Did Jello Biafra Write "Let's Lynch The Landlord" About Sam Zell?

Nationally, Sam Zell is best known as one of the sleaziest and most hated landlords in America. He probably owns more rental property than anyone other than the Pope. Most of Zell's $4.8 billion net worth has been derived from wheeling and dealing in the property markets. But here in L.A. he's mostly known as the penny-pinching, sleazy right-wing scumbag who destroyed the L.A. Times. In Chicago he's also known as the Blagojevich conspirator who "somehow" escaped without going to prison and the guy who decided to sell the Cubs and Wrigley field (though separately, to squeeze every nickel he could out of the deal... as well as the cherished stadium's re-naming rights). He's one of America's most hated billionaires. He's 100% in sync with Romney's 47% comments. Speaking about the subprime mortgage crisis in 2008, Zell said "This country needs a cleansing. We need to clean out all those people who never should have bought in the first place, and not give them sympathy." He's the 68th richest man in America, a living breathing example of why an updated tax code should be used to exterminate all billionaires (not the human beings, just that kind of wealth accumulation).

And this week the 86th richest man in America, who has given hundreds of thousands of dollars to right-wing politicians (just like the ones his parents fled from as the Germans invaded Poland in 1939), found the time to appear on CNBC's Squawk Box to claim that people are poor because government benefits disincentivize them and make them lazy. Zell:

The reality is as follows: the whole focus has been on how the, quote, one percenters, the 10 percenters, whatever these top earners have moved ahead of everybody. I wonder if there’s any correlation between while they were moving ahead, the rest of the government was subsidizing, subsidizing more and more people and disincentivizing them. Why is it always assumed that somebody doesn’t succeed because he can’t, as opposed to he doesn’t want to, or isn’t incentivized to... I think that they are disincentivized by, in effect, if you don’t have to pay for your health care, that’s another thing you don’t have to worry about…For every step contributing to the progress at the top, there’s an additional step on the bottom to increase the earned income [tax credit], to extend unemployment insurance for 28 years.

Think Progress has a video of the segment up and pointed out that "[b]oth Zell and CNBC co-host Joe Kernen claimed that Europe proves their point of view, saying that the European populace has 'learned helplessness' due to government, rather than learning to succeed. However, economic mobility is actually higher in many European countries (with large social safety nets) than it is here in the U.S., where '65 percent of Americans born in the bottom fifth stay in the bottom two-fifths as adults, while 62 percent of those born in the top fifth of incomes stay in the top two-fifths.' It is growing income inequality, spurred by policies that benefit those at the very top of the income scale, that is killing economic mobility.

"Meanwhile, as ThinkProgress reported, the lion’s share of tax breaks actually go to the richest Americans, not to those in the middle or bottom of the income scale. The bottom 60 percent of earners only garner 20 percent of the total tax breaks. Zell’s Tribune Company benefited from some of these breaks, saving $1.8 billion by filing taxes as an S corporation, rather than paying the full corporate income tax rate."