Selling Social Darwinism

Robert Reich has a blog that is well worth following. He is a knowledgeable person with the facts and the social empathy to present an honest account of the situation that the 99% find themselves in.

Here is his latest post:

The Republican Myth of Obama's "Entitlement Society"

One of the few things Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich agree on is that President Obama is turning America into “European-style welfare culture.”

In his standard stump speech Romney charges Obama with creating a nation of dependents. “Over the past three years Barack Obama has been replacing our merit-based society with an entitlement society.”

Gingrich calls Obama “the best food-stamp president in American history.”

What’s their evidence? Both rely on federal budget data showing direct payments to individuals shot up by almost $600 billion, a 32 percent increase, since the start of 2009.

They also point to Census data showing that 49 percent of Americans now live in homes where at least one person is collecting a federal benefit – Social Security, food stamps, unemployment insurance, worker’s compensation, or subsidized housing. That’s up from 44 percent in 2008.

Finally, they trumpet Social Security Administration figures showing that the number of people on Social Security disability jumped 10 percent in Obama’s first two years in office.

They argue our economic problems stem from this sharp rise in “dependency.” Get rid of these benefits and people will work harder.

They have cause and effect backwards. The reason for the rise in food stamps, unemployment insurance, and other safety-net programs is Americans got clobbered in 2008 with the worst economic catastrophe since the Great Depression. They and their families have needed whatever helping hands they could get.

If anything, America’s safety nets have been too small and shot through with holes. That’s why the number and percentage of Americans in poverty has increased dramatically over the past three years, including over a third of families with young children.

One scandal, for example, is that only 40 percent of the unemployed qualify for unemployment benefits because they weren’t working full time or long enough on a single job before they were canned. The unemployment system doesn’t take account of the fact that a large portion of the workforce typically works part time on several jobs, and moves from job to job.

Republicans also object to Obama’s health care law, which covers 30 million more Americans than were covered before. But it still leaves over 20 million without health insurance. They’ll get emergency care when they’re in dire straights — hospitals won’t refuse them — but we all end up paying indirectly.

Regressive Republicans pretend they’re about opportunity. In reality they’re back at what they’ve been doing for years — promoting Social Darwinism.

Go read his blog.

The manipulation of statistics to sell their Social Darwinism is utterly cynical. The political right knows that it is lying. It isn't naive. But it trusts in the big lie technique. They know that if they repeat their right wing lies long enough and through enough media, most people will assume it is true because the message is so prevalent.

I remember being incredulous when I matured and discovered that my father believed that if something was printed it had to be true. In his mind, nobody would go to the expense of printing something unless it was true. I could never change his mind. He proved to me just how effective a propaganda campaign could be. He lived a life believing falsehoods simply because "they were printed" and I could never change his mind because my arguments were "just words" and he refused to look at the printed material I presented to him. Propaganda can be very, very effective.

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.

Why America is Confused

Here is the start of a post by Dean Baker on his Beat the Press blog that incisively identifies why the average American is completely confused about the economy, the role of big business, and who politics works:

David Brooks Is Projecting His Self Indulgence Again

Undoubtedly projecting from the fact that he can draw a nice 6-figure income for little obvious work, David Brooks complained in his column:

"Today, the country is middle-aged but self-indulgent. Bad habits have accumulated."

For the most part the column is a confused diatribe against the Obama administration's economic policies with a lecture on moral rectitude thrown in for good measure. He starts by condemning the efforts to stimulate the economy by telling readers:

"Today, Americans are more likely to fear government than be reassured by it.

"According to a Gallup survey, 64 percent of Americans polled said they believed that big government is the biggest threat to the country. Only 26 percent believed that big business is the biggest threat. As a result, the public has reacted to Obama’s activism with fear and anxiety. The Democrats lost 63 House seats in the 2010 elections."

One might think that the fact that the Obama administration relied on a stimulus that was only designed to lower the unemployment rate by 1.5-2.0 percentage points might have played a big role in the election defeat. (Read the number of jobs the stimulus was projected to create, not the baseline forecasts for the economy.) If the government had used bigger stimulus to get the unemployment rate down to say -- 7 percent -- it is difficult to believe that the Democrats would have suffered such a big defeat last year, in spite of people's fear of big government.

After dismissing the stimulative policies of the Great Depression, Brooks then gives us a beautifully crafted grand misunderstanding of economics comparing the economy today with the economy of the Progressive era:

"the underlying economic situations are very different. A century ago, the American economy was a vibrant jobs machine. Industrialization was volatile and cruel, but it produced millions of new jobs, sucking labor in from the countryside and from overseas.

"Today’s economy is not a jobs machine and lacks that bursting vibrancy. The rate of new business start-ups was declining even before the 2008 financial crisis. Companies are finding that they can get by with fewer workers. As President Obama has observed, factories that used to employ 1,000 workers can now be even more productive with less than 100."

The fact that factories can produce large amounts of output with 100 workers is in fact evidence of economic vibrancy, not the opposite. This is called "productivity growth." It is the main measure of the economy's ability to raise living standards through time. The fact that 100 people in a factory can produce the same output as 1000 people did 30 years ago means that we are potentially much richer than we were 30 years ago. We can have the other 900 people doing other productive work. Alternatively, we can all work many fewer hours.

