I hate top ten lists.

So, I’m making a Favorite Eight list.

I find the arbitrary ranking of musicbooksmovies a futile exercise that only serves to encourage disagreement from other highly opinionated people, leading to endless arguments about which one is right in a realm where there is no right or wrong. Those discussions, usually fueled by wine in a dimly lit friend’s apartment, devolve into each party arguing to defend their own person (fuck you if you think Avatar was anything other than a CG remake of Ferngully: The Last Rainforest), rather than making any intelligent points about the validity of the works about which they’re at odds (Avatar did have similarities to that Robin Williams-starring animated picture; however, Cameron’s film offers a 3D experience unlike anything we’ve ever seen and I think that warrants merit on its own).

My personal paradox is that I love getting into those arguments, futile as they may be. So, I have to put out my list of favorite films of the year to get that discussion started. However, I refuse to rank them by numbers. To be honest, I don’t know how that’s possible given how varied are the genres of these movies and the necessary mood in which one should be in order to truly appreciate the film.

HERE ARE MY FAVORITE MOVIES OF 2011 SO FEEL FREE TO SLAM MY PICKS AND REMIND ME OF HOW STUPID I AM THAT I FORGOT TO INCLUDE ALL OF THE TRULY GREAT FILMS OF THE YEAR

WIN WIN

One of the first films I saw in 2011 ends up still being one of my favorites of the year. Tom McCarthy is three-for-three in his directorial career, with his debut The Station Agent – a rarely seen jewel of the 2000s – followed up by the excellent The Visitor. And now this. McCarthy is like the John Hughes for the 21st Century, deftly maneuvering between hilarious exchanges borne from the fantastically drawn everyday characters and genuinely earned touching moments that challenge you to hold back those tears. Win Win tells the tale of a small-town lawyer (Paul Giamatti) who makes an ethically questionable decision to become the legal guardian of an elderly man in order to collect the state aid for his own financially ailing family. All is well until the elderly man’s grandson appears in their lives.

ONCE I WAS A CHAMPION

Not sure why MMA fighters show up in two of my favorite movies this year considering I’m not an avid watcher of the sport, but that’s just the way it goes. Once I Was A Champion is a documentary focusing on the life and mysterious death of Evan Tanner, an introspective man who dominated the mixed-martial arts field before alcohol and his own existential issues with being a fighter brought him down and out, leading to his untimely death out in the Southwestern wilderness. I knew nothing about Tanner before seeing this film, but found him a captivating personality more due to how he wasn’t than how he was. He wasn’t boisterous, he wasn’t larger than life, he wasn’t a monster, he wasn’t the stereotypical alpha male. He was quiet, he liked to read, he was philosophical. Despite being a feared competitor, he never considered himself a fighter at heart. A sad tale without many answers, director Gerard Roxburgh paints an honest picture of Tanner’s rise and fall, leaving the audience to determine whether or not Tanner was who he thought he was.

THE INNKEEPERS

After much of the 2000s ruined the ghost story with all those unnecessary adaptations and sequels of adaptations of Japanese 90s horror flicks, Ti West reinvigorates the genre with this excellently hilarious and scary tale of a haunted hotel in New England. The Innkeepers essentially a two-person show: Sara Paxton and Pat Healy portray the two hotel employees charged with manning the front desk of the Yankee Peddlar Inn on its final night of service before closing its storied doors for good. They’d always heard tales of ghosts inhabiting the hotel and, figuring they had nothing better to do, might as well try to find proof while they’re there for the final few hours. Genuinely creepy it is, but those moments wouldn’t work nearly as well were it not for the endearing and believable relationship between Paxton and Healy, whose playful banter and wonderfully realized characters make this film the knockout that it is. The only knock would be Kelly McGillis’s character who feels a bit cliched and forced. With everything else running on all cylinders, it’s an easy thing to look past.

BEGINNERS

I had nearly zero desire to see this movie based solely on its trailer: all of those quirky “indie” tropes were apparent here, from the overly earnest voiceover to the subtitled dialogue of a dog (really?), Beginners threatened to be exactly the type of post-student film that mainstream moviegoers roll their eyes at. To my pleasant surprise, Mike Mills’ film about love, life, and loss is absolutely splendid, a cinematic treat that earns every emotion it evokes. Truly touching, it never gets maudlin, keeping a relatively light atmosphere considering its potentially heavy subject matter – a thirtysomething single man comes to terms with the end of his long-term relationship with a new one, all while dealing with his widowed father’s recent coming out of the closet and terminal illness. Familiar yet original, Beginners is a powerful, honest film that went from something I almost didn’t see to one of my favorites of the year long before I was even finished watching it for the first time. And yes, I ended up loving that little dog, subtitles and all.

WARRIOR

If you’ve seen the trailer (or DVD cover art to the right) for Warrior, you know the entire movie. You know every major beat, all the conflicts, and you can likely even guess the resolution. It doesn’t matter. What should’ve been a trite, umpteenth re-rehash of Rocky about two estranged brothers played by Tom Hardy (Inception) and Joel Edgerton (Animal Kingdom) who get into the ultimate fighting ring for different yet understandable reasons despite unlikely odds, ends up a remarkably powerful character study that delivers as many tears as knockout right hooks. And I mean that in the best way possible. Rarely do I agree with those obviously hand-picked critical praises that appear on the movie poster that say something like, “You’ll stand up and cheer!” But, in this case, that’s not hyperbole at all. I have a feeling this will be a staple on TNT in the near future, and I’ll be hard-pressed to not watch it every time it’s on, rooting for both brothers to win even though there can only be one named the victor.

