Rand Paul says half those on disability are “gaming the system.” Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan says banks are under assault.

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Did libertarian Republican Rand Paul just have his version of Mitt Romney’s “47% of people are takers,” moment?

“What I tell people is, if you look like me and you hop out of your truck, you shouldn’t be getting a disability check,” said Paul, adding. “You know, over half the people on disability are either anxious or their back hurts. Join the club. Who doesn’t get up a little anxious for work every day and their back hurts? Everybody over 40 has a back pain.”

I’m not sure what club he wants me to join.

The “I never had to do a job requiring actual physical labor in my life” club?

I’m almost 67. My back hurts. And it is too late for me to join his club.

Paul’s current net worth is estimated at $2.5 million.

Which, by the way, puts him in the bottom tier of U.S. Senators.

If Paul, who is 52, has back pain, maybe it’s from his golf game. Maybe the club he wants me to join is his Country Club. Which I’m guessing may not allow folks like me to join.

Donald Trump and Rand Paul.

Meanwhile J.P. Morgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon is complaining that banks are under assault.

Paticularly his bank.

“Banks are under assault,” Mr. Dimon said in the call with reporters. “In the old days, you dealt with one regulator when you had an issue. Now it’s five or six. You should all ask the question about how American that is, how fair that is.”

In case you aren’t upset enough about how one of the world’s largest financial institutions has to answer to five or six regulators, Dimon plays the China card.

“America has been the leader in global capital markets for the last 50, 100 years,” he said. “I look at it as a matter of public policy. I wouldn’t want to see the next JPMorgan Chase be a Chinese company.”

Today’s message from the one percent:

Forty percent of the disabled are gaming the system and the world’s largest banks have to answer some un-American questions.

J.P. Morgan might become a Chinese company?

That doesn’t really keep me up at night.

Sunday links.

The Civic Committee’s plan for Chicago. H/T Karen Lewis.

Ed Week’s Stephen Sawchuk wonders what critics of corporate school reform will say about the half million bucks that Bill Gates gave to the NEA Foundation to fund collaboration. Easy answer. It sucks.

Here is a list of some of the panelists and presenters who will be at the Save Our Schools conference in Washington DC , August 3 through 5th.

Mitt Romney will address the NAACP on his contributions to the fight for Civil Rights. It should be a short speech.

Why is Governor Christie angry?

Amy Goodman in Spain on the 75th anniversary of the fascist’s bombing of Guernica, made infamous by the painting by Pablo Picassso. Perhaps the greatest paining of the 20th Century.

The kids at Politico, the ones who still have jobs because no screeching wingnuts have scared their bosses into firing them yet, had a little scoopling to share with us today. It seems that, in an effort to convince The Board to hire him to be CEO of America LLC, Willard Romney is planning to make a tour of 1947 foreign-policy hot-spots. He is passing on Suez and the Plain Of Jars, but he’s going to go and bore people in Germany and in Poland, where he plans to issue a stern warning to the Soviet overlords, particularly cautioning Khrushchev and the rest of the Politburo not to meddle in the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire. Or something.

“I’m talking about something like the Condi Rice essay in Foreign Affairs in 2000 laying out the Bush vision (which a number of candidates did in 2007 too). The party needs its nominee to lay out a post-Bush, post-Obama foreign policy. [John] McCain’s vision was essentially Bush with less forethought. The country needs and expect a coherent critique from Romney of Obama’s foreign policy and a layout of his vision for the future as well.”

By all means, let’s go back to the advice given by the Typhoid Mary of National Security Advisors. And Bush’s foreign policy had forethought? Who knew? Romney’s just dolt enough on this stuff to take this advice. I just hope he doesn’t piss off Gomulka too much. Charlie Pierce

Romney wants us to to talk about inequality in quiet rooms.

The other day I was sitting through a school staff meeting. It was terrible.

Under our current administration, each meeting seems worse than the last.

Pointless. A checklist of what counts as poor professional practice.

We sat through two consecutive 20 minute power point presentations that had no context, no connection to each other or to any real needs we had. The sound on the last one didn’t work, so every bullet point was read to us.

At the conclusion, the Type 75 asked if there were any questions. I raised my hand and said, “I have a question. Do you think that none of us can read?”

She looked at me and said, “I don’t think I will respond to that,” as if I were a rude child.

