supply chain workers have poverty wages and next to know security while corporations enjoy outsized profits. Like workers in Walmart stores and warehouses, these workers know they’ll only share the wealth if they fight for it, and they’re ready to strike for living wages.
Legally speaking, workers can’t be fired for striking, but Buffett’s company is ready to skirt the law and fire their whole subcontracting firm if they stand up better pay.
We’re never going to get inequality under control if workers can’t organize to make big corporations share the wealth. We need to come together and expose his rank hypocrisy.
Sign our petition to Warren Buffett: respect rail yard workers’ rights
Thanks for all you do,
Rob, Kaytee, and the rest of us

************
More information:
Buffet: Stop Bullying Drivers, Warehouse Workers for Justice
SumOfUs is a world-wide movement of people like you, working together to hold corporations accountable for their actions and forge a new, sustainable path for our global economy.

Berkshire Hathaway Buys $3.45 Billion Stake In Exxon Mobil

(Reuters) - Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Inc on Thursday disclosed a new $3.45 billion stake in Exxon Mobil Corp, after buying 40.1 million shares in the world's largest publicly traded oil company.
The purchase was disclosed in a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing that detailed Berkshire equity investments, mostly listed on U.S. exchanges, as of September 30.
Berkshire also disclosed other changes to its holdings, including a reduced stake in another oil company, ConocoPhillips.
U.S. regulators require large investors to disclose their stock holdings every quarter, and the disclosures can offer a window into their strategies for buying and selling stocks.
(Reporting by Luciana Lopez and Jonathan Stempel in New York; Editing by Gary Hill)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/14/berkshire-hathaway-exxon-mobil_n_4277067.html

Passing the Buffett Rule so that Everyone Pays Their Fair Share (CONTACT CONGRESS) 31MAR12

THE Pres is calling on Congress to pass the Buffett Rule, cutting the tax breaks of the wealthy 1% so they pay their fair share. Here is his weekly address, video and transcripts. And because democracy is not a spectator sport he is calling on all Americans to contact their Senators http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm 
and their Representative https://writerep.house.gov/writerep/welcome.shtml
and tell them you want the Buffett Rule passed, NOW.

The White House

Office of the Press Secretary

For Immediate Release

March 31, 2012

WEEKLY ADDRESS: Passing the Buffett Rule so that Everyone Pays Their Fair Share

WASHINGTON, DC— In this week’s address, President Obama calls on Congress to pass the Buffett Rule, a principle of fairness that ensures that millionaires and billionaires do not pay less in taxes as a share of their income than middle class families pay.  The President believes our system must ask the wealthiest to pay their fair share, while protecting 98 percent of Americans from seeing their taxes go up at all. That is why the President proposed the Buffett Rule, which will help make our system reflect our values so that all Americans get a fair shot, play by the same rules, and pay their fair share.

