Quote of the Day

Here is a snippet from the book Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber, a book with an endlessly fascinating take on money, debt, and markets over the long history of civilization:

Another way to look at this might be to say that the new age [1450-1971, the Age of Great Capitalist Empires] came to be increasingly uncomfortable with the political nature of money. Politics, after all, is the art of persuasion; the political is that dimension of social life in which things really do become true if enough people believe them. The problem is that in order to play the game effectively, one can never acknowledge this: it may be true that, if I could convince everyone in the world that I was the King of France, I would in fact become the King of France; but it would never work if I were to admit that this was the only basis of my claim. In this sense, politics is very similar to magic -- one reason both politics and magic tend, just ab out everywhere, to be surrounded by a certain halo of fraud

I highly recommend Graeber's book for an alternative analysis of money, debt, and markets. You may not agree with his analysis, but he will help you broaden your understanding through his deep understanding of anthropology/history deeply rooted in 5,000 years of human civilization.

How Media Misleads

Even public media like NPR misleads the consumer of its "news". Here is an excellent example by Dean Baker in his Beat the Press blog:

NPR Editorializes Against Growth In Europe

A Morning Edition segment on the recent European Union summit was headlined, "Most EU Nations to Sign Pact to Stop Overspending." This is both flat-out wrong and misleading.

It is flat-out wrong because the pact restricts deficits, not spending. It is misleading because it implies that the current crisis was caused by overspending. It wasn't. Most of the crisis countries had declining debt to GDP ratios before the downturn and two, Spain and Ireland, were actually running budget surpluses. The problem was caused by housing bubbles and the inept management of the economy by the European Central Bank.

If the media lies, then a representative government is impossible. And that makes the constitutional requirement for a free press a waste of effort. At least a significant majority of the press must be honest enough to tell the truth. A free press can be honest or sold out. The hope of the writers of the US Constitution was that the media was so fragmented and numerous that it would be impossible to manipulate the press as a whole. But the writers of the US Constitution lived in a simpler time when the US press was more like the bloggers of today: numerous and cheap to set up. They didn't envision "big media" with wall-to-wall coverage and a practical monopoly on the public's attention.

The coming of radio made possible the horrible dictators of the 1930s. The monopolization of the media in the late 20th century made possible the overweening power of right wing politics today. It took WWII to break the power of the dictators and give back popular democracies. What will it take to break the present day monopoly of big media and the rampant right wing politics that have created?

Tilting at Windmills

Here is Robert Reich, ex-Secretary of Labor under Clinton making a call from the political left for people to take back control of their government from the corruption of money and power by corporations and the ultra-rich.



Sadly, it looks like the plutocrats have got things pretty well sewn up and only if there is real revolution with blood in the streets will the clock be turned back to a true republic. The US over the last few decades has passed over the Rubicon and like the age of Imperial Rome, there is a pretense of "republican" government, but the real control is in the hands of very few, very very rich people. There is no going back. There is only collapse and decay in America's future. I've given up any pretense of optimism. Dark days are ahead.

The 1% Attack on Public Goods

Here is a bit from a post by Robert Reich on his blog:

America no longer values public goods as we did before.

The great expansion of public institutions in America began in the early years of 20th century when progressive reformers championed the idea that we all benefit from public goods. Excellent schools, roads, parks, playgrounds, and transit systems would knit the new industrial society together, create better citizens, and generate widespread prosperity. Education, for example, was less a personal investment than a public good — improving the entire community and ultimately the nation.

In subsequent decades — through the Great Depression, World War II, and the Cold War — this logic was expanded upon. Strong public institutions were seen as bulwarks against, in turn, mass poverty, fascism, and then communism. The public good was palpable: We were very much a society bound together by mutual needs and common threats. (It was no coincidence that the greatest extensions of higher education after World War II were the GI Bill and the National Defense Education Act, and the largest public works project in history called the National Defense Interstate Highway Act.)

But in a post-Cold War America distended by global capital, distorted by concentrated income and wealth, undermined by unlimited campaign donations, and rocked by a wave of new immigrants easily cast by demagogues as “them,” the notion of the public good has faded. Not even Democrats any longer use the phrase “the public good.” Public goods are now, at best, “public investments.” Public institutions have morphed into “public-private partnerships;” or, for Republicans, simply “vouchers.”

Mitt Romney’s speaks derisively of what he terms the Democrats’ “entitlement” society in contrast to his “opportunity” society. At least he still envisions a society. But he hasn’t explained how ordinary Americans will be able to take advantage of good opportunities without good public schools, affordable higher education, good roads, and adequate health care.

His “entitlements” are mostly a mirage anyway. Medicare is the only entitlement growing faster than the GDP but that’s because the costs of health care are growing faster than the economy, and any attempt to turn Medicare into a voucher — without either raising the voucher in tandem with those costs or somehow taming them — will just reduce the elderly’s access to health care. Social Security, for its part, hasn’t contributed to the budget deficit; it’s had surpluses for years.

Other safety nets are in tatters. Unemployment insurance reaches just 40 percent of the jobless these days (largely because eligibility requires having had a steady full-time job for a number of years rather than, as with most people, a string of jobs or part-time work).

What could Mitt be talking about? Outside of defense, domestic discretionary spending is down sharply as a percent of the economy. Add in declines in state and local spending, and total public spending on education, infrastructure, and basic research has dropped from 12 percent of GDP in the 1970s to less than 3 percent by 2011.

Only in one respect is Romney right. America has created a whopping entitlement for the biggest Wall Street banks and their top executives — who, unlike most of the rest of us, are no longer allowed to fail. They can also borrow from the Fed at almost no cost, then lend the money out at 3 to 6 percent.

All told, Wall Street’s entitlement is the biggest offered by the federal government, even though it doesn’t show up in the budget. And it’s not even a public good. It’s just private gain.

We’re losing public goods available to all, supported by the tax payments of all and especially the better off. In its place we have private goods available to the very rich, supported by the rest of us.

America is becoming a banana republic. As the public sphere melts away, little fiefdoms are left where private armies control access. The rich get "special treatment" and the masses are left to mob the gates and beg for a crust of bread. Sad.

2011 as a Turning Point

Here is a bit from an interesting article by Rick Salutin in The Toronto Star:

Time magazine named The Protester its 2011 “Person of the Year” because, for decades till recently, most protests “seemed ineffectual and irrelevant.” That’s just silly. You can always find resistance and, depending on how you judge, it’s often relevant. ...

What may have been unique this past year was something else: a collapse of the conventional fountains of authority and respect. In the Arab world that meant governments. But in the West, it meant big business and finance. The brilliance of Occupy Wall Street was that it didn’t go to Washington. The Tea Party did; it directed its rage toward politicians and so it was eclipsed by the Occupiers, who targetted the bankers and financiers who control governments. That clearly resonated, but it wouldn’t have, 20 or 30 years ago.