SHAME

Shame, much like director Steve McQueen’s previous effort, Hunger, stars Michael Fassbender in a tour-de-force performance that makes or breaks the entire film. In both cases, Fassbender didn’t disappoint. And while he’s a force to be reckoned with any time he’s on screen, his absolutely mesmerizing and unforgettable in Shame puts his former performance to, well, shame. McQueen’s unflinching, brutal examination of sexual addiction follows Fassbender’s Brandon, a thirtysomething New York professional who needs an exorbitant amount of carnal knowledge but cannot handle any form of emotional intimacy. Brandon is sad and pathetic but not without charm. He’s not so much endearing as fascinating, making believable the notion that someone could truly be addicted to sex. Ultimately, it’s a challenging film on many levels, especially for traditional American audiences who shy away from graphic sex but gravitate toward brutal violence. Rather than something you pop in over and over again, Shame is a brave piece of cinema that is provocative without being salacious, taking the burden of hypersexuality to a level that honestly feels like a burden not the fratb0y overly masculine dream that it’s often portrayed as.

KILL LIST

Holy shit. This Mack truck flattened me into the asphalt and then ran me back over and spit on my mashed bones for good measure. Billed as hit-man-taking-one-last-gig movie, you go into Kill List with completely different expectations of what will occur over the next 100 minutes. Suffice it to say, you have no clue where this movie is going and are fully unprepared for what it delivers. I don’t want to give anything away because not only would it not nearly have much impact here in my woefully pathetic attempt at describing it, but you should just experience it for yourself. This is the reason I go to the movies: to be surprised, to see something wholly original, and to be unexpectedly knocked flat on my ass. I still haven’t met anyone who has seen this — I caught it at the AFI Fest, so hopefully it will be hitting either theaters or DVD sooner rather than later — and can’t wait to discuss it. Although I think I need to see it again to be able to discuss it properly. It’s that kind of a movie. If it weren’t for Drive, this would be my favorite movie of the year. In fact, depending on the day you ask me, it still might be. A genre-bending masterpiece.

DRIVE

On the flip side to Beginners, the 2-minute preview clip of Drive early last year had my interest so insanely piqued that I worried there was no way the actual film could live up to my expectations. It did. And then some. Nicolas Winding Refn’s cinematic brand of lyrical imagery combined with savage violence set to 80s retro music makes the leap from Europe to the US for the first time and it’s exactly what American film needed this sequel-soaked year. It’s not what you’d expect, to the point where some people were even suing the filmmakers for it being so not what they thought it would be. True, it’s not Faster and More Furiouser, and for a movie called Drive, there isn’t an overwhelming amount of car chases. Perhaps it would’ve been more properly titled Driver, since it is definitively about Ryan Gosling’s character, a Hollywood stuntman by day, freelance getaway driver by night, who excels at setting explicit boundaries both in his personal and professional life, until he gets attached to his comely neighbor played by Carey Mulligan. More than an action film, Drive is a film noir updated for the 21st-century’s lust for graphic violence and thumping musical scores, but manages to provide both in ways that serve the story rather than simply glossing over a hollow shell of a narrative; its style enhances its substance, making it easily the coolest film of the year.

HONORABLE MENTIONS

These flicks rocked; they just didn’t quite make it into the “favorite” column. I highly recommend seeing all of these, but I tried to be harsh in my parsing of the quality films of the year and any of these following films could’ve made the list had I done a favorite 10 or 15 films.

Margin Call, Moneyball, The Tree of Life, Attack The Block, Extraterrestrial, Into The Abyss, I Melt With You, The Future, Pearl Jam Twenty.

MOVIES I ADMITTEDLY HAVEN’T SEEN YET BUT PROBABLY WILL END UP ON MANY BEST-OF LISTS BUT I CAN’T SPEAK TO THEM BECAUSE THERE ARE ONLY SO MANY HOURS IN A DAY AND I DIDN’T SEE EVERY MOVIE THIS YEAR, SORRY

Melancholia, Martha Marcy May Marlene, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, We Need To Talk About Kevin, Hugo, The Artist, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo

BEST HORROR-COMEDY SINCE SHAUN OF THE DEAD

Tucker And Dale Vs. Evil

GUILTIEST PLEASURE OF THE YEAR

Hall Pass. Twelve years ago, I wouldn’t have felt guilty to admit that I enjoyed a recent Farrelly Brothers comedy, but after about a decade of total crap (at worst) and forgettable misses (at best) this one surprised me. It’s actually hilarious if extremely conventional both in structure and theme. It’s not comedic gold, but considering the putrid shit that hit screens in the Year of the R-Rated Comedy (I’m looking right at you, The Change-Up and The Hangover Part II), the O.G. Restricted Maestros reign supreme once again. More of these, please, Peter and Bobby.

NO, I DIDN’T FORGET TO ADD TINTIN OR WAR HORSE INTO ANY OF THOSE LISTS

The Adventures Of Tintin looks like it could be fun so long as it ends up being more Raiders than Crystal Skull but the first trailer for War Horse looked like The Onion doing an amazingly hilarious parody of Spielberg-like Oscar-bait. I mean, a teenage boy so obsessed with a freaking horse that he devotes an entire sketchbook to personal drawings of it? That it was for a real film only made it that much funnier. Someone needs to cut that trailer into making it look like an equine Fatal Attraction. That would be amazing.

Oh, War Horse! I can't wait until that one day we can be together and start a wonderful family of centaurs!