Remarks of President Barack Obama
Weekly Address
The White House
March 31, 2012

Hello.
Over the last few months, I’ve been talking about a choice we face as a country.  We can either settle for an economy where a few people do really well and everyone else struggles to get by, or we can build an economy where hard work pays off again – where everyone gets a fair shot, everyone does their fair share, and everyone plays by the same rules.  That’s up to us.
Today, I want to talk to you about the idea that everyone in this country should do their fair share.
Now, if this were a perfect world, we’d have unlimited resources.  No one would ever have to pay any taxes, and we could spend as much as we wanted.  But we live in the real world.  We don’t have unlimited resources.  We have a deficit that needs to be paid down.  And we also have to pay for investments that will help our economy grow and keep our country safe: education, research and technology, a strong military, and retirement programs like Medicare and Social Security.
That means we have to make choices.  When it comes to paying down the deficit and investing in our future, should we ask middle-class Americans to pay even more at a time when their budgets are already stretched to the breaking point?  Or should we ask some of the wealthiest Americans to pay their fair share?
That’s the choice.  Over the last decade, we’ve spent hundreds of billions of dollars on what was supposed to be a temporary tax cut for the wealthiest two percent of Americans.  Now we’re scheduled to spend almost a trillion more. Today, the wealthiest Americans are paying taxes at one of the lowest rates in 50 years.  Warren Buffett is paying a lower rate than his secretary.  Meanwhile, over the last 30 years, the tax rates for middle class families have barely budged.
That’s not fair.  It doesn’t make any sense.  Do we want to keep giving tax breaks to the wealthiest Americans like me, or Warren Buffett, or Bill Gates – people who don’t need them and never asked for them?  Or do we want to keep investing in things that will grow our economy and keep us secure?  Because we can’t afford to do both.
Now, some people call this class warfare.  But I think asking a billionaire to pay at least the same tax rate as his secretary is just common sense.  We don’t envy success in this country.  We aspire to it.  But we also believe that anyone who does well for themselves should do their fair share in return, so that more people have the opportunity to get ahead – not just a few.
That’s the America I believe in.  And in the next few weeks, Members of Congress will get a chance to show you where they stand.  Congress is going to vote on what’s called the Buffett Rule: If you make more than $1 million a year, you should pay at least the same percentage of your income in taxes as middle class families do.  On the other hand, if you make under $250,000 a year – like 98 percent of American families do – your taxes shouldn’t go up.  You’re the ones struggling with the rising cost of everything from college tuition to groceries.  You’re the ones who deserve a break.
So every Member of Congress is going to go on record.  And if they vote to keep giving tax breaks to people like me – tax breaks our country can’t afford – then they’re going to have to explain to you where that money comes from.  Either it’s going to add to our deficit, or it’s going to come out of your pocket.  Seniors will have to pay more for their Medicare benefits.  Students will see their interest rates go up at a time when they can’t afford it.  Families who are scraping by will have to do more because the richest Americans are doing less.
That’s not right.  That’s not who we are.   In America, our story has never been about what we can do by ourselves – it’s about what we can do together.  It’s about believing in our future and the future of this country.  So tell your Members of Congress to do the right thing.  Call them up, write them a letter, pay them a visit, and tell them to stop giving tax breaks to people who don’t need them and start investing in the things that will help our economy grow and put people back to work.
That’s how we’ll make this country a little fairer, a little more just, and a whole lot stronger.  Thank you.

America Needs a President Who Will Confront the Financial Industry's Hegemony Over Our Lives 14JUL11