Whether or not this productivity growth generates jobs depends on the structure of the economy. If the productivity growth translates into wage growth, as was the case with the very rapid productivity growth of early post-war period, then it is likely to be associated with a vibrant jobs machine. On the other hand, if the One Percent pocket most of the benefits of productivity growth, then we may have real problems of stagnation and lack of job growth, since the Bill Gateses of the world will probably not increase their spending much if they get another billion or two. The key issue here is the distribution of the gains of productivity growth, a simple fact that totally escapes Brooks.

Go read the whole article. There is much more to learn from Dean Baker.

One reason why Americans keep electing the right wing Republicans is because the media is dominated by fools with a glib and seductive writing style like David Brooks. I confess that I was seduced by his book Bobos in Paradise but I've since had the scales fall from my eyes. Brooks is a seductive writer much like William F. Buckley. It is easy to be seduced by those who dismiss the gritty reality and instead focus on grandiose generalities that blame the victim and put robber barons on pedestals.

One of Mitt Romney's Houses

He's got a $12 million house in California and all he wants to do is tear it down and build a bigger and fancier house!

Crystal Balling America's Future

Blogger The Big Picture has a post that notes that five years ago the Wall Street Journal had an article by Robert Frank clearly identifying the brave new world of "plutonomy" that the US, UK, Canada, and Australia were entering.

Exactly 5 years ago today, the WSJ published this post (Plutonomics) about a rather fascinating study on wealth inequality.

It was written by of all folks, Citigroup global strategist Ajay Kapur. In 2005, Kapur’s research team “came up with the term ‘Plutonomy’ in 2005 to describe a country that is defined by massive income and wealth inequality. According to their definition, the U.S. is a Plutonomy, along with the U.K., Canada and Australia.”

What are the basic characteristics of Plutonomies? According to Kapur:

1. They are all created by “disruptive technology-driven productivity gains, creative financial innovation, capitalist friendly cooperative governments, immigrants…the rule of law and patenting inventions. Often these wealth waves involve great complexity exploited best by the rich and educated of the time.”

2. There is no “average” consumer in Plutonomies. There is only the rich “and everyone else.” The rich account for a disproportionate chunk of the economy, while the non-rich account for “surprisingly small bites of the national pie.” Kapur estimates that in 2005, the richest 20% may have been responsible for 60% of total spending.

3. Plutonomies are likely to grow in the future, fed by capitalist-friendly governments, more technology-driven productivity and globalization.

Kapur also noted the impact massive income and wealth inequality had on other aspects of the economy: Savings rates, national debt level, spending patterns, reaction to high commodity prices, and more. All of these, he claimed are substantially affected by the ultra wealthy.

Note that this was from 5 years ago today — circa January 2007 was, ten months before the market peaked, 11 months before the Great Recession began, and 15 months before Bear Stearns, 21 months before Wall Street (AIG BAC C FNM LEH, etc.) collapsed, and about 55 months before Occupy Wall Street began.

Quite fascinating . . .

It is worth your time to go read the entire Robert Frank post in the WSJ. I haven't read his upcoming book The High-Beta Rich: How the Manic Wealthy Will Take Us to the Next Boom, Bubble, and Bust but I've got a hold on it at the library and expect to be entertained and appalled.

Here is a different Robert Frank, this is Robert H. Frank who teaches at Cornell University in a PBS Newshour interview with Paul Solman:



If you listen to 8:00 into the above video you find an interesting straddling of the middle. He argues from the right for the value of the free market and from the left for the importance of government in regulating the market and ensuring a fair playing field. (Funny, this isn't Darwinian. This is Adam Smith who has been misconstrued by the political right to be only the "invisible hand" guy when, in fact, he very much appreciated the role of government in helping to establish the possibility of a market.)

Don't confuse the Robert Frank who writes for the Wall Street Journal with the Cornell professor. Both have something interesting to say, but they are two different voices, but unfortunately with the same name.

As for America's future, it will succeed only if it gets off the destructive path that is creating a more and more unequal society and gets back to something more like the 1950s and 1960s when the middle class bloomed, America was prosperous, and the future looked unlimited. The future requires a more pragmatic politics that isn't dogmatic right or dogmatic left. It needs a politics that overthrows the idiocy of Reaganism and that overthrows the idiocy of a nanny state. The US needs a renewed robust middle, a real middle class, and a real political middle.

An Honest Assessment of the US's Federal Reserve

From a post at the Eschaton blog:

If this really is the Fed's view, then they're saying that monetary policy is generally going to be utterly useless in fighting recessions as they won't be willing to do anything. Time to rewrite all the textbooks. As in, instead of the usual "fiscal policy is less likely to be useful during recessions due to lags in recognition, implementation, and impact" claptrap, we should have "monetary policy is unlikely to be useful during recessions due to the fact that modern central bankers are sociopaths whose only concerns are inflation and the economic wellbeing of the creditor class."

It is clear that all central banks are more concerned about the creditor class than the debtor class. The tragedy of the 2008 financial crisis is that central bankis have shown themselves more dedicated to ensuring the wealth of the rich than the economic well-being (jobs, houses, retirement, education, etc.) of the bottom 99%. Sad.