Think back to the torrent of bestselling business bios and takeover epics like Iacocca or Barbarians at the Gate that began around 1980. Business was the hero; government was the “problem” because it impeded business’s freedom (even if business icons like Lee Iacocca demanded and relied on public money). Pro-business think-tanks proliferated; they disgorged “educational” series, often on public TV, by advocates like Milton Friedman. This accelerated through the Clinton-Bush years and beyond. Disdain for the über-rich was unthinkable until —

It wasn’t the crash of 2008 that led to their fall from grace, nor exposure of the greed and stupidity that required a massive public rescue. It was their graceless reaction to the bailouts: no apologies, remorse or gratitude — even faked; just more arrogance, bonuses, takeovers, foreclosures. Wall Street begged to be occupied. The Unrepentant Financier could have been Time’s Person.

...

Whose authority has also declined? How about Time magazine? The newsmag style used to sound authoritative and serenely confident. Now it sounds inane. “Everywhere, it seems, people said they’d had enough. . . . They dissented; they demanded —” Everywhere? Like out my window right now? And “it seems”? Seems to who(m)? Who makes these claims? What voice would you need to actually say words so pompous and vacuous? You can see Jon Stewart (if he did print) wincing as he reads it. Where did that invincible authority go?

The power of authority diminishes when you can hear credible, contesting voices. Print tends to be monotonal and univocal, unlike the oral tradition that preceded it. But the Internet, though it often lacks actual speech, is oral in the sense of interactive, like a Socratic dialogue. In oral mode, less is often more because speech is so laden with gesture, tone etc.; even something as short as a tweet can suffice. That too diminishes normal authority, which likes to rumble on.

Go read the whole article. It is very thought-provoking.

I personally like the analysis that says that our culture is moving from hierarchy where the "experts" dictate to a collective where everybody's voice gets a chance to contend for attention and authority. I understand the need for an organizing principle to reduce the cacophony, but I'm also aware that elitism tends to suffocate the voice of the dissenter and prevents the rise of the new. We need diversity. Life is a race and we need change and innovation to help us to get from here with all its problems to there with its promise of a better future.

Politics in the "Land of the Free (to be Bought & Sold)"

America loves to thump its chest about its "democracy". But the facts say something else. Here is a bit from an article by Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone magazine:

But the ugly reality, as Dylan Ratigan continually points out, is that the candidate who raises the most money wins an astonishing 94% of the time in America.

That damning statistic just confirms what everyone who spends any time on the campaign trail knows, which is that the presidential race is not at all about ideas, but entirely about raising money.

The auctioned election process is designed to reduce the field to two candidates who will each receive hundreds of millions of dollars apiece from the same pool of donors. Just take a look at the lists of top donors for Obama and McCain from the last election in 2008.

Obama’s top 20 list included:

Goldman Sachs ($1,013,091)
JPMorgan Chase & Co ($808,799)
Citigroup Inc ($736,771)
WilmerHale LLP ($550,668)
Skadden, Arps et al ($543,539)
UBS AG ($532,674), and...
Morgan Stanley ($512,232).

McCain’s list, meanwhile, included (drum roll please):

JPMorgan Chase & Co ($343,505)
Citigroup Inc ($338,202)
Morgan Stanley ($271,902)
Goldman Sachs ($240,295)
UBS AG ($187,493)
Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher ($160,346)
Greenberg Traurig LLP ($147,437), and...
Lehman Brothers ($126,557).

Obama’s list included all the major banks and bailout recipients, plus a smattering of high-dollar defense lawyers from firms like WilmerHale and Skadden Arps who make their money representing those same banks. McCain’s list included exactly the same banks and a similar list of law firms, the minor difference being that it was Gibson Dunn instead of WilmerHale, etc.

The numbers show remarkable consistency, as Chase, Morgan Stanley, and Citigroup all gave roughly twice or just over twice as much to Obama as they did to McCain, almost perfectly matching the overall donations profile for both candidates: overall, Obama raised just over twice as much ($730 million) as McCain did ($333 million).

Those numbers tell us that both parties rely upon the same core of major donors among the top law firms, the Wall Street companies, and business leaders – basically, the 1%. Those one-percenters always give generously to both parties and both presidential candidates, although they sometimes will hedge their bets significantly when they think one side or the other has a lopsided chance at victory. That’s clearly what happened in 2008, when Wall Street correctly called Obama as a 2-1 (or maybe a 7-3) favorite to beat McCain.

The 1% donors are remarkably tolerant. They’ll give to just about anyone who polls well, provided they fall within certain parameters. What they won’t do is give to anyone who is even a remote threat to make significant structural changes, i.e. a Dennis Kucinich, an Elizabeth Warren, or a Ron Paul (hell will freeze over before Wall Street gives heavily to a candidate in favor of abolishing their piggy bank, the Fed). So basically what that means is that voters are free to choose anyone they want, provided it isn’t Dennis Kucinich, or Ron Paul, or some other such unacceptable personage.

Go read the original to get the whole story and the links to follow up.

When will the American public wake up to the charade that passes for "democracy" where the rich have bought and sold the whole process and only let the "little people" play bit roles before they are shuffled aside to let the big boys milk the system for what they want.

The whole process is so predictable that Taibbi can already read the presidential election results ten months before the election is held:

Most likely, it’ll be Mitt Romney versus Barack Obama, meaning the voters’ choices in the midst of a massive global economic crisis brought on in large part by corruption in the financial services industry will be a private equity parasite who has been a lifelong champion of the Gordon Gekko Greed-is-Good ethos (Romney), versus a paper progressive who in 2008 took, by himself, more money from Wall Street than any two previous presidential candidates, and in the four years since has showered Wall Street with bailouts while failing to push even one successful corruption prosecution (Obama).

When the "voice of the people" can be ignored because the rich have already bought the result, that isn't "democracy". That is plutocracy.

The Story of America

The great middle class society known as "America" is dead. Dead as a dodo. Buried by the "greed is good" 1980s and the glorification of "me first" family values of the political right over the last few decades.

Here is a nice summary by Bob Lefsetz in his blog The Lefsetz Letter:

What Happened To My Country?

My father was a real estate appraiser.

He started out as an engineer, but that lasted less than a year, he wasn’t an ass-kisser, he couldn’t play the game, he was bounced out.

So he opened a liquor store and tried his hand at commercial real estate. Unsuccessfully, because he didn’t have enough money to purchase property.

Trying to improve his lot in life, he relocated the package store next to an exit by the newly-finished I-95, otherwise known as the Connecticut Turnpike. And when redevelopment hit Bridgeport, his friend Maury Magilnick said no one knew as much about local real estate as my dad, and if he became an appraiser, he’d hire him.

My father spent a week at UConn. Another at the University of Chicago. He got licensed. And with his engineering background and his natural acumen he became a legend in the state, Attorneys General feared him, and my dad garnered the income of a doctor or a lawyer, he sent three children to private universities and graduate schools.

That dream is dead today.

I’m in Vail, Colorado. My family started skiing when I was ten. Used to be an egalitarian sport, you saw Beetles in the parking lot, sandwiches were de rigueur in the base lodge, brought from home. Skiers were not the upper crust, they were us.

No more.