Which brings me to an exchange between NBC’s Matt Lauer and Mitt Romney from the Tribune’s Eric Zorn’s blog:

HOST MATT LAUER: When you said that we already have a leader who divides us with the bitter politics of envy, I’m curious about the word envy. Do you suggest that anyone who questions the policies and practices of Wall Street and financial institutions, anyone who has questions about the distribution of wealth and power in this country, is envious? Is it about jealousy, or is it about fairness? 

 MITT ROMNEY: You know, I think it’s about envy. I think it’s about class warfare. I think when you have a president encouraging the idea of dividing America based on 99 percent versus one percent, and those people who’ve been most successful will be in the one percent, you’ve opened up a wave of approach in this country which is entirely inconsistent with the concept of one nation under God. And the American people, I believe in the final analysis, will reject it. 

 LAUER: Are there no fair questions about the distribution of wealth without it being seen as envy, though? 

 ROMNEY: You know I think it’s fine to talk about those things in quiet rooms and discussions about tax policy and the like. But the president has made this part of his campaign rally. Everywhere he goes we hear him talking about millionaires and billionaires and executives and Wall Street. It’s a very envy-oriented, attack-oriented approach and I think it’ll fail.

These days, the most important thing seems to be that we should be polite.

Don’t complain when professional teachers are treated with contempt.

Don’t bring up income inequality except in quiet rooms.

Keep your voices down. Shhh. Be polite.

Scott Walker’s Wisconsin blooper.

It ranks up there with Mitt Romney’s “I like firing people.”

Wisconsin’s anti-union governor, Scott Walker, has plastered a billboard claiming he creates jobs right in front of the Janesville GM plant.

Which is closed and shuttered.

Wisconsin voters are a week away from filing enough signatures to have a recall election on the governor.

The photo of the Walker billboard has gone viral, of course.

The internet is tough on stupid politicians these days.

So, a new billboard went up quickly:

Hat Tip: Defend Wisconsin.

No honor among thieves. Wing-nuts defend Romney when it comes to job destruction.

Some of the crazy right-wingers in the GOP would rather lose the White House than elect Mitt Romney, in spite of his claim of being conservative. He’s just not conservative enough for the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity.

But when Newt Gingrich came out with a blistering video on the job destruction practices of Bain Capital when Mitt ran it, they suddenly close ranks behind Mitt.

Firing workers is what they like about Romney.

Politico reports:

Conservative blogger John Hawkins spends the vast majority of a post Monday morning criticizing Romney, but adds that Bain Capital’s work was productive.

“On balance, Romney’s experience at Bain Capital should be perceived as an asset… Bain Capital did more good than harm,” Hawkins writes at RightWingNews.

Of course, this didn’t stop Hawkins from excoriating Romney as a “mediocre, unpopular governor in Massachussetts [whose] signature piece of legislation, Romneycare, was an enormous failure” and “supported TARP.”

“Public employee pensions.” Code words for public employee unions.

Teachers and other public employees who are part of state pensions systems are in the cross hairs for corporate America.

The narrative that the corporate PR machine has created has two components. One part is that public employees are making out like bandits by getting huge retirement benefits that are not available and at the cost of private sector employees. The other part of the narrative is that if public employees don’t surrender these benefits voluntarily, they will be taken from them.

The real agenda is that public pensions are code words of public employee unions. As the largest sector of organized workers in the United States, public employee unions, and particularly teacher unions are the thorniest thorns for corporate interests. These interests see public pensions as a huge wedge issue to divide public employees from their unorganized private sector brothers and sisters.

The recent report from the Economic Policy Institute undermines the myth of the public pension bandits.

The study analyzes workers with similar human capital. It controls for education, experience, hours of work, organizational size, gender, race, ethnicity and disability and finds that, compared to workers in the private sector, state government employees are undercompensated by 7.55% and local government employees are undercompensated by 1.84%. The study also finds that the benefits that state and local government workers receive do not offset the lower wages they are paid.

So, when New Jersey Governor Chris Christie claims that “There are two classes of people in New Jersey: public employees who receive rich benefits, and those who pay for them” and Mitt Romney argues,  “Average government workers are now making $30,000 a year more than the average private-sector worker,” the data shows that they lie. And we see the ultimate aim to go after the unions.

The New Republic’s Jonathan Cohn asks a good question:

To what extent is the problem that the retirement benefits for unionized public sector workers have become too generous? And to what extent is the problem that retirement benefits for everybody else have become too stingy?