The "Complexities" of American Law

With the full unveiling of the concept of corporations are "people" (as Mitt Romney happily repeats on the presidential nomination trail), the Citizens United case settled by the Supreme Court has demonstrated the wondefully "complex" nature of American law.

Here is a bit from a post by UC Berkeley economist Brad DeLong expatiating on the subtleties:

Justinian: How does this Fourteenth Amendment read?

Edward Coke: Like this:

Section. 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens.... No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Section. 2. Representatives shall be apportioned... counting the whole number of persons in each State....

Justinian: So if you have more corporations in your state, you get more representatives in the legislature?

John of Salisbury: No, no, no! "Persons" in Section 2 refers only to human beings...

Edward Coke: And "persons" at the start of Section 1 refers only to human beings...

John of Salisbury: Only "persons" at the end of Section 1 refers to legal persons, i.e. corporations, as well as human beings...

If the US were consistent in its "law" then there would be a rush by the ultra-rich to incorporate all kinds of "companies", millions of companies, so that at the next election the ballot boxes could be happily stuffed with all kinds of votes from the corporate "persons" acting under the full weight of the law as laid down by the Fourteenth Amendment. If ever the poor organized themselves, it would simply require a renewed effort to incorporate some one "instant corporations" to help the "people" of America to keep the 99% in their place. Because... as the Supreme Court has affirmed, corporations are "people" too!

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.

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.

Misrepresenting Debt

Here is a bit from a NY Times op-ed by Paul Krugman that tries to explain why the political right's obsession with deficits and debt is wrong-headed:

Deficit-worriers portray a future in which we’re impoverished by the need to pay back money we’ve been borrowing. They see America as being like a family that took out too large a mortgage, and will have a hard time making the monthly payments.

This is, however, a really bad analogy in at least two ways.

First, families have to pay back their debt. Governments don’t — all they need to do is ensure that debt grows more slowly than their tax base. The debt from World War II was never repaid; it just became increasingly irrelevant as the U.S. economy grew, and with it the income subject to taxation.

Second — and this is the point almost nobody seems to get — an over-borrowed family owes money to someone else; U.S. debt is, to a large extent, money we owe to ourselves.

This was clearly true of the debt incurred to win World War II. Taxpayers were on the hook for a debt that was significantly bigger, as a percentage of G.D.P., than debt today; but that debt was also owned by taxpayers, such as all the people who bought savings bonds. So the debt didn’t make postwar America poorer. In particular, the debt didn’t prevent the postwar generation from experiencing the biggest rise in incomes and living standards in our nation’s history.

But isn’t this time different? Not as much as you think.

It’s true that foreigners now hold large claims on the United States, including a fair amount of government debt. But every dollar’s worth of foreign claims on America is matched by 89 cents’ worth of U.S. claims on foreigners. And because foreigners tend to put their U.S. investments into safe, low-yield assets, America actually earns more from its assets abroad than it pays to foreign investors. If your image is of a nation that’s already deep in hock to the Chinese, you’ve been misinformed. Nor are we heading rapidly in that direction.

Now, the fact that federal debt isn’t at all like a mortgage on America’s future doesn’t mean that the debt is harmless. Taxes must be levied to pay the interest, and you don’t have to be a right-wing ideologue to concede that taxes impose some cost on the economy, if nothing else by causing a diversion of resources away from productive activities into tax avoidance and evasion. But these costs are a lot less dramatic than the analogy with an overindebted family might suggest.

And that’s why nations with stable, responsible governments — that is, governments that are willing to impose modestly higher taxes when the situation warrants it — have historically been able to live with much higher levels of debt than today’s conventional wisdom would lead you to believe. Britain, in particular, has had debt exceeding 100 percent of G.D.P. for 81 of the last 170 years. When Keynes was writing about the need to spend your way out of a depression, Britain was deeper in debt than any advanced nation today, with the exception of Japan.

Of course, America, with its rabidly antitax conservative movement, may not have a government that is responsible in this sense. But in that case the fault lies not in our debt, but in ourselves.

So yes, debt matters. But right now, other things matter more. We need more, not less, government spending to get us out of our unemployment trap. And the wrongheaded, ill-informed obsession with debt is standing in the way.

It is utterly amazing how many times Krugman has made this point and those on the political right simply ignore him and continue with their lies and deceits. The media never call the Republicans to task for their lies. The poor people of America live in an intellectual ghetto because powerful forces conspire to treat them like mushrooms: keep them in the dark and feed them shit.

Dead Hands Reach Out from the Past

Corporate greed has gotten the US Congress to change copyright to make it last longer and longer and longer. Here are some bits from an excellent post by Duke University's Center for the Study of the Public Domain:

Current US law extends copyright protection for 70 years after the date of the author’s death. (Corporate “works-for-hire” are copyrighted for 95 years after publication.) But prior to the 1976 Copyright Act (which became effective in 1978), the maximum copyright term was 56 years (an initial term of 28 years, renewable for another 28 years). Under those laws, works published in 1955 would be passing into the public domain on January 1, 2012.

