Do You Think Chris Christie Is Mainstream, A Centrist? He Wants You To. How About AOC?

In the video above, Morning Joe regular, Mike Barnicle, asked Chris Christie how he felt about the neo-fascist CPAC convention giving the announcement of Senator John McCain's death a standing ovation. Barnicle's soft ball: "Is that your political party?" Watch Christie's pivot into an attack on the figure the right-of-center establishment fears most in the whole country. "No, that's not people I would agree with," establishes a rapport with the audience who would also not agree with Nazis cheering the death of John McCain either. "You know, Mike, there's always been elements of my party that I haven't agreed with." Oh, he's such a bipartisan centrist (just like me... my kinda guy). Now that he's got your attention and sympathy... the pivot:

I think that's normal for any political party. I'm sure there are folks who have heard some of the things that Alexandria Ocasio Cortez is saying that are mainstream Democrats who say 'no, that's not the party that I belong to, even though that may be where the energy is right now in the Democratic Party.'... Both parties...

Which "things that Alexandria Ocasio Cortez is saying" are comparable to a bunch neo-Nazi Trump supporters cheering the death of John McCain? A 70% margin tax rate on annual income over $10,000,000? The Green New Deal? Medicare for All? Replacing ICE? What does she say that is so offensive to self-labeled "centrists?" That "people who are taking money from pharmaceutical companies shouldn't be drafting health care legislation and that people who are taking money from oil and gas companies shouldn't be drafting climate legislation?" I understand exactly why that enrages congressional criminals like Frank Pallone (D-NJ), Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and Steny Hoyer (D-MD). I can see how it drove that worthless slug Claire McCaskill (D-MO), who was kicked out of office by voters in Missouri in part because she took $1,671,164 from the healthcare sector, denounce a reformer like AOC. She doesn't make establishment career criminals comfortable. Nor does she want to. And they want her DEAD.

Yesterday Mehdi Hasan's Intercept essay, AOC, Sanders And Warren Are The Real Centrists Because They Speak For Most Americans, made a lot more sense that the garbage you normally hear fromBeltway media sellouts using the word "moderate" to describe conservatives. Hasan is as angry about this as I am. He asks his readers-- one of whom you should be-- to "Google the words 'moderate' or 'centrist' and a small group of names will instantly appear: Michael Bloomberg, Amy Klobuchar, Joe Biden, and, yes, Howard Schultz. Bloomberg is considered a 'centrist thought leader' (Vanity Fair). Klobuchar is the 'straight-shooting pragmatist' (Time). Biden is the 'quintessential centrist' (CNN) and the 'last hurrah for moderate Democrats (New York Magazine), Shultz is gifted with high-profile interview slots to make his 'centrist independent' pitch to voters." Blood boiling yet? Hasan:

Now Google the freshman House Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She’s been dubbed a member of the “loony left” (Washington Post), a “progressive firebrand” (Reuters), and a “liberal bomb thrower” (New York Times).

Got that? Biden, Schultz and Co., we are told, sit firmly in the middle of American politics; Ocasio-Cortez stands far out on its fringes.

This is a brazen distortion of reality, a shameless and demonstrable lie that is repeated day after day in newspaper op-eds and cable news headlines.

“It’s easy to call what AOC is doing as far-lefty, but nothing could be farther from the truth,” Nick Hanauer, the venture capitalist and progressive activist, told MSNBC in January. “When you advocate for economic policies that benefit the broad majority of citizens, that’s true centrism. What Howard Schultz represents, the centrism that he represents, is really just trickle-down economics.”

“He is not the centrist,” continued Hanauer. “AOC is the centrist.”



Hanauer is right. And Bernie Sanders is centrist too-- smeared as an “ideologue” (The Economist) and “dangerously far left” (Chicago Tribune). So too is Elizabeth Warren-- dismissed as a “radical extremist” (Las Vegas Review-Journal) and a “class warrior” (Fox News).

The inconvenient truth that our lazy media elites do so much to ignore is that Ocasio-Cortez, Sanders, and Warren are much closer in their views to the vast majority of ordinary Americans than the Bloombergs or the Bidens. They are the true centrists, the real moderates; they represent the actual political middle.

Don't believe me? Take Ocasio-Cortez’s signature issue: the Green New Deal. Former George W. Bush speechwriter-- and torture advocate-- Marc Thiessen claims that the Green New Deal will “make the Democrats unelectable in 2020.” The Economist agrees: “The bold plan could make the party unelectable in conservative-leaning states.” The Green New Deal “will not pass the Senate, and you can take that back to whoever sent you here and tell them,” a testy Diane Feinstein, the senior and supposedly “moderate” Democratic senator from California, told a bunch of kids in a viral video.