So I’m riding up the lift with a fourth year medical student. I ask him what he’s gonna be.

"An anesthesiologist."

Why? Because he loves it? No, because he can make good bread and vacation and live the high life.

I’d like to tell you I met some musicians on the lift, some regular people, but I kid you not when I tell you the only people I met were in finance. Oh, and there was one dentist.

They traded for the family account. They were "consultants". They worked for hedge funds. They had their own private ski instructors, at $700 a day. They were the 1%.

And everybody in America is scrambling to get into the club.

That’s what’s wrong with the music business. The executives want to be as rich as the bankers, they too want to fly in private jets and tip with hundred dollar bills. What is the right tip these days? For a ride through town? I’m thinking $20, because the bankers have driven up the rate and the employees expect it and they’re struggling to make ends meet.

I grew up in the sixties. We were all in it together. Sure, my dad told me to be a lawyer, so he didn’t have to worry about me, but instead of taking the LSAT, I went to Montreal. There were no corporate recruiters on campus. Life was about personal fulfillment.

But now life is about money.

Either you’ve got it or you’re struggling to get it.

That wannabe anesthesiologist? He’s a Republican. He doesn’t want socialized medicine and he doesn’t want taxes.

Nobody wants taxes. Everybody thinks life is a personal struggle, that there’s no common infrastructure, no freeways, no police department, no power utility.

What’s mine is mine.

And if you don’t watch out, I’m gonna take yours.

No wonder musicians sell out to the Fortune 500. They too want to be rich. But the joke is upon them, they can never be that rich, the corporations laugh at them, they’re pawns in their game.

We live in a completely duplicitous country where no one’s honest, no one does what he believes in, everybody’s just motivated by the money.

And the problem?

PUBLIC EMPLOYEES!

Those teachers ruined the economy. Hell, you can barely make it on a teacher’s salary, you can’t vacation in Vail, Colorado, you’re closed out.

And somehow we accept all this. We shrug our shoulders and say it’s the way it is and will always be.

Why?

I feel like I’ve been asleep for thirty-odd years. While I was pursuing my dream, everybody else was pursuing the dollar. Reagan made greed legitimate and the baby boomers filled that hole and now their kids want more of the same. They just want to play on their hand-helds and feed at the trough. No one wants to innovate, they just want to get rich.

Ever speak to someone in finance? It’s a rare bird who likes it.

They do it for the money.

And with this money they buy up those concert tickets so you can’t get a good seat. They’ve got a shortage of time. When they get to the amusement park, they want to close you out. Get concierge treatment, cut the line…and you think this is okay because you think you’re gonna be rich too.

Ain’t that a laugh.

At least at Middlebury I saw what rich was.

Most people can’t afford a private college education any longer. 50k a year? Hell, public education keeps going up and up. Most people never even get into the game they think they’re gonna win.

There’s a ruling class, pulling the strings, and you’re not a member.

This is not a Democratic or Republican issue. This is a money issue. Money’s corrupted the system. You’ve got to be on the take to get elected. So you’re beholden to the corporations, not the people.

But you’ve read Steve Jobs’s biography and you think you’re gonna make it.

Don’t you get it? The odds of music success are infinitesimal, all the things you want most musicians haven’t got, a house, a spouse, kids, health insurance…

Don’t be angry with me.

And don’t be angry with the music business titans, keeping you out. They’re just worrying about themselves, they don’t care about you, they just want to live in a gated community and vacation where you aren’t.

They’re revolting in Russia. And they overthrew the government in a bunch of Middle Eastern countries. And if you don’t think it can happen here, you’re nuts.

Everybody thinks just because people have flat screens, they’re happy. But have you been following the shenanigans in cable? You’re paying for all this stuff you don’t watch just to keep rich people rich.

Music is a game for the poor. A place where the uneducated with no status can get a bit of notoriety and money. And as long as someone makes it, no one pays attention to the real problem.

The game is rigged.

You’re gonna be left behind unless you start making yourself number one and doing what’s expedient to get ahead.

What kind of country is that?

Not one I want to live in.

P.S. That great middle class of yore? It created the classic rock you’re still listening today. Music was a reasonable pursuit, rock stars were as rich as anybody in America. That framework expired decades ago, rock stars are no longer rich. There are bankers who make $20 million a year every year! So the Grace Slicks of today, people born with a silver spoon in their mouths, don’t go into the arts, it just doesn’t pay. Tom Rush was a Harvard graduate. He revolutionized the folk circuit, he pioneered the singer-songwriter game. Now we’ve just got poor people rapping about Benzes and boats. How fulfilling is that? I get it, they want in. But you used to follow your dreams, not the dollar. But now if you ain’t got the moolah, you’re gonna have a heart attack and no health insurance and you’re gonna be bankrupted. Hell, the dirty little secret is one health episode puts many people in bankruptcy even when they have insurance! But we’ve got to have less corporate regulation and as far as health insurance goes…you’re on your own. Don’t you see, health insurance is a metaphor for our entire country! Can you imagine someone writing "Get Together" today? Come on people now, smile on your brother, everybody get together and love one another right now… Who sings about that? Chumps.

The Occupy movement is trying to raise the dead, get the 99.99% to rise up against the rapacious 0.01% who have bought the politicians and dictate the rules that has put America on a path careening downwards towards doom.

The Mechanics of Class Warfare

First, a bit of humour:

“Give a man a gun and he can rob a bank. Give a man a bank and he can rob the world.”

Next, here is a bit from an article on how right wing political "consultant" Frank Luntz is advising his clients with techniques to deflect the Occupy Wall Street crowd's message of the 99% versus the 1%:

... here’s how Luntz’s 10-strategy playbook should be annotated for the Super Rich who are the real powers behind Luntz’s political clients.

We began with what Yahoo News reporter Chris Moody heard Luntz tell the 29 governors about how to “fight back by changing the way they discuss the movement.” My re-edits shift the focus to the real problem, the growing economic class war between the Super Rich and the 99%. Hopefully to improve the dialogue. Listen:

1. Capitalism is a bad word, don’t say it

Luntz admits: “I’m trying to get that word removed and we’re replacing it with either ‘economic freedom’ or ‘free market’.” He admits the public “prefers capitalism to socialism, but they think capitalism is immoral.” But don’t mention “capitalism?” Impossible: Capitalism is in the genes of these conservative governors. Has been since Adam Smith, the “Wealth of Nations” and 1776.

Deny capitalism exists? They’ll sound hypocritical to both occupiers and their base.

2. Taxing the rich is bad. Say government’s taking from the rich

Clever, say “taking” not “taxing.” This word play will backfire: Luntz admits “If you talk about raising taxes on the rich,” polls show most voters want to tax millionaires. So shift the focus: Say government’s “taking the money from hard-working Americans?”

Luntz is too clever with his Words That Work. He’s also ignoring the fact that billionaires like Buffett, the new Patriotic Millionaires and others see a need for new tax revenues to feed the recovery.