What might you be able to read or print online, quote as much as you want, or translate, republish or make a play or a movie from? In this centennial year of the sinking of R.M.S. Titanic (April 15, 1912), how about Walter Lord’s A Night to Remember? Lord first published A Night to Remember in 1955. If we were still under the copyright laws that were in effect until 1978, A Night to Remember would be entering the public domain on January 1, 2012 (even assuming that Lord or his publisher had renewed the copyright). Under current copyright law, we’ll have to wait until 2051. This is because the copyright term for works published between 1950 and 1963 was extended to 95 years from the date of publication, so long as the works were published with a copyright notice and the term renewed (which is generally the case with famous works such as this). All of these works from 1955 won't enter the public domain until 2051.

...

Most of the works highlighted here are famous — that is why we included them. And if that fame meant that the work was still being exploited commercially 28 years after its publication, the authors would probably renew the copyright. (This is true for many of the works featured on this page, though even a surprising percentage of successful works exhaust their commercial potential very quickly.) But we know from the Copyright Office that 85% of authors did not renew their copyrights (for books, the number is even higher — 93% did not renew), since most works exhaust their commercial value very quickly.

That means that all these examples from 1955 are only the tip of the iceberg. If the pre-1978 law were still in effect, we could have seen 85% of the works created in 1983 enter the public domain on January 1, 2012. Imagine what that would mean to our archives, our libraries, our schools and our culture. Such works could be digitized, preserved, and made available for education, for research, for future creators. Instead, they will remain under copyright for decades to come, perhaps even into the next century. Think of the cultural harm that does. In addition, because most of these works are orphan works — works that are still presumably under copyright, but commercially unavailable and with no identifiable copyright holder — no one is benefiting from continued protection, while the works remain both commercially unavailable and culturally off limits. (You can read more about the current costs associated with orphan works here and here.) It seems that The Public Domain Snatchers is not the stuff of fiction.

These "property rights" stolen from the public are just one more example of how the ultra-rich buy politicians to write laws that that enrich the rich at the expense of the 99%. They have literally stolen the cultural patrimony and locked it up and demand big bucks to access what rightfully should belong to everybody.

Great Recession

There is no better concise picture of the Great Recession than this graph from the Calculated Risk blog:

Click to Enlarge
This clearly shows that all previous post World War II recessions which had fully recovered employment by 4 years after the start of the recession. Even the pathetic "recovery" brought about Bush's two tax cuts to "inspire" entrepreneurial spirit got employment back to pre-recession levels in four years. But the recession is different. This is a credit crunch just like the Great Depression.

Obama's "stimulus" was pathetically inadequate with one-third of the money going to "tax cuts" which clearly are very poor stimulants (see the four year delay in recovery due to Bush's tax cut strategy). The other two-thirds was money that truly stimluated but was about three to four times too small for the size of the real problem. But Obama spent all of 2009 and 2010 assuring everybody that his stimulus was a Goldilocks "just right" amount. Then in 2011 Obama compounded his mistake by focusing on "deficits" (read austerity budgets) instead of stimulation to get the economy to come back.

The US economy is in a complete mess because both major political parties are more interested in catering to corporate interest than they are in the people and the real economy. They both spin masterful stories about how their policies are "effective" when it is utterly evident that they fail. Of course the Republicans are grievously wrong-headed. The Democrats at least pretend to cater to the interests of the 99%, but in reality they are just junior partners with the Republicans in acting as the minions of Wall Street, big corporations, and the ultra-rich. Tragic.

DeLong on the Financial Sickness in America

The financial "industry" is a bloated, corrupt section of the economy that grows at the expense of everything else. Here is a bit from UC Berkeley economist Brad DeLong on the Project Syndicate blog:

In 1950, finance and insurance in the United States accounted for 2.8% of GDP, according to US Department of Commerce estimates. By 1960, that share had grown to 3.8% of GDP, and reached 6% of GDP in 1990. Today, it is 8.4% of GDP, and it is not shrinking. The Wall Street Journal’s Justin Lahart reports that the 2010 share was higher than the previous peak share in 2006.

...

But if the US were getting good value from the extra 5.6% of GDP that it is now spending on finance and insurance – the extra $750 billion diverted annually from paying people who make directly useful goods and provide directly useful services – it would be obvious in the statistics. At a typical 5% annual real interest rate for risky cash flows, diverting that large a share of resources away from goods and services directly useful this year is a good bargain only if it boosts overall annual economic growth by 0.3% – or 6% per 25-year generation.

There have been many shocks to the US economy over the past couple of generations, and many factors have added to or subtracted from economic growth. But it is not obvious that the US economy today would be 6% less productive if it had had the finance-insurance system of 1950 rather than the one that prevailed during the past 20 years.

There are five ways that an economy gains from a well-functioning finance-insurance system. First, people are no longer as vulnerable to the effects of fires, floods, medical disasters, unemployment, business collapses, sectoral shifts, and so forth, because a well-working finance-insurance system diversifies and thus dissipates some risks, and deals with others by matching those who fear risk with those who can comfortably bear it. While it might be true that America’s current finance-insurance system better distributes risk in some sense, it is hard to see how that could be the case, given the experience of investors in equities and housing over the past two decades.

