Super-Rich Hiding $21+ Trillion In Tax Havens; GOP Says Obama Focus Too Much on Middle Class

To listen to Mitt Romney and his GOP brethren one would think that things are really rough for the 1% and the super wealthy.  Hence why  the GOP wants to give these folks each over $250,000 in tax cuts.  Meanwhile, most of us are struggling to hold on to what we have - much of which has been seriously devalued given the collapse of the real estate market and the performance of the stock market.  A new study shows that many of these hard put super wealthy have followed Romney's example and stashed assets in tax havens and overseas accounts.  How much have they stashed?  At least $21 trillion.  Think Progress looks at the massive tax avoidance scheme used by the ultra-rich while the GOP seeks to throw grandma off of Medicare and reduce many of the lower and middle class to poverty.  Oh, and did I forget to mention that the GOP claims to be the party of Biblical values - even thought the Gospel message of helping the poor, the sick, the homeless and the hungry has apparently been ripped from their Christianists issued Bibles.  Adding to the hypocrisy is Mitt Romney's new line that Barack Obama is too focused on the middle class - a section of society Romney seems to want to wipe out.  First, here are some story highlights from Think Progress:

According to a new study, the world’s super-rich are shielding at least $21 trillion in secret offshore tax havens. Using data from the Bank of International Settlements, IMF, World Bank, and national governments, the Tax Justice Network found that an astonishing 100,000 people worldwide hold nearly $10 trillion of offshore wealth, equivalent to the size of the Chinese economy. According to the study:

1. Big banks manage the wealth. The three private banks handling the most assets offshore are UBS, Credit Suisse, and Goldman Sachs.
2. Offshore wealth is creating a global economic “black hole.” If the $21 trillion in offshore earned a conservatively-estimated 3 percent rate of return, and that income was taxed at just 30 percent, this would generate tax revenues of nearly $200 billion — roughly twice the amount OECD countries spend on international development assistance.
3. High impact on developing countries. In the 139 developing countries highlighted in the report, the richest citizens had amassed $7.3 to $9.3 trillion of unrecorded offshore wealth that is beyond the reach of local tax authorities. The report reveals that many developing “debtor” countries are actually quite wealthy, but the money is held by a few individuals.
4. Huge tax haven growth in the last few years. In 2005, the world’s top 50 banks managed $5.4 trillion in offshore money. By the end of 2010, the figure is over $12 trillion, representing an average annual growth rate of more than 16 percent.

Obviously, the USA's portion of these lost revenues could go a long way to shore up budget gaps and rebuild the nation's crumbling infrastructure.   Meanwhile, the GOP is complaining that Obama is too focused on the middle class.  Here are highlights from another Think Progress article:

President Obama’s plan to allow the Bush tax cuts for incomes above $250,000 to expire at the end of the year has revived the Republican talking point that he is waging “class warfare” against the wealthy, a point Arizona Sen. Jon Kyl (R) drove home in an entirely new fashion today.

Speaking on the Senate floor, Kyl claimed that the president’s usage of the phrase “middle class” is “misguided and wrong and even dangerous.” Calling for an end to rhetoric about classes, Kyl blasted Obama for “incessantly” talking about class, “particularly the middle class”:

KYL: Most prominently, we have a president who talks incessantly about class, particularly the middle class. Maybe you’ve noticed that. He defines class strictly by your income. In the president’s narrative, someone who makes $199,000 a year is a member of one class and someone who makes $200,000 belongs to another class. Does that make sense? Indeed, each day the president’s out on the campaign trail championing himself as the great protector of what he calls the middle class and pitting these Americans against their fellow citizens by arguing that the wealthiest class is victimizing them through the tax code.

Excuse me, but the wealthy with the help of the Republicans ARE victimizing  the rest of us. 

Are Republicans Beginning to Lose the Messaging War?

The inability of the Democrats to counter the generally untrue messaging put out by demagogues in the GOP such as Eric Cantor has driven me to distraction all too often. Part of the problems has been that Democrats and the spineless occupant of the White House are far to reticent about flat out calling the GOP mouth pieces out as liars. I'm sorry, but if a politician is disseminating lies, he or she needs to be called out and labeled as a liar. Playing nice with the Republicans gets one nowhere and merely sets one up to be rolled yet again. Are the Democrats finally waking up to this reality and fighting back more effectively? A piece in the Washington Post conjectures that perhaps they are based on the increasing crankiness of some Republicans. Here are some highlights

We may be reaching an inflection point, the moment when the terms of the political argument change decisively. Three indicators: an important speech last week by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), the increasingly sharp tone of President Obama’s rhetoric and the success of Occupy Wall Street in resisting attempts to marginalize the movement.

