Max Boot-- A Conservative Republican-- Explains Why He's Voting The Straight Party Line... For Democrats Up And Down The Ballot

 

Celebrated artist Nancy Ohanian portrays the worst president in history

From what I can recall from a high school course in European history, the terms "right" and "left" were first applied to politics in the early stages of the French Revolution when the representatives of the parties that represented the noble families and Church hierarchy (less than 5% of the population but a majority of the representatives) were seated on the right of the National Assembly (formerly the Estates-General), while the Third Estate, the representatives of about 95% of the population, sat on the left. Those on the left represented the legitimate interests of the working class. Those on the right... eventually got what was coming to them. Reactionary political parties never needed to be "saved," which has what conservative Republican Max Boot was advocating in his Washington Post column yesterday; they always needed and need to be destroyed. "We have to destroy the party in order to save it," he wrote. He admits his party had always had "long-standing problems-- conspiracy-mongering, racism, hostility toward science," but it apparently didn't really matter much to him until Trump was able to "exploit [and] exacerbate all of those maladies, just as he made the coronavirus outbreak much worse than it needed to be." He wrote that he "watched with incredulity the GOP’s descent into collective madness." The madness, though, just exposed what was almost motivation for Republicanism and its the heart of the nature of American conservatism.

Many Republicans I know began by holding their noses and voting for Trump because of judges and taxes and their hatred of Hillary Clinton. Now the whole Republican Party seems to inhabit the Fox News Cinematic Universe, an alternative reality where President Barack Obama spied on Trump and Joe Biden is a socialist who will let “anarchists” and “arsonists” run riot.





The party has even become infected by the lunatic QAnon cult, whose followers believe Trump’s opponents are blood-drinking, Satan-worshipping pedophiles. In one recent poll, half of Trump supporters said top Democrats are involved in child sex trafficking. Georgia’s Senate primary offers a disturbing snapshot of the state of the party: Rep. Douglas A. Collins promotes his endorsement from two convicted felons (former Trump advisers Michael Flynn and George Papadopoulos) while Sen. Kelly Loeffler touts her support from Marjorie Taylor Greene, a soon-to-be House member who questioned whether the Pentagon was really attacked on 9/11.

The same trickle-down craziness is evident in Republican mishandling of the coronavirus. Trump has given up trying to control the pandemic, mocks masks and promotes conspiracy theories such as his claim that death counts are inflated because “doctors get more money and hospitals get more money” if they say people died of covid-19. This specious allegation is faithfully echoed by Republicans such as Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa. Red states are paying a devastating price for pandemic denialism: North Dakota has the lowest rate of mask-wearing in the country and the highest covid-19 death rate per capita in the world. [As of yesterday North Dakota had 52,367 cases per million residents, the worst rate of COVID in the entire world outside of Andorra, a tiny principality in the Pyrenees ruled by France and Spain and subsisiting entirely on tourism and smuggling.]

Trump has given permission for Republican bigots to come out into the open-- to replace dog whistles with wolf whistles. Sen. David Perdue (R.-GA) mocked Sen. Kamala Harris’s Indian first name. Madison Cawthorn, a House nominee in North Carolina, proudly visited Hitler’s lair and created a website attacking a journalist for having worked “for non-white males, like Cory Booker, who aims to ruin white males running for office.” Laura Loomer, a Republican candidate for a House seat from Florida, calls herself “a proud Islamophobe” and cheered the deaths of 2,000 refugees crossing the Mediterranean (“Good. 👏 Here’s to 2,000 more”).

The longer Trump stays in office, the more damage he does-- and the more loyal Republicans become. “Axios on HBO” found that, among 178 congressional Republicans who have been in office since Trump began his run for president, 42 percent criticized him after the Access Hollywood tape was released in 2016. Only 12 percent criticized him for the attack on peaceful demonstrators and Bible photo-op this year.

Republicans flatter Trump the way Trump flatters Kim Jong Un. Ken Cuccinelli, acting deputy secretary of homeland security, just tweeted that Trump is the “greatest SCOTUS [Supreme Court] President since the founding era (at least), and possibly of all time,” and that his “Nobel Peace Prize for Mideast peace” is a “sure thing.” Internet memes depict the portly president as a superhero.

Trump has no second-term agenda, and the party has no platform other than supporting him. Even the editor of National Review-- supposedly the intellectual leader of conservatism-- suggests that the primary reason to vote for Trump is to extend a middle finger to his critics. This is sheer nihilism-- and it will get worse if Trump wins reelection. By next year, fewer than 1 in 6 House Republicans will have been in office during George W. Bush’s presidency. Trumpism is their reality now.

The V-Dem Institute at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden just released a study showing that in four years the GOP has been transformed into an autocratic party that has much in common with the Fidesz Party in Hungary, the Law and Justice party in Poland and the Justice and Development Party in Turkey.

America needs a sane center-right party. It doesn’t need an extremist party that undermines democracy, caters to White grievances, and rejects science and reason. The only way Republicans will come to their senses is if they see that the path they are on leads to electoral oblivion. That’s why, even though I’m not a Democrat, I’m voting straight-ticket Democratic on Nov. 3-- and for as long as necessary to make Republicans come to their senses. The GOP needs to be detoxified and de-Trumpified.

What Will the Real American Resistance Look Like — Chaotic Rebellion or Organized General Strikes?

Click to enlarge. Suitable for framing.

by Thomas Neuburger

I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half.
—Jay Gould, 1886

It's normally a bad idea to denigrate the other side's supporters in a fight, especially in a political fight like the one we're currently engaged in, and especially when the game being played is the oligarch's version of Eric Berne's "Let's You and Him Fight" — the one where the rich get the poor to kill each other, while they steal both of them blind.

So don't consider this piece to be about the other side's supporters, whichever side the "other side" is to you, so much as it is an indictment of us all, and a call for all of us to change our ways.

The Real Surrender Monkeys

The indictment comes from Juan Cole, writing at Informed Comment. Two notes before we begin. First, I'm going to quote at some length, so forgive me; his point is stronger that way.

Second, despite its headline, the point is not about resistance to Trump alone, but far more general than that. Is America's broken state the fault of Republicans, or do the corrupted leaders of both parties have a hand in what we suffer?