Second, well-functioning financial systems match large, illiquid investment projects with the relatively small pools of money contributed by individual savers who value liquidity highly. There has been one important innovation over the past two generations: businesses can now issue high-yield bonds. But, given the costs of the bankruptcy process, it has never been clear why a business would rather issue high-yield bonds (besides gaming the tax system), or why investors would rather buy them than take an equity stake.

Third, improved opportunities to borrow allow one to spend more now, when one is poor, and save more later, when one is rich. Households are certainly much more able to borrow, thanks to home-equity loans, credit-card balances, and payday loans. But what are they really buying? Many are not buying the ability to spend when they are poor and save when they are rich, but instead appear to be buying postponement of the “unpleasant financial retrenchment” talk with the other members of their household. And that is not something you want to buy.

Fourth, we have seen major improvements in the ease of transactions. But, while electronic transactions have made a great deal of financial life much easier, this should have been accompanied by a decrease, not an increase, in the finance share of GDP, just as automated switching in telecommunications led to a decrease in the number of telephone switchboard operators per phone call. Indeed, the operations of those parts of the financial system most closely related to technological improvements have slimmed down markedly: consider what has happened to the checking operations of the regional Federal Reserve Banks.

Finally, better finance should mean better corporate governance. Since shareholder democracy does not provide effective control over entrenched, runaway, self-indulgent management, finance has a potentially powerful role to play in ensuring that corporate managers work in the interest of shareholders. And a substantial change has indeed occurred over the past two generations: CEOs focus much more attention than they used to on pleasing the stock market, and this is likely to be a good thing.

Overall, however, it remains disturbing that we do not see the obvious large benefits, at either the micro or macro level, in the US economy’s efficiency that would justify spending an extra 5.6% of GDP every year on finance and insurance. Lahart cites the conclusion of New York University’s Thomas Philippon that today’s US financial sector is outsized by two percentage points of GDP. And it is very possible that Philippon’s estimate of the size of the US financial sector’s hypertrophy is too small.

Why has the devotion of a great deal of skill and enterprise to finance and insurance sector not paid obvious economic dividends? There are two sustainable ways to make money in finance: find people with risks that need to be carried and match them with people with unused risk-bearing capacity, or find people with such risks and match them with people who are clueless but who have money. Are we sure that most of the growth in finance stems from a rising share of financial professionals who undertake the former rather than the latter?

This is a pretty astounding indictment of the sleaze, corruption, and fraud in America's financial industry that has let it grow huge despite providing no real benefits to justify its larger share of national GDP.

Sadly, no govenment has taken on this issue and tried to cut the financial industry down to size to make it more economically efficient. Exactly the opposite has occurred. Over the last 30 years great laudatory sermons have been given about "enterprise" and "unleashing business from regulation" when in fact this has proven to be catchwords for turning a blind eye to corruption and crime on an unimaginable scale. The American people have been hoodwinked and lied to and nobody has yet been held accountable because the rich and powerful have bought off the politiians.

An Indictment of Obama and Most Western Governments

Here is Paul Krugman in a NY Times op-ed laying bare the open secret: Obama and European governments are contemptuous of Keynes, rejecting his advise, and imperiling the tenuous "recovery" that countries have been experiencing by calling for "deficit reduction" which is just another name for austerity:

“The boom, not the slump, is the right time for austerity at the Treasury.” So declared John Maynard Keynes in 1937, even as F.D.R. was about to prove him right by trying to balance the budget too soon, sending the United States economy — which had been steadily recovering up to that point — into a severe recession. Slashing government spending in a depressed economy depresses the economy further; austerity should wait until a strong recovery is well under way.

Unfortunately, in late 2010 and early 2011, politicians and policy makers in much of the Western world believed that they knew better, that we should focus on deficits, not jobs, even though our economies had barely begun to recover from the slump that followed the financial crisis. And by acting on that anti-Keynesian belief, they ended up proving Keynes right all over again.

... the real test of Keynesian economics hasn’t come from the half-hearted efforts of the U.S. federal government to boost the economy, which were largely offset by cuts at the state and local levels. It has, instead, come from European nations like Greece and Ireland that had to impose savage fiscal austerity as a condition for receiving emergency loans — and have suffered Depression-level economic slumps, with real G.D.P. in both countries down by double digits.

This wasn’t supposed to happen, according to the ideology that dominates much of our political discourse. In March 2011, the Republican staff of Congress’s Joint Economic Committee released a report titled “Spend Less, Owe Less, Grow the Economy.” It ridiculed concerns that cutting spending in a slump would worsen that slump, arguing that spending cuts would improve consumer and business confidence, and that this might well lead to faster, not slower, growth.

Sadly a generation will pay the price for this obtuse ideological refusal to accept standard economics in favour if the idiocies of right wing economics that created the deregulation fiasco leading to the S&L crisis, the dot.com bust, and the 2008 financial crisis. These are the failures of government by right wing politicians who have sold the public on the idea that "government is not the solution to our problems; government is the problem". For 30 years bad ideas pushed by right wing politicians have enriched the ultra-rich while the bottom 99% have been left to tread water. Wealth has increased but "trickle down" economics delivered nothing to the poor who are poorer now than since the Great Depression when the lot of the poor was to live in Hoovervilles and stand in bread lines.

