As You Sow So Shall You Reap

And now they are demanding their due…

72 super PACs spent $83.7 million on election, financial disclosure reports show
By T.W. Farnam
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, December 3, 2010

The newly created independent political groups known as super PACs, which raised and spent millions of dollars on last month's elections, drew much of their funding from private-equity partners and others in the financial industry, according to new financial disclosure reports.

The 72 super PACs, all formed this year, together spent $83.7 million on the election. The figures provide the best indication yet of the impact of recent Supreme Court decisions that opened the door for wealthy individuals and corporations to give unlimited contributions.
[…]
Most of the donations from the financial industry went to interest groups attacking Democrats, the disclosure reports show.

Now they are demanding their pound of flesh. Tax cuts for billionaires. This is who they want to give the tax cuts to…

In the United States, wealth is highly concentrated in a relatively few hands. As of 2007, the top 1% of households (the upper class) owned 34.6% of all privately held wealth, and the next 19% (the managerial, professional, and small business stratum) had 50.5%, which means that just 20% of the people owned a remarkable 85%, leaving only 15% of the wealth for the bottom 80% (wage and salary workers).
Source: G. William Domhoff UCSC Dept. of Sociology

The Republicans are holding the middle class hostage so that these billionaires can make millions more at the expense of the middle class.

Senate Republicans Defeat Reauthorization Of Jobless Aid, Tax Cuts
Arthur Delaney
Huffington Post
Dec. 4, 2010

Senate Republicans and a handful of Democrats Saturday defeated a bill to reauthorize unemployment benefits for the long-term jobless and a plethora of tax provisions for the middle class not because of the bill's trillion-dollar deficit impact, but because it did not include tax cuts for the rich.

"In economic times like these, 9.8 percent unemployment, you should not raise taxes on anyone," Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) told HuffPost.

Yup…lets not give the middle class relief from Bush’s depression until the fat cats gets theirs.

Republicans and conservative Democrats have opposed reauthorizing the benefits without offsetting their deficit impact by cutting spending from elsewhere in the budget. But those same lawmakers have not insisted that tax cuts for the rich, estimated to cost nearly $700 billion over 10 years, be offset in any way. A yearlong reauthorization of unemployment benefits would cost roughly $60 billion.

Not a bad return on investment…spend $80 million on the election and get back $60 billion.

The Tea Partiers ran on a campaign of reform, but all I see is still the same… take from the poor, give to the rich. Where will the cuts come from to pay for the billions that will go to the rich? Why, from cuts in Social Security, Medicare and TANF, of course.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said during floor debate that Republicans are taking their strategy from Lucy van Pelt, the cartoon girl who takes the football away right before Charlie Brown tries to kick it.

"We've all heard Republicans weep for the deficit they say they fear. Democrats agree that we need to do something about it," Reid said. "But what did Republicans do? They pulled away the football and said: Rather than reduce the deficit, we'd really rather give an unnecessary, unwanted and unaffordable handout to the richest of the rich”

We are returning to the era of the Robber Barons, when the likes of Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, J. P. Morgan and Cornelius Vanderbilt had politicians in their back pocket to do their bidding. Before there were labor laws, the EPA, OSHA and civil rights laws, all of which the Tea Party has vowed to do away with and defund them.

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