The most telling was Ryan’s address at the Heritage Foundation. House Republicans regard Ryan as their prophet, their intellectual and their resident wonk. . . . . So it was jarring to see Ryan used as the principal counterattacker against the president, who has been making the injuries of class inequality clear and pointing to the costs of the Republicans’ just-say-no strategy in Congress.

Ryan spoke of his “disappointment” that “the politics of division are making a big comeback.” He accused Obama of using “divisive rhetoric” and of “going from town to town, impugning the motives of Republicans . . .

Now it takes some temerity for a Republican to charge Obama with divisiveness, given the GOP’s willingness to promote or countenance assaults on the president as “a socialist,” as someone not even born in the United States, as a supporter of “death panels,” and on and on.

But what’s most instructive is that Ryan would not have given this speech if the Republican Party were not so worried that it is losing control of the political narrative. In particular, growing inequalities of wealth and income — which should have been a central issue in American politics for at least a decade — are now finally at the heart of our discourse. We are, at last, discussing the social and economic costs of concentrating ever more resources in the hands of the top sliver of our society.

Ryan offered the classic defense of inequality, arguing that what really matters is upward mobility . . . . The only problem is that upward mobility has declined as inequality has grown, and social mobility is now higher in Europe than it is in the United States. That’s shameful. And don’t believe me on this: Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum brought this up at a recent debate, backed by a study from the Economic Mobility Project.

All of this explains why efforts to taint Occupy Wall Street as nothing more than a bunch of latter-day hippie radicals haven’t worked. It’s also why Obama, by sharpening his arguments about what’s fair and what’s unfair, has finally stopped his slide in the polls.

A recent survey by The Washington Post and the Pew Research Center showed Occupy Wall Street to be more popular now than the Tea Party, which keeps losing ground. . . . on many of Occupy’s core issues (favoring higher taxes on millionaires and believing in a more even distribution of income and wealth), public opinion strongly supports the anti-Wall Streeters.

Obama’s aides have a habit of congratulating themselves too much when things start going well. The president has a long way to go, and he is pursuing a strategy now that he resisted for a long time. But it ought to encourage him that Paul Ryan is terribly upset. Telling the truth about inequality is politically wise, and morally necessary.

The Real Proponents of Class Warfare

While Obama continues some what fecklessly to to try to get some type of jobs bill passed a meaningful deficit reduction package through the super committee, the demagogues in the Republican Party - e.g., Paul Ryan, Eric Cantor, and John Boehner who have about the same level of truth and veracity as Tony Perkins, Linda Harvey, Maggie Gallagher or Pat Robertson - continue the disingenuous mantra that Obama and the Democrats are engaging in "class warfare." One can only surmise that these lying douche bags are looking in the mirror when they make such statements. While the wealthiest Americans continue to do quite well during this time of economic hardship, I continue to daily see clients who have had their financial/economic dreams wiped out. Yet these every day individuals are the people the Republicans want to saddle with the burden of deficit reduction even as the income disparity in the nation widens further. For a political party that gives lip service to religiosity and worship of Christ, the hypocrisy is numbing. Eugene Robinson looks at the real truth in a column in today's Washington Post. Here are some highlights:

The hard-right conservatives who dominate the Republican Party claim to despise the redistribution of wealth, but secretly they love it — as long as the process involves depriving the poor and middle class to benefit the rich, not the other way around.

That is precisely what has been happening, as a jaw-dropping new report by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office demonstrates. Three decades of trickle-down economic theory, see-no-evil deregulation and tax-cutting fervor have led to massive redistribution. Another word for what’s been happening might be theft.

The gist of the CBO study, titled “Trends in the Distribution of Household Income Between 1979 and 2007,” is that while we’ve become wealthier overall, these new riches have largely bypassed many Americans and instead flowed mostly to the affluent. Perhaps my memory is faulty, but I don’t remember voting to turn the United States into a nation starkly divided between haves and have-nots. Yet that’s where we’ve been led.