Here's Cole:

How did Americans become such Wimps? Silence as Trump kills tens of Thousands, Destroys Social Security and Post Office, Plots Election Fraud

Nicole Winfield and Lisa Marie Pane at the Associated Press write at the unbelief with which Europeans are staring at the United States, as we head for 300,000 dead from the coronavirus and our economy shrank 33% on an annualized basis last quarter, and we just appear to be all right with that.

Not only are we perfectly willing to toss grandma in an early grave on Trump’s say-so, but we are supine as he openly engineers the destruction of social security and medicare, and of the post office, on behalf of himself and the billionaire class he represents. That is after we sat by while he completely gutted all environmental regulations that got in the way of corporations making money off poisoning us. I don’t think the neutering of the EPA has even been reported on daytime cable news, though the prime time magazine shows on MSNBC have at least brought it up.

Americans imagine themselves rugged individualists. A cartoonist did a satire on us showing brawny guys, shirts off, with the logo “Rugged individualism works best when we obey.”

In fact, Americans are masochistic sheeple who let the rich and powerful walk all over them and thank them for the privilege. ...

The rich figured out in the 1980s that Americans are all form over substance, and if you put up for president a Hollywood actor like Ronald Reagan who used to play cowboys, they would swoon over him. In 1984 when Reagan ran against Walter Mondale, I saw a middle aged white Detroit auto worker interviewed who said he woudn’t vote for Mondale because he was a “panty-waist.” Reagan took away their right to strike and took away government services by running up the deficit and cutting taxes on the rich simultaneously, then claiming the government couldn’t provide the services the people had paid for because it is broke.

Reagan raised the retirement age from 65 to 67. Why? Most young people don’t realize that their health will decline in their late 60s and they often won’t actually get any golden years.

What did Americans do in response? They just bent over and took it.

Actually, it is the French who are much more like Americans imagine themselves to be. President Emmanuel Macron last December tried to raise the retirement age from 62 to 64. I can’t understand why. France has persistently high unemployment as it is.

In response, all hell broke loose. Some 30 unions went on strike, and they supported each other. Trains were interrupted. Trucking was interrupted. Life was interrupted. A million people came out into the streets. But one poll had 61% of the French approving of the strikes. They went on for months, and were very inconvenient. ...

Macron backed down on raising the retirement age.

In the 2000s, Americans ridiculed the French as "surrender monkeys" for not joining the "Coalition of the Willing (to Commit War Crimes in Iraq)."

That was particularly rich coming from a nation that, in 2000, had just witnessed its presidency stolen by a blatantly partisan Supreme Court — and lifted not a single finger to stop it. The French (and Germans, and Italians) would have been in the streets had that happened to them, burning cars and reputations until the wrong was redressed.

The 2000 election was a constitutional coup — two of them if you count the one attempted by George Bush's brother Jeb in Florida, whose own coup attempt was made moot by the U.S. Supreme Court's. Yet for almost every American, it happened on television only, a game show to be watched between dessert and the late-night comics.

Cole writes about how the French are not only willing to "throw a first class fit when the servants of the rich in government come after their lifestyles," but also how all of the unions and most of the working class had each other's backs during these actions.

For contrast, in the U.S. the United Food and Commercial Workers union recently filed a lone-wolf lawsuit against the Dept. of Agriculture for allowing poultry manufacturers to speed up production lines, and no other union joined with them. In France, according to Cole, "it wouldn’t have been one union filing a lawsuit. ... It would have been a massive set of mutually reinforcing strikes."

A massive set of mutually reinforcing strikes. Surrender monkeys indeed.

Civil War or Civil Chaos?

Now for the call to change our ways: At the beginning of the third decade of the 21st century, Americans face a crossroads. For everyone who isn't either independently wealthy (like most of the donors who make up the real Republican base), or comfortably tucked into the professional managerial class (whose interests the Democratic Party seems most to serve), daily life is a both horror show now and collapsing fast to something even worse.

If there were ever a time to rise up, it's today. And rise up Americans will, I'm sure of it. With Covid deaths high (1,000 a day as I write this), incomes insecure for all but work-at-home professionals, and evictions just one or two missed paychecks away, even for the pre-Covid comfortable — with all this at the door, why would they not?

The question isn't will they rise up, but how will they revolt?

Will Americans rebel in an organized, focused way — like colonial Americans, for example, rose against British taxes, with planned resistance and coordinated action?

Or will the next rebellion devolve to the kind of battle that Jay Gould contemplated more than a century ago, a civil war where half of the suffering class attacks the other half, a chaotic free-for-all that allows the muscular security state to bootstomp in and "restore order" — all while our modern Jay Goulds (Jamie Dimon, Jeff Bezos, our hedge fund kings and queens, our CEOs of Google, Disney and Comcast), sail blindly off to their private-jet cocktail sunset, feeding on caviar and broken hearts?

Will Americans rise up effectively, with targets in mind — Medicare for All, Student Debt Forgiveness, Free Public Colleges and Universities, an actual End to Police Violence and Murder — and fight the misery descended upon them all?

Or will they rise up chaotically, their legitimate protests hijacked by Boogaloo Boys and FBI provocateurs, a faux-revolt where fascists battle anti-fascists, the former aided by violent, racist police, until the nation, getting nowhere, yearns for the security of a rapid but "managed" decline over the insecurity of a state-funded free fall to despair?

The time to decide all this is now, before the real first spark, the one that starts the American Arab Spring, is lit. If a General Strike seems frightening, consider the alternative, a five-way civil war with armed cops permanently stationed in the streets and skirmishes everywhere.

The French learned their lesson in 1789 and the century that followed their world-historical revolt, though it took them six generations to get things right.

"America, rise, or you will surely fall" is a lesson this generation has yet to learn. The task is not only to rise from five decades of sleep, but in rising, to act in a way that dispels the nightmare, and doesn't deepen it.
   

A National Crossroads: The Needs of the Many or Wants of the Few?

In the fictional Star Trek universe, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.

by Thomas Neuburger

The U.S. is at a national crossroads of world-historical proportions. Thanks to the COVID-19 epidemic we're headed for a collision, a heavy-engine oil train pileup, between two competing imperatives — does the nation serve the pathological wants of the few who control it or the immediate and existential needs of the many who live in it?

Long put off, this question can no longer be avoided. The few — the bankers and profiteers; investors and CEOs of all kinds and stripes; their well-paid enablers in the media and professional classes — think the corona virus emergency will pass and "business" (our modern, rapacious way of doing it) will eventually return to normal.