But here is the reality: The Green New Deal is extremely popular and has massive bipartisan support. A recent survey from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and George Mason University found that a whopping 81 percent of voters said they either “strongly support” (40 percent) or “somewhat support” (41 percent) the Green New Deal, including 64 percent of Republicans (and even 57 percent of conservative Republicans).

What else do Ocasio-Cortez, Warren, and Sanders have in common with each other-- and with the voters? They want to soak the rich. Ocasio-Cortez suggested a 70 percent marginal tax rate on incomes above $10 million-- condemned by “centrist” Schultz as “un-American” but backed by a majority (51 percent) of Americans. Warren proposed a 2 percent wealth tax on assets above $50 million-- slammed by “moderate” Bloomberg as Venezuelan-style socialism, but supported by 61 percent of voters, including 51 percent of Republicans. (As my colleague Jon Schwarz has demonstrated, “Americans have never, in living memory, been averse to higher taxes on the rich.”)

How about health care? The vast majority (70 percent) of voters, including a majority (52 percent) of Republicans, support a single-payer universal health care system, or Medicare for All. Six in 10 say it is “the responsibility of the federal government” to ensure that all Americans have access to health care coverage.

Debt-free and tuition-free college? A clear majority (60 percent) of the public, including a significant minority (41 percent) of Republicans, support free college “for those who meet income levels.”

A higher minimum wage? According to Pew, almost 6 in 10 (58 percent) Americans support increasing the federal minimum wage from $7.25 an hour to (the Sanders-recommended) $15 an hour.

Gun control? About six out of 10 (61 percent) Americans back stricter laws on gun control, according to Gallup, “the highest percentage to favor tougher firearms laws in two or more decades.” Almost all Americans (94 percent) back universal background checks on all gun sales-- including almost three-quarters of National Rifle Association members.

Abortion? Support for a legal right to abortion, according to a June 2018 poll by NBC News and the Wall Street Journal, is at an “all-time high.” Seven out of 10 Americans said they believed Roe v. Wade “should not be overturned,” including a majority (52 percent) of Republicans.

Legalizing marijuana? Two out of three Americans think marijuana should be made legal. According to a Gallup survey from October 2018, this marks “another new high in Gallup’s trend over nearly half a century.” And here’s the kicker: A majority (53 percent) of Republicans support legal marijuana too!

Mass incarceration? About nine out of 10 (91 percent) Americans say that the criminal justice system “has problems that need fixing.” About seven out of 10 (71 percent) say it is important “to reduce the prison population in America,” including a majority (52 percent) of Trump voters.

Immigration? “A record-high 75 percent of Americans,” including 65 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents, told Gallup in 2018 that immigration is a “good thing for the U.S.” Six in 10 Americans oppose the construction of a wall on the southern border, while a massive 8 in 10 (81 percent) support a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants living in the United States.

How much of this polling, however, is reflected in the daily news coverage of the Democrats, which seeks to pit “leftist” activists against “centrist” voters, and “liberals” against “moderates”?

How is it that labels like “centrist” and “moderate,” which common sense tells us should reflect the views of a majority of Americans, have come to be applied to those who represent minority interests and opinions?

How many political reporters are willing to tell their readers or viewers what Stanford political scientist David Broockman told Vox’s Ezra Klein in 2014: “When we say moderate what we really mean is what corporations want. Within both parties there is this tension between what the politicians who get more corporate money and tend to be part of the establishment want-- that’s what we tend to call moderate-- versus what the Tea Party and more liberal members want”?

The center ground-- if it even exists-- cannot be found on a map; it is not a fixed geographical location. You cannot get in your car, type the address in your navigation, and then drive to it.

It moves, it shifts, it reacts to events. The center of 2019 is not the center of 1999 or even 2009. You want to know where it is right now? You want to find the moderate middle? Then ignore the right-wing hacks, the conventional wisdom-mongers, and the donor class. Go check out the policy platforms of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren.

You may not recall Brad DeLong, the subject of an interesting piece by Zach Beauchamp for Vox yesterday. He's a UC-Berkeley economist, who served as deputy assistant secretary of the Treasury for economic policy in the Clinton administration and is widely considered "one of the market-friendly, neoliberal Democrats who have dominated the party for the last 20 years. The term he uses for himself is 'Rubin Democrat'-- referring to followers of finance industry-friendly Clinton Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin." Zach reports that "DeLong believes that the time of people like him running the Democratic Party has passed. “The baton rightly passes to our colleagues on our left,” DeLong wrote. “We are still here, but it is not our time to lead.” Good; I hope that's one less vote for Status Quo Joe.

