Another Hack Who Misfires On the 60s

Iconic image from 1960s: Jack Ruby guns down Lee Oswald at Dallas PD. Many of us knew then the ruse was up and the cover-up had begun.


It's truly incredible how many bloviating hacks have spouted opinions and ideas on the 60s who either never lived through that decade, or - if they did - were essentially comatose the entire time. I already noted this syndrome with former great folk singer Bob Dylan, e.g.

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2012/06/has-bob-dylan-totally-lost-his-moorings.html

As well as P.J. O'Rourke

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2014/01/p-j-orourke-wants-60s-taken-off-life.html

In Dylan's case he just couldn't comprehend why people kept making a "fuss" over a decade that saw two signal pieces of legislation passed (The Civil Rights Act in 1964, and Voting Rights Act in 1965) that conferred the practical basis for the exercise of rights to a minority that hadn't been manifested for over 100 years.  Oh, and then there was the legislation that gave us Medicare,  which nearly 45 million seniors currently depend upon and without which they'd likely be dying in ditches, unattended and impecunious.  Dylan also evidently didn't see the fuss in all the anti-War protests for which his songs provided anthems. Not to mention his being oblivious to the rioting that erupted(in inner cities- since 'peaceful' protests weren't getting anywhere to advance civil rights-    and the four major political assassinations.  Dylan clearly missed the memo that the 60s  marked the most tumultuous decade in U.S. history.

I was so flabbergasted by his piffle that I had to ask if he was stoned the whole time.

Then there was uber hack O'Rourke who related (in a TIME essay)  how he was driving his daughter and 3 classmates to school and asked them if they realized it was the day President Kennedy was assassinated - and none of them had a clue. I noted at the time:

"I'd have been ashamed to admit such a thing in a widely circulated medium, even TIME. It reveals the author to be defunct (as a parent)  in his own contributions to his daughter's education, in failing to provide what her school didn't.  It also says more about the currently deficient high school history curriculum than it does about an event O'Rourke presumes is passé. It again, shows that if today's kids are being denied knowledge of this defining event (which likely saw a coup d'état and our nation's future course permanently altered) than they really do need to avail themselves of other sources i.e.  via the Kickstarter project:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1450964693/jfk-and-the-unspeakable-the-graphic-adaptation"

But alas, both examples show how easy it is to be oblivious when people are not conscious enough  to actually appreciate the periods in which they live. No one is saying you need to use a note pad to document every event and your response, but you should be open enough to the living experience to faithfully recall it years later - as opposed to corporate media telling you what it was about!

Fortunately, some of us are able to do this - as well as being obsessive about the details of history - including how the Neoliberal imperative has sought to distort or revise it.

Enter now Bloomberg scribe - or hack - Sam Tanenhaus, who penned an essay about commencement speeches in the Perspective section of the Sunday Denver Post. While opening with complaints about academic "correctness" - i.e. in the examples of assorted speakers pulling out of their speeches under protest, he eventually ended up pontificating on the 60s - as I suspected he would.

After quoting Joan Didion (from a 1975 address to the class of the same year at University of California - Riverside):

"We all distort what we see. We all have to struggle to see what's really going on".

He then jumps to her remarks on the 1960s, as she invited her audience to "look through her eyes at 'a generation still in thrall to that darkling plain we call the 60s'."

Adding Didion's words:

"Which seems when we look back on it, a decade in which everyone lived in an entirely imagined world; when everyone operated from an idea and all the ideas got polarized and cheapened."

But WHOSE fault was that exactly?  Was it the fault of the people living at the time - many of whom had just lived through one of the most earth shaking events in modern history: the assassination of a beloved President, and seeing his whole agenda washed away?  Destroyed under the lies and subterfuge of one Texas varmint named "Lyndon" - who set up his own commission to conceal his earlier crimes as well as the crime of the century and worse, concoct the pretext for a conflict that would eventually claim 58,000 American lives, and millions of Vietnamese.

I don't blame the people who zoned out in the aftermath, I blame the crass political elites, their media and power structures which mind fucked them to a far- thee -well to the point most were no longer capable of thinking clearly.  Because ultimately, the reasoning capacity and truth-seeking barometer of a population hinges on the information - the knowledge it receives from the knowledge "minders"  - on what's "really going on". Ultimately those knowledge-minders and dispensers failed the American people and big time.