Thus for them, the current crisis represents once-in-a-generation opportunity for theft on the grandest of scales, the plundering of public goods and control in the time of greatest emergency. They think this theft, like the many similar others that went before it, will occur with no consequence for them and only long-term consequences for others — thefts like the 2000 election, which cost them nothing while adding to their power and credibility, but left a great many others broken or dead; or the theft of family fortunes and futures during the 2008 global meltdown, losses that even today only they have recovered from.

The Pain of the Many

In this they are wrong. True, when the pain of the many is slow to arrive, their response is slow as well. The theft of the 2000 election was without immediate consequences for the mass of those wronged by it. Men and women went off to war only later, killed without mercy and died without reason only after years had passed, and returned damaged or dead to the families they had left only in trickles, not floods.

The mass surveillance instituted by the Bush-Cheney regime, which too was a theft, affected people only slowly — at first because most were just dimly aware of it, and later because so few were materially harmed by it. People even now do not object to the constant governmental intrusion into their private lives, likely because so few feel its sting.

In the same way, the massive loss of wealth by the working class after 2008 — wealth they have still not regained — happened slowly, and in a nation filled with "back to normal" TV propaganda (you don't see the struggling depicted on spry network dramas and comedies) their constant pain has by now been normalized and accepted as just the way things are "for some people." (Those "some people," it must be noted, put Donald Trump in the White House.)

In contrast, the Great Depression struck suddenly, massively and nationally. In an instant the nation's people were cast into poverty and fear, with consequences they could see and feel in front of them almost the very next day — starvation, joblessness, homelessness, helplessness — a nation surprised in an instant by the collapse of their lives. That suddenness put Roosevelt in the White House, and thank God for that.

Sudden Crises and Sudden Responses

When calamities this large happen quickly — in a span of months, not decades — people respond as did the people of France. In 1789 a severe financial crisis forced the king to call the Estates-General, giving the people for the first time in a century a voice in the national outcome. That opened the gates, and barely two months later the Bastille was taken. The old regime had collapsed in a matter of weeks, never to return.

When societies do break apart, they often break quickly. Thus it will be here. In two months' time our grocery shelves have gone from stuffed to bare.

In one weeks' time, the barely-passed week of March 7-14, initial unemployment claims jumped by 33%, from 210,000 to over 280,000.

While jumps this large are not unusual, the Labor Department made it clear this one was corona virus crisis-related, a crisis that's in its infancy. "The increase in initial claims are clearly attributable to impacts from the COVID-19 virus," according to the BLS report. Layoffs are expected to increase for the duration of the pandemic, with predictions of unemployment above 20% not uncommon.

The Many or the Few?

Just as when the U.S. entered World War II, lives will be changing dramatically and fast. Clearly, government will have to step in massively and soon — and therein lies the problem. On whose side will government throw its weight? On the side of the pathological few or the side of the suffering many?

The answer to that question will determine the future of the nation. Will we more resemble the country of FDR and his widely loved government for the people, or that of Louis XVI and his overthrown government of the people. A crossroads indeed. Will the national needs of the many be honored and met? Or will the pathological few light a flame that burns us all?

Early indications aren't promising, but still, it's early days. Either way, we're not going back to what we used to call normal — the next new normal may be written in the next few months.
 

Kavanaugh And A Different Kind Of New Order

Yesterday we featured a tweet by Frank Schaeffer on a class of elite, entitled, white males represented by Brett Kavanaugh: "They were the tears," he wrote, "of an entitled bully unused to getting caught. Brett Kavanaugh was as mad as a privileged white man can be at the prospect of losing a coveted seat on the US Supreme Court to a mere girl who wasn't part of his Georgetown Prep social circle." As soon as I saw the Tom Williams photo above, Frank's tweet popped right back into my mind.

And then Matt Stoller's powerful tweet storm early Saturday morning on American artistocracy! WOW! "Kavanaugh's clearly on display anger and pain was quite confusing to millions of Americans," he began. "Many saw authenticity in his voice and thus in some way believed he is telling the truth. It is time for us to wake up to what aristocracy is. Aristocracy is a moral system. Most Westerners have a hard time imagining aristocracy. The enlightenment kind of pushed the end of feudalism as a moral frame. The idea of divinely ordained social hierarchies doesn't make any sense to us. We think of aristocracy as a bunch of men in whigs and women in petticoats and corsets, a sort of black and white before color TV world. That is not what aristocracy is. Aristocracy is a belief in the moral right of elites to rule and abuse everyone else for their own good.



"There are clear moral codes," continued Stoller, "owed by aristocrats to everyone else. Military service, for instance. Stewardship. Noblesse oblige. Sometimes people are nostalgic for these, like our elites don't even have a sense of social obligation. That's nonsense. Aristocrats were monsters. Before 1775, Americans lived in an aristocracy. It wasn't just a set of states with slaves and women without rights. Almost no one had political rights. Children learned social hierarchies of rank before they learned the difference between their left and right hands. It's easy to see abuse today and just sort of say see there's always been abuse. But the aristocracy of the pre-revolutionary world was different. Because people didn't think of it as abuse, they thought of it as enforcement of moral rights. Kavanaugh was sincerely angry. But he wasn't angry that he was caught lying. He was angry that people were attacking his moral system of aristocracy. It isn't just a white male thing. It's a super-rich powerful village thing. He was angry people were criticizing Versailles."



Stoller: "I went to a boarding school similar in some ways to Georgetown Prep. A culture of brutal hazing. Noblesse oblige. Servant leadership. Massive wealth, unspoken. Sexual assault. Anorexia. Connections to insane power. It's normal in some ways, but massively unusual in others. I was sort of a weird student, a gawky Jewish kid from Miami with a group of beautiful and athletic WASP-y kids mostly from New York and New England. We went to chapel four times a week. This is a very strange world. You get trained to be comfortable with power and hypocrisy. Kavanaugh grew up in that world. He doesn't know any different. He can't imagine any different. To him all of us are just peasants and he doesn't owe any of us the truth. It is beneath contempt for us to make moral demands on him. His whole career, from being one of the most sleazy and dishonest operatives in the Kenneth Starr investigation to lying about torture, stolen emails, and wiretapping, is about manipulating the peasants. He's an aristocrat."