The common people need to rise up and say "enough!" and vote in politicians who want to grow the economy for the benefit of the 99% and who want to see a profound redistribution of income so that those who work hard in the 99% get the kind of rewards that for the last 30+ years have only flowed to the ultra-rich. Stop the privatization of government for the bottom 99% with the cutting of services and the raising of "hidden" taxes. Stop the socialization of government for the top 1% with the quiet fraud that lets the rich milk the poor, demand and get sweetheart deals from government, and the continued policy of handouts and bailouts and tax cuts and special tax loop holes for those who can buy government via lobbyists.

Krugman perfectly characterizes the failures of politics today:

We entered 2011 amid dire warnings about a Greek-style debt crisis that would happen as soon as the Federal Reserve stopped buying bonds, or the rating agencies ended our triple-A status, or the superdupercommittee failed to reach a deal, or something. But the Fed ended its bond-purchase program in June; Standard & Poor’s downgraded America in August; the supercommittee deadlocked in November; and U.S. borrowing costs just kept falling. In fact, at this point, inflation-protected U.S. bonds pay negative interest: investors are willing to pay America to hold their money.

The bottom line is that 2011 was a year in which our political elite obsessed over short-term deficits that aren’t actually a problem and, in the process, made the real problem — a depressed economy and mass unemployment — worse.

For three years the political right has been screaming "inflation" and called for austerity to stop the devaluation of "fiat money". In truth, there has been no runaway inflation despite the trillions that the Federal Reserve has pumped into the monetary system.

Keynes called for a coordinated fight on both the monetary and fiscal fronts to fight depression. But since 2008 there has been only a monetary policy in place that is now being withdrawn and there was a very, very small fiscal policy with Obama's 2009 stimulus package. The tools that Keynes outlined have not been used. That is why the Great Recession continues to plague the United States.

New Rules for the New Economy

Rule #1: He who writes the rules owns the gold.

Here is a bit from an article by Simon Johnson that rips into the insanity of the US government letting the big banks make big bucks on their housing bubble fraud but then demanding that the little guy, the taxpayer, first fork over billions to "make whole" the fraudulent banks, then stand by and look down at our feet while the big bank's top people get billions in bonuses, then go through a charade of "law enforcement" where the bankers get off the hook with pitifully small fines for bad behaviour and no jail time:

Santa Claus came early this year for four former executives of Washington Mutual (WaMu), a large US bank that failed in fall 2008. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) had brought a lawsuit against the four, actions that included taking huge financial risks while “knowing that the real estate market was in a ‘bubble.’” The FDIC sought to recover $900 million, but the executives have just settled for $64 million, almost all of which will be paid by their insurers; their out-of-pockets costs are estimated at just $400,000.

To be sure, the executives lost their jobs and now must drop claims for additional compensation. But, according to the FDIC, the four still earned more than $95 million from January 2005 through September 2008. So they are walking away with a great deal of cash. This is what happens when financial executives are compensated for “return on equity” unadjusted for risk. The executives get the upside when things go well; when the downside risks materialize, they lose nothing (or close to it).

Here is the problem with the current "system" that is shafting the 99%:

But capitalism without the prospect of failure is not any kind of market economy. We are running a large-scale, nontransparent, and dangerous government subsidy scheme for the benefit primarily of a very few, extremely wealthy people.

Jon Huntsman, a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, is addressing this directly – insisting that we should force the largest banks to break up and to become safer. No other candidate for the presidency is seriously confronting this issue head-on: just saying “we’ll let them fail” is no kind of answer when the failure of megabanks would cause so much damage.

We should learn from both the WaMu and the Occupy movement. In both cases, the lesson is the same: concentrated financial power is a gift that keeps on giving – but not to you.

How to Know That Your Government is Rotten

Here is a bit from a Washington Post article that points out that while the "representatives" of the people have gotten fabulously wealthy over the last 25 years, the common people are either treading water or slowly sinking:

Between 1984 and 2009, the median net worth of a member of the House more than doubled, according to the analysis of financial disclosures, from $280,000 to $725,000 in inflation-adjusted 2009 dollars, excluding home ­equity.

Over the same period, the wealth of an American family has declined slightly, with the comparable median figure sliding from $20,600 to $20,500, according to the Panel Study of Income Dynamics from the University of Michigan.

The comparisons exclude home equity because it is not included in congressional reporting, and 1984 was chosen because it is the earliest year for which consistent wealth statistics are available.

The growing disparity between the representatives and the represented means that there is a greater distance between the economic experience of Americans and those of lawmakers.

...

The growing financial comfort of Congress relative to most Americans is consistent with the general trends in the United States toward inequality of wealth: Members of Congress have long been wealthier than average Americans, and in recent decades the wealth of the wealthiest Americans has outpaced that of the average.

In 1984, the 90th percentile of U.S. families had holdings worth six times the median family’s; by 2009, the 90th percentile was worth 12 times the median family, according to the University of Michigan study, a longitudinal panel survey. These figures include home equity.

This growing inequality, not surprisingly, is seen in Congress. Not only has the median wealth increased, but the proportion of representatives who have little besides a home has shrunk. In 1984, one in five House members had zero or negative net worth excluding home equity, according to the disclosures; by 2009, that number had dropped to one in 12.