3. Never say middle class: Call them hard-working taxpayers

Luntz admits that most Americans know the governors are not defending the middle class. He also knows polls show most Americans don’t trust the Republicans to fight for the middle class. But the advantage shifts when the buzzwords become “defending hard-working taxpayers.”

Warning: New buzzwords without new policies will ring hollow to many occupiers who are unemployed, lost benefits, lack job prospects or can’t find a new job for their training.

4. Stop talking about jobs, instead talk about careers

Luntz apparently has a very low opinion of the intelligence of occupiers. Folks, the word jobs just is not going away because of our 16% rate of underemployment. And yet Luntz asked his audience: “Everyone in this room talks about jobs,” but who wants a job? Raise your hands, he asked. “Few hands went up.”

But then “he asked ‘who wants a career?’ Almost every hand was raised. So why are we talking about jobs?” I wonder how many of the 99% laughed at that cruel joke. It really is “the economy stupid.” We really need jobs.

5. Never say government spending, it’s government waste

Luntz’s polling apparently tells him that most Americans are not against government spending, on them. But call it government waste, because that “makes people angry.”

6. Compromise is bad. Never admit you’re willing to compromise

The “no-new-taxes” pledge is a must for these 29 governors. Luntz warns: “If you talk about ‘compromise,’ they’ll say you’re selling out.” Your base “doesn’t want you to ‘compromise … replace it with ‘cooperation.’ It means the same thing. But cooperation means you stick to your principles but still get the job done. Compromise says that you’re selling out those principles.”

Unfortunately, the public, especially the 99%, see past the jargon into today’s economic reality, and an “unprincipled” failure to “cooperate.”

7. Tell occupiers, ‘I get it, you’re angry, we’ll fix it.’ Sound sincere

Luntz definitely has chutzpa: “Here are three words for you all: ‘I get it.’ … ‘I get that you’re angry. I get that you’ve seen inequality. I get that you want to fix the system.’” Then, he instructed, “offer Republican solutions to the problem.” What, more solutions? Better ones? Different from the solutions the 99-percenters believe are the problem?

Warning: America’s problem is not about politics. Not Republican political solutions. Nor Democrat. Too self-destructive. No, this is not about politics. This is a class war, a new American Revolution. Luntz’s sweet talk won’t convince governors. Nor their base. Nor the OWS who’ve been conned too often. So please get it. The 99% will smell the insincerity.

8. Entrepreneur or innovator are bad words, say job creator

From a purely behavioral economic standpoint this one is guaranteed to have unintended consequences and backfire. America’s global competitive thrust is driven by innovators and entrepreneurs. Imagine telling Silicon Valley they’re now just “small-business owners” and “job creators.” That’s guaranteed to make them wonder if these 29 states actually support America’s desperately needed “innovation” and “entrepreneurship.”

9. Never ask anyone to sacrifice, especially not millionaires

Luntz admits that “there isn’t an American today … who doesn’t think they’ve already sacrificed. If you tell them you want them to ‘sacrifice,’ they’re going to be pretty angry at you.” Solution? Luntz says “talk about how ‘we’re all in this together.’ We either succeed together or we fail together.”

Afterwards? Once back home in their states, see who still gets the tax breaks … who’s forced to make concessions … who’s still “sacrificing” in a world of politicians who signed that “no-new-taxes-for-the-rich” pledge.

10. Blame Washington, and never take responsibility

No, Luntz does not get the OWS movement yet. These guys are natural enemies. Governors are also in a class war with occupiers. Yet Luntz tells them to tell the 99-Percenters: “You shouldn’t be occupying Wall Street, you should be occupying Washington … occupy the White House because it’s the policies over the past few years that have created this problem.”

Warning, the 99% have long memories, they recall the Bush years, the massive war spending. They remember the 2008 meltdown. They see Wall Street greed unabated, their spending hundreds of millions fighting reforms. They know this is not about politics.

America is in a class war, the Super Rich versus the 99%. And the occupiers are not going away, vanishing into the cold winter nights. They’re already planning their version of an Arab Spring in 2012.

Finally, a little bonus … never, never say bonus!

Luntz also warned his state governors not to use the word bonus if they give staffers any extra money this holiday season. Why? The rest of America is sacrificing. “If you give out a bonus at a time of financial hardship, you’re going to make people angry.” Reframe your bonuses, call them “pay for performance.”

Yes, Luntz remains one of the greatest behavioral economists ever. He could rewire, debug and reprogram individual and collective brains with just a few verbal flip-flops.

Here is the Wikipedia background on Frank Luntz.

Sadly rhetoric can sway. Demagogues use words to bend people to their will. Without an awareness of the cynical lies used to manipulate people, democracy can be crushed. Think 1933 with the ascension of Hitler, the crushing of democracy, and the unleashing of the horrors of the Nazis.

If you don't believe, then seeing is believing. Here is a picture of the rising Jobbik party in Hungary (more info here in a Der Spiegel article):

Click to Enlarge
The maxim of George Santayana still applies:

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

Similarly, those who fail to understand demagogues and "political spin" are condemned to destroy democracy.

What the Elite Offers When You Ask for Democracy

The ultra-rich don't like the bottom 99% "demonstrating". It is just too messy. Those 99% don't have a clear agenda. They don't have polished spokesmen who can step forth with a program.

The elite just don't like the messiness of "democracy". There are too many loose ends. It can't easily be controlled from one centre. So here is what the ultra-rich offer:



The rich like to leave running things to themselves. They have the money, so they can afford to buy the politicians, the police, the judges, the lawyers, the bureaucracy. The above video shows the elite of Egypt beating "good sense" into the heads of recalcitrant Egyptians, foolish people in the bottom 99% who don't understand that their "job" is to serve the rich. The military and police are simply on the street to remind the bottom 99% where their place is in society.

Peddling Lies

Here is a Goldman Sachs partner taking on an activist/reporter in a debate on UK TV. It is interesting to watch this snake in a suit suavely manipulate the "discussion" to deliver all the same right wing talking points of the last 30 years and pretend that he has a revelation about wasteful "socialism". It was capitalism that crashed the system in 2008. And in Europe today, it is private banks who lent the trillions to governments that has created the latest global crisis. It wasn't people receiving pennies to feed themselves of the dollars to get medical care, the bits of money to find housing. It is the greed of bankers and the ultra-rich that has shut down the engine of growth and wants to impose even more "austerity" as they extract more and more from the bottom 99%.



I love the fact that this slimy Goldman Sachs suit claims that the protesters don't have "a clear agenda" and fail to have "spokesmen" to present a clearly laid out agenda. He pulls the big lie technique by claiming that the protests were "flaccid" and that their protests were over "trivial points". He obviously has never been hit by a truncheon or been gassed by police in riot suits. It takes somebody who hold more than "trivial concerns" and a "flaccid stance" to put up with police brutality and arrest. But this is the spin that the big bankers and ultra-rich want to put on it.