Matt wasn't stopping there, don't worry. "But it goes far beyond Kavanaugh to how DC has been for 40 years. This is my favorite quote from the whole insane Clinton impeachment saga. '[Clinton] came in here and he trashed the place,' says WaPost columnist David Broder, 'and it's not his place.' The total contempt for normal people has been a hallmark of Western politics for four decades. Kavanaugh is just the most obvious signpost. We are now beyond aristocrats pretending to live in a democracy. He just demands what is his. And Trump loved it. Across our culture, from Tim Geithner to Bill Clinton to Brett Kavanaugh to Mark Zuckerberg, we tolerate aristocratic abuse. This was obvious in the financial crisis. Tens of millions of people kicked out of their homes, and yet they were the ones who carried shame. My favorite Kavanaugh quote is his regret at not going to work for Facebook in its early days. 'You know,' Kavanaugh said, 'I am committed to public service, as I said, but I do spend some time reading Robert Frost, The road not taken.' It reveals how becoming a massively wealthy Silicon Valley exec and being a right-wing Federal judge are basically both legitimate positional objectives. It's such a great window into this aristocratic culture."



Why the tweet storm? Matt explained: "Anyway, I guess I'm putting this out there because we have to start understanding the genuinely privileged position of people like Kavanaugh, which is a function of elite upbringing. He was a super rich coddled DC kid. What Kavanaugh is displaying looks like the pain of an abusive white male. And all those GOP Senators look like out of touch white men. And they are. More than that they are aristocrats. This is about the morality of power. Kavanaugh is an aristocrat and disdains democracy. This may be some sort of turning point. If we want a democracy, we are going to have to take back power, starting with our own sense of self. I am inspired by all of the people talking about how they were abused and saying that was wrong. This is how we regain our society. We must end aristocracy. Aristocracy in the Obama WH was about bailouts for bankers and debts for peasants. The aristocratic pretensions of the Trump administration were on display this week. 'We must disenthrall ourselves,' said Lincoln, 'and then we shall save our country.'"

I just want to add one thing. I want to ask you to watch how the DCCC and Pelosi's SuperPAC spends its I.E. funds from now 'til Nov. 6. How much will they spend on the genuine working class candidates like Randy Bryce, Kara Eastman, Ammar Campa-Najjar, Jess King, Nate McMurray, J.D. Scholten, Jahana Hayes, Jared Golden... and how much will they spend on the faux "aristocrats" the DCCC recruited, from Kathy Manning, Dan Kohl, Joseph Kopser and Susie Lee to a clown like lottery winner Gil Cisneros who they recruited because he's a multimillionaire and have still reserved $3,000,000 in broadcast media time for. They fear and they loath working class invaders into their elite little DC world. Bryce wore work boots to a DCCC function and they're still looking down their noses at him for it. Paul Ryan's SuperPAC has already spent $1.8 running a smear campaign against Bryce. The DCCC has responded with... ZERO. They would rather have a corporate lawyer in that seat-- one of their own (albeit a Republican) than see a man who works with his hands to provide for his family join them in Congress. Yes, that's the Democrap Party today. We need to take it back from them. As Lincoln said, "We must disenthrall ourselves and then we shall save our country."




UPDATE: But Will They Remember In 2020?

A new national poll indicates that a majority of voters have an unfavorable opinion of Kavanaugh, 53-44% (slightly better than Trump's 55-45%). When the question was asked "if your senator voted to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court would that make you:

• Much more likely to re-elect- 30%
• Somewhat more likely to reelect- 7%
• Wouldn't make a difference- 13%
• Somewhat less likely to re-elect- 7%
• Much less likely to re-elect- 44%

Up for reelection this cycle are just three senators who, realistically, could be impacted-- Ted Cruz (R-TX), Dean Heller (R-NV) and Joe Manchin (D-WV). But in 2020-- if voters have long enough memories-- senators most likely to be impacted are Susan Collins (R-ME), Cory Gardner (R-CO), Mitch McConnell (R-KY), Joni Ernst (R-IA), Ben Sasse (R-NE), Dan Sullivan (R-AK) and Doug Jones (D-AL). Did you watch Matt Damon nail Kavanaugh last night?

When Will It Be Time To Bring Out The Guillotines Again?

You can't imagine what a humongous fan I am of the French Revolution. I also love New Order songs... especially "Age of Consent," so this video above-- Oh God! No guillotines but, by the end, you get the point where all that excess it shows was leading. The French came to refer to Marie Antoinette as Madame Déficit and saw her as profligate self-serving, promiscuous (with Count Axel von Fersen, who looks very hot in the clip above) and reactionary. She was executed on the Place de la Révolution, now called the Place de la Concorde-- by everyone but me-- on October 16 1793.

Yesterday, travel reporter Hugo Martin, writing for the L.A. Times, did a story on excess worthy of the folks who got guillotined: United Airlines offers wealthy fliers at LAX access to a private terminal to avoid the crowds. (And it's not just United, needless to say.)

At Los Angeles International Airport, the nation's biggest airlines have added several new ways for Hollywood's A-list celebrities and well-heeled tycoons to catch a flight while avoiding noisy crowds, nosy paparazzi and frustrating lines [and common people].



Both Delta and American Airlines offer VIP services that let big-shot travelers slide into LAX terminals through private entrances at the curb. Inside, they can relax in private, luxury lounges, where they can drink and eat gourmet food without having to rub elbows with the hoi polloi.

United Airlines is also trying to cater to the most affluent passengers by announcing last week a partnership with the Private Suite, the private terminal on the outskirts of the airport where VIPs can check in for a flight, relax in luxury, clear security and get whisked to the plane in a shiny new BMW sedan without having to set foot in an LAX terminal.

The suite features individual lounges furnished with couches, a flat-screen TV, a pantry stocked with snacks and a refrigerator filled with soft drinks and booze. Personal assistants are on hand to cater to the fliers' needs.

To get access to the swanky terminal, fliers must pay a $7,500 annual membership plus $2,700 for each domestic flight or $3,000 for each international flight. The cost covers a group of up to four people. The alternative for less-frequent fliers is to pay $3,500 per domestic flight and $4,000 for an international flight without any annual fee.

The deal with United Airlines will allow passengers to gain access to the terminal simply by purchasing a ticket with a premium fee. The airline declined to divulge the fee, saying the cost will vary based on the airfare. The deal is not yet available on the airline's website, United.com and for now can only be booked through "select" travel agents and corporate booking desks that cater to well-to-do clients.

