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Editor, Index-Tribune:
Obama returns to California for a re-election fundraising trip on Oct. 25. A minimum of 11 hours round-trip. According to the 89th Airlift Wing, one hour of flight time on air Force One costs $181,757. Add to that the cost of operating Marine One, the Secret Service detail and expenses on the ground including overtime for local police.
In 2010, Air Force One flew 172 times. What does that say about Obama’s carbon footprint? Never mind Sasquatch – Bigfoot is here!
Several flights were to California for fundraisers. Who picked up the tab? Certainly not the Democratic National Committee. Obama chalked up the trip to government business. We paid.
On May 25, 2010, Obama flew west for a Boxer fundraiser. Next day, his motorcade made a stop at Solyndra in Fremont. The solar panel company recently declared bankruptcy after receiving a $535 million stimulus loan from the Obama administration.
Congress and the FBI are now investigating Solyndra. The government paid $2.4 million in fees to the law firm that managed legal work related to Solyndra’s loan guarantee. An associate of the law firm is married to a Silicon Valley investor who raised more than $500,000 for Obama in 2008. As of Sept. 30, this former energy department official had bundled the same amount for Obama’s 2012 campaign.
Incidentally, when Solyndra’s assets are liquidated, private investors, including billionaire George Kaiser, big-time bundler for Obama, will have first crack at the proceeds.
June England
Sonoma
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It is class warfare. But it was begun not by the tear-gassed, rain-soaked protesters asserting their constitutionally guaranteed right of peaceful assembly but rather the financial overlords who control all of the major levers of power in what passes for our democracy. It is they who subverted the American ideal of a nation of stakeholders in control of their economic and political destiny.
Between 1979 and 2007, as the Congressional Budget Office reported this week, the average real income of the top 1 percent grew by an astounding 275 percent. And that is after payment of the taxes that the superrich and their Republican apologists find so onerous.
Those three decades of rampant upper-crust greed unleashed by the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s will be well marked by future historians recording the death of the American dream. In that decisive historical period the middle class began to evaporate and the nation's income gap increased to alarming proportions. "As a result of that uneven growth," the CBO explained, "the distribution of after-tax household income in the United States was substantially more unequal in 2007 than in 1979: The share of income accruing to higher-income households increased, whereas the share accruing to other households declined.... The share of after-tax household income for the 1 percent of the population with the highest income more than doubled...."
That was before the 2008 meltdown that ushered in the massive increase in unemployment and housing foreclosures that further eroded the standard of living of the vast majority of Americans while the superrich rewarded themselves with immense bonuses. To stress the role of the financial industry in this march to greater income inequality as the Occupy Wall Street movement has done is not a matter of ideology or rhetoric, but, as the CBO report details, a matter of discernible fact.
The CBO noted that in comparing top earners, "The [income] share of financial professionals almost doubled
People demand loans to those who don't qualify with legal threats to lenders and are surprised at the negative consequences?
People demand unending loose credit and its corollary, a weakened dollar, and are surprised at the consequences?
You can ignore cause and effect, but not the consequences.