What this exposes is the great divide. These snakes in suits are used to quiet deals with money crossing hands to buy politicians and to buy "justice". The people in the street are used to working long hours, they are used to being lied to by politicians, and they have no clear method to get "heard" by the elites. So they go into the streets. This is messy. This is ugly. But if you can't buy the government, buy the police, buy the politicians, you are left with going into the street and getting your head cracked by a police baton. The bankers just can't understand this.

Keith Olbermann Takes Oakland's Mayor to Task

Olbermann starts out by praising Mayor Jean Quan's previous service to Oakland. It is an impressive list. But then he gets down to the horror that she unleashed by turning her police loose on peaceful protesters and makes it utterly, utterly clear the crime she has perpetrated by her actions. You must watch this video:



For a first person narrative by somebody on the ground in Oakland, read this article by Mike Godwin in reason.com:

If you've been following the mainstream media coverage of the Occupy Wall Street protests, odds are that you've heard about events at Occupy Oakland. What you can't tell from the news clips is how the situation has played out for those of us who live here. I can't speak for everyone, but I do know that my reaction, both to the protestors and to the violent police interventions against them, is hardly an uncommon one.

...

The vibe where I was standing was tense. Occasionally an individual shouted at the arrayed police, “This is America! What are you doing here?” Or, “I can't believe you're doing this! We love you guys but what you're doing is wrong!” I didn't think it was a great idea to shout at the (silent but intent) array of police—it wasn't likely they were going to suddenly relent, and I knew they had been wearing heavy riot gear and carrying weapons (including astonishingly large batons) for six or more hours. My instinct was that it was not particularly safe to shout at tired men and women with weapons, no matter how righteous one's outrage is.

...

One guy passing me on the way downtown warned about tear gas. I spotted New York Times reporter Malia Wollan talking into her mobile—as she walked past I heard her describing the apparent effects of the gas on individuals exposed to it. Her account is available here.

Of the people headed toward me, I first thought a disproportionate number were bicyclists—only a few minutes later did I realize, embarrassingly, that there were other reasons for wearing a bicycle helmet that night. The tension in the crowd was palpably building so I decided it was time to head home. Keeping my distance turned out to have been wise, because this is what I missed getting caught up in:



I was also standing 50-100 feet south from where a police officer appears to have thrown a flash grenade into a crowd of people gathered to help 24-year-old Scott Olsen, who suffered massive head injuries after allegedly being struck by a tear gas canister.



I confess that it breaks my heart to watch this clip. If I had seen someone collapsed in the street, I'd have tried to help that person too. These people were apparently punished for their impulse to help.

...

I don’t know how to interpret everything I saw, and I can’t state with any authority what Occupy Oakland or any of the other protests ultimately mean. But I do know this: The millions of dollars California just spent on this crackdown did nothing to dispel or discourage the protestors. In fact, the police intervention has echoed around the world. Occupy Wall Street committed to sending $20,000 to Occupy Oakland and protestors as far away as Tahrir Square in Egypt have expressed their solidarity with the Oakland protestors.

History tends to happen when you least expect it, and my new neighbors have taken their first steps into its pages.

Go read the full article.

If you want to see the sympathy protest in Tahrir Square Egypt for the Occupy Oakland violence, here is a post on BoingBoing with pictures.

Here is political commentary in Wired magazine on the fallout from the police violence at Occupy Oakland:

But the police forces’ violent tactics worked only temporarily, and have, for the moment at least, handed the Occupy movement a moral and political victory so big that not even Occupy protestors seem to recognize it.

The nation, and even much of the world, seemed to recoil in shock from the images coming out of Oakland Tuesday night, where police used tear gas and rubber bullets to disperse unarmed protestors, who built a camp in the city as part of the nationwide protest against an unfair political and economic system.

Critically wounded Marine veteran Scott Olsen became a rallying point for Occupy, following widely seen footage of protestors trying to carry him to safety in the midst of a tear gas assault. There were other pictures and videos: streets littered with rubber bullets, people in wheelchairs trapped in the tear gas, and bloodied faces and bruised bodies of unarmed protestors.

On Wednesday, OccupyOakland’s fortunes reversed.

Oakland Mayor Jean Quan announced that people could reoccupy Frank Ogawa plaza, renamed Oscar Grant plaza by the occupiers in honor of a black Oakland man shot to death by transit police in 2009. When people arrived for the General Assembly, the occupation’s standard open meeting, the grassy area of the plaza was fenced off. But through the course of the evening, and not without violent conflict among the occupiers, the fences came down.

People fought each other over the fences, pulling at each other, some linking arms to protect the fence, and screaming, all while the GA went on in the distance. Despite the fears of those attempting to protect the fence, no police moved in after it went down. The GA proceeded through the evening undisturbed by anything but news choppers overhead and a turn-out too big for the sound system to cover.

But word came in that an attack was imminent on OccupySF across the bay, and a large contingent moved to get on the BART transit to join San Francisco’s Occupiers in Justin Herman Plaza. But when they arrived at the station they found it closed; BART wasn’t letting the occupation on in Oakland, or letting people off at Embarcadero, the station closest to OccupySF.

The roused crowd took to the streets, marching down Broadway towards the police station. They met no resistance. The police stayed a block away on all sides, and melted back in front of the path of the crowd, directing traffic away from the protestor-filled streets of Downtown Oakland. Many protestors were looking for a confrontation with police, but found none — staying peaceful and well behaved, if boisterous and peripatetic. The only property damage I observed were a couple incidents of graffiti-tagging, of which only one was definitely attributable to the OccupyOakland march. There were no broken windows or even overturned trash bins, and police stayed largely out of sight for the evening.

...

During the slow, tweeted protestor pursuit of police, OccupySF drilled for a police raid, practicing locking arms around their camp and removing vital gear from the site. As the hours wore on, many tired occupiers became paranoid, and every bus or van that went by startled people and sent them into conspiratorial speculations. Some occupiers went around writing the National Lawyer’s guild phone number on the arms of occupiers who didn’t already have a lawyer.

Five members of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, several running for mayor, arrived and used the people’s mic to address the occupiers. They stayed put for hours, and many occupiers credited them for preventing the police raid.

On Thursday, the SFPD stretched credulity by telling ABC Channel 7 that the whole thing was a training exercise, resulting in a sarcastic local news report regarding the whole event. At the same time, OccupySF posted a picture of a notice given to businesses around the occupation warning of “…increased activity by the SFPD in the immediate vicinity of One Market Plaza starting around this evening’s commute.”

In Oakland the occupation was returning Thursday, growing from one tent in the reclaimed area Wednesday night to eight tents. OccupyOakland is rebuilding against the background of a campaign to recall Mayor Quan, calls for OPD to be disciplined, solidarity marches around the country and the world, and the New York City GA’s consensus to devote 100 sleeping bags and $20,000 for legal and medical expenses to OccupyOakland.

...

Sheamus Collins, a bartender from Dublin, showed off his rubber bullet wound.

Click to Enlarge
...

No one seemed aware of how crushing their political victory in the last 24 hours had really been.

