Friday September 03, 2010

OUR FEEBLE EFFORT AGAINST PROFESSIONAL LIARS. As Moscow Gold is not what the rightbloggers would have you believe it is, I must work for my daily bread, and have not all day to deal with the bullshit dished out by high-volume lie-vendors like Glenn Beck's new internet catastrophe, The Blaze.

Nonetheless I will try to handle one of their recent ass-effusions, "KEY OBAMA ALLY WORKS WITH SOCIALISTS FOR GLOBAL TAX."

The overview: AFL-CIO Prez Richard Trumka (helluva guy, saw him at Netroots) is portrayed by Beck as not only a friend of Obama, but also "a friend and close ally with European Socialists."

Keep in mind: Most of us, if we met and liked any Europeans, would wind up being friends with "European Socialists" because they're all socialists, at least by the wingnut definition. Never mind that, though.

Trumka speaks in favor of a tax on speculative financial transactions -- you know, the kind that bankrupted America. This tax is also favored by many other democracies around the world. That's what makes it "socialist" to the Beck people.

The tax Trumka mentioned is described at the "Wealth for the Common Good" site as a 0.25 percent tax "on stock trades and 0.02 on trades of future contracts, swaps and credit default swaps (options would also be taxed at the underlying rate governing the security on which the option is written)," which "would dampen the incentive of short-term speculators, thereby protecting long-term investors." Does that sound bad to you? Or even especially socialistic?

But in keeping with Beck's grotesque misrepresentation, when Trumka suggests democracies "regulate speculative funds such as hedge funds and private equity funds, create a financial speculation tax, or a financial transaction tax, or a Robin Hood Tax, however you wish to refer to it" -- this is how Beck's people show that:

SKREE ROBIN HOOD! Must be a Scandinavian Commie!

Oh, and the activist whose Hitleresque friendship Beck kept using to damn Trumka? He's Poul Nyrup Rasmussen -- the former Prime Minister of Denmark. I know, you thought he was Karl Marx reincarnated.

These dirtbags lie so much, and in so many venues, that I couldn't possibly keep up. But I figured at least I'd nail one before I went to bed. Light a single candle, and all. G'night.

UPDATE. Oops, sorry, Batocchio, you mean like this:

UPDATE 2. Jennifer, in comments: "Funny - they love all other types of transaction taxes -- sales taxes on poor people's food, VAT taxes, etc. -- because by their definition they are the only 'fair' taxes since they shift the burden of taxation to those lowest on the ladder."