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- When is someone going to write about the subtopic of catalytic villains? Yes, bullies are often the victim of bullying; some find unhealthy/illegal ways to continue their habits while other use healthy/legal ways to channel their fury. Movies including BATMAN RETURNS and X-MEN: FIRST CLASS tap into catalytic villains as part of origin stories but they tend to get left behind in the first act. The prey becomes the predator; it's a cliche that does not always apply. The powerless seeking power at all costs and the human desiring to become a demon if not a god; that is the path to becoming evil. It also ignores game theory: good guys have to worry about bad guys, while bad buys have to prepare fight-or-flight plans against everyone.
- We have to pay for these $3T wars in Afghanistan & Iraq just like the $3T WWII (in today's money). The top marginal income tax then was 91% on money above $3M (in today's money) lowered to 74% under LBJ after closing loopholes. Corporations = people, so tax capital gains at least 35% not just 15%. New brackets: over $1B income/profit = 91%, over $500M = 74%, over $100M = 50%, over $20M = 39%, over $1M = 35%. Raise the hourly minimum wage $1/year from 2007's $7.25 to $10 (the 1968 level in today's money) to $15 (Ralph Nader's estimate based on productivity). Combine these tactics for a strategy of full employment of forty-hour-workweeks with four weeks/year paid vacation, with single-payer healthcare like China and free education like pre-Reagan California. This would encourage charitable giving and re-investment like the old cartoons about capitalism. At least one elementary school textbook presumes only Communism and democratic capitalism exist, not democratic socialism or corporatism/fascism. The debt ceiling would be moot if the Bush tax cuts ended in 2010 and not renewed through 2012 to save 2M jobless benefits.
- The $5M cap on CEO's sounds great, but didn't the old $1M cap divert money to stock options and spur the focus on next-quarter planning not next-decade thought? No, we have to pay for these $3T wars in Afghanistan & Iraq just like the $3T WWII (in today's money). The top marginal income tax then was 91% on money above $3M (in today's money) lowered to 74% under LBJ after closing loopholes. Corporations = people, so tax capital gains at least 35% not just 15%. New brackets: over $1B income/profit = 91%, over $500M = 74%, over $100M = 50%, over $20M = 39%, over $1M = 35%. Raise the hourly minimum wage $1/year from 2007's $7.25 to $10 (the 1968 level in today's money) to $15 (Ralph Nader's estimate based on productivity). Combine these tactics for a strategy of full employment, with single-payer healthcare like China and free education like pre-Reagan California. This would encourage charitable giving and re-investment like the old cartoons about capitalism. At least one elementary school textbook presumes only Communism and democratic capitalism exist, not democratic socialism or corporatism/fascism.
- Ed, I have great respect for the New World Symphony, America's Orchestral Academy. When www.nws.org gets its facelift, it will accurately boast the European nobility and other big backers who support it. It is an academy, not a career for most of its players.
Unfortunately, the local professional orchestra, the (second) Florida Philharmonic Orchestra, was permitted to plummet to its death to clear the way for the Cleveland Orchestra to save money by operating in South Florida.
The story dovetails with the national budget crisis because wealth has concentrated into the fewest hands since the financial bubble of the 1920's.
If we still had the multi-millionaires' 74% top marginal rate of income tax like under LBJ/Nixon/Ford/Carter, it would encourage write-offs like employees and business investments and charitable donations instead of gambling on real estate and on derivatives; the JFK rate of 90% created the Salvador Dali Museum of St. Petersburg, Florida among other benefits. George H.W. Bush called Reagan's tax cuts "voodoo economics" in 1980 and he was right. South Florida lost AM 940 WINZ's www.thomhartmann.com, so now only listeners to it or www.green960.com know these facts.
Combine this with the under-funding of the arts in school and with the correlation of orchestras with American industry, and it's less about MP3's and CD's and more about how orchestras were funded for the past century. We may have to state-sponsor them like Vienna, Austria does, as musicians compete less with other live acts and more with home theaters and high-quality recordings. The latter were unthinkable in the late 19th century unless you count sheet music or piano player rolls or gramophone cylinders.
