Plutocrats

http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2012/10/24/18724436.php






Plutocrats

by Ted Rudow III, MA ( Tedr77 [at] aol.com )

Wednesday Oct 24th, 2012 

You know, and after the S&L crisis, for instance, we went in and there were massive criminal investigations. We put 1,000 people in jail. There were no such investigations this time around. So this was just making everybody well again and restoring everybody to the status quo, which I think was a major mistake because it produced precisely the result we're talking about now. It allowed everybody to think that the previous status quo was okay.



The plainest example is Mitt Romney. I mean, you know, if you look at his tax returns, he paid, you know, rates of 14, 13 percent. That's totally normal in this world if you work in a private equity fund. He's not an exception, he's an embodiment. He's an embodiment. In the financial services industry for sure, the very, very rich mostly receive income as capital gains or if they're private equity people, as carried interest.In both of those, the max rate is 15 percent. So people who make $20 million, $30 million, $50 million a year like Mitt Romney. You work in a private equity firm, the money that you earn– so, you invest a little bit of your own money. And the gains that you make on that investment would be treated under any definition as a capital gain taxed at 15 percent. But you also earn money because you are investing on behalf of all of your investors.That money that you earn, it's called carried interest.

Despite how the plutocrats have reacted to Barack Obama, he does not seem to be like FDR, taking on the economic royalists. Barack Obama in many ways is one of them. He is educated the way a plutocrat is educated. He had an opportunity to join the plutocracy. He could very easily right now be a top corporate lawyer. And they know that. He thinks the way they do. He's a technocrat in the accepted manner of the current plutocracy. And I think they like that. I think that's why he had such a strong reception in 2008.

Ted Rudow III, MA