13% of Americans believe Obama is the Antichrist

Matt Berman reports for National Journal, April 2, 2013, that a new poll by Public Policy Polling found that 13% of registered American voters surveyed believe the POS is the Antichrist, while another 13% are not sure.

The poll of 1,247 registered American voters was conducted from March 27-30, 2013, through automated telephone interviews. The margin of error for the overall sample is +/-2.8%.

Some other findings of the poll (here’s the survey in pdf):

• 4% of respondents believe shape-shifting reptilian people control our world by taking on human form and gaining power.
• 5% of respondents believe Paul McCartney died and
  was secretly replaced in the Beatles in 1966.
• 7% of those surveyed do not believe the moon landing was fake and that astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin had ever really landed on the moon.
• 11% are not sure if Osama bin Laden indeed is dead. (Note from Eowyn: Bin Laden allegedly was killed by Navy SEAL Team 6 on May 2, 2011, although the Pentagon has no records of his death.)
• 14% of respondents believe the CIA was “instrumental” in dealing crack cocaine into America’s inner cities in the 1980s.
• 15% of those surveyed think the media or government add “secret mind-controlling technology” to TV broadcasts.
• Only 25% of those surveyed think Lee Harvey Oswald had acted alone in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. 51% believe there was a larger conspiracy.
• 28% of respondents think Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11; 51% don’t.
• 28% of those surveyed believe that a “secretive power elite with a globalist agenda is conspiring to eventually rule the world through an authoritarian world government, or New World Order.”
• 37% of respondents said global warming is a hoax; 51% think it is not.
• 44% of respondents believe the Bush administration intentionally misled the U.S. about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq to promote the war; 45% said no.

~Eowyn

How the super-rich avoid paying taxes

F. Scott Fitzgerald famously said that the rich are not like you and me.

Tyler Durden writes for ZeroHedge, Feb. 15, 2013, that 1% of Americans control over 40% of the United States’ wealth. But those making $10 million or more a year pay an average income tax rate of only 19%, which is a much smaller percentage than middle class folks like my husband and I pay!

Despite all of Obama’s and the Dems’ tax-increase talk, those increases will  not affect the super-rich. The truth is many members of Congress are among the super-rich — Nancy Pelosi, John Kerry, Diane Feinstein come to mind — and the super-rich are protected by both major political parties.

I’ve often wondered how the super-rich shield their wealth from taxes. Here’s how:

Writing in The Atlantic in 2011, Chrystia Freeland reiterated what the late and brilliant Christopher Lasch had first observed more than 17 years ago in his book, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy: There is a new global super-rich elite that is transnational and anational. Having more in common and identifying with each other, their concerns are global instead of national. Put in a different way, this new global super-rich are internationalists, not nationalists. Among them are the American super-rich.

Freeland writes:

[... the rich of today are also different from the rich of yesterday. Our light-speed, globally connected economy has led to the rise of a new super-elite that consists, to a notable degree, of first- and second-generation wealth. Its members are hardworking, highly educated, jet-setting meritocrats who feel they are the deserving winners of a tough, worldwide economic competition—and many of them, as a result, have an ambivalent attitude toward those of us who didn’t succeed so spectacularly. Perhaps most noteworthy, they are becoming a transglobal community of peers who have more in common with one another than with their countrymen back home. Whether they maintain primary residences in New York or Hong Kong, Moscow or Mumbai, today’s super-rich are increasingly a nation unto themselves.

The rise of the new plutocracy is inextricably connected to two phenomena: the revolution in information technology and the liberalization of global trade. [...]

As with the aristocracies of bygone days, such vast wealth has created a gulf between the plutocrats and other people, one reinforced by their withdrawal into gated estates, exclusive academies, and private planes. We are mesmerized by such extravagances as Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s 414-foot yacht, the Octopus, which is home to two helicopters, a submarine, and a swimming pool.

[...] another defining characteristic of today’s plutocrats: they are forming a global community, and their ties to one another are increasingly closer than their ties to hoi polloi back home. As Glenn Hutchins, co-founder of the private-equity firm Silver Lake, puts it, “A person in Africa who runs a big African bank and went to Harvard might have more in common with me than he does with his neighbors, and I could well share more overlapping concerns and experiences with him than with my neighbors.” The circles we move in, Hutchins explains, are defined by “interests” and “activities” rather than “geography”: “Beijing has a lot in common with New York, London, or Mumbai. You see the same people, you eat in the same restaurants, you stay in the same hotels. But most important, we are engaged as global citizens in crosscutting commercial, political, and social matters of common concern. We are much less place-based than we used to be.”

[This...] helps explain why many of America’s other business elites appear so removed from the continuing travails of the U.S. workforce and economy: the global “nation” in which they increasingly live and work is doing fine—indeed, it’s thriving.

Read the rest of the article, here.

~Eowyn

New Jobs Created Are In Low-Pay Industries

Flipper & Hamburger

Last Friday, the Obama administration trumpeted that the economy is reviving because of the alleged decline in unemployment and concomitant increase in the number of new jobs. But according to Gallup, the U.S. unemployment rate actually rose to 10.3% at the end of February. Worse still, most of the new jobs are in the low-pay “hamburger flipper” sector.

Here are excerpts from Zachary Roth’s March 9, 2011 article for Yahoo! news, “Jobs Returning – But Good Ones Not So Much“: 

• Lower-wage industries – things like retail and food preparation — accounted for 23% of the jobs lost during the recession, but 49% of the jobs gained over the last year, a recent study (pdf) by the National Employment Law Program found. Higher-wage industries, by contrast, accounted for 40% of the jobs lost, but just 14% of the jobs gained. In other words, low paying jobs are increasing as a percentage of total jobs, while high-paying jobs are on the decline.

• Meanwhile, the percentage of those working who have part-time jobs and want full-time ones surged in mid-February to 19.6% — almost as high as it was a year ago before the recovery began, according to Gallup numbers. That suggests, of course, that a large number of the new jobs created over the last year are part-time.

• And a recent Wall Street Journal analysis found that even though productivity rose 5.2% from mid 2009 to the end of 2010, wages increased by just 0.3%. That means only 6% of productivity gains were shared with workers. In past recoveries, that figure has averaged 58%. This time around, far more of the gains went to shareholders, in the form of profits, which are at record levels.

In other words:

1. The Obama administration’s rosy picture about the economic recovery is a lie.
2. The structural change in the U.S. economy which has been going on for some time now even before the present recession/depression struck in 2007 is real and our government is unable/unwilling to do anything about it. The structural changes include:
   1. The outsourcing export and loss of manufacturing jobs;
   2. The movement down of those workers to lower-paying low-skill low-education “hamburger flipper” jobs; and
   3. The socio-political consequence is a diminishing middle class that bodes ill for democracy’s future. 
3. Conservatives shy away from this, but the miniscule 0.3% wage increase despite a 5.2% increase in labor productivity means that American workers are being screwed by their corporate masters. Remember what the late Christopher Lasch warned us in his prescient book, Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy:

There is a new global elite — comprised of multinational business corporations, Hollywood and pop music, news media, and professionals (bankers, traders, investors, lawyers,) – who are not nationalists because they make their living in/from a global market. The Americans among them have U.S. citizenship but don’t really care about America or the American people. They have more in common with their cohorts across the world. That is where their hearts are, and it’s not America. 

~Eowyn