Republican Riddle

Help me out here.

Republicans want to cut taxes.

Now we learn that multi-millionaire Mitt Romney pays a paltry 15 percent in taxes.

You’d think this would be cause for celebration among Republicans. Nice going, Mitt!

But oh, no, his opponents in the Republican presidential nomination mud bath are lobbing clods at him for not “paying his fair share.”

Isn’t that what the Occupy Movement has been saying for months? The rich aren’t paying their fair share. (Mitt, by the way, has an estimated net worth of $250 million.)

Could GOP candidates Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul be closet Occupiers?

The answer, of course, is — only if it is to their political advantage as they exploit the latest one-day scandal in this bizarre contest.

Has anyone asked Romney what he thinks of his low tax rate? Does he think it’s fair?

Why aren't all the GOP presidential candidates driven to the edge of GOP blasphemy with the question: Should Romney and other exceedingly rich Americans pay more?

Congressional Republicans have been rock-solid, vocal opponents to raising taxes on the rich.

This much is certain: Romney can rightly say his tax rate is “perfectly legal” — thanks to the likes to legislators and ex-legislators like, you guessed it, Santorum, Gingrich and Paul.

So, Mitt, point your finger at the real culprits, your opponents, and say, “You made me and my tax accountants do it!”

For more on this subject, read “Perfectly Legal” by David Cay Johnston. It will make you weep.

"Christian" pols mum about the shameless rich

Just how gilded and inequitable is this New Gilded Age?

An article by David Cay Johnston, which was buried in the business section of Saturday’s New York Times, lays it out.

“The increase in incomes of the top 1 percent of Americans from 2003 to 2005 exceeded the total income of the poorest 20 percent of Americans….”

Yes, the INCREASE for the top 1 percent exceeded the TOTAL INCOME for the bottom fifth.

Well, that’s bad, but it couldn’t have exceeded the total income of the poor by much.

Wrong.

The gains of the super rich exceeded the entire income of the poor by 37 percent, $524.8 billion to $383.4 billion.

Here’s another way of looking at what happened in those two years. Writes Johnston, “On average, incomes for the top 1 percent of households rose by $465,700 each, or 42.6 percent after adjusting for inflation. The incomes of the poorest fifth rose by $200, or 1.3 percent, and the middle fifth increased by $2,400 or 4.3 percent.”

And just who had the greatest need?

The motto of this oh-so Christian administration whose Decider-in-Chief calls himself a born again Christian, might as well be “Greed is good.”

When will the so-called Christian Republican candidates address this issue? Who among them dares put in the face of their super rich backers Christ’s teaching from Matthew: “...Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God”?

(Could it be that at least some of Michael Huckabee's current political traction derives from his has daring to call the anti-tax, anti-government Club of Growth for what it is — in Huckabee's words, the "Club of Greed"?)

Meanwhile, right here at home, the Portland Development Commission is pouring a public-backed $3 million loan into the new “The Nines” luxury hotel over the downtown Macy’s because the hotel wasn’t up-scale enough to cater to the rich.

Airlines are squeezing coach passengers to make room for sleeper cabins for the rich. The yacht business is booming. And executives are paid 400 times what their workers make.

Where is the shame? Where is the outrage?

(By the way, I’m still waiting to see the Johnston story printed in The Oregonian. And why was the story on page three of the Times business section instead of on the front page?)

Delightful, mysterious encounter

I’ll play along with the author of the four-word comment to yesterday's post about David Cay Johnston, the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the New York Times.

The comment's author purports to be Johnston himself.

Maybe, maybe not.

The comment seems slightly off, as seemed the original “Johnson” e-mail I wrote about yesterday.

The comment reads:

Delightfully hilarious and whimsical. —David Cay Johnston

So what’s the "off" part?

For one thing the words read like one of those snippets in ads for Broadway plays.

The RED ELECTRIC

"Delightfully Hilarious! Whimsical!"

For another, when isn’t “hilarious” delightful?

For that matter, when isn’t “whimsical” delightful?

Then again, if you are at your New York Times desk with a full day of investigative reporting ahead of you, maybe you don’t take the time to trim one liners dashed off to skeptical bloggers in the hinterland.

One other scrap of evidence: When someone posts a comment on this site, I get an e-mail copy. The return address for this comment led me to a vacant blogger profile site titled “DavidCay.”

Go figure.

So it comes down to this: David, if you are the comment's author, all is forgiven — I promise to check out your new book and share my trenchant observations with Red Electric readers and any wayward search robots that drop by.

In the meantime, we are counting on you, David, so get back to work!

Robotic correspondence

In my e-mail in-box this morning was a note from David Cay Johnston, the Pulitzer-Prize winning New York Times reporter.