The Private Suite option will be offered only to United's business-class travelers flying between LAX and New York; Newark, N.J.; Aspen, Colo.; Hawaii; London; Los Cabos, Mexico; Melbourne and Sydney, Australia; Shanghai; Singapore; or Tokyo. The airline does not call its most expensive ticket options "first class."

Gavin de Becker, chief executive of the firm that owns and runs the Private Suite, dismissed suggestions that he teamed up with United Airlines because his business is struggling.

"We are doing amazingly well," he said, noting that the Private Suite has made similar deals with a handful of luxury hotels and charter jet companies. "We are exceeding our initial projections."

And if the 13 private lounges at the Private Suite are not enough to meet the demand, De Becker said he is already prepared to build additional lounges at his current location.

"When we see the writing on the wall that it's necessary, we are doing it," he said.

Perhaps Monsieur de Becker is looking at the wrong writing on the wrong wall, if get my point? Perhaps this would be more appropriate writing on a more appropriate wall. You can only get away with this kind of thing for so long before people have been pushed as far as they can be pushed and it's time for a little payback from the yobs and proles. 1,500 lost, "misplaced" children? Is that possible in 2018?

The Irony Of Trump Celebrating The French Revolution Is Too Mind-blowing To Comment On

I never forget Bastille Day; it's my parents wedding anniversary and I thought that was the coolest thing about their marriage. That Donald Trump was the guest of honor for the celebration of it today is a little bizarre, considering what it was all about. Conservatives may be more comfortables referring to July 14 as la Fête nationale rather than as Bastille Day, but it does commemorate the historic storming on the Bastille and the oomph that gave the French Revolution. The spark that set the day off was the firing of Jacques Necker, the finance minister-- who was known to be sympathetic to the plight of the common workers-- and by the desire of the workers to arm themselves against an expected attack from Louis XVI's army. The immediate result of the storming of the Bastille was the formal abolition of feudalism and the subsequent Declaration of the Rights of Man by Thomas Jefferson and his pal, the Marquis de Lafayette. Emmanuel Macron-- who deserves an award for keeping a straight face today and yesterday while Señor Trumpanzee babbled his nonsense-- is more than aware that the current boob Putin helped install in the White House is no Thomas Jefferson.

My best friend is Roland Charest, whose ancestors traveled from France to Quebec and subsequently to Maine, and this year we spent most of June in Paris. My first trip to France was more than 4 decades earlier, when I was bumming around Europe in a VW van for the summer after my graduation, something that turned into an adventure of nearly 7 years. France was special to me precisely because of the French Revolution and its significance in the battle against predator anti-social families like the Trumps, historical scourges of humanity.

Many years later, as president of a division of TimeWarner on an official visit to our French affiliate, I was taken by the company to the restaurant on top of the Eiffel Tower, the Jules Verne. which Willa Frej denounced yesterday as "a giant tourist trap, basically the equivalent of dining inside the Statue of Liberty." She's totally and utterly wrong, although I've never been inside the Statue of Liberty. I don't usually care much about views in restaurants, just about food-- an the Jules Verne's is fantastic. And that's not just a memory from the 1980s. Roland and I ate there 3 weeks ago. Alain Ducasse's restaurant's food matches the incomparable views. Macron could have taken Trump to Guy Savoy (slightly better) but the Jules Verne is one of France's best restaurants and only a boob would reflexively decide its "one of the most cliché venues imaginable." I have a feeling Frej has never eaten there but I'm sure she'll be relieved to hear that you can tell the waiter, as many do, that you don't want the foie gras and they replace it with a healthier dish that's far better-- even the waiters say it's far better.

Meeting dinner at Guy Savoy

Most of the food we ate in Paris wasn't quite on a Michelin star level-- and I'm still trying to work off that 14 course dinner at Guy Savoy-- but all the food was unbelievable. Even just a baguette and some cheese and tomato is more delicious in Paris. No, really, it is. Ask anyone who's been there.

Hey, Rich Criminals, The Guillotine Won't Have To Be Reinvented

You can only push people so far before they react

The big news out of the U.K. this morning was that the country's biggest corporate bosses have gotten big pay raises over the last year and now make an average of $7.2 million, a tidy 140 times more than their employees' average earnings. Theresa May, the U.K.'s new Conservative Prime Minister, whose party's policies have made this possible, said "There is an irrational, unhealthy and growing gap between what these companies pay their workers and what they pay their bosses." I suppose the two previous posts had to lead directly to this one about how hedge fund managers are preparing for the armageddon-- or revolution-- they are helping create with their unfettered greed and control of (the coercive powers of) government. Alec Hogg, reporting last year from Davos-- yes, I'll be honest: I would vote for a Trumpanzee if he'd promise to use a nuke (a small one ONLY) on one of these Davos summits-- wrote that the predatory super rich were "preparing getaways by buying airstrips and farms in remote areas."

With growing inequality and the civil unrest from Ferguson and the Occupy protests fresh in people’s mind, the world’s super rich are already preparing for the consequences. At a packed session in Davos, former hedge fund director Robert Johnson revealed that worried hedge fund managers were already planning their escapes. “I know hedge fund managers all over the world who are buying airstrips and farms in places like New Zealand because they think they need a getaway,” he said.

Johnson, who heads the Institute of New Economic Thinking and was previously managing director at Soros, said societies can tolerate income inequality if the income floor is high enough. But with an existing system encouraging chief executives to take decisions solely on their profitability, even in the richest countries inequality is increasing.

Johnson added: “People need to know there are possibilities for their children-- that they will have the same opportunity as anyone else. There is a wicked feedback loop. Politicians who get more money tend to use it to get more even money.”

Global warming and social media are among the trends the 600 super-smart World Economic Forum staffers told its members to watch out for long before they became ubiquitous. This year, income inequality is fast moving up the Davos agenda-- a sure sign of it is poised to burst into the public consciousness.

Jim Wallis, founder of Sojourners and a Davos star attraction after giving the closing address in 2014, said he had spent a lot of time learning from the leaders behind recent social unrest in Ferguson. He believes that will prove “a catalytic event” which has already changed the conversation in the US, bringing a message from those who previously “didn’t matter.”

But as former New Zealand prime minister and now UN development head Helen Clark explained, rather than being a game changer, recent examples suggest the Ferguson movement may soon be forgotten. “We saw Occupy flare up and then fade like many others like it,” Clark said. “The problem movements like these have is stickability. The challenge is for them to build structures that are ongoing; to sustain these new voices.”

