A Government Of The Rich, By The Rich And, More Than Anything Else, FOR The Rich

A bunch of slimy New Dems-- your father's Republican Party

Almost half the Members of Congress (48%) are millionaires and most of the rest are there at the sufferance of millionaires and billionaires who finance their miserable political careers. The median estimated net worth of all 535 Members is about $966,000, although higher among the freshmen-- $1,066,515. The richest freshmen are New Dem mega-millionaires who bought their seats in Congress the way you go out for a nice dinner on your birthday-- John Delaney (MD) and Scott Peters (CA), each worth a couple million bucks-- which goes a long way towards explaining why they don't vote for-- let alone comprehend-- the interests of ordinary working families. Delaney, for example, is all about wrecking Social Security... after all, who needs that pesky annoyance? A better question: why is he a Democrat? Or why did the DCCC recruit someone like that? Oh, yeah, they take any self-funder no matter what he or she thinks.

So it should be no shock to anyone's sensibilities who read the report from Reuters yesterday that Congress' top tax breaks benefit the wealthy... their own kind and the kind they're going to for money for their campaigns (and careers).

The top ten U.S. tax deductions, credits and exclusions will keep $12 trillion out of federal government coffers over the next decade, and several of them mainly benefit the wealthiest Americans, a new study from the Congressional Budget Office shows.

The top 20 percent of income earners will reap more than half of the $900 billion in benefits from these tax breaks that will accrue in 2013, the non-partisan CBO said on Wednesday.

Further, 17 percent of the total benefits would go to the top 1 percent of income earners-- families earning roughly $450,000 or more. The same group that was hit with a tax rate hike in January.

The benefits of preferential tax rates on capital gains and dividends, a break worth $161 billion this year, go almost entirely to the wealthy, including 68 percent to the top one percent of earners.

We've been talking about how the so-called "New Dems," conservatives who have sold out to Big Business entirely, have been working with the Republicans to gut Dodd Frank and overturn progressive achievements of the past. The dozen worst New Dems in the House, who are doing the most damage to ordinary families and must be defeated as much as any Republican-- from bad to worst:

• Ami Bera (CA)
• Jim Himes (CT)
• Dan Maffei (NY)
• Scott Peters (CA)
• Kyrsten Sinema (AZ)
• Jim Cooper (TN)
• Bill Foster (IL)
• John Barrow (GA)
• Sean Patrick Maloney (NY)
• Patrick Murphy (FL)
• Mike McIntyre (NC)
• Ron Barber (AZ)

Bob Scheer's latest column, Congress Still Puts Out For Wall Street, starts with a question: "What does it take to make a Wall Street banker squirm with shame?" Scheer implies that absolutely nothing makes the banksters feel any shame. Why don't the so-called Democrats-- or, rather, "New Democrats," on the list above realize that as well? Scheer asserts, correctly, that "[t]he Republicans, with the exception of a few die-hard libertarians, always do the bidding of the banks that finance them, but the Democrats are just as eager to pig out at the bankers’ trough."

Wall Street lobbyists were only too happy to hold a fundraising dinner last week for Democratic Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney of New York, who co-sponsored the Citigroup bill, one of several such events banking groups have organized for lawmakers who support their legislation.

What is at issue here is an attempt to gut the already tepid effort of the Dodd-Frank Act to control the runaway $700 trillion derivatives trading market. One source of alarm is the extensive in-house trading in these derivatives between affiliates of the too-big-to-fail banks. As an example of the profound corruption of our legislative process, congressional staffers turned to top corporate lawyers to draft the wording pretending to rein in their activity.

For example, as the emails reviewed by the Times revealed, House committee staffers consulted Michael Bopp, a partner at the elite law firm Gibson, Dunn who represents corporations involved in derivative trading, as to the verbiage he would prefer in the legislation. His language was well received, as the Times reported: “Ultimately, the committee inserted every word of Mr. Bopp’s suggestion into a 2012 version of the bill that passed the House, save for a slight change in phrasing.”

That last sentence, conveying the essence of America’s crony capitalist system, should stand as the defining epitaph for the death of representative democracy.

“I won’t dispute for one second the problems of a system that demands immense amount of fund-raisers by its legislators,” Jim Himes, a Democrat from Connecticut who supported the bankers’ recent bills and conveniently heads fundraising for House Democrats, conceded to the Times. Himes, who worked for Goldman Sachs before pretending to represent the people’s interest as an elected representative, is one of the top beneficiaries of Wall Street payoffs but claims to be distressed by the corruption that is his way of life. As he told the Times, “It’s appalling, it’s disgusting, it’s wasteful and it opens the possibility of conflicts of interest and corruption. It’s unfortunately the world we live in.”

No, buddy, it’s the world you guys make and wallow in. Other folks just lose their jobs and homes while you manage to slither out of the slime richer and more powerful than ever.