The e-mail bore the note line “NOT for posting.”

I’m not quite sure what to make of the contents, which I will dutifully not post. But I will give you the gist of the brief message allegedly from Johnston.

First a little background.

Nearly four years ago Johnston wrote an incisive, upsetting book, “Perfectly Legal,” about how corrupt our tax system is. The book’s subtitle is “The Covert Campaign to Rig Our Tax System to Benefit the Super Rich - and Cheat Everybody Else.”

I’ve never met Johnston, and I’m certain he didn’t sit down at his computer yesterday to write me this note, which is nothing more than a pitch to read (and comment on) his next book. It is called “Free Lunch” and will be published in December.

That last sentence is pretty lame “buzz” if that’s what the e-mail was trying to generate. Who knows how many thousands of bloggers found the same message from "Johnston" in their in-boxes this morning.

The e-mail also included three links to recent stories Johnston has written for the Times. I’d read all three when they were published. I do admire Johnston’s work.

Several things about this missive give me pause.

It addresses me as “Mr. Seifert,” which a computer program obviously can do. It also makes reference to the fact that the new book starts with a story out of Oregon. Again, a computer can search blog authors’ profiles for that kind of information and then tailor a letter accordingly. I believe the word in the trade is “personalize.” I call it computerized pandering.

But then, in the middle these machinations, there’s a typo. A glitch. I often make those here when I am rushing to get something posted. Glitches like this aren’t made by computers. At least not normally. Could this be a contrived error, for verisimilitude? Anyway, the typo, whoever or whatever made it, did make me wonder, momentarily, whether possibly, just possibly, a person might behind this letter. Not Johnston himself, but someone paid to pump these little promos into the blogosphere.

It’s all quite clever and probably sells books. or jewelry, deodorant or political agendas.

Am I not now writing about “Free Lunch,” if only in an off-hand way, making it part of your consciousness? Given what I know about Johnston’s work, it may well be worth looking at.

Faint praise to be sure, but praise none-the-less. Better than nothing.

Finally, there’s another concern. I’ve mentioned before that I have a site meter recording the number of visits to this blog. It is running, on average, about 50 a day, but I have no idea what that means. Old Internet hands have cautioned me that many of those “visits” are by “bots” or robots. I’m certain that a searching, computer-driven “bot” discovered my “David Cay Johnston” tag from an earlier post, gathered in “Oregon” from my profile and then spewed out the letter, or the raw material for a letter.

So will 50 of you read this post?

I doubt it, and my doubt is greater today than it was yesterday.

As for those visits by sentient beings, I’m certain one by David Cay Johnston isn’t among them. Johnston has better things to do than to write me about his latest book. At least I hope he does.

I would suggest, however, that he take a moment to question the wisdom of allowing his publisher’s promotion department to send out fabricated e-mails purporting to be written by him.

Right story; Wrong page

It's time to play "You be the editor" again.

Where would you put a story bearing the headline "'05 Incomes, on Average, Still Below 2000 peak"?

If you were the editors of the New York Times, you put it on the front page of today's business page, on the left, in a single column one-third of the way down the page.

Hardly prime journalism real estate.

But isn't this story of general interest? Isn't it worthy of the front page? Isn't it, at the very least, a political story? Note the politically pivotal year 2000, the year the Supreme Court elected George Bush.

Delve into the story and it becomes all the more newsworthy.

Remember the Bush tax cuts for the rich, which are still in effect?

Their unfairness is all right here. "People with incomes of more than a million dollars also received 62 percent of the savings from the reduced tax rates on long-term capital gains and dividends that President Bush signed into law in 2003.... 28 percent of the investment tax cut savings went to just 11,433 (My note: That's roughly the population of Hillsdale and Bridlemile neighborhoods) of the 134 million taxpayers, those who made $10 million or more, saving them almost $1.9 million each. Over all this small number of wealthy Americans saved $21.7 billion in taxes on their investment incomes as a result of the tax-cut law.... the nearly 90 percent of Americans who made less than $100,000 a year saved on average $318 each on their investments."

As you ponder these numbers, guess who is going to be paying for the war in Iraq for years to come.

The article, by the way, is written by David Cay Johnston, author of "Perfectly Legal: The Covert Campaign to Rig Our Tax System to Benefit the Super Rich - and Cheat Everybody Else," a book guaranteed to make your blood boil.

In short, we've been ripped off in every which way by this plutocratic, power-mad administration.

Folks, it's time to get serious about impeachment, if only to air out the White House closets before the next resident arrives.

P.S. The good news is that the story was in the Times. Let's see whether The Oregonian considers it worthy of publication.