So what is the solution to having the new voices being sufficiently recognised to actually change the status quo into one where those with power realise they do matter?

Clark said: “Solutions are there. What’s been lacking is political will. Politicians do not respond to those who don’t have a voice In the end this is all about redistributing income and power.”

She added: “Seventy five percent of people in developing countries live in places that are less equal than they were in 1990.”

Republicans aren't the only politicians who sell out-- Schumer and Murphy

The panellists were scathing about politicians, Wallis describing them as people who held up wet fingers “to see which way the money is blowing in from.”

Author, philosopher and former academic Rebecca Newberger-Goldstein saw the glass half full, drawing on history to prove society does eventually change for the better. She said Martin Luther King was correct in his view that the arch of history might be long, but it bends towards justice.

In ancient Greece, she noted, even the greatest moralists like Plato and Aristotle never criticised slavery. Newberger-Goldstein said: “We’ve come a long way as a species. The truth is now dawning that everybody matters because the concept of mattering is at the core of every human being.” Knowing you matter, she added, is often as simple as having others “acknowledge the pathos and reality of your stories. To listen.”

Mexican micro-lending entrepreneur Carlos Danel expanded on the theme. His business, Gentera, has thrived by working out that “those excluded are not the problem but realising there’s an opportunity to serve them.”

He added: “Technology provides advantages that can lower costs and enable us to provide products and services that matter to the people who don’t seem to matter to society. And that’s beyond financial services-- into education and elsewhere.”

Which, Danel believes, is why business was created in the first place – to serve. A message that seemed to get lost somewhere in the worship of profit.

Two days later, Hogg was still reporting from Davos about how our elites have engendered a feeling of worldwide pessimism and geopolitical tensions by not doing enough to reduce runaway inequality. The Davos elites, who gave us Austerity for monkey politicians like Paul Ryan and David Cameron to espouse, were worried that "the next big revolution will be in regulation rather than innovation."

Laura Tyson, professor of business administration and economics at UC, Berkeley says she's worried that accelerating economic inequality will lead to clashes all over the world, although she focused particularly on the Middle East. "We have not done nearly enough about inclusive growth. We’re now having economic growth with increasing inequality."

Thomas Piketty's former professor, Christopher Pissarides, a 2010 Nobel winner at the London School of Economics, said governments need to use tax revenues to create jobs but saying what you might expect someone with a "Sir" in from of his name warned that punishing the rich is not the way to go. "I don’t think taxing high incomes and simply taking the money and passing it on as transfers to lower incomes can work in today’s open globalised world," he said. Parroting the standard age-old, right-wing world view, he insists that redistribution takes away the incentive for lower-skilled people to acquire skills and go into the labour market and creates disincentives for higher earners to stay in the country, work hard and look for new ventures to make money." Yes, he could be Paul Ryan if he wanted to give up half his IQ. But where he parts ways with garden variety conservatives like Ryan is that he calls on governments to use more imaginative ways of rebalancing incomes by creating more and better jobs at the lower end and investing in better education.

One example of such innovation, Pissarides said, is in Sweden. Tax rates can be as high as 60% but tax revenues are used to provide services that would not otherwise be created by the free market at a reasonable price. He said the best example is subsidised childcare, which allows both parents to work, and creates jobs for carers.

This, he said, “is boosting the income of the family, as well as the childcare worker because their salary is subsidised, and it reduces inequality.” Couples on lower incomes, who would not be able to afford expensive childcare, can stay in the workforce while raising a family, not just people on high incomes.

One reason this model is so successful in Sweden, he argued, is that people have faith in the state: “You have to have trust in the public sector. There should be no corruption. [In Sweden], because people have trust in the public sector to make use of the money, they pay it and tax evasion is very low.”

The American right-- long before Trump came around-- figured this out and set about-- with a great deal of success-- to undermine that faith and in fact, preach hatred of government and persuade their partisans that "government is the problem, not the solution."

One last bit about how the Davos elites think, a report from Jo Confino, on whether or not the criminal billionaire class thinks it's profitable to just let the world go to hell. He points out, for example, that most CEOs care not a whit about Climate Change.

How depressed would you be if you had spent more than 40 years warning of an impending global catastrophe, only to be continually ignored even as you watch the disaster unfolding?

So spare a thought for Jørgen Randers, who back in 1972 co-authored the seminal work Limits to Growth, which highlighted the devastating impacts of exponential economic and population growth on a planet with finite resources.

As politicians and business leaders gather in Davos to look at ways to breathe new life into the global battle to address climate change, they would do well to listen to Randers’ sobering perspective.

The professor of climate strategy at the Norwegian Business School has been pretty close to giving up his struggle to wake us up to our unsustainable ways, and in 2004 published a pessimistic update of his 1972 report showing the predictions made at the time are turning out to be largely accurate.

What he cannot bear is how politicians of all persuasions have failed to act even as the scientific evidence of climate change mounts up, and as a result he has largely lost faith in the democratic process to handle complex issues.

In a newly published paper in the Swedish magazine Extrakt he writes:

It is cost-effective to postpone global climate action. It is profitable to let the world go to hell.

I believe that the tyranny of the short term will prevail over the decades to come. As a result, a number of long-term problems will not be solved, even if they could have been, and even as they cause gradually increasing difficulties for all voters.

Randers says the reason for inaction is that there will be little observable benefit during the first 20 years of any fiscal sacrifice, even though tougher regulations and taxes will guarantee a better climate for our children and grandchildren.

Trump's standard Republican economic agenda, delivered in Detroit today was geared right towards wealthy donors, not towards workers. For example, he boasted about abolishing the inheritance tax, babbling about how "workers have paid enough," but perhaps not aware that "workers" don't pay a dime of inheritance taxes. In fact no one does except a fraction of the top 1% of earners. It kicks in at around $11 million and that tends-- in real life-- to be unrealized capital gains which hasn't been previously taxed, negating one of the primary right-wing talking points about estate taxes. The whole plan sounded like it could have been written by one of Paul Ryan's interns aimed to increase rather than decrease economic inequality. Just as Señor Trumpanzee was speaking, a new Monmouth poll was released showing Hillary clobbering him 46-34% among registered voters, with Gary Johnson at 7% and Jill Stein at 2%.Among likely voters, it's Hill-dog at 50% and Mr. T at 37%. Independents prefer Trump by 2 points, 32 to 30%, a rapidly eroding advantage.