You Have "Rights" But Just Not Here

Here is an attempt to hold an "assembly to petition the Government for a redress of grievances" on the steps of the Supreme Court. But you get arrested there despite what the US First Amendment says:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

So... the Constitution says you have a right to petition, but the "laws of the land" say not here, not there, and not over there. You have a right, but if you try to exercise that right, you get arrested! Here was an attempt to exercise a Constitutional right and it got the protesters arrested:



The joke is:

The Constitution gave no "rights" to corporations, but the Supreme Court has empowered things to be "people" by giving corporations more rights than people have. Corporations don't need to petition their government because they simply buy the politicians they need.

The reason why the founders of the US put in the First Amendment was that they knew that people would not have the power individually and had to have a mechanism to get the attention of their government. But the government, through laws and legal decisions, has systematically shutdown all access except to those with the money to buy access. The Supreme Court has participated in this farce by twisting the Constitution to ignore facts and make up "new realities" that cater to the very rich in the very process that has corrupted the system!

The Political Program of the Bottom 99%

Here is an excellent statement from a disenchanged 2008 Obama supporter who has given up on Obama and joined the Occupy Wall Street movement:

In October 2008, my wife and I loaded our 6-month-old baby into her car seat and drove six hours to Reno. As 40-something new parents, a weekend road trip to walk precincts for a presidential candidate was not convenient or easy. But when we arrived at the staging ground for volunteers, we were rewarded by an inspiring sight: The line to sign in snaked through a parking lot the length of two football fields. Barack Obama's candidacy had inspired a lot of people to participate in their democracy.

What I most liked about Obama was the independence and intelligence reflected in his position, taken five years earlier when it was not politically expedient, to oppose the Iraq invasion plans well before they had been put into motion. In 2008, as a terrifying financial crisis was unfolding, Obama seemed to have the combination of sound judgment and courage that our country needed in the White House. It seemed reasonable to hope that he might become an FDR-for-our-time who would hold people accountable and get us back on a path toward shared prosperity.

But three years later, not one executive from a major firm involved in the 2008 disaster has been prosecuted. On the contrary, Obama hailed the CEO of the firm that most personified the abuses -- Goldman Sachs -- as a "savvy businessman." But the rest of us continue to be punished for their crimes. We are losing homes, watching our retirements vaporize and struggling with long-term unemployment.

And those least responsible, the young, will ultimately pay the most.

To lead us forward, Obama also needed to explain to the country how wealth and power had become more and more concentrated over several decades and how that trend had reached a critical point at which it was cannibalizing our economy and corrupting our democracy. He needed to put forth a vision for how we would take our country back from the 1 percent that has only continued to amass wealth and power. But such leadership never materialized.

So a few weeks ago, my wife, daughter and I set out on another civic journey. This time the little one was riding her trike as we walked to a park in our neighborhood where about 80 people came together to form Occupy San Jose, a local affiliate of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

There is more. Read the whole article.

The mass media claims that these protesters have "no program" and just a bunch disorganized ex-hippies and college students. False. That is media, owned and operated by the top 1%, making sure that their readers get a distortion instead of the truth, a distortion that will turn them off and insulate them from any meaningful participation in a democratic movement to regain control by the bottom 99%.

Matt Taibbi on the "Occupy Wall Street" Protests

Here is an interview of Matt Taibbi by Don Imus:



His point that these protests are going to help push Washington to do more real change to break up the "too big to fail" banks is good. He does touch on the income disparity and the skewing of wealth to the ultra-rich, but he doesn't go into much detail.

I get a real chuckle at the "straight guy" who shows up in the last two minutes of the video claiming that "if you give all the money from the banks to these people you will destroy jobs". That is a classic right wing distortion. Matt Taibbi had just carefully stated that these people have no "political demands" but are unhappy about the direction of the country. This right wing nut immediately translates that into "they are going to rob the rich and fritter it away on the poor... and that means nobody will have a job". He puts fear into everybody. But that isn't the Occupy Wall Street message. They want a "better society". They want to end the political handout to the big banks. They aren't talking about robbing the rich and destroying jobs. But that "fear message" is the classic way the elite control the poor. A lot of people will be terrified and want to suppress Occupy Wall Street because they are hearing "those people will take away my job!". It isn't true. It is a lie used to defeat social change.

How the Media Makes up "Facts"

Here is a bit from an excellent article in the NY city The Village Voice newspaper. It highlights how the NY Times newspaper in a matter of minutes "changes" the news from one of demonstrators being allowed onto a bridge then cut off and arrested to a much more hostile account where the demonstrators confront the police and force them into arresting a disorderly crowd.

Click to Enlarge
From The Village Voice:

The above photo of juxtaposed screenshots from the New York Times website has been making the rounds on Facebook, and it shows two very different takes for the same story on yesterday's Brooklyn Bridge arrests. The screenshot on the left, from 6:59 p.m., appears to reflect what many protesters are saying: The police tricked them into marching on the bridge. At 7:19 p.m., any mention of the police allowing demonstrators onto the bridge was removed from the lede. Why did they make this change?

We asked City Room Bureau Chief Andy Newman, and he said the following:

At every point yesterday as the story unfolded, we offered the most complete account we could of a large and chaotic scene that could not be grasped by any one person. The earlier version had almost no input from the police. The later version reflected the accounts of the police, protesters and of course our reporters at the scene. The later version, read in its entirety (not just the one highlighted sentence in that photo), reflected the various perspectives much more thoroughly. The final version of the piece was more thorough still.

It's worth noting that one of their reporters at the scene, freelancer Natasha Lennard, was among the over 700 arrested. The original City Room report that Lennard contributed to says that police did in fact allow protesters onto the bridge:

After allowing marchers from the Occupy Wall Street protests to claim the Brooklyn-bound car lanes of the Brooklyn Bridge and get partway across, the police cut the marchers off and plunged into the crowd and began making arrests around 4:15 p.m. Saturday.

That paragraph is now nowhere in the story. Currently, the only mentions in the piece of police telling protesters they were allowed onto the bridge are in the words of the protesters themselves.

The wonderful thing about those with money and power: they get to define reality. The bottom 90% have to patch together bits and pieces to uncover what has been covered up. We live in lies all our life struggling to know what is really going on. It is those at the top who manipulate and deceive in order to protect their power. The media is owned by the ultra-rich. In the final analysis, the ultra-rich get to decide what is "news" that is fit for the rest of us to see. And of course, the ultra-rich help "guide" the police in "doing their duty".

In a "strange coincidence" the Wall Street bank JP Morgan Chase has decided now is the right time to "donate" to the NY Police:

A coincidence, I'm sure, but it sure is poetic. Just as the Occupy Wall Street movement was picking up speed, JPMorgan Chase donated what the financial organization itself described as "an unprecedented" $4.6 million to the New York City Police Foundation, part of which will be used to boost surveillance systems. Well isn't that special.

The gift was the largest in the history of the foundation and will enable the New York City Police Department to strengthen security in the Big Apple. The money will pay for 1,000 new patrol car laptops, as well as security monitoring software in the NYPD's main data center.

Wow! What a remarkable "coincidence".