Admittedly, I’ve heard more good reviews than bad. But that said, I’ve only heard of three people who have actually subjected themselves to it so I’d say the jury is still out. Given my low threshold for maudlin, syrupy schmaltz, I’d say regardless of the consensus, War Horse just ain’t for me. Maybe I should’ve seen it after all; it might have ended up one of my favorite comedies of the year.

Let the ad hominem slams begin!

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The Occupy Wall Street movement continues despite getting met with evictions from public spaces across the country and mass misunderstanding of the general feeling behind the whole protest.

There have always been haves and have-nots. What makes this situation different is that, yes, the haves have tons more than ever before in history, but mainly it’s the sense of injustice felt by the have-nots, who have bore the brunt of the worst recession since the Great Depression, trying to survive in an economy where we’ve lost over a 12 million jobs yet only gained back 80,000 jobs in October, and for this, are branded as being lazy.

This is why you have people marching in the streets.

And in Chicago, anonymous flyers were spread around the entire Occupy area, supposedly written by the 1% and addressed to the 99%. Here is a photo of that flyer that has been making the email rounds so I don’t have anyone to credit for this:

Whoever wrote this misses the point entirely as so many do: it’s not about inequality, it’s about injustice. Yes, it’s their job to make money, but fleecing the middle class and then nearly collapsing the economy shouldn’t be part of that equation. There need to be limits. Rules of the road. Whether or not they were following those rules is up for debate (as is everything these days since opinion is now considered fact), but any sane person would look back on the past few years and say that we need a few more rules – or properly enforced existing ones – to prevent this sort of calamity from happening again.

It’s true that people weren’t complaining when the market was at 14,000. But, they should’ve been because it was all fake. It was all a con. And, yes, the market has rebounded decently, but the only ones who are really feeling the benefits of that are the banks and big business. Corporate profits are at record highs while the rest of the country still deals with 9-plus-percent unemployment.

Wall Street felt some pain but that was no different than the rest of America: jobs lost, retirements evaporated. But the difference is that their jobs came back quickly, or never even were lost, because we, the taxpayers, the 99%, bailed them out. And even if 51% of those 99%ers didn’t pay income taxes last year, they’re still paying for it with other state and local taxes, sales taxes, as well as all of the austerity measures aimed at cutting pensions, cutting public services, cutting public sector jobs, etc.

The nerve and sheer entitlement of this writer. There wouldn’t even be a Wall Street anymore if we lived in a true free-market economy because they all would’ve failed and this Wall Streeter would be having to put his money where his mouth is in regards to teaching and landscaping and everything else that he considers to be so unbelievably easy that he could just jump right into any other profession and do it better than you. It’s easy for him to demonize everyone else on high while his profession, his entire industry, was saved by us the rest of America, while our industries disappeared. Jobs haven’t just been lost; they’ve been exported, never to return.

Which brings me to another point: it’s not that people feel that they’re too good for landscaping and teaching; it’s that they want to be treated fairly. They’d like to be able to make a living wage doing those jobs. Instead, while the financial industry and corporate Americans in the 1% have seen their overall income go up by over 200% over the past 30 years, the average middle class worker has seen their wages remain stagnant. They’d also like to, you know, not be blamed for what almost became a global economic Armageddon because they receive a modest pension after being a police officer or custodian for forty years. Anyone who believes that is what caused the recession or is what is dominating our deficit prefers their own ideology over reality.

“We eat what we kill.” I have zero idea what they means. All I can assume is that he has unbridled greed that knows no ethical bounds (not a stretch, really) and it just reinforces to me why we need regulations to keep these pure ids from trying to destroy the economy again. Is that implying that families barely making ends meet are wasteful, not eating everything they kill? Or that they’re not as successful because they’re not cannibals like he and his kind are? Whatever.

His major fallacy (and, yes, I’m certain that the author behind this creed is a man) is that Joe Mainstreet doesn’t want Wall Street to not exist. Sure, there are the Occupy Wall Street loons out there on the fringes who want all debt absolved and other impossible scenarios. But the overall feeling is that there’s a middle-ground that can be achieved here. (You know, compromise? That act of giving up something you want in order to get something you want and then the other side does the same thing? That thing that you do with your spouse if you want to keep things moving along smoothly? Yeah, that.)

We need banks. We need investors. We need investment banks. We need lenders. We need businesses. We need entrepreneurs.

But we need a lot of other professions and industries, too, if our entire country is going to be productive, not just the plutocracy currently running things. The level of inequality is getting dangerously high, but I think that people would be willing to ride it out were it not for the accompanying injustice that exacerbates the feeling that there is a monster divide between the 1% and the rest of us. How else do can you interpret it when teachers, custodians, fire fighters, police officers, environmental regulators, factory workers, and everyone else are demonized as being lazy, undeserving, entitled, or all of the above simply because they want some accountability from the people at the top? As long as that’s happening, you’re going to find people on the street holding picket signs demanding something be changed.

Most of the Occupy Wall Street movement just want them to be held accountable for their actions. It’s about the injustice, not the inequality.

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Class warfare. Both sides are accusing the other of waging it.

Mainly the GOP is blaming Obama for it with his plan to raise taxes on millionaires — and by millionaires I mean people who make a million or more per year. But there are also those on the left blaming the GOP for the same thing due to the status quo where the top one-percent control over fifty percent of the wealth in the country.