Tea Party's Reign Of Terror Just May Save The Incompetent Democrats Next Year

Danton et Farenthold

The French Revolution spawned many important things aside from the motto "Liberté, égalité, fraternité." Before the French Revolution, for example, a debauched and unaccountable monarchy and aristocracy ruled mankind with impunity and conspired with the Established religions to give that the imprimatur of ruling by "Divine Right." Things really did change because of the monumental revolution, even if they've slipped back in the ancien direction-- substitute plutocracy and oligarchy for aristocracy-- in recent years. The whole "left"/"right" dichotomy of looking at politics comes from the 1789 Revolution as well-- and the idea that mere mortals could have a role in governance. The Revolution brought about the whole concept of universal male suffrage. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen came in 1789 and was earthshaking; suddenly "rights" were described as being "natural, unalienable, sacred and incontestable." It was bye-bye to the Divine Right of kings (and take your nobles and your clergy with you)... hello popular sovereignty. These are some of the principles we may recognize today that came out of that Declaration:

• Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions may be founded only upon the general good.

• The aim of all political association is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man. These rights are liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression.

• Liberty consists in the freedom to do everything which injures no one else; hence the exercise of the natural rights of each man has no limits except those which assure to the other members of the society the enjoyment of the same rights. These limits can only be determined by law.

• Law can only prohibit such actions as are hurtful to society. Nothing may be prevented which is not forbidden by law, and no one may be forced to do anything not provided for by law.

• Law is the expression of the general will. Every citizen has a right to participate personally, or through his representative, in its foundation. It must be the same for all, whether it protects or punishes. All citizens, being equal in the eyes of the law, are equally eligible to all dignities and to all public positions and occupations, according to their abilities, and without distinction except that of their virtues and talents.

• No person shall be accused, arrested, or imprisoned except in the cases and according to the forms prescribed by law. Any one soliciting, transmitting, executing, or causing to be executed, any arbitrary order, shall be punished. But any citizen summoned or arrested in virtue of the law shall submit without delay, as resistance constitutes an offense.

• The law shall provide for such punishments only as are strictly and obviously necessary, and no one shall suffer punishment except it be legally inflicted in virtue of a law passed and promulgated before the commission of the offense.

• As all persons are held innocent until they shall have been declared guilty, if arrest shall be deemed indispensable, all harshness not essential to the securing of the prisoner's person shall be severely repressed by law.

• No one shall be disquieted on account of his opinions, including his religious views, provided their manifestation does not disturb the public order established by law.

• The free communication of ideas and opinions is one of the most precious of the rights of man. Every citizen may, accordingly, speak, write, and print with freedom, but shall be responsible for such abuses of this freedom as shall be defined by law.

• A general tax is indispensable for the maintenance of the public force and for the expenses of administration; it ought to be equally apportioned among all citizens according to their means.

• All the citizens have a right to decide, either personally or by their representatives, as to the necessity of the public contribution; to grant this freely; to know to what uses it is put; and to fix the proportion, the mode of assessment and of collection and the duration of the taxes.

• Society has the right to require of every public agent an account of his administration.

• Property being an inviolable and sacred right, no one can be deprived of it, unless demanded by public necessity, legally constituted, explicitly demands it, and under the condition of a just and prior indemnity.

Four years later, however, the Revolution turned on itself with the rise of the Jacobins and Robespierre. As many as 40,000 were killed during their Reign of Terror (not to mention as many as 200,000 in the War in the Vendée). Revolutionaries like Brissot, Danton and Westermann were guillotined. Eventually, so was Robespierre. Danton-- Georges-Jacques Danton-- is often described as the man who overthrew the monarchy. He was the first President of the radical Committee of Public Safety but in 1794 he was executed for "counter-revolutionary activities."

I recall his story today when I read Michael Cohen's excellent post in The Guardian, Republicans' big problem with crazy. His point is that the Republican establishment pandered to Tea Party extremism to win the 2010 midterms and now that Establishment is "reaping the whirlwind." Andy Harris (R-MD) is an unlikely Danton but, says Cohen, "if you're "looking for a Republican congressman who truly embodies the ethos of the Tea Party, Maryland Representative Andy Harris is a pretty good pick." He hate RINOS and he hates Big Government. He primaried mainstream Republican Wayne Gilchrest and is a certified member of the Tea Party.

As a congressman, Harris has had a difficult time finding a single government program or legislative initiative he doesn't hate. He opposed the debt limit deal in the summer of 2011; he was one of the handful of Republicans to vote against the fiscal cliff deal in January 2013; he's against immigration reform, foreign aid, more money for Pell grants, and even the Violence Against Women Act.

And, of course, he hates Obamacare.

This record of conservative allegiance would, you might imagine, inoculate Harris from Tea Party criticism. Yet, earlier this month, in a town hall meeting in his home district, he was assailed by his constituents-- for not being strident and uncompromising enough.

"You guys are being nice guys" and "I want to see more defiance!" were just some of the accusations hurled at the congressman in a heated session that included questions about the supposed IRS scandal and the current lodestar of conservative lunacy-- Benghazi.

Harris is not alone.

Blake Farenthold, another Tea Party Republican from Texas, who voted against the fiscal cliff deal as well, and told constituents "there are several [cabinet] departments we could completely get rid of", was assailed by "birthers" for the GOP's failure to impeach President Obama. (His defense was not that impeachment would be insane, but that it would be infeasible.) Tea Partiers in North Carolina pummeled Congressman Robert Pittenger for refusing to support defunding Obamacare even thought he has supported a number of bills repealing Obamacare.

Indeed, across the nation, Republican senators and congressmen are finding themselves under withering assault from Tea Party critics.

After three and a half years of legislative hostage-taking and policy nihilism and unceasing, uncompromising obstructionism of President Obama's agenda, the message from the Tea Party is a simple one: we want more crazy.

So what's going on here? Quite simply, Republicans are being destroyed by the rightwing monster they created.

Although, once upon a time, the divide in the GOP was between moderates and conservatives; today, the intra-party cleavage is between the Republican establishment and the lunatic fringe. And the fringe is not so fringe-y.

For years, the GOP establishment mined this wellspring of racial and economic anxiety. They railed against gay marriage and abortion; attacked big government and out-of-control federal spending and demonized welfare and social programs.