For those at the bottom — the one-fifth of households with the lowest incomes — the increase was just 18 percent. . . . . By contrast, look at the top 1 percent of earners. Their after-tax household income increased by an astonishing 275 percent. For those keeping track, this means it nearly quadrupled. Nice work, if you can get it.

This is not what Republicans want you to think of when you hear the word redistribution. . . . . If Americans were to realize they’ve been the victims of Republican-style redistribution — stealing from the poor to give to the rich — the whole political atmosphere might change. I believe that’s one reason why the Occupy Wall Street protests have struck such a nerve. The far-right and its media mouthpieces have worked themselves into a frenzy trying to disregard, dismiss or discredit the demonstrations.

[T]he system is rigged. Wealthy individuals and corporations have disproportionate influence over public policy because of the often decisive role that money plays in elections.

Second, and more broadly, the real issue is what kind of nation we want to be. Thomas Jefferson’s “All men are created equal” is properly understood as calling for equality of opportunity, not equality of outcomes. But the more we become a nation of rich and poor, the less we can pretend to be offering the same opportunities to every American. As polarization increases, mobility declines. The whole point of the American Dream is that it is available to everyone, not just those who awaken from their slumbers on down-filled pillows and 800-thread-count sheets.

We believe in individual initiative and the free market, but we also believe that nationhood necessarily involves a commitment to our fellow citizens, an acknowledgment that we’re engaged in a common enterprise.

As I noted yesterday, when "Old Europe" offers more opportunity for upward social mobility than the United States, something is seriously f*cked up in this country.

Republican Angst Over Huckabee

As a former Republican (I resigned from the Party when it began to shamelessly pander to the Christianists at the expense of valuing religious freedom), I find some perverse humor and joy in the reaction of the GOP establishment to the surge of Mike Huckabee in Iowa. For years from the Chimperator and Karl Rove on down, the GOP has cynically used and cultivated the Christian Right evangelicals and far right Catholics to achieve their election goals. Now the Frankenstein Monster that they created has gained a life of its own and they are horrified. Why they did not see what they were creating is beyond me - when you dance with the Devil, he may expect you to take him home. This somewhat tongue in cheek New York Times opinion column (http://egan.blogs.nytimes.com/) looks at the very real angst these establishment Republicans are now feeling:

The rap against Mike Huckabee, the Baptist preacher and ex-Arkansas governor now doing for the Republican Party establishment what three-alarm chili does for an afternoon nap, is that he’s too inexperienced to be president, too naïve — a rube straight out of Dogpatch.

Few of Huckabee’s critics have actually come out and said what many of them think. The language is coded, as it usually is with class and race in this country. The Wall Street Journal, the anti-tax jihadists at the Club For Growth, the National Review – these pillars of Old School Republicanism have signaled that Huckabee is Not One of Ours. But they’re careful to say it’s not about class, because, of course – it is! Class war is forbidden in the Republican playbook. But Huckabee, despite an inept last week of campaigning has forced the Republican party to face the Wal-Mart shoppers that they have long taken advantage of. He’s here. He’s Gomer. And he’s not going away.

Huckabee has been telling people in Iowa that Republican higher-ups would never let him become the nominee because he “has a hick last name.” Wow. I’d like to be in on that focus group. “For my family, summer was never a verb,” he says. Take that, Mitt Romney and your perfect family, costumed in Ralph Lauren casual wear down by the shore. And this: “Wall Street types are afraid to death of a guy like me.” You mean, a guy who lost 110 pounds and cooks squirrels in his popcorn popper?

Among fellow Republican candidates, Huckabee is certainly “not one of them” in the bottom-line sense. All the other leading contenders would be comfortable on the massage table at a Trump seaside resort, in between seminars on how to keep poor people from getting health care. Romney, with a net worth estimated by Money magazine at upwards of $250 million, made his pile with an investment firm. Rudolph Giuliani is close to the $50 million club, enriched by such heavy-lifting as trying to help the makers of OxyContin stay out of jail.

There is some evidence that he’s bringing lower-income Americans into the party. The latest Des Moines Register poll shows that Huckabee runs strongest among people earning $50,000 or less a year.