I think Obama framed it wrongly, by saying that the rich need to pay their “fair share.” This is an impossible argument. Everyone already feels like they’re paying their fair share already. And even those, like Warren Buffett, who argue that the rich should be taxed higher don’t necessarily want to just give up their money. (There’s a story going around the conservative blogosphere about how Berkshire Hathaway owes all this money in back taxes to the IRS but there isn’t a single MSM article confirming it. It may or not be true.)

The better way to argue it is simply this: all the spending that we’re cutting in order to reduce our debt has been gutting social programs that go overwhelmingly to the poor and middle classes, so by raising taxes on the rich back to 1990s levels – which were still not high compared to historical levels – it simply ensures that all Americans share in the sacrifice of reducing the nation’s worsening debt. You cut teachers’ pensions, you lay off state workers, you’re reducing the overall wealth of the working class, the middle class — whose wealth was hit the hardest in the 2008 recession, even more so than the rich. (The middle class tended to have most of their wealth tied into their homes which all drastically lost value while the wealthier classes had more diversified portfolios which rebounded quickly from the recession.) Tax hikes on the rich provide a balance. A necessary hit to keep the entire country afloat.

But then it becomes an argument about whether or not those programs should even exist anyway. Don’t buy into that. It’s a red herring.

If we’re not reforming Medicare/Medicaid, then the cuts are simply ideological in nature — cutting things like teachers’ pensions, police officers’ and firefighters’ jobs, etc. — and don’t come close to reducing our deficits by more than a tiny fractional amount. If anyone thinks that we’re going to solve the debt crisis by eliminating the EPA and cutting foreign aid have zero understanding of just how much of a percentage of the federal budget goes to those programs compared to the debt.  It’s using the guise of fiscal responsibility to make partisan slashes to the budget.

And, for the most part, the Obama Administration has been on board with this, hoping to illicit some bipartisan support through their centrist game plan. It’s not worked very well.

So now here is the latest attempt, which has pleased some liberals with his class warfare claims to rile the base and put some pressure on the Republicans. It might work. Polls – including Rasmussen which tends to lean conservative – show that a majority of Americans favor tax hikes for the rich over spending cuts to reduce the debt. Maybe that is class warfare.

Or maybe it’s that the bottom 90 percent have felt stepped on and neglected for too long by both big business and the government and feel that it’s time that the rich take a little bit of a hit like the rest. Because while the rich will feel pinched by added taxes, they’ve also felt unprecedented benefits over the past thirty years, the 400 richest Americans seeing their wealth grow over 400 percent since 1995 while the majority of us have seen ours go down over the past decade.

My math isn’t that great, but raising tax rates roughly 4 percent on the rich doesn’t exactly negate those gains the rich enjoyed for the past three decades. Hardly class warfare. Class wrapping-on-the-knuckles maybe.

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Republicans are already blasting President Obama’s jobs speech before he’s even given it, even though part of his plan is rumored to be extending tax cuts to spur growth, which tends to be the GOP talking point on fixing the economy.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell says that it’s just going to be more of the same failed policies.

But what are those same failed policies, exactly?

Ending off-shore drilling? Nope, that’s back to near pre-ban levels.

EPA’s regulations smothering business? Nope, the EPA’s new rule on smog has been pushed for two more years down the road.

Raising taxes on the rich? Nope, Obama extended the Bush-era tax cuts for everyone another two years as well as cut payroll taxes for all workers.

How about the financial regulation and health care laws? Most of those rules haven’t even gone into affect yet. Of course, the argument about that is that’s causing uncertainty in the markets. But there isn’t much data showing that’s the primary reason why companies aren’t hiring. Rather it’s plummeting consumer demand due to massive unemployment and extreme losses in overall wealth due to the housing market meltdown.

So it must be the stimulus, right? The dreaded stimulus that apparently not only did nothing but made things worse (even though job creation went up right after the stimulus and continued so – albeit not amazingly – until this past month or so, which coincidentally aligns with the end of most of the stimulus).

Is that the failed policy then that we can’t dream of repeating? Certainly it’s not the third of the package that was all tax cuts, since tax cuts are always a good idea (except when they’re not, right, Republicans?). And if that was what caused the spike in jobs, then shouldn’t the Republicans be pointing to that as evidence of good policy rather than blasting it?

At what point are taxes so low that there’s zero rebuttal about whether or not they’re working to stimulate the economy when job growth continues at an anemic pace? Because, honestly, we’re pretty much there now. The tax environment is as friendly as its been in recent history for business. Last year, GE not only didn’t pay any taxes on their $14 billion in profits, they got $3.2 billion back from the federal government. (Read: from us taxpayers.)

Why then haven’t they hired thousands of American workers?

Well, according to their own report, GE is planning to hire 8,000 workers in the next 18 months. Even though that’s a year and a half away, let’s just assume for argument’s sake that their tax refund from 2011 is what caused this growth. That would mean that it cost taxpayers $475,000 per job. A bit pricey and unsustainable considering we need over 14 million jobs to get back to where we were before the 2007/2008 calamity.

Even more troubling is that report comes at the same time as another report that’s not nearly as optimistic: it says that GE is moving their X-ray business from Wisconsin to China, with plans to invest $2 billion dollars overseas. They claim that this won’t result in job cuts, which may be true, but it’s hard to see much future American growth if they’re building new facilities in and moving business to China. Moving industries out of America rarely creates jobs in America.

And now I’ll let Andrew Sullivan finish this off with some nuggets of worthwhile factual information, his emphasis:

One third of the hated stimulus was tax cuts. Obama is now proposing an extension of the payroll tax cut. Tax revenues are at their lowest in fifty years and tax rates are lower than under Reagan. Obama even agreed to extend the Bush tax cuts for two more years. If tax cuts are the solution, why aren’t we booming?