When the guardians of the government are stuffing their pockets with money while the people are slowly sinking, things are rotten. There is corruption and incompetence in government.

The Republicans loved to say that "government is the problem, not the solution". That's got it wrong. The problem is that the government politicians are the problem, not the solution. These "elected representatives" have been using their power to feed at the trough of government, taking money from lobbyists, selling their votes, all while they have been telling the ordinary citizens that the problem is "big government", not crooked, greedy politicians.

Rather than pass laws to help their constituents. These pigs have been feasting off tax money while blaming "big government" for everything. They are hypocrites, crooks, and liars. And they and their buddies, the elite 1% are doing this at the expense of the bottom 99%.

Note: From this same article. Here is how the rich view themselves as deserving their wealth. This is what a guy who married into the Phillips petroleum empire says of how "hard work" will make you a billionaire:

In 1973, Kelly married Victoria Phillips, an heir to the oil fortune. Kelly’s financial disclosure forms show that among her holdings is stock in Phillips Resources Inc., which is valued at between $5 million and $25 million and which generated more than $100,000 annually in dividends.

Four years out of college in 1974, Mike and Victoria were able to buy a home for $50,000, roughly twice the median value of homes in Pennsylvania at the time, a large, stately house close to downtown.

In 1997, Kelly bought his dad’s business from him, taking out a $1.6 million mortgage to pay for it.

When discussing his wealth and how it came to him, Kelly, who was called “Millionaire Mike” during the 2010 campaign, grows animated.

“The way my dad taught me was pretty basic: You have to kill more than you eat. You gotta wake up every day before anyone else, you better get to work, and you better stay later than everybody else,” he said. “I’m a rich guy because I’ve worked hard. I gotta work every fricking day. Listen, nobody gives it to you. I compete. I’m not the only guy selling hot dogs at the ballpark, okay?”

I don't doubt he worked hard. But tens of millions of people work hard, real hard. A lot of poor people hold down two jobs at minimum wage working incredibly hard. But they don't "build up" car dealerships. This guy Mike Kelly, a Republican, worked hard. I don't doubt it. But he didn't get fabulously wealthy from working hard. His dad owned a car dealership and he bought out his father (probably at a steeply discounted price) and he married an heiress to a fortune. I bet a lot of janitors would me multi-millionaires if their fathers owned car dealerships and they married heiresses. And I bet they would be millionaires if they only put in an "average day" at work. It wasn't the hard work that made Mike Kelly rich. It was his education, his connections, his charm, probably his "flexible" ethics, and certainly some good old fashioned hard work.

The Sleaze that Passes for Politics in America

Here are some bits from a NY Times op-ed by Paul Krugman exposing the cynical manipulation of truth by Republicans, Romney in particular:

Suppose that President Obama were to say the following: “Mitt Romney believes that corporations are people, and he believes that only corporations and the wealthy should have any rights. He wants to reduce middle-class Americans to serfs, forced to accept whatever wages corporations choose to pay, no matter how low.”

How would this statement be received? I believe, and hope, that it would be almost universally condemned, by liberals as well as conservatives. Mr. Romney did once say that corporations are people, but he didn’t mean it literally; he supports policies that would be good for corporations and the wealthy and bad for the middle class, but that’s a long way from saying that he wants to introduce feudalism.

But now consider what Mr. Romney actually said on Tuesday: “President Obama believes that government should create equal outcomes. In an entitlement society, everyone receives the same or similar rewards, regardless of education, effort, and willingness to take risk. That which is earned by some is redistributed to the others.”

And in an interview the same day, Mr. Romney declared that the president “is going to put free enterprise on trial.”

This is every bit as bad as my imaginary Obama statement. Mr. Obama has never said anything suggesting that he holds such views, and, in fact, he goes out of his way to praise free enterprise and say that there’s nothing wrong with getting rich. His actual policy proposals do involve a rise in taxes on high-income Americans, but only back to their levels of the 1990s. And no matter how much the former Massachusetts governor may deny it, the Affordable Care Act established a national health system essentially identical to the one he himself established at a state level in 2006.

Over all, Mr. Obama’s positions on economic policy resemble those that moderate Republicans used to espouse. Yet Mr. Romney portrays the president as the second coming of Fidel Castro and seems confident that he will pay no price for making stuff up.

Welcome to post-truth politics.

...

So here’s my forecast for next year: If Mr. Romney is in fact the Republican presidential nominee, he will make wildly false claims about Mr. Obama and, occasionally, get some flack for doing so. But news organizations will compensate by treating it as a comparable offense when, say, the president misstates the income share of the top 1 percent by a percentage point or two.

The end result will be no real penalty for running an utterly fraudulent campaign. As I said, welcome to post-truth politics.

If there were any justice in the world, this farce that passes for politics would quickly lead to the complete collapse of America. Instead, the Republicans have been pulling this fraud for 30+ years and the only penalty has been a slow decay within America and a slow collapse of their economy. And the electorate continues like sheep to the slaughter. They don't complain. They keep electing these liars to positions of power, to positions that let them enrich the top 1% at the expense of the bottom 99%.

