Winners & Losers: Herman Cain Talks Buffett Rule, Racists Attack Trayvon

Bigot hack Trayvon Martin's Facebook account, Obama targets the rich and more

This week’s edition of Winners and Losers focuses on taxes for the wealthy and the continued smear campaign against Trayvon Martin.

Should the wealthy pay more taxes than working people do? Democrats think so, but Republicans oppose the Buffett Rule, which would stop the wealthy from getting a pass come Tax Day.

On a different and despicable note, a white supremacist has reportedly hacked into Travyon Martin’s email and social networking accounts.

Winner: The United States economy is still sluggish, a situation that largely hurts the working and middle classes more than the wealthy, but Republicans still fervently support the rich.

Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan, chair of the House Budget Committee, just released a new budget that gives the rich tax breaks. Meanwhile, Herman Cain has spoken out against the Buffett Rule, President Barack Obama’s proposal to make the rich pay a higher share of taxes than the middle class. Republicans describe this move as class warfare, but it’s the right thing to do considering that our economy will never fully bounce back if the middle class isn’t financially stable.

[ALSO READ: Mitt Romney Doesn’t Care About the Poor]

On Thursday, the White House Office of the Press Secretary issued a statement about why Obama supports more taxes for the rich.

“The President proposed the Buffett Rule to ensure a very basic principle of fairness: millionaires shouldn’t pay less in taxes as a share of their income than middle class families pay. The President believes our system must ask the wealthiest to pay their fair share, while protecting 98 percent of Americans from seeing their taxes go up at all.”

Congress will vote on the issue in a few weeks.

Loser: It’s hard to imagine that white supremacists could sink any lower than they already are, but on Thursday the gossip website Gawker.com reported that a white supremacist hacked into Trayvon Martin’s email and social networking accounts.

The racist hacker, who uses the name Klanklannon, posted purported messages from Trayvon’s Facebook account to the message board 4chan. The hacker claims that the messages prove that Trayvon smoked marijuana habitually and even dealt drugs, an assumption he made because of a picture in which the 17-year-old, killed last month by a man of white and Hispanic heritage in a gated community in Florida, posed with a large amount of cash.

Gawker suggests that the messages Klanklannon posted are a mixture of real and fake. Not only did Klanklannon try to smear Trayvon, he also changed the youth’s passwords to racial slurs such as “niggerniggernigger” for Gmail and “coontrayvonnigger” for Twitter.

[SUBSCRIBE TO LOOP 21 RSS FEED]

Gawker reports that Trayvon’s Twitter and Gmail accounts have since been deactivated, but his MySpace page is still up. Gawker notes that Trayvon’s Gmail messages show that he was interested in college and preparing to take the SATs but the white supremacist failed to publicize these messages because they paint a portrait of a typical American youth rather than a scary black man.