class war

How does this sound to you?

While powerful beneficiaries of war and military spending - major banks (as primary lenders to governments) and the military-security-industrial complex - thrive on war and international tensions, they nonetheless tend to prefer local, national, limited, or "manageable" wars to large scale regional or global wars that, in a cataclysmic fashion, could paralyze global markets altogether.

No one likes the tax collector; no one ever has. But the anti-IRS hysteria generated by Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and Congress' richest (and most crooked) Member, was way beyond the ginned up Tea Party Scandal merited-- even by right wing standards of hollow victimology and martyrdom. But it was never very difficult to figure out why they worked so hard to undermine the IRS and delegitimize its authority-- and slash its budget.

You've probably heard by now that Boehner and his caucus are screaming bloody murder over a loophole in the bill they passed to cut almost $9 billion in nutritional assistance to the poorest families in America, one of the Republican Party's biggest legislative priorities for the current session. Their base was ecstatic when it passed. But now 8 states and Washington DC have already figured out how to use the loophole to keep food stamp assistance flowing.

Although he occasionally writes a check to Democratic corporate whores who serve Wall Street and fight for the plutocracy-- like Chuck Schumer, Kirsten Gillibrand, Andrew Cuomo, Steve Israel and Cory Booker-- in the last few election cycles Ken Langone has contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars-- at least $800,000-- to the Republican Party

I live in a rich zip code; there aren't any multi-family dwellings near here except a couple of condos where they charge over a million dollars for an apartment. So everyone in the neighborhood gets free copies of very glossy magazines from Modern Luxury-- as do rich zip codes in Aspen, Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Honolulu, Houston, Miami, NYC "and the Hampstons," Orange County, San Diego, San Francisco, Scottsdale and Washington, DC. Apparently, that where the money is.

Boehner and Cantor have a song they want to sing you about jobsThis week, a slightly inebriated Boehner was whining about some hostage crisis he's cooking up-- for the national debut, if I remember correctly-- and demanded the price of not driving the U.S. government into default on the debts Congress had run up would be… job creation. Job creation? Everyone likes job creation, right? Well, no, actually.

I expect that by now you've been hearing about the Wall Street Journal OpEd by grotesque, clueless Belvedere billionaire Thomas Perkins whining about how working families are Nazis who want to put the makers Wall Street predators in concentration camps. One of the worst avatars of gentrification of working class neighborhoods, Perkins bought the top of the Millennium Tower on Mission St.

Last night 26 Senate Republicans-- basically, the hardcore lunatic fringe-- voted to shut down government operations.

Here at DWT, once we saw Patty Murray and the Senate Dems sacrifice the working poor to the voracious appetite of conservative predators in their shameful compromise with Paul Ryan, we amped up our coverage of the Republican War on the Poor and the Republicans' latest advances in the highly effective class war they've been fighting against America's working families for decades.