Anyone?

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The jobs crisis has been shoved under the rug in favor of other issues like the debt ceiling crisis and the Libyan massacre crisis. Now that there’s nothing but football and baseball to divert us from the fact that 14 million of us don’t have jobs, it’s finally come to the forefront of the federal government’s to-do list.

President Obama is going to announce some jobs plan tomorrow night and it should probably come as no surprise that it will be underwhelming. The reality is that we still have divided government and the Republicans completely disagree with every policy that the Democrats put forward, and vice versa. (Although, the difference between the two is that the Democrats keep enacting Republicans’ policies despite controlling two-thirds of the federal government.)

Since our government is representative of the general populace (at least, that’s the idea), it’s telling that we’re just as divided and conflicted over what to do about government spending and solving this jobs crisis as our elected officials.

According to this chart, much of our government spending evens out in 20 years, except for health care costs, which go up linearly to over 12 percent of GDP by 2051.

So, we know where the issue is in our budget. And we know that people, in theory, favor spending cuts to raising taxes. Per Reason.com 57 percent of Americans want primarily cuts in government spending. Even CNN’s poll found the same thing, although their poll revealed that 63 percent also favor raising taxes on the richest Americans and businesses as well as part of the overall debt reduction measures.

Great! Everyone agrees we need to cut spending. And we know where we need to cut. Done deal?

Not so fast. It turns out that an overwhelming majority opposes cuts to Medicaid – a Washington Post poll says 72 percent. A decent majority of 54 percent also oppose raising the Medicare eligibility age.

Since everyone is so desperate to cut government spending, and since no one wants to cut health care costs, that’s why we get the cuts we’ve seen happening: proposed future cuts in areas like defense that could end up not going through should the whole super-committee figure out something else. On the surface, it looks like we’ve made progress and the Republicans can claim victory to their cuts and the Democrats can say they’re not socialists out to just punish the rich with excessive taxes.

But really? For anyone crunching the numbers, our debt crisis has hardly been averted.

Perhaps that’s why, per a McClatchy-Marist poll, 59 percent of Americans prefer tackling the debt now even if it means slowing the economy down even further. You can blame the Republicans for being obstructionists when they adamantly refuse to add more to the debt to help fix the jobs crisis with new stimulus (except with their own proposed budget that added $5 trillion to the deficit over the next decade), but they seem to be voicing the opinions of a strong section of Americans.

For whatever reason, the fact that 14 million Americans are unemployed (and another 8.8 million not even counted anymore as they’ve completely dropped out of the workforce) doesn’t seem to faze a large swath of Americans, preferring to deal with an increasingly bleak jobs crisis for longer in order to cut down the debt, even though these two are connected. With fewer people working, that’s fewer taxes being paid to the government. It also means more revenue going out in the form of aid and unemployment benefits. It means less consumer demand, which means fewer business transactions, which means again, less revenue going to the government.

By solving the jobs crisis, we simultaneously help ease the debt crisis, since it stands to reason that getting more people to work will help curb our spending and increase our revenue without touching taxes.

But we can’t expect our politicians to listen to reason when a majority of us voters can’t either. I don’t know what the answer is. Perhaps more stimulus, which has a slim-to-none chance of getting passed through this Congress. (The Republicans are even talking of not renewing what little stimulus still exists out there for the average workers: the payroll tax cut – which means a tax hike. So you know they’re really against a stimulus when they’re in favor of tax hikes, which they’re scarcely in favor of.)

It’s no wonder we have so much faux-action in Washington. Since there’s no majority that agrees on the same way to fix it, looks like we’re destined to have this stalemate. And of the not-so-exciting options on the table, that might just be the worst possible response to this jobs crisis.

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A hot phrase these days regarding middle class taxes, particularly coming from pundits and guests on conservative TV like Fox News, is “skin in the game” — implying that the lower near-50 percent of earners in America who don’t pay federal income tax due to 1) their lack of income and 2) government programs like the Earned Income Tax Credit, need to pay something in order to warrant them receiving any benefits from Washington.

But what “game” are they referring to?

The only definition could be the game of federal income taxpayers since even the poor pay taxes if not on their income. There are plenty of middle class taxes on Americans, like the payroll taxes for Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid that affect every worker regardless of income level on nearly every dollar they make, as well as sales taxes that hit people with nearly every item they purchase.

In fact, contributions to Social Security is capped, meaning that no matter how much you make over $106,800, you don’t pay any extra into the system. Someone making $1 million a year will pay the same amount as someone making $107,00, making that contribution seem smaller and smaller as you make more money — less skin in the game, so to speak, while still a weekly burden to the poor.

So, it’s not as if the bottom 60 percent – who, combined, earned the same amount last year as the top 1 percent of earners – have no skin in the game.

The game we should be looking at is the overall American economy, not this myopic view of only income taxpayers. It’s not some fiscally pure notion seeking fairness and equality to want everyone to pay a share of their income to Uncle Sam since these same people are not remotely in favor of taxing hedge fund managers – some making billions of dollars per year  – at their equivalent income tax rate instead of the current loophole that allows them to only be taxed at the capital gains rate – which is roughly the same rate that a married couple making $25,000 would pay. For everyone to have skin in the game, per those rudimentary terms, then those clamoring for the poor to do their part should be also demanding the same of the rich.

But this isn’t about that.