How the Whole Truth Never Makes it into what the Press Publishes

Journalism specializes in printing part of the news. The part that the elites want you to hear so they can shape your actions to what they want. Here is a post from Dean Baker in his Beat the Press blog that lays out how truth is doled out in dollops:

If Millennials Do Worse Than Their Parents, It Will Be Because Bill Gates' Kids Have All the Money

The Washington Post had a column by a millennial columnist complaining about the lack of opportunity. It is striking that the column never once mentioned income inequality.

There is no doubt that millennials will on average be far wealthier than their parents. Output per hour has roughly doubled over the last three decades, meaning that the real wage could be almost twice as high today as it was in 1980. Insofar as the typical millennial is not seeing the benefits of this productivity growth it is due to the fact that so much income has been redistributed upwards, not the result of any generational dynamics.

Here's a bit from Alexandra Petri's Washington Post opinion piece:

Youth unemployment is 18 percent — double the overall rate. The polls teetered, then tilted. Will your standard of living be better than your parents’? Probably not. Is the American Dream still in reach? Define dream.

What’s worse is that no one seems to realize that we’ve noticed.

“The kids are all right,” they say. “Let’s tweet them a bone. They love it when you tweet.”

It’s enough to give a self-respecting millennial a headache.

Right now, there are at least 100 people Occupying Wall Street. It’s a protest movement. We are the 99 percent who will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1 percent, they say.

They have a nice Web site. They want to find some sort of solution as a group. They also don’t have jobs — or a real plan.

That’s basically millennials in a nutshell.

What bugs me is that she puts down the Occupy Wall Street protest as "a hundred kids". Here's a picture of what "a hundred kids" looks like when reported by a UK newspaper, The Daily Mail with the title "Thousands of protesters descend on Manhattan as police gear up for a weekend of mayhem... but is this the start of a middle class uprising?":


Only the mainstream press in the US continues to "report" this as a handful of disorganized malcontents who have "no message" and aren't worthy of any media attention.

Here is the only thing close to

• a proper mainstream press appraisal of what is going on with this demonstration by Lawrence O'Donnell on MSNBC
and
• this follow-up interview by O'Donnell with Michael Moore.

Pierre Berton's "The Great Depression"

Pierre Berton is always a delight to read. His style is excellent. He melds broad history with personal detail to create a tapestry that maintains interest and gives a deeper understanding by blending policy with the effects of policy on real human lives.

This book is organized into chapters by years from 1929 to 1939 to tell the story of the Great Depression in Canada. It is a unrelentingly grim picture of the depression and the utter incompetence and indifference of political leadership to the savage effects of politicians that the rich elite on the lives of the 27% unemployed who struggled hard to keep body and soul together as year after year "hard times" ruined more and more of their lives.

The politicians simply never "got it". They never understood the depth of the pain and misery. They kept worrying about how to either deny relief benefits or to shuffle the costs from off their layer of government onto another. As well, the story shows how a weird ideological hatred for "commies" led the politicians to use the police to commit horrible crimes against the innocent. Even when they came down on real "commies" the brutal treatment by the police was all out of scope with any threat from the political agitators.

This is an ugly, raw, cruel portrait of a Canada so different from the Canada of today that I don't recognize it. This is a Canada that hates "ethnics" and paranoid about "commies". It is a state that is absolutely indifferent to suffering and a state that is never held accountable for its cruel treatment of those down and out through no fault of their own. It is a searing tale of political conniving to shred political rights in a mad hunt for "commies". The portrait of R. B. Bennett is one of a cruel rich man who simply refused to believe that the government should ever provide relief to the starving unemployed. Mackenzie King comes across as a cross between a crazed spiritualist/neurotic and a politician pettily scheming about his "image" while ignoring the real suffering of the people.

The only glimmer of hope is the bits about the founding of the CCF. But even here, the founder, J. S. Woodsworth, ends up being an idealist who fails to come to grips with the real evil of the Nazis and the need to face up to an impending world war.

Here are some bits from the book so that you can get a taste of the style and the focus on facts by Pierre Berton:

It is true that the Communists were using the unemployed for their own political ends.So, indeed, were the major parties. After his defeat, Mackenzie King viewed the unemployment crisis as a bonus for his own Liberals and a chance to get in a lick at Bennett. Although "sorry for the country's sake," he recorded on March 31 his satisfaction when told by Woodsworth and other Labour M.".s that things were far worse than they had been the previous year under a Liberal administration.

That the Communists were sincere is beside the point; after all, so was Hitler. The gospel according to Karl Marx made them just as blindly orthodox as their capitalistic opponents, who clung to the dogma of the balanced budget no matter what the cost in human suffering. Yet in the ranks of the Reds and, indeed, among the leadership there was also a sense of genuine outrage not unmixed with human compassion for those who had been felled by economic disaster.

Two topics covered by this book that I found especially interesting were laws used to suppress "dissent". One was Section 98 that banned "unlawful assemblies" and was wielded brutally. Even worse was the Padlock Law in Quebec that seized property when the police "found" communist literature, but was so broadly used that it was invoked to seize Protestant literature from an evangelizer. These laws were used in the most heavy-handed way and the broad public simply ignored the effect: rights and liberties were cast to the wind. Here's Berton:

Section 98 was in force for fifteen years. It was the government's big stick against radical thought because it made mere membership in an illegal organization convincing evidence of the political or economic system by force of violence, then every member was guilty. If you went to even one of its meetings, gave it money, spoke publicly in its favour, distributed its literature, or wore its emblem you were liable to twenty years' imprisonment. And contrary to British legal practice, you were held to be guilty until you could prove your innocence. Anyone who rented a hall to an illegal group was subject to a five-thousand-dollar fine. Anyone who printed its literature advocating violent political change, or who imported similar literature, could also go to jail for twenty years. In fact, anybody who advocated violence in this context, whether he belonged to an illegal association or not, could go to jail.

The treatment of suspected "commies" was brutal in Canada:

... it was not just die-hard communists who faced deportation from Canada under the Bennett regime. Anyone who had been in the country for less than five years could be deported as a public simply by applying for relief. That regulation covered not only the "undesirables" but also thousands of others who had been recruited to come to Canada in the twenties by a business-oriented community looking for cheap labour. The Canadian Manufacturers' Association had lobbied the government to broaden its immigration policy, and in 1926 the two major railways and the Canadian Bankers' Association quietly backed the campaign. In fact, until the Depression, Canada had not only welcomed newcomers, it had also wooed them and subsidized them with low rail fares and free land, especially in the West. The immigrants, in turn, had helped make the country prosperous. Now, with hard times returning, the government was callously prepared to throw them out.

Finally, this bit by Berton shows the priggish morality of Canada at that time. It is a story about William Aberhart, a teacher with fundamentalist religion, who rose to control the province of Alberta with his "Social Credit" philosophy:

Under the Canadian moral standards of the middle thirties, sex was held to be dirty and therefore not to be discussed in public, on the radio, or in the newspapers. William Aberhart had come up against the taboo in January when he told a joke in Calgary, in which he talked about the hard time he was being given by his critics.