Yes, some of us saw through the ruse, and thirty or so years later (after actual files to do with the JFK assassination were finally released) we saw how so many had been played, by Johnson, his bogus Commission and its fabricated lies, and distortions of history. But few saw it at the time, because hell, everything - all the key evidence was being "handled" and much of it covered up. The so-called commission wouldn't even release the actual autopsy photos for view, fearing they might incept thousands of nervous breakdowns.

From the "unspeakable" lies of the Warren Commission there then issued a foul pestilence that permeated the body politic and set  up the toxic polarization seen today. The further assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and Bobby Kennedy - with the accompanying lies on how they happened, merely added to the then extensive mind fuck. By the time Bobby was assassinated in June, 1968, nearly everyone from a generation had tuned out - resigned to the belief that all hope for change in the world, at least in the country - was destroyed.

That despair then led to the so-called "counter culture" because so many believed the system as it was couldn't be trusted to produce real change for the better. It was too corrupt from the inside, the politicos too in the maw of a money-dominated bribery system.

All that mistrust was subsequently proven true when the Watergate conspiracy erupted in 1972.  It was further reinforced when Gerald R. Ford (he who altered the bullet path descriptions in the Warren Report) then pardoned the perpetrator. A pardon, a looking the other way, that enabled the Iran-Contra conspiracy barely 15 years later.

So Tanenhaus has some nerve when he writes that:

"Americans had collectively lost the ability to think and judge".  And, quoting Didion,  "the whole country was like a cargo cult".

But again, in general the ability of a people to think and judge hinges on the quality of the information they receive to know and recognize the world (and nation) they live in. But through the 60s the American people were let down, and over and over again, by their own media - which recklessly lied to them about everything from Vietnam (originally) to Kennedy's assassination. Many of the lies in the latter case kept alive via an operation called "Mockingbird" we only learned about when Frank Church opened his CIA investigations a decade later.

Indeed, few at the time recognized that the virus of false consciousness was the name for what citizens had been subjected to, so no wonder so many were unable to think or judge. A false conscious person can no more do that than a drowning man can breathe.

 

'False consciousness' is the term given to a false information system that's been absorbed in part or whole, osmotically or via direct mental ingestion, by the majority of a population.  It has specific uses in the Corporatocracy to mislead a population about how things actually work. In the political system, for example, ' democracy' is the rhetorical term, but corporate dictatorship the reality. In the economy 'free market' the rhetoric, but controlled markets the reality,  and so on. If people's understanding can be obfuscated, and attention deflected to specious distractions and titillation, then the people can be disempowered and their thought processes undermined. They can even cooperate in their own economic (or social, political) subjugation.

Are the people to blame for harboring erroneous perceptions and rendering "false judgments"? Not at all. As noted by  Maxine Baca-Zinn and D.Stanley Eitzen (p. 371, 'In Conflict and Order', 1991):

"The United States is undemocratic in many very important ways. The people, although they do vote for their representatives every few years, are really quite powerless. For example who makes the really important decisions about war and peace, economic policies and foreign policy? The people certainly do not. The record shows that many times the American people have been deceived when the object was to conceal clandestine illegal operations, mistakes, undemocratic practices and the like."

 

Also as Charles Reich has pithily observed ('Opposing the System', p. 15)

"Today much of the system by which we are governed is invisible, because it is either not seen at all, or seen incorrectly. The system that we 'see' is democracy and a free market. But if we really have such a system, why have people's efforts at change failed over and over again? The answer is that we are actually governed by a system that we cannot see - an *invisible* system."

 Too many citizens from the era of the 1960s then, had been left essentially like blind men by the institutional media powers on which they depended for facts, honesty. Worse, they'd been victimized by an unseen system they couldn't even track or parse on account of its draconian secrecy rules -  but which wrought untold havoc on their lives. And Tananhaus seeks to blame them?

 

He even goes beyond that by extolling no less a Neoliberal tool than Milton Friedman, referring to his 1975 University of New Hampshire address where he spoke about "the fragility of freedom" and "America at a crossroads".. It was at a crossroads, all right, a crossroads in which one path led to the Neoliberal domination by markets we're all experiencing now. Markets ex machina!