America's Love Affair with the Rich

Here is an excellent post by Joshua M. Brown on his blog The Reformed Broker. I've bolded some key bits:

Dear Jamie Dimon,

I hope this note finds you well.

I am writing to profess my utter disbelief at how little you seem to understand the current mood of the nation. In a story at Bloomberg today, you and a handful of fellow banker and billionaire "job creators" were quoted as believing that the horrific sentiment directed toward you from virtually all corners of America had something to do with how much money you had. I'd like to take a moment to disabuse you of this foolishness.

America is different than almost every other place on earth in that its citizenry reveres the wealthy and we are raised to believe that we can all one day join the ranks of the rich. The lack of a caste system or visible rungs of society's ladder is what separates our empire from so many fallen empires throughout history. In a nation bereft of royalty by virtue of its republican birth, the American people have done what any other resourceful people would do - we've created our own royalty and our royalty is the 1%. Not only do we not "hate the rich" as you and other em-bubbled plutocrats have postulated, in point of fact, we love them. We worship our rich to the point of obsession. The highest-rated television shows uniformly feature the unimaginably fabulous families of celebrities not to mention the housewives (real or otherwise) of the rich. We don't care what color they are or what religion they practice or where in the country they live or what channel their show is on - if they're rich, we are watching.

When Derek Jeter was toyed with by the New York Yankees when it came time for him to renew his next hundred million dollar contract, the people empathized with Derek Jeter. Sure, this disagreement essentially took place between one of the wealthiest organizations in the country and one of the wealthiest private citizens - but we rooted for Jeter to get his money. Nobody begrudged him a penny of it or wanted a piece of it or decried the fact that he was luckier than the rest of us. In the American psyche, Jeter was one of the good guys who was deservedly successful. He was one of us and an example of hard work paying off.

Likewise, when Steve Jobs died, he did so with more money than you or any of your "job alliance" buddies - ten times more than most of you, in fact. And upon his death the entire nation went into mourning. We set up makeshift shrines to his brilliance in front of Apple stores from coast to coast. His biography flew off the shelves and people bought Apple products and stock shares in his honor and in his memory. Does that strike you as the action of a populace that hates success?

No, Jamie, it is not that Americans hate successful people or the wealthy. In fact, it is just the opposite. We love the success stories in our midst and it is a distinctly American trait to believe that we can all follow in the footsteps of the elite, even though so few of us ever actually do.

So, no, we don't hate the rich. What we hate are the predators.

What we hate are the people who we view as having found their success as a consequence of the damage their activities have done to our country. What we hate are those who take and give nothing back in the form of innovation, convenience, entertainment or scientific progress. We hate those who've exploited political relationships and stupidity to rake in even more of the nation's wealth while simultaneously driving the potential for success further away from the grasp of everyone else.

Here in New York, we hated watching real estate and financial services elitists drive up the prices of everything from affordable apartments to martinis in midtown with the reckless speculation that would eventually lead to mass layoffs, rampant joblessness and the wreckage of so many retirement dreams. No one ever asked the rest of us if we minded, it just happened. I'm sure people across the country can tell similar stories.

So please, do us all a favor and come to the realization that the loathing you feel from your fellow Americans has nothing to do with your "success" or your "wealth" and it has everything to do with the fact that your wealth and success have come at a cost to the rest of us. No one wants your money or opportunities, what they want is the same chance that their parents had to attain these things for themselves. You are viewed, and rightfully so, as part of the machine that has removed this chance for many - and that is what they hate.

America hates unjustified privilege, it hates an unfair playing field and crony capitalism without the threat of bankruptcy, it hates privatized gains and socialized losses, it hates rule changes that benefit the few at the expense of the many and it hates people who have been bailed out and don't display even the slightest bit of remorse or humbleness in the presence of so much suffering in the aftermath.

Nobody hates your right to make money, Jamie. They hate how you and certain others have made it.

Don't be confused on this score for a moment longer.

If only the American people really took the sentiments of this post to heart. They could break the chains of financial and political abuse they have been under for 30+ years of the "Reagan Revolution".

Justice in America

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

— American Airlines uses bankruptcy to ward off debtors and renegotiate labor contracts. Donald Trump’s businesses go bankrupt without impinging on Trump’s own personal fortune. But the law won’t allow you to use personal bankruptcy to renegotiate your home mortgage.

— If you run a giant bank that defrauds millions of small investors of their life savings, the bank might pay a small fine but you won’t go to prison. Not a single top Wall Street executive has been prosecuted for Wall Street’s mega-fraud. But if you sell an ounce of marijuana you could be put away for a long time.

The above is the key issue in the 99% versus 1% fight now going on in the US. There is a "justice" for the poor and a "justice" for the rich. There is a government for the rich and the poor have no voice in government. In fact the US Supreme Court has made it official with its Citizens United case: corporations are "people" with no limits on their political donations, while real living and breathing human beings are limited -- by law! -- in their donations. So the "person" of a corporation is above the law that applies to "mere persons" as represented by the bottom 99%.

Here is the reality of today:

... the four hundred richest Americans, whose total wealth exceeds the combined wealth of the bottom 150 million Americans put together, pay an average of 17 percent of their income in taxes. That’s lower than the tax rates of most day laborers and child-care workers.

Read the whole post.