"It brought to my mind," Aberhart said, "the story of the young lady in the maternity ward who was in agony. She asked the nurse if there was a young man in a brown suit and brown fedora outside in the corridor.

"The nurse said, 'Yes, I saw one there when I came in.'

"'Well,' said the girl, 'tell him that if this is anything like married life, the engagement is off.'"

That parable, inoffensive by almost any standards, got Aberhart into a heap of trouble. The Social Credit leader was assailed by complaints that he had told a "lewd" joke. Efforts were even made to take him off the air.

I highly recommend this book both for the sheer joy of the quality of the story told and for the history of Canada that it reveals.

Just the Facts Ma'am

Here is a post by Dean Baker on his Beat the Post blog that points out just who inside the Federal Reserve is working hard to sabotage the US economy: the private sector banks!

A segment on Morning Edition noted that 3 members of the Fed's Open Market Committee (FOMC) opposed the plan to shift from shorter term debt to holding longer term bonds in an effort to drive down interest rates. It would have been worth mentioning that all 3 of the no votes came from the district bank presidents. The bank presidents are essentially appointed by the banks in the district.

The 5 bank presidents who are voting members of the FOMC split 3-2 against this measure. By contrast, the 5 Fed governors who were appointed through the political process (by both Presidents Bush and Obama) voted 5-0 in support further action.

This is a striking split between the FOMC members who essentially represent banks and the members who were appointed by democratically elected officials. It would have been worth mentioning this fact in this story. (The NYT and the Post commited the same sin.)

I guess the rich and powerful are nice and comfy with their wealth and their ability to strangle the economy for their own benefit. Why let the bottom 99% have a better life if this might inconvenience or threaten the ultra-rich?

The Cruel Criminality at the Heart of America

Here is a bit from an article entitled "The Great Bank Robbery" by Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Mark Spitznagel and published by CNN's Fareed Zakaria in his Global Public Square:

For the American economy – and for many other developed economies – the elephant in the room is the amount of money paid to bankers over the last five years. In the United States, the sum stands at an astounding $2.2 trillion. Extrapolating over the coming decade, the numbers would approach $5 trillion, an amount vastly larger than what both President Barack Obama’s administration and his Republican opponents seem willing to cut from further government deficits.

That $5 trillion dollars is not money invested in building roads, schools and other long-term projects, but is directly transferred from the American economy to the personal accounts of bank executives and employees. Such transfers represent as cunning a tax on everyone else as one can imagine. It feels quite iniquitous that bankers, having helped cause today’s financial and economic troubles, are the only class that is not suffering from them – and in many cases are actually benefiting.

Mainstream megabanks are puzzling in many respects. It is (now) no secret that they have operated so far as large sophisticated compensation schemes, masking probabilities of low-risk, high-impact “Black Swan” events and benefiting from the free backstop of implicit public guarantees. Excessive leverage, rather than skills, can be seen as the source of their resulting profits, which then flow disproportionately to employees, and of their sometimes-massive losses, which are borne by shareholders and taxpayers.

In other words, banks take risks, get paid for the upside, and then transfer the downside to shareholders, taxpayers, and even retirees.

Go read the rest of the article. It has more details.

The authors point out the cruel irony of the situation for average Americans:

So the facts are clear. But, as individual taxpayers, we are helpless, because we do not control outcomes, owing to the concerted efforts of lobbyists, or, worse, economic policymakers. Our subsidizing of bank managers and executives is completely involuntary.

The author's go on to plead with the big investment companies to use their money to try and discipline America's criminal banks. But that isn't going to happen. The investment companies rub elbows with the bankers and go to the same country clubs and own houses around the world at the same locations as the bankers. They live an insulated life. In their world the bankers are "just one of the fellows". For the investment companies and the banks, the real "threat to America" is the bottom 90% of the population who still have a right to vote and an aspiration to wrest control back from the financial overlords.

The rich aren't going to do a favour for the bottom 90% and "discipline" the bankers. The bottom 90% have to seize back control from the criminal rich. The bottom 90% have got to realize that the Barack Obama's are in the pocket of the rich and that almost all the politicians are poodles of the rich. It is going to take a social revolution of immense scope and depth to seize back control from the rich. And this shouldn't be done with the wild-eyed idea of "revolution". That is nutty. It will take decades and it requires the hard world of education and political organizing. It will require discipline. If it is to be effective it must be done through traditional institutions. To try to short cut things simply means replacing one set of criminals with a new set of criminals.

Robert Reich's Lament for the Passing of the Middle Class

America has become of, by, and for the rich. No more silliness about government of the people, by the people, for the people. Nope. It is now reduced to the modern essentials: government for the rich.

From a post by Robert Reich on his blog:

The economy won’t really bounce back until America’s surge toward inequality is reversed. Even if by some miracle President Obama gets support for a second big stimulus while Ben S. Bernanke’s Fed keeps interest rates near zero, neither will do the trick without a middle class capable of spending. Pump-priming works only when a well contains enough water.

Look back over the last hundred years and you’ll see the pattern. During periods when the very rich took home a much smaller proportion of total income — as in the Great Prosperity between 1947 and 1977 — the nation as a whole grew faster and median wages surged. We created a virtuous cycle in which an ever growing middle class had the ability to consume more goods and services, which created more and better jobs, thereby stoking demand. The rising tide did in fact lift all boats.

During periods when the very rich took home a larger proportion — as between 1918 and 1933, and in the Great Regression from 1981 to the present day — growth slowed, median wages stagnated and we suffered giant downturns. It’s no mere coincidence that over the last century the top earners’ share of the nation’s total income peaked in 1928 and 2007 — the two years just preceding the biggest downturns.

Starting in the late 1970s, the middle class began to weaken. Although productivity continued to grow and the economy continued to expand, wages began flattening in the 1970s because new technologies — container ships, satellite communications, eventually computers and the Internet — started to undermine any American job that could be automated or done more cheaply abroad. The same technologies bestowed ever larger rewards on people who could use them to innovate and solve problems. Some were product entrepreneurs; a growing number were financial entrepreneurs. The pay of graduates of prestigious colleges and M.B.A. programs — the “talent” who reached the pinnacles of power in executive suites and on Wall Street — soared.

The middle class nonetheless continued to spend, at first enabled by the flow of women into the work force. (In the 1960s only 12 percent of married women with young children were working for pay; by the late 1990s, 55 percent were.) When that way of life stopped generating enough income, Americans went deeper into debt. From the late 1990s to 2007, the typical household debt grew by a third. As long as housing values continued to rise it seemed a painless way to get additional money.

Eventually, of course, the bubble burst. That ended the middle class’s remarkable ability to keep spending in the face of near stagnant wages. The puzzle is why so little has been done in the last 40 years to help deal with the subversion of the economic power of the middle class.

I don't see much hope for America. There should be political revolts against the current downward trend. Instead, the ultra-rich have cleverly used the media to build astro-turf groups to agitate for pro-ultra-rich policies, more tax cuts, more deregulation, more anti-worker laws, the destruction of social safety nets, etc.