Paul Krugman on the wrathful uprising of the rich: "Sacrifice is for the little people"

Eventually poor Howard becomes megacorporate boss Arthur Jensen's personal pet tool, and a ratings downer -- in writer Paddy Chayefsky and director Sidney Lumet's Network, with Peter Finch as Howard, Faye Dunaway as Diana Christensen, and William Holden as Howard's best friend and former boss Max Schumacher.

"In a nutshell, [the "concept analysis report"] said, 'The American people are turning sullen. They've been clobbered on all sides by Vietnam, Watergate, the inflation, the depression.' They've tuned off, shot up, and they fuck themselves limp, and nothing helps. The concept analysis report concludes, 'The American people want someone to articulate their rage for them.'"

-- Diana Christensen (Faye Dunaway), in Network

"Anger is sweeping America. True, this white-hot rage is a minority phenomenon, not something that characterizes most of our fellow citizens. But the angry minority is angry indeed, consisting of people who feel that things to which they are entitled are being taken away. And they're out for revenge."

-- the start of Paul Krugman's NYT column today,

"The Angry Rich"

by Ken

Even if you haven't read Paul Krugman's column today yet, you can probably tell -- if only from the column title -- that he's not talking about who and what he's trying to trick us into thinking he's talking about.

No, I'm not talking about the Tea Partiers. I'm talking about the rich.

These are terrible times for many people in this country. Poverty, especially acute poverty, has soared in the economic slump; millions of people have lost their homes. Young people can't find jobs; laid-off 50-somethings fear that they'll never work again.

Yet if you want to find real political rage -- the kind of rage that makes people compare President Obama to Hitler, or accuse him of treason -- you won't find it among these suffering Americans. You'll find it instead among the very privileged, people who don't have to worry about losing their jobs, their homes, or their health insurance, but who are outraged, outraged, at the thought of paying modestly higher taxes.

But then, Network's Diana Christensen wasn't really talking about all those angry Americans either, or at least she wasn't talking about their interests. She was talking about how their anger could be used to make money for her and her TV network. And while everyone remembers the exhilaration of the popular uprising inspired by fired anchorman Howard Beale's message, "I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore," fewer people remember that poor Howard isn't just "mad" in the angry sense, but "mad" in the sense that he's gone nuts, though not so nuts that he doesn't recognize how he's being used as a tool for the TV money-makers.

And hardly anybody remembers that poor Howard winds up as the personal pet tool of the megacorporate boss played by Ned Beatty, who remains so devoted to Howard that eventually, with the inevitable decline in Howard's ratings, everyone interested in the corporation's and the network's sustainability has to find a way to, er, deal with their ratings-afflicted has-been messiah. It's hard not to be touched by titan Arthur Jensen's loyalty to Howard, but of course the rich can't necessarily be counted on to recognize even what's in their own longer-term interest.

At this point I think we should just turn the floor over to Mr. Krugman, who shares with Robert Parry (as reported in my post last night) astonishment at Forbes magazine's astonishing decision to publish that astonishing piece of political pornography by the bald-faced liar Dinesh D'Souza. As PK notes, "Craziness has gone mainstream."

The rage of the rich has been building ever since Mr. Obama took office. At first, however, it was largely confined to Wall Street. Thus when New York magazine published an article titled "The Wail Of the 1%," it was talking about financial wheeler-dealers whose firms had been bailed out with taxpayer funds, but were furious at suggestions that the price of these bailouts should include temporary limits on bonuses. When the billionaire Stephen Schwarzman compared an Obama proposal to the Nazi invasion of Poland, the proposal in question would have closed a tax loophole that specifically benefits fund managers like him.

Now, however, as decision time looms for the fate of the Bush tax cuts -- will top tax rates go back to Clinton-era levels? -- the rage of the rich has broadened, and also in some ways changed its character.

For one thing, craziness has gone mainstream. It's one thing when a billionaire rants at a dinner event. It's another when Forbes magazine runs a cover story alleging that the president of the United States is deliberately trying to bring America down as part of his Kenyan, "anticolonialist" agenda, that "the U.S. is being ruled according to the dreams of a Luo tribesman of the 1950s." When it comes to defending the interests of the rich, it seems, the normal rules of civilized (and rational) discourse no longer apply.

At the same time, self-pity among the privileged has become acceptable, even fashionable.

Tax-cut advocates used to pretend that they were mainly concerned about helping typical American families. Even tax breaks for the rich were justified in terms of trickle-down economics, the claim that lower taxes at the top would make the economy stronger for everyone.

These days, however, tax-cutters are hardly even trying to make the trickle-down case. Yes, Republicans are pushing the line that raising taxes at the top would hurt small businesses, but their hearts don't really seem in it. Instead, it has become common to hear vehement denials that people making $400,000 or $500,000 a year are rich. I mean, look at the expenses of people in that income class -- the property taxes they have to pay on their expensive houses, the cost of sending their kids to elite private schools, and so on. Why, they can barely make ends meet.

And among the undeniably rich, a belligerent sense of entitlement has taken hold: it's their money, and they have the right to keep it. "Taxes are what we pay for civilized society," said Oliver Wendell Holmes -- but that was a long time ago.

The spectacle of high-income Americans, the world's luckiest people, wallowing in self-pity and self-righteousness would be funny, except for one thing: they may well get their way. Never mind the $700 billion price tag for extending the high-end tax breaks: virtually all Republicans and some Democrats are rushing to the aid of the oppressed affluent.

You see, the rich are different from you and me: they have more influence. It's partly a matter of campaign contributions, but it's also a matter of social pressure, since politicians spend a lot of time hanging out with the wealthy. So when the rich face the prospect of paying an extra 3 or 4 percent of their income in taxes, politicians feel their pain -- feel it much more acutely, it's clear, than they feel the pain of families who are losing their jobs, their houses, and their hopes.

And when the tax fight is over, one way or another, you can be sure that the people currently defending the incomes of the elite will go back to demanding cuts in Social Security and aid to the unemployed. America must make hard choices, they'll say; we all have to be willing to make sacrifices.

But when they say "we," they mean "you." Sacrifice is for the little people.

There you go, sacrifice is for the little people. But not, of course, for the people who shamelessly exploit their helpless rage.

#