Arkady's Thoughts

A reader passed this link along and I am compelled to share. This will of course not endear the movement to the wealthy and in fact reads more like a threat than anything, but is impossible to disagree with. Most important point is that people are looking for a scapegoat. Indeed when this country was juiced up on Fed funny money nobody was complaining. When people extracted equities out of their house to go on vacation nobody was complaining. When employment dipped under 5% under Bush nobody was complaining. When every mutual fund under the sun was making money by just buying and holding and 401ks ballooned, nobody was complaining. Yet when the credit stopped flowing and the poor investments had to be erased then came the pain. Lots of pain. Instead of biting the bullet and bracing for austerity ACORN , unions and other radical leftists decided in the wisdom of Rhamb-o to utilize this crisis as best as possible.  Ahh, people will never learn.  Yesterday's Jews are...

I have been getting some push back recently for my previous articles where I accuse the OWS/Occupy movement of being a bunch of socialist nutters.  In fairness, I have also called them anarchists (socialists in disguise), Truthers/conspiracy fringe (they will protest regardless) and *even* regular people too.   However it would be foolish to consider this movement as some kind of representation of middle class America, that it most surely is not. Does it make me some right-wing extremist?  No, I am simply making observations on the mountains of visual and audio data that is streaming from around the world.  The comparisons with the Tea Party are absolutely laughable and simply shows how clueless people are when it comes to identifying basic ideological differences.  Just because the Tea Party and OWS happen to object to TARP means absolutely diddly squat.  It's like saying that Ron Paul and Bernie Sanders are ideologically compatible because they both opp...

With the OWS movement leaving many Americans confused as to whether they should support or stay away, one thing is for certain, Americans are aware of a certain truth that is happening in our country.  We have a certain combination of events that is leaving many people struggling and asking very good questions. The truth is this; We have structurally high unemployment, salaries are stagnant, debt burdens are rising, costs for education, health and energy are on the rise and we are increasingly overwhelmed with clear and present danger coming from every corner of the earth. To make matters worse the ruling elite of this country and the very wealthy are continuing to benefit while the remainder of the population struggles.  This is the appeal of the OWS movement despite the fact that the members making up the movement are advocating entirely unappealing solutions in the form of wealth distribution, punishing success and other hard left ideologies. Of course in a country w...

"We are, the 99% - we are, the 99%".   This is the chant from the multiple 'occupy' movements heard around the country and as of recent times, around the world .   As my previous article indicated , this particular movement is an amalgamation of socialist fringe elements, unions, leftists, angry liberals and an assortment of libertarians/conspiracy theorists and yes, even average Americans.  However I would like to take this opportunity to invite you into my personal life and show you the real 99%. My parents brought me to America in 1988 from Soviet Russia where life had become so unbearable and so awful that for the sake of my future and my soon to be born brother's future, everything was left behind and opportunities provided by the free market and capitalism were chosen.  The very thing that the protesters now demand to be destroyed was entirely non-existent in the USSR and life for many consisted of nothing more than survival.  Unless politically connecte...

I have been resisting commenting on this movement hoping secretly that the notion of scapegoating the 1% of America's wealthy would not gather any steam - guess I was wrong.  At first blush the movement and its message appear to be quite appealing, after all, the imbalance in this country is frightening and the widening gap between the wealthy and poor is growing.  However it does not take a genius to figure out that the issue with our growing wealth disparity, mounting debt and increase in poverty has very little to do with the wealthy and everything to do with the political class that enables the injustice in the first place.  On top of that and more importantly, the general animosity and hate of success and the generalization that anyone making more than a million dollars is somehow evil and should be punished is misplaced and wrong - this is like jailing the crack addict in hopes that crack would go away - oh wait...  So the first thing we must do as observers...

Next week will be yet another unveiling of another plan full of promises to shore up Americas ailing financial woes.  Obama is ratcheting up the populist rhetoric sharply by first presenting a false choice during his "jobs bill" by suggesting that either the wealthy get tax breaks or teachers get to work and now by going directly after the richest of the rich.  According to the New York Times who I am sure are devastated by this proposal:  Mr. Obama, in a bit of political salesmanship, will call his proposal the “Buffett Rule,” in a reference to  Warren E. Buffett , the billionaire investor who has complained repeatedly that the richest Americans generally pay a smaller share of their income in federal taxes than do middle-income workers, because investment gains are taxed at a lower rate than wages.  Mr. Obama will not specify a rate or other details, and it is unclear how much revenue his plan would raise. But his idea of a millionaires’ minimum tax w...

Today is September 11th, 2011 - exactly ten years after a terrorist attack changed this country forever.  I am going to republish a piece I wrote two years ago because the exact same subject continues to haunt this country, a group of people convinced that the tragedy perpetrated by this country by enemies of the United States was nothing more than a complex conspiracy of epic proportions.  Using junk science, lies and distorted pieces of information the Truthers have sharply divided this country and continue to soil the memory of 9/11 with their senseless calls for "truth", accusations of wrongdoing and offensive insinuations. My original article also included the mention of Birthers who have largely vanished in the wake of tangible evidence released by the Obama administration, but it is a perfect example of how conspiracies become entrenched belief systems.  For a long time I would get emails from people convinced that the Birther issue was real and that ...