Damn Straight, Your Eminance! Pope Calls for Massive Wealth Distribution

Right on, Father! Almost 20 years to the day after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Pope Benedict XVI took aim at Communism's seeming polar opposite.

Sam Walton's children have more money than the Catholic Church. Seriously.

A more just and peaceful world requires "adequate mechanisms for the redistribution of wealth," said the Pontiff in a statement released on December 16th in preparation for World Peace Day. So is the Pope a Communist?

Hardly. Capitalism only appears to be the polar opposite of Communism. At the core of each ideology is a belief that tramples the individual while claiming to speak for the commoner. While Communism takes away the right of the individual under the State, capitalism takes away the right of the individual by way of the all mighty dollar.

Am I being overly dramatic? Maybe not, when you consider attempts to stifle freedom of expression via the Internet, or attempts to eliminate government meat inspection. Sure, a few people might die, but that would cost precious dollars!


E. Coli in hamburgers, poison pet food, led paint in children's toys. This is unregulated capitalism friends, and it ain't pretty. Unless you're at the very top, unrestrained capitalism doesn't enable life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Certainly not if you don't have health insurance. And if not for Medicare, Medicaid, S-CHIP, along with massive tax breaks for employer-provided health insurance AND President Obama's recent reforms, most people in this country wouldn't be able to afford health insurance. They would simply be priced out of the market.

Pope Benedict called for--among other things--better education. Boy, this country sure does need it, because the uber-capitalists have actually led people to believe that the rich in this country are insufficiently rich. That's a theory that is beyond absurd.

Did you know that Sam Walton's children have more money than Warren Buffett or Bill Gates? Seriously, the four of them have a combined wealth of nearly $85 billion! And they can't pay their employees a living wage because?

The Pope has criticized unrestrained capitalism before. Perhaps with income inequality in the news courtesy of Occupy Wall Street, people will notice.

To be continued . . .

Paul Krugman doesn't begrudge people like Mitt Romney for destroying jobs--he should.

And so it has come to this: Paul Krugman, a prominent, self-identified liberal economics professor, Nobel Prize winner and New York Times columnist says he doesn't hold it against Mitt Romney for getting rich by taking away other people's source of income. Seriously. He said that. In last week's column titled All the G.O.P.'s Gekkos, the Princeton University Professor wrote:

Krugman should think and hard before being soft on Romney

"Mr. Romney made his fortune in a business that is, on balance, about job destruction rather than job creation. And because job destruction hurts workers even as it increases profits and the incomes of top executives, leveraged buyout firms have contributed to the combination of stagnant wages and soaring incomes at the top that has characterized America since 1980."


Damn! Scathing criticism, right? But two paragraphs later, Krugman asks:

"So what do we learn from this story? Not that Mitt Romney the businessman was a villain. Contrary to conservative claims, liberals aren’t out to demonize or punish the rich. But they do object to the attempts of the right to do the opposite, to canonize the wealthy and exempt them from the sacrifices everyone else is expected to make because of the wonderful things they supposedly do for the rest of us."

Huh? It's okay to ship jobs overseas, cut wages and pay for remaining domestic workers, and get rich by producing absolutely nothing of value so long as such an individual pays a slightly higher tax rate? Sorry, Professor, but I'll have to disagree with on that one.

Perhaps Professor Krugman would be wise to examine the impending collapse of Slate.com, an online magazine that he once wrote for. The opinions and commentary webizine built up a steady readership with well-thought out, articulately reasoned online columns. Not two paragraph blog-brain farts, but actual columns. Like a newspaper. Just for the web.

Enter the Washington Post. I documented the slow destruction of Slate recently, so I will not recount all of that here, but the irony is overwhelming. The Washington Post increased its profits by laying off smart writers like Timothy Noah and Jack Shafer, and replaced the thoughtful, if not always correct Annie Lowrey with the sophomoric Matthew Yglesias.

Let's be frank: The Washington Post probably isn't paying Yglesias nearly what it paid Lowrey. And instead of paying staff writers, Slate currently leans heavily on reproducing news from the Associated Press to increase web traffic. And then there are the "guest contributions," paying some professor a fraction of the Post would pay a salaried writer to produce content.

Ironically, one of these guest columnists is an economics professor by the name of Robert Frank from Cornell University.  I say ironically because this Ivy League economics professor is laughably wrong in his prescription for America's current economic malaise. In a piece titled, "The Progressive Consumption Tax," Professor Frank identifies income inequality as a problem that can only be resolved by scrapping the income tax and replacing it with a progressive sales tax--that is, instead of a fixed tax rate on goods services, a rate on goods and services that would increase based on one's income. Incredibly, with the wealthiest Americans earning more money, Frank proposes that his progressive sales not be implemented at this time.

Clearly, Robert Frank is educated beyond his intelligence. After all, it is in the interest of the 99.9 percent of all Americans that the super-rich spend more money, not less. Spending keeps the economy going, and the Mitt Romeny's and Jamie Dimon's of the world have more money at their fingertips than they could ever possibly hope to spend. That's a problem, because with when corporations and super-wealthy individuals horde money into offshore savings account, such money has essential disappeared from the economy. Presto. Gone. Someone else has seen the fruit of his or her labor vanish, likely to never be seen again.

Where should Krugman and other self-proclaimed liberals go from here? Perhaps they should stand for more than just higher tax rates on the wealthiest one tenth of one percent and instead focus more on the root causes of income inequality. And believe me, they came from somewhere.

To be continued . . .