 

As for Friedman, Naomi Klein pegged him perfectly in her book 'The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism' (2007).   In  her chapter on the Russian capitalist "experiment" (pp. 282-87) she documented how a  cabal of gangster capitalists under the IMF and the "Chicago gang of Milton Friedman" attempted to brutally re-make the existing Russian centrally planned economy into a Neoliberal free market outpost of  the West. The process was long and painful, entailing first getting rid of Mikhail Gorbachev - who through his glasnost and perestroika did far more than Reagan to render the world more peaceful, never mind the propaganda.
 

Economist and Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz (p. 283) called Russia's pro-capitalist market experimenters  like Milton Friedman "market Bolsheviks". As Klein put it (ibid.):

"However, where the original Bolsheviks fully intended to build their centrally planned state in the ashes of the old, the market Bolsheviks believed in a kind of magic: if the optimal conditions for profit were created - the country would rebuild itself- no planning required."

 

The sad facts on Friedman's Russian experiment? After only a year of Neoliberal thuggery and "market therapy" millions of Russians had lost their life savings when the ruble lost nearly all its value (similar to what happened to Germans and their Deutsch mark, thanks to von Hayek). Adding insult to injury, abrupt cuts in government subsidies meant that millions of workers had not been paid in months. Consumption? The average Russian consumed 40 percent less in 1992 than 1991 - and they weren't even consuming that much in '91!

The very fact a financial hack like Tanenhaus can hold a character like Friedman up for adulation, shows he is part and parcel of the same disinformation establishment that brought us the original mind fuck of the Warren Report. not to mention Operation Mockingbird and in toto - the entire thrust of false consciousness that's dogged us since the early days of Edward Bernays works on Propaganda.

 

Tanenhaus near the end writes:

 

"The truth is, political correctness is just one symptom of a broader malady. Argument itself has all but disappeared from public conversation. The premium is on opinions and points of view.."

 

 

The real truth? The universal aversion to the truth! The reluctance to call a spade a spade - which prolongs false consciousness and compromises minds as it robs of them of the facility to argue based on critical thought. And the debasement of thought always begins with the language distortions and substitutions of euphemisms for reality. Using "passed" for DIED, using "collateral damage" for those killed in a military attack -but unintended, using "scandal" for conspiracy, and enablng "war" for occupation. Once the building blocks of thought have been compromised, thought as a whole is next, which explains why mostly today one finds only "opinions" and POVs.

Unable to recognize facts, including accepted scientific ones, and with a disabled language - founded mostly on PR and euphemisms, it's no wonder so few can engage in sustained argument or incisive, intelligent debate. It's also no surprise why what one beholds instead is the regurgitation of the propaganda sound bites of the corpora-media.  So, of course, all discussion reduces to "point of view"  - Fox's or MSNBC's - with little else to go by.

Those who comment on the 1960s, should at least be required to study that decade carefully minus the corporate filters they may not be aware of using. Those who lived in the 60s, and venture to discuss it, need to ensure they aren't also victims of the Orwellian language manipulations used so prevalently at the time to distort and undermine objective perceptions, and thought.

Why Russians Hate Neoliberal Imperialists and Their Lackeys (1)

The "free" market rat descendants of Friedrich von Hayek were largely responsible for destroying the lives of millions of Russians with their gangster capitalism, as von Hayek was for destroying the Weimar Republic with his austerity remedy to make room for capital markets.


I have to thank Dr. Gregory Stam and his wife, who taught Russian at Loyola University in the 1966-67 academic year, for introducing our small class to Russian history - as well as teaching a terrific language course. Their enrichment using Russian history made the course much more palatable despite having to learn a new alphabet (Cyrillic) as well as more conjugations, declensions and cases since I took Latin in high school.

This provided a background into another nation most Americans lack, and plus, it was provided during the Cold War. Why did I take Russian? Clue one: Not because I was a "commie sympathizer". I needed an additional language to German on the math-science-engineering track. A second reason was I wanted to gain further insight into a nation that had been so demonized from the end of WWII - despite the fact the Russians made way more sacrifices than we did, losing millions  of their own as they fought the Nazi onslaught on their own soil. (If you need a hint: check out the Battle of Stalingrad, including documentaries of that mammoth battle!)