THANK YOU SHEILA BAIR, we are already missing you! You are quite a lady for sure!!!!
No one in a position of authority in our government today seems to understand fully the threat to American institutions and ideals represented by the untrammeled clout the financial industry now holds permeating the halls of government through the power of influence and money. We are barreling toward a destabilizing schism in our society where one interest group, the finance world and its allies, are running the nation to their own economic benefit, oblivious of the pain and loss being endured by their fellow citizens on the Main Streets of our towns and villages and the neighborhoods and tenements of our cities
Our president, whose objectives are certainly sincere, has surrounded himself with men whose formation and ties run deep into the culture of Wall Street -- be it his Chief of Staff William Daley, formerly Midwest Chairman of JPMorgan Chase; Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, Former Chair of the New York Fed, or Gary Gensler, Chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and former Goldman Sachs partner -- while consulting freely with Warren Buffet, that champion of and investor in Goldman Sachs. In many ways very little has changed from the previous administration when the Treasury and virtually all government agencies responsible for financial oversight were in some manner beholden to Wall Street houses and banks, and when the crunch came in September 2008 it was their "club" members who were bailed, while the rest of the country sank into a miasma of recession and unemployment. As Sheila Bair was quoted in the New York Times Magazine saying to Joe Nocera: "You know, Wall Street barely missed a beat with their bonuses. Isn't that ridiculous?"
Nor has their been a serious effort made by prosecutors in the Obama administration and its agencies to hold individuals responsible nor to claw-back the billions of dollars paid out as bonuses for phony profits that were booked by creating and marketing fundamentally flawed financial instruments such as the now notorious C.D.O.'s. The Justice Department opted for a policy known as 'deferred prosecutions'. The guidelines left open a possibility other than guilty or not guilty, giving leniency all too often if companies investigated and reported their own wrongdoing. In return the government would enter agreements to delay or cancel prosecution if companies promised to change their behavior -- in other words, no punishment and little assurance that it wouldn't happen again.
Yet there was one player in government, that progressively rare breed, a moderate republican appointee holdover from the Bush Administration, who fought tooth and nail against the clubhouse fraternity that had taken over the fiscal soul of the nation. She was unflinching in defending the interests of the nation's citizens, becoming an equal opportunity irritant to Democrat and Republican alike. And she knew what she was talking about.
I personally have had the good fortune of hearing her speak at an Aspen Ideas Festival event just over a week ago. She was lucid, forthright, without hyperbole conveying a sense of reasoned indignation felt by too many of us, at the unfairness of the present structure. Where we, as citizens seem unable through our elected officials to stem the influence, the systematic 'heads I win, tails you lose' construct of our financial institutions and their growing impact on the functioning of our society.
Upon her retirement as Chairman of the FDIC (Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation) this July 8th Sheila Bair received this accolade from the Wall Street Journal's Deborah Salomon: "Sheila Bair, who is stepping down as Chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. this week, leaves behind an agency transformed from a sleepy bank overseer into a financial regulatory powerhouse focused on preventing another financial crisis." The article goes on to report that at her last FDIC meeting the agency finalized a rule allowing the government to recover compensation from executives responsible for a financial firm's collapse. Only someone with the gumption of Bair could have achieved such a result given the opposition massed against her.
In an in-depth article by Joe Nocera, Nocera writes that Bair began sounding the alarm about the dangers posed by the explosive growth of subprime mortgage rates in June 2006. At the time, "Bair insisted that she and her agency have a seat at the table and fought Henry Paulson and Timothy Geithner, the President of the New York Federal Reserve, as they tried to cobble together solutions that would keep the financial world from going off a cliff: She and the F.D.I.C. managed a number of huge failing institutions during the crisis including Indy Mac, Wachovia, and Washington Mutual."
Of particular significance was Bair's belief in market discipline where, according to Nocera, she found herself at variance with Obama's Treasury Department, meaning she held that shareholders and debt holders should take losses ahead of depositors and taxpayers. "She was tough-minded and straight-forward." And as she would be quoted, "Our job is to protect bank customers, not banks."
She fought for increasing the capital requirements for banks in the face of banks who lobbied strenuously against her. Lower capital requirements allow for more risk, ergo larger bonuses. She fought against the United States' adoption of the bank boondoggle called Basel II which would have lowered bank capital requirements and worse, self selection of risk models thereby significantly exposing the system to even greater bank failures. Nocera would declare "I've long believed her opposition to Basel II has been a hugely underappreciated factor in helping to save the financial system when the crisis came."
And on it went. Geithner, in full Wall Street mode, wanted the F.D.I.C. to guarantee all debt issued by bank-holding companies (such as JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley). Sheila Bair said NO!
To Bair, her fight with the Treasury and the federal Reserve was ultimately about the bondholders. According to Bair "They did not want to impose losses on bondholders and we did...there is no insurance premium on bondholders... For the little guy on Main Street who has bank deposits, we charge the banks a premium for that, and it gets passed along to the customer. We don't have the same thing for bondholders, they're supposed to take losses."
And, most tellingly, she was clear in her displeasure that the government, by acting as if it was no one's fault, placed no responsibility where it should have been placed. For the many of us who have been wondering the same thing, what a breath of fresh air.
She has a stalwart fighter for mortgage modifications that would truly help homeowners. As Nocera explains that "what particularly galls her is that the Treasury under both Paulson and Geithner has been willing to take all sorts of criticism to help the banks. But it has been utterly unwilling to take any political heat to help homeowners."
All the while the Dodd-Frank Bill meant to prevent the too big to fail syndrome from ever rearing its head again, thereby making the largest banks accountable for their actions, is being lobbied into impotence by the financial brotherhood.
Here we have Sheila Bair, Kansas transplant to Washington, taking on the behemoths of the financial world, dogged in her defiance, "We always saw ourselves as the champion of the little guy. The other regulators never saw a bank closure, because that was our role. We were the ones that saw people losing their jobs when we had to shut down a little bank. They never understood the unfairness of the way little banks were treated versus the big banks...I've always thought that it was really important for everybody to have to play by the same set of rules."
Given the financial crisis in which our nation finds itself -- given the access and the power of the financial intuitions' hold, enabling them to play events to come to their own advantage -- would it not be better to have one of our own in the White House who understands the game? Who is on our side, and by virtue of her position and knowledge can stare down all the entreaties for special treatment because she inherently understands that this nation cannot flourish, nor overcome the obstacles that lie ahead and maintain its dignity if we do not all together play by the same set of rules?
Sheila Bair may not know it yet, but we need not only her kind, we need her to become our president. Her persona, her values, her experience would be a rare and welcome gift to the nation!