The dwindling middle class already has plenty of skin in the game. They stand to lose much more than the rich if they have to pay more to the government while programs that benefit them the most get cut. Programs like public education. This year, some state colleges in California have had to raise their fees by at least 22 percent — some up to 30 percent higher than last year — because of state budget shortfalls.

The cost of education has already been skyrocketing and we all know that those with college degrees have a drastically lower unemployment rate (4.5 percent compared to 12 percent) and much higher average salary over their lifetimes than those with just a high school diploma; meaning, that as fees go up and fewer lower income families can afford to send their kids to college, that’s more people stuck in lower paying jobs — or more people going into even more debt to climb out of their station in life. As the lower classes try to stay competitive with the wealthy, they find themselves burdened with more and more debt just to keep the playing field even.

That’s just one example. And if that’s not skin in the game, I don’t know what is. Because the game is about being a member of American society, of which we’re all a part regardless of how little is collected from middle class taxes. And the more of us who are involved in the economy, the better we all are, including the very rich. Kicking the poor while they’re already bearing the overwhelming brunt of this Great Recession makes no sense.

The richest one percent of households in America possess as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent combined. That we should be damning the middle and lower classes for not pulling their weight as their wages drop, as their jobs disappear overseas, as their buying power shrinks, is sleight of hand by the plutocracy to keep our attention focused on anything but the handful of major corporations who gain more and more control over our country and its policies.

Don’t buy into it.

Photo courtesy of RLHyde’s Flickr Photostream.

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The debt ceiling crisis has dominated the national dialogue for months now, to the point where we don’t even bother talking about how we’re still fighting in Libya despite President Obama’s declaration that it’d be a matter of weeks not months, nor does it get much press that Iraq was the deadliest month for American troops in the past two years.

But it sure has been entertaining political theater. In fact, it’s so much like a Hollywood blockbuster that I thought it might be worth looking back at some movies that could end up being extremely prescient metaphors for our current debt ceiling debate.

We’re nearing the end of the second act, with all the tension building as the  ticking clock of the August 3rd deadline looms so close and the parties look like they’re nowhere near a deal.

Depending on how it all works out, here are some possible cinematic analogues to the debt ceiling crisis that we’re witnessing daily on cable news:

Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines – After an exhilarating back-and-forth chase sequence after chase sequence that we swear we’ve seen before almost exactly, we come to some agreement at the 11th hour (hallelujah!) only to find that Moody’s lowers our credit rating anyway (Skynet is the Internet!), jacking up interest rates (launching nuclear strikes at Russia!) and tanking the already sluggish economy even more (robopacalypse!). At least John Connor is still alive and kicking so he can send a savior into the past later in the future to save the past from the future even though the future is inevitable so either way the world ends up as burning rubble.

2012 — Both parties are too busy blaming each other for the debt ceiling crisis and making competing bills that have no chance of being approved by the other party (or even by their own party) that they miss the deadline, we go into default, the global economy collapses, mass chaos and world wars until a fraction of the population is left alive but everything is better now that we can start over from a clean slate now that we’ve learned our lesson about the dangers of fiscal irresponsibility. Directed by Roland Emmerich.

Nick of Time — Obama as Johnny Depp and Boehner as Christopher Walken, not that one is the good guy and the other is the bad guy, but more that Boehner manages to have the upper-hand despite controlling only 1/3rd of the government but he’s holding the economy hostage much like Depp’s daughter and so Obama finds himself between a rock and a hard place just like Johnny — kill the governor or your daughter dies. Cave to the Republicans or America defaults. This one actually ends well even if it’s rather unbelievable. The daughter lives in the end and Boehner’s time as Speaker of the House ends as the freshman House Republicans cannibalize him for striking any deal that Obama agreed to. But you can’t imagine that Depp and his daughter are going to be emotionally sound any time after that ordeal.

Pretty Woman — The prostitute with the heart of gold. The businessman who learns the value of building a product rather than tearing companies apart just to make a dollar (and also puts aside the fact that his new-found love used to have sex for money while trolling Hollywood Boulevard). In this case, they’re one and the same — politicians on all sides whoring themselves out to big business for campaign donations and the expense of the middle class (dignity, STDs, etc.). You get the idea. Also the least likely scenario to end up coming to fruition in real life. 2012 is more realistic than this fairy tale. Maybe if Go West were providing the soundtrack to CSPAN it would give us that same optimistic feeling. Go West makes everything better. Even a debt ceiling crisis.

Heaven’s Gate — Nothing good comes from this one. Director Michael Cimino went drastically over budget on his Western epic, reportedly having sets rebuilt from the ground up because minor details that weren’t even going to be captured on screen weren’t up to his standards. It was one of the biggest bombs in all of Hollywood history, destroying Cimino’s career and bankrupting the studio that funded it, United Artists. A total disaster for just about everyone involved except for the actors, many of whom still have careers to this day, 30 years later. Substitute United Artists with the global economy, Michael Cimino for average Americans, and the actors for the politicians. Arguably a worse outcome than 2012.

The Sixth Sense — Everything’s leading up to this supernatural climax where the little kid can see dead people and Bruce Willis’s wife won’t speak to him and we find out – gasp! – Willis has been dead the whole time! What a twist! Substitute the Congress for Haley Joel Osment and the rest of us watching this political theater are the movie’s audience only to find Obama come out of left field by invoking the 14th Amendment. This whole charade was just a sham! All just exciting political theater to provide us new entertainment since all movies this summer are either remakes or adaptations! The debt ceiling could be raised this whole time! You got us M. Night Obamamaylan.

I’ve got my money on Nick of Time. But there’s a totally possible chance of T3.