The other reason is that one whole branch of my family ancestry is Slavic in origin, and my grandfather spoke Russian, as well as other languages. (He came from what is now Cabuna, Croatia).  Thus, I wanted to become more fluent in that language and indeed, I did have a few brief Russian exchanges with Grandpa before he passed.  I also admired him for being a conscientious objector when it wasn't popular, in the WWI era. He had come to this country just before the U.S. entered the war, escaping the then war torn Austrian-Hungarian Empire - and having escaped he sure as hell wasn't going to join the conflagration from this side of the pond! Instead he worked as a lumberjack in Wisconsin,  giving alternative service, much like I did in Peace Corps.

Sadly, a certain "brother" seems to know nothing of this, because if he did he would surely realize that when he slanders me for "not serving in the military" he slanders our grandfather too!

Anyway, the topic of this blog is why the Russians detest the Neoliberal, hyper-market imperative and why they evolved to be the suspicious nation they are today - distrustful of most of the crap the West (including its secondary agents like the IMF) tries to foist on them. Author Naomi Klein gives the key information in her book 'The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism' (2007).  I had referenced Klein in an earlier blog, e.g. http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2012/11/the-military-industrial-complex-still.html

and noted how the "Chicago school" of faux economists - led by Milton Friedman- have been using multiple shocks or intermittent crises (military and non-military or economic) over the past 30 years to try to turn our world into a capitalist pig whore house.


Well, in her chapter on the Russian capitalist "experiment" (pp. 282-87) she documents how a cabal of gangster capitalists under the IMF and the "Chicago gang of Milton Friedman" attempted to brutally re-make the existing Russian centrally planned economy into a Neoliberal free market outpost of  the West. The process was long and painful, entailing first getting rid of Mikhail Gorbachev - who through his glasnost and perestroika did far more than Reagan to render the world more peaceful, never mind the propaganda.

Klein makes no bones about the fact that the Friedman "school of economics" - tracing its lineage to Friedrich von Hayek (the same creep that was responsible for bringing about the economic collapse of  the Weimar Republic - opening it to Nazi takeover) was responsible largely for the ideological ruthlessness that laid waste to Russia in the early 1990s.  They only needed (Boris) Yeltsin to help dissolve the former Soviet Union.

Economist Joseph Stiglitz (p. 283) called Russia's pro-capitalist market experimenters "market Bolsheviks". As Klein put it (ibid.):

"However, where the original Bolsheviks fully intended to build their centrally planned state in the ashes of the old, the market Bolsheviks believed in a kind of magic: if the optimal conditions for profit were created - the country would rebuild itself- no planning required."

U.S. Neoliberal puppet Boris Yeltsin, meanwhile, made reckless promises that things would only be hard "for six months"  and "very soon" Russia would be an economic titan. Never happened! As Klein notes (ibid.):

"The logic of so-called creative destruction resulted in scarce creation and spiraling destruction"

Newspapers, magazines from the period (which I still have and can peruse anytime) depicts horrific suffering by ordinary Russians as they had to beg, borrow or steal to survive - thanks to the Neoliberal market barbarians. Is this being an "American traitor" to reveal this, probably something most Americans don't know? Nope, because one can't be a traitor to an economic paradigm he never accepted in the first place!

The sad facts?  After only a year of Neoliberal thuggery and "market therapy" millions of Russians had lost their life savings when the ruble lost nearly all its value (similar to what happened to Germans and their Deutsch mark, thanks to von Hayek). Adding insult to injury, abrupt cuts in government subsidies meant that millions of workers had not been paid in months. Consumption? The average Russian consumed 40 percent less in 1992 than 1991 - and they weren't even consuming that much in '91!

Basically, to survive, the Russian middle class was forced to sell all or most of their belongings - setting up card tables on the streets to do so. As Klein describes this travesty:

"Desperate acts, that the Chicago School of Economics praised as 'entrepreneurial' and proof that a capitalist renaissance was indeed under way."

Wonder why the Russians of today are deeply skeptical and affronted by the Neoliberal rogues and puppets of the G20?  Look no further than recent Russian history and how the uber - capitalists twisted and perverted the country's whole economic foundation in order to force it into a globalized capital new world order.

Next: How the U.S. was itself deformed based on the shock doctrine used on Russia

Yes! The Repubs' 'Fiscal Cliff' Position is Based on the Pareto!