But once in office, Republicans had a funny way of never really carrying through with their tough rhetoric. Rather than do away with social security or Medicare-- they strengthened it and expanded it. Rather than slash government spending or the size of the federal bureaucracy-- they increased it. The more visceral imperative for Republican officeholders was to provide tax breaks for their wealthy supporters, weaken regulation (be it financial, environmental or workplace) and, above all, hold on to their political power. Going after sacred cows like social insurance programs or popular spending programs, or working to enact abortion restrictions, were political nonstarters (or were quickly shelved once they became political liabilities).

Then, in 2009, things began to take a turn. With the election of Barack Obama, Republicans found themselves with a new political adversary uniquely capable of upsetting the far right-- and the GOP made sure this was exactly what happened. Playing on fears of social change, racial anxiety and expanding big government, Republican leaders inveighed against the evils of Obamacare and the president's alleged profligate spending.

They pulled out every stop to thwart Obama's legislative agenda, and even went far down the political rabbit hole as they flirted with "birtherism", charges of socialism, and allegations that the president was a secret Muslim. In the process, they both enraged and energized the party's most radical followers.

The result was a short-term political victory (control of the House of Representatives, won in the 2010 midterms)-- but an increasingly long-term political headache, like the one playing out in GOP town hall meetings across America right now. The establishment players in Congress found themselves with a host of new Tea Partier colleagues little interested in following the usual GOP script of compromise in the name of political necessity. They were willing to undermine the full faith and credit of the US government in order to force draconian spending cuts upon the White House. They've continued their assault on Obamacare, voting to repeal it 40 times, and now, one of the group's biggest bomb-throwers, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, is talking about shutting down the government in order to defund it. They've allowed sequestration-- and its devastating affect on communities across the country-- to continue. And they have resisted any and all effort to moderate the party's image, dragging the Republican establishment under the bus with them.

On immigration reform, the Tea Party contingent has made clear that the Senate immigration bill is dead-in-the-water-- thus, gravely undermining national GOP efforts to improve the party's image among Hispanic voters. On abortion rights, state legislatures filled with ultra-conservatives continue to pass legislation restricting access to reproductive health services and, in the process, further devastated the party's already poor relationship with women voters. In the struggle between those who want to moderate the party (albeit only slightly) and those who want to ride the train straight to crazy-ville, the latter are winning.

Finally, they've turned their guns on their own leaders and, in the process, driven the party more and more toward their uncompromising positions.

With deadlines coming soon on a possible government shutdown and an extension of the debt limit, Republican leaders like Speaker John Boehner and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell who is facing a Tea Party primary challenge are under growing pressure to not get off the politically suicidal path on which they find themselves-- but instead to stay the course.

The result of all this is more dysfunction, more budgetary shutdowns and more political black eyes for a Republican party unable to reason with its most ideologically fervent followers. None of this should really be unexpected. If you're going to tell radical conservatives that Obamacare is the worst thing to ever happen to America, is it really a surprise that those same extremists are not going to meekly nod when you tell them that it's now a fact of life? If you're going to tell voters that government debt is destroying the country, is it really a surprise when those voters demand that every step must be taken to reduce it?

Any hope that the defeat of Mitt Romney in November 2012 would begin to drain the GOP's fever swamp has gone by the wayside-- and Republicans have no one to blame but themselves. In nurturing and radicalizing its extremist fringe-- in pursuit of short-term gain-- the Republican establishment created a political Frankenstein. Increasingly, however, it looks as though the monster's first victim is going to be them.

Gérard Depardieu will play Andy Harris in the movie version

Work Till You Drop

As a small time entrepreneur in San Francisco with my own indie record label I never thought about money except in terms of meeting our responsibilities to our artists and creditors and building the company. Money goes into small business startups, not out of them. For years my take home pay was $100/week. This was considerably before San Francisco's Mission District, where I lived and had my office (in a somewhat renovated firehouse), was gentrified. By the time we sold the company to SONY my take home pay had doubled. I felt rich.

Then everything changed. TimeWarner hired me to run one of their labels and I was in an environment where executives complained bitterly about making only six figures. (My direct boss complained bitterly about only making seven figures.) I was feeling like the richest guy in the world and no one around me was happy even though many made many times what I was making. It was an important life lesson.

Later I rose in the company and became a Warner Bros divisional president. I felt like a kid in a candy store and got to work with artists whose work I had worshipped, from the Ramones, Lou Reed, Depeche Mode, The Smiths to Neil Young, Joni Mitchell and Eric Clapton, while helping young artists like Green Day, the Barenaked Ladies and Enya develop their careers. What could be better? And I was making seven figures-- plus benefits. Sometimes I had trouble justifying that much money to myself. My tax-free annual expense account was more money than my father ever made in his life. I watched more than a few executives practicing a kind of potlatch syndrome-- not burning up canoes and totem poles and their worldly possessions, but snorting up their six-figure incomes in the form of cocaine. Did they feel guilty about making so much money? No one I ever talked to about did. Everyone, consciously at least, left they deserved every cent of what they got-- and more. I justified my salary to myself as well, though it always made me uncomfortable. I used to be the first one in in the mornings and the last to leave and I worked my ass off for our artists and our employees and our customers. But... seven figures is a lot for one person, no matter how you slice it... and I did have the best job in the whole world.

Thursday Matthew Yglesias pointed out that tough times have dealt JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon a harsh fate-- only $11.5 million in 2012 (down from $23 million in 2011). Nevermind that he did a horrible job and helped bring his hated company into further disrepute and tarnishing an already severely damaged brand. He's entitled.

Friday Ezra Klein subbed for Lawrence O'Donnell on MSNBC's The Last Word and he really did an excellent job pointing out the kind of plutocratic entitlement that led directly to the French Revolution and, for many plutocrats, Madame Guillotine. But Ezra, as you can see in the clip up top, wasn't talking about the French Revolution (nor about executing banksters like Dimon); he was simply pointing out that the wealthy executives who love their jobs and are so well paid to do those jobs, should perhaps feel a little more empathy for workers who don't feel like kids in candy stores and who aren't quite so well-compensated. Raising the retirement age for Social Security and Medicare is swimming against the grain of history and unless the Jamie Dimons of the world figure that out... well, no telling what could happen if people get angry enough. Empathy-- maybe people in Congress and the media should think about it too.