But actually, I think the real winner of this debt ceiling crisis is:

AVP: Alien vs. Predator — The movie’s tagline was “Whoever wins, we lose.” I think that just about sums it all up to a tee.

Photo courtesy of Heritage Vancouver’s Flickr Photostream.

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Much of that inchoate anger that stemmed from the economic meltdown, the bank bailouts, and massive unemployment coalesced into the Tea Party movement, misguidedly aiming it all at the government for the bailouts rather than the banks for their pivotal role in the economic meltdown.

New York Times columnist William D Cohan reminds us not to let go of our anger, pointing to the recent rallies and demonstrations against Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker over collective bargaining rights for teachers unions, wondering why Americans don’t seem to be doing much of anything against the banks who haven’t gotten so much as a slap on the wrist for their pivotal role in the current recession.

Cohan openly calls for the Justice Department to release the findings of their investigation to explain to the American public just why they are not bringing charges to any of the bankers involved in the meltdown (aside from those in Bear Stearns who were already found not guilty in court and Raj Rajaratnum, who was convicted of insider trading at Galleon Group, a hedge fund, which wasn’t an activity that had any impact on the economic meltdown as his crimes resulted in about $60 million, not the trillions that were lost and cost in the financial crisis).

I’d be curious to read that, but I don’t imagine that there’s anything to tell. Because the reality is that the problem wasn’t just by a few bad eggs: it was our entire economic system. With banks able to leverage so much capital – during the heyday before the collapse upwards of 30 times the amount of money they had on hand – there was no reason to not get overextended while people were making billions of trades. Of course the bottom dropped out and everything went to hell in a handbasket.

So, I don’t think that people are losing their anger. They just don’t know what to do about it. They feel powerless. Those who voice their vitriol find it easier to point to a political party or to a catchphrase like “big government” as the culprit than understanding the complex relationship between investment banks, deposit banks, the Fed, the Treasury, insurance companies, hedge funds, and mortgage-backed securities.

And even if you’re one of the few who do understand that intertwined network of money transfers that involve more zeroes than most people can even fathom, how do you protest an entire system? It’s not as if Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were the only culprits. Or JP Morgan. Or Goldman Sachs. Or AIG. Or the NYSE. Or the SEC. It was everyone. It was the whole damned thing and nearly everyone in it.

And especially, how do we protest that system when so many us aren’t part of that game? I don’t have any investments. I’m one of those Americans that have the opposite of investments – I have debts. (People invest in me, is how I like to call my debt burden. Sounds so much more impressive, doesn’t it?) I suppose I could pull my money out of my Chase bank since it used to be Washington Mutual but got bought out by JP Morgan after it failed; but I doubt they’d miss my several hundred dollars that I keep in there on a regular basis. Not when they’re making money off borrowing from the Fed at a miniscule amount of interest and then turning around and lending it out at much higher rates — or, rather, in this case, buying bonds from the government; essentially, lending that very money back to the federal government at a higher interest rate than they borrowed it initially. And when I say “federal government,” of course that means “taxpayers.” Incredible, right? This is actually happening.

The anger gets superseded by frustration because there just doesn’t seem to be any recourse that we can do on an individual basis to make any sort of difference or dent. Certainly it’s not electing “the other guy” every two or four years; that’s shown it doesn’t work when it comes to this problem since everyone is beholden to the big banks.

Perhaps the best thing we can do is to continue to keep this conversation going. To not become complacent to the point of just accepting this as the status quo. But again, I just don’t know how much that will change. So far that’s all we’ve been doing and the banks are turning profits already while we still have 9 percent unemployment and over 13 million Americans out of work. I just wish I knew what to do.

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Seemingly moments after President and First Lady Obama invited rapper/actor/poet Common to the White House for an “Evening of Poetry” for students, the conservative media machine launched into Defcon 1 full-court press blasting the choice, going so far on Fox News’ Hannity TV show to even give this whole event a name: “The Invitation.”

It’s beyond laughable. I mean the fact that anyone cares about some poetry night (honestly: no one cares about poetry; name the current poet laureate and any other poet other than Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Shakespeare, Dr. Seuss, or Shel Silverstein… go ahead, I’m serious) at the White House is a rather coup, I must say, since I’m pretty sure most Americans have much more relevant issues to worry about in their lives.

Like Common or not, it’s irrelevant. But, what’s truly worthless is bashing the Obamas’ choice to have him perform at the event as being an affront to “class and decency,” as Sarah Palin called it. The blanket conservative response is to point to a couple lines of one poem, taken out of context, that sound like he’s advocating killing cops and is against former President George W. Bush. (Yes, this only perpetuates the notion that conservatives are tone-deaf when it comes to art in general, solidified by their desire to cut funding to the National Administration of the Arts of all things.)

It’s altogether the wrong response. Sure, it unifies the all-white suburban parents who have never left the towns they grew up in by placating to their ignorant notions that all black kids wear baggy jeans, stroll through class wearing headphones blasting that rap music, and speak only in Ebonics. But those people were most likely already voting Republican anyway.

But it’s no surprise that this is their response, since that’s been the way to treat minorities for the past ten years: marginalize, demonize, ostracize. Instead of bringing the Muslim community even more into the American fray after the attacks on 9/11, they pushed them out, conflating regular American Muslims with terrorists, under the guise of making us safer. And here with someone as ridiculously non-threatening as Common — honestly, this guy was in a romantic comedy where he falls in love with Queen Latifah, for crying out loud, a movie whose entire theme is that true beauty is on the inside — instead of just doing the least amount of work by ignoring it entirely, they’ve tried to expose him as this gun-toting, violence mongering, anti-establishment boogeyman to support the tired notion that Obama is some radical. What a waste of energy.