"Assume a collectivity made up of a wolf and a sheep. The happiness of the wolf consists in eating the sheep, that of the sheep in not being eaten. How is this collectivity to be made happy?"

- Vilfredo Pareto


I've been asked repeatedly lately what over-arching paradigm might underpin the Republican position in regards to the dealing over the "fiscal cliff". To bring readers up to speed (especially after the DOW dumped nearly 90 points yesterday) let me summarize:
The Repukes have proclaimed that they are still interested in "raising revenues" as part of a "Grand Bargain". After teasing Obama with the possibility of real increases in tax RATES - as opposed to closing ambiguous loopholes, the Reeps are now dug in and maintain that "revenues would be raised through later tax reform" - and this, btw, is with NO 'trigger' in place to enforce it. And in return for that vague, ambiguous promise of fiscal rectitude they demand:

- The upcoming defense sequestration be cancelled, i.e. no cuts for the Big D

- The age for Medicare eligibility increase to 67, or 68

- And changes be made to Social Security, namely by way of re-calculating its benefits via a lower COLA - to cut them.

Are they fuckin' nuts? Or haven't they seen the results of the just finished election? Do they not see they were the LOSERS? So how can they insinuate that THEIR plans to carve out social insurance benefits are the ones the voters chose?

As a separate issue, these fuckers want to address the debt ceiling issue separately, or translation: they want to have the power - as they did last year- to send this country hurtling over a REAL cliff of default! This time, however, Obama appears to possess the stones to not let these knuckle-dragging morons roll him in a back alley - like he did last year. Sometimes it takes time for Dems to grow a spine, what can I say?

Okay, now where does this come from? Some may say partly from adhering to Grover Norquist's no tax increase "pledge" and they may be right. But a more fundamental basis is to impose the Pareto Distribution of resources across the land. To refresh readers' minds, Vilfredo Pareto is the one who basically put forward the Pareto distribution, and also the form of economic efficiency known as Pareto efficiency.

The basic insights may be derived from the Cumulative form of the Pareto distribution which is shown in the graphic. Basically, we are graphing "utils" or nominal units of "utility" on the vertical axis, vs. value of dollars used or consumed along the horizontal. The curves are displayed for two populations, one "rich" (say earning in the top 1% or $340,000/yr.) and the other "poor" (earning about $14,000/yr.). The key aspect to note is the width corresponding to the "delta x" portion of the gradient (delta U over delta x) which translates into the net dollar's worth for each population. As readers can see from inspection, the width of $1 for the rich is significantly longer than the one for the poor. This translates into the argument that the buck is worth more to the rich man, and hence, any transfer from the rich to the poor hurts the rich more than it helps the poor (especially as the 'utils' for the poor man is also rather smaller by comparison).


Thus, by Pareto's original example (in quotes): Allowing the wolf in the wolf-sheep collective to EAT the sheep expresses less overall "hurt" or pain on it than permitting the sheep to remain unscathed, thereby merrily prancing away eating its grass while the poor wolf starves. Of course, let me hasten to add here, that nowhere is Pareto's original quote on the wolf-sheep combo given in any standard university economics texts. God forbid any students draw the wrong conclusion and infer that modern economics is consigning the poor to be sheep for the rich wolves. But, as a matter of fact, that's fairly close to the truth!

To sum things up in a crude nutshell: Applying the Pareto model for efficiency ensures that money will be circulated and spent by the highest quality producers and generators. This was subsequently imbibed by Arch Capitalist Milton Friedman of the "Chicago School" of economics as Naomi Klein notes in her book, The Shock Doctrine. As she notes (p. 68), Friedman asserted (in his book  ‘Capitalism and Freedom’ ) that "everything went wrong with the New Deal".

To Friedman all government social protections that were unearned, either from speculation in the markets or protracted hard work, had to be negated. Also, any gov't based medical programs like Medicare needed to be outsourced to corporations or the private sector. No one could have any "handouts" ...whatsoever, and oh, by the way, the minimum wage had to be abolished as well! (Workers could then individually compete for the best wages based on innate talents) As Klein further noted (p. 70): Friedman's tracts "though cloaked in the language of math and science" were in fact being passed on from multinationals and corporate interests with a lot at stake. Hello, serfs, meet the new Overlords!

Social Security payments? They pour more money into the economy, but not via real time productive labor or market indices, returns. People receive their checks merely by existing and breathing day to day, and having paid into the system with FICA deductions. Even then, they receive far more in benefits than actually paid in, making a total mess of "utils" earned. In a way, the Social security recipient (in the eyes of this Pareto-riguer bunch) are like the rent subsidized couple with their "consumer surplus". Worse, the S.S. COLAs increase the non-productive payments each year, one reason why – back in 1997 –  Alan Greenspan demanded an artificially much lower COLA increase than had originally been proposed.


No surprise that this COLA is exactly what the Reeps are proposing now. It is also fueled by propaganda put out by assheads and morons like Lloyd Blankfein, who on CSB news recently made the remark we "can't afford people living off of entitlements for 30 plus years." This slimey bankster rat lied and fortunately Ed Schultz corrected the slimeball on a subsequent show, noting the average American worker lives roughly 16.3 years depending on Social Security!  This during a period when medical costs are likely to explode, as well as the likelihood of being in a nursing home.

So what alternative does the Pareto Distribution demand and which Repukes are secretly pushing? Easy! Removing the money allotted from Social Security will force oldsters to gamble in a risky stock market casino in which we now know flash trading and fractional stock taking dominates (subject of a future blog) and the little guy suffers. Even as Boehner and McConnell wheel and deal, Maul Street's unscrupulous money managers salivate like Pavlovian dogs over reaping major rewards for themselves via deceptive fees. With a growing population of elderly Americans afflicted by Alzheimer’s, the fine-print artists peddling deceptive retirement products will have a field day. THIS is what the Reeps are bargaining for!

Make no mistake here that though the well-funded campaign to partly privatize Social Security under George W. Bush (in 2005)  failed, the same forces are at it again using the "fiscal cliff" BS as a leverage point. Now, they want to achieve the same result indirectly, by getting Obama and enough conservative Democrats in Congress (kowns as DINOS) , along with the GOP, to cut Social Security. Their manifest objective is to comply with every Fed Chairman's wet dream and compel Americans to try to make up the losses in public benefits by gambling more with their savings in mutual funds ( from which hefty profits will be skimmed by overpaid money managers.)  Wall Street will then become even richer than it now is relative to Main Street, as the Pareto Pirates gloat.

This we cannot allow! Every sensate being in the nation needs to keep on his reps' butts and make sure they do the right thing. If you have a weakling or wavering wimp, be sure to tell it like it is and assert that (far from cutting anything) we need to expand the stable, efficient, low-overhead public part of America’s retirement security system — Social Security. 

Meanwhile, we pare back on the risky alternatives like 401ks wherein workers must fend for themselves. (The other alternative is to provide a government "match" - for every dollar saved, i.e. in a money market or fixed income fund,  and not lost in a 401k via speculating).

Meanwhile, any reinforcements or added steps we do have to make to Social Security and Medicare, to ensure their integrity,  can be made independently next year. This would be after the fiscal cliff hysteria has passed and the Reepos can no longer exploit it for their own ends. Let us not be held hostage to the Reeps' alleged guns now, as we were last year with their disreputable debt ceiling brinksmanship!

One last point: I disagree with Obama barnstorming around the country and asking the Middle class to complain to reps about losing up to $2200 a year or more if the fiscal cliff is hit without Repups cooperating. To me this plays into the Reeps' hands and uses unnecessary scare-mongering. Hence, I agree with Robert Reich's take in salon.com today:

"So rather than stoking middle-class fears about this, the White House ought to be doing the opposite – reassuring most Americans they can survive the fall. In fact, to use his trump card effectively, Obama needs to convince Republicans that the middle class is willing to jump over the cliff."

Indeed, and for my money, the fact Americans could afford to splurge to the tune of some $55 BILLION on 'Black Friday' and "Cyber Monday" shows me they have disposable income to survive the "fall". In addition, the scare mongering sets liberals nerves on edge because it implies Obama & Co. might teeter over if the standoff is protracted. Keep the stiff upper lip, Mr. Prez. And understand that if going over this "cliff" is what we must do to finally get actual tax rate hikes on the rich, they we do it. And we LOVE doing it! Why? Because it'll make the Repukes (and that turd Grover Norquist) puke!