Instead of further marginalizing people (don’t conservatives remember that when kids hear their parents tell them not to listen to something/someone, that’s exactly what they end up listening to!?), the better move is to do what Obama did: invite them over. Then you’ll see that he’s not the boogeyman that you think he is.

Bill O’Reilly defended Fox News against Jon Stewart’s epic takedown on The Daily Show, arguing again that it’s not so much about Common as an artist, rather how inappropriate the decision was by Obama to have him present at the White House. He points to Stewart bringing up President George W. Bush honoring Johnny Cash – a man who also aligned himself with criminals and talked of shooting men just to see them die – and Sean Hannity being friends with Ted Nugent as being pointless arguments since it doesn’t make it okay just because a Republican president did it, too. But that’s not the argument that Stewart is making. He’s simply pointing out the conservative hypocrisy, how vehemently they attack this Democratic president for things that they support when done by a Republican president. That’s all.

That’s just another day in the life of those who watch Fox News for the “news,” since they live in a bubble. A bubble full of hypocrisy and total nonsense. Everyone’s said something at some point that, taken out of context, could be considered blasphemous. I mean, c’mon: George H.W. Bush invited Easy E to the White House while he was in office. Easy E! The guy who was in a group called N.W.A (Niggaz With Attitude)! A group who had a major hit with a song called “Fuck tha Police”! Like Stewart, I don’t bring this up to mean that Bush 1 made an affront to “class and decency” by that invitation at all. Quite the contrary: it was fine of Republicans and Bush 1 to invite Easy E to the White House just like it’s fine for Obama to invite Common to the White House.

People aren’t all bad. People aren’t all good. We all live in that gray area of imperfection, trying to make sense of this world and ourselves in it. The more we can learn from each other – the good, the bad, the ugly – the better we will all be. Ignoring it doesn’t make it go away and the more we can understand the other side of the coin, the more likely we’ll make better decisions – and, in the case of politicians, better policies. Which will only help us all.

Image courtesy of Tom Lohdan’s Flickr Photostream.

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The world didn’t change with the news that 9/11 terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden had been killed in a raid by Navy SEALs on his sprawling compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. Facts surrounding just what happened during the late-night incursion continue to shift as the White House releases conflicting, changing information every single day.

As of yesterday, President Obama has said that he will not release photos of bin Laden’s dead body to the public.

To be sure, there’s no way any civilian can truly know what happened that night. Nor with anything to do with bin Laden’s demise. Interestingly enough, while the facts around his death remain extremely mysterious despite the accepted fact that he’s indeed dead and was killed in a raid this week, the event has much less to do with reality and much more to do with how one perceives reality. That is, bin Laden’s death is a litmus test for determining one’s personal view of the world.

For those who believe that torturing KSM and other Guantanamo Bay inmates back in 2004 was a good thing will find this the essential evidence proving their case. For those who think that Osama has been dead for years can point to the whole throwing-bin-Laden-over-the-aircraft-carrier as evidence to their case. For those who think that the government is using this as way to solidify Obama’s re-election point to those same things, too. For those who placed all their anger from 9/11 into him, this is a time to rejoice and celebrate. For those who consider his death to be just as depressing as the pain and misery he caused, you’re right, too. Even if you think that bin Laden is still alive and well, you have your angle on arguing that, too.

Basically, nothing has changed. In a world where facts don’t matter – even if they’re readily available to the public – opinions reign supreme, needing no breaking news to change one’s view of the world. Even when public enemy number one gets a couple bullets through the face, the disparate factions within America can’t agree. Even when the one person that everyone, regardless of creed, party, affiliation, or philosophical stance can agree was a less-than-good human being gets wiped off the face of the earth, that’s not enough to share a moment of all being on the same side.

Within minutes, politics were involved. I posted a Facebook status update before Obama even took to the podium, where I said, “So, we can stop invading Arabic countries now that bin Laden is dead, right?” Sure there were some Likes, but there were also a number of people telling me to forget the politics for the night. As if bin Laden’s death somehow superseded politics. I didn’t, and still don’t, quite understand how someone who was the face that launched a thousand ships, troops, and tanks into wars that still rage on could possibly be separated from politics.

But after nearly ten years, bin Laden has become exactly what we all want him to be. He’s been a ghost for a decade. A specter. Vapor. A boogeyman in our collective consciousness that has embodied whatever evils we have wanted him to carry. And now there’s just us. Left to our own devices, we’ve shown that we’re only capable of using his death to serve our own ends. His demise means everything, but it means absolutely nothing. Everyone who was at odds with each other before – pro-enhanced interrogationers vs. anti-torturers, leftists vs. rightists, Obama-is-a-commies vs. Obama-is-the-saviors, birthers vs. non-birthers, Palin supporters vs. Palin haters, MSNBC vs. FNC, you name it vs. you name the other – remain at odds with each other, pointing to aspects of bin Laden’s death (and the reports around his death) as support for their side.

It’s win-win. Or lose-lose.

No matter how you slice it, this supports your view of the world. So in that sense, we’ve all won with bin Laden’s death. But we’ve also all just propagated our divided status quo. And that’s fine. Well, it’s not fine but it’s what we’ve got. And if killing the guy behind the atrocious 9/11 events can’t change that, it seems that nothing will.

Photo courtesy of The White House’s Flickr Photostream.

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