The core reason, DeLong argues, is political. The policies he supports depend on a responsible center-right partner to succeed. They’re premised on the understanding that at least a faction of the Republican Party would be willing to support market-friendly ideas like Obamacare or a cap-and-trade system for climate change. This is no longer the case, if it ever were.

“Barack Obama rolls into office with Mitt Romney’s health care policy, with John McCain’s climate policy, with Bill Clinton’s tax policy, and George H.W. Bush’s foreign policy,” DeLong notes. “And did George H.W. Bush, did Mitt Romney, did John McCain say a single good word about anything Barack Obama ever did over the course of eight solid years? No, they fucking did not.”

The result, he argues, is the nature of the Democratic Party needs to shift. Rather than being a center-left coalition dominated by market-friendly ideas designed to attract conservative support, the energy of the coalition should come from the left and its broad, sweeping ideas. Market-friendly neoliberals, rather than pushing their own ideology, should work to improve ideas on the left. This, he believes, is the most effective and sustainable basis for Democratic politics and policy for the foreseeable future.

President AOC? Not Yet

The graphic above shows the 45 members of the House who signed on to a vague statement of support for the Green New Deal. But now that AOC is actually getting ready to introduce a formal bill-- although some of the details are still sketchy and up for negotiation-- there are far fewer members... at least so far. The first members of Congress to sign on as co-sponsors:

• Earl Blumenauer (D-OR)
• Ted Lieu (D-CA)
• Ro Khanna (D-CA)
• Pramila Jayapal (D-WA)
• Joe Neguse (D-CO)
• Ayanna Pressley (D-MA)
• Brendan Boyle (New Dem-PA)
• Joaquin Castro (New Dem-TX)
• Yvette Clarke (D-NY)

He may have been a little ahead of himself but Michael Moore has already declared Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez the leader of the Democratic Party. Don't we wish! Also, he said, "moderates" are should wise up and realize the whole "moderate" thing is gone and just needs to be buried.

MOORE: If you're being moderate, stop being moderate. Take a position. There's no middle ground anymore. There's no half-way point to should somebody be paid a living wage. 'Well, I'm a moderate so I think they could be paid half of that living wage.'

You know, on the issue of choice, there is no half-way there. You're either for it or you're against it.

Do you believe in equal rights for women? Do you believe we should have an Equal Rights Amendment?

There's no middle ground. There's no time for moderation.

Alexandria Ocasio Cortez gave us another reason to love her tonight while the unspeakable baboon was pretending to be president and so many Democrats make fools of themselves by jumping up and applauding him, treating him like a "normal" "president." (By the way, the 3 New Dems sitting directly behind her were Ann Kuster (NH), Julia Brownley (CA) and Ann Kirkpatrick (AZ) and the smiling imbecile in front of her is Joe Manchin (WV). All 4 of them have ProgressivePunch "F" ratings and only Trump makes them look any better than they are.

Sherrod Brown? No

Yesterday, The Washington Post introduced us to a sad new feature of its 2020 coverage, The Post 2020 Power Ranking. Karen Tumulty, the moderator, noted that her "pick for the most interesting candidate-to-be is Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH). He’s seasoned, a little on the bland side for a populist, and most importantly, a Democrat who knows how to win in a swing state that became Trump Country in 2016. His 'Dignity of Work' swing through Iowa is a pitch-perfect way to start." His ranking is an absurd #4 on their list. Outside the Beltway, the only things remotely interesting about Brown showing up in Iowa was him calling Howard Schultz a "total idiot" and then going on to disqualify himself by giving a thumbs down to Medicare for All.

Brown, whose Senate voting record is consistently ranked by ProgressivePunch in the Top 10, is known to grievously disappoint at key junctures. In 2006, when he made the jump from House to Senate, he cravenly voted for Bush's torture program-- the only progressive who did-- because he thought it would play well in Ohio. (He later apologized and admitted he fucked up but not before he became the first Blue America-endorsed candidate to ever be un-endorsed in the midst of a campaign.) That torture bill Brown voted for was opposed by all but 34 Democrats, almost all of whom have long since been defeated for reelection or otherwise driven from office-- garbagecrats like John Barrow (Blue Dog-GA), Dan Boren (Blue Dog-OK), Jim Marshall (Blue Dog-GA), Leonard Boswell (Blue Dog-IA), Gene Taylor (Blue Dog and then R-MS), Tim Holden (Blue Dog-PA), Stephanie Herseth (Blue Dog-SD), Jim Matheson (Blue Dog-UT), Harold Ford (Blue Dog-TN), Melissa Bean (New Dem-IL)... I basically don't care about fake Democrats who can almost always be counted on to support conservatives in a pinch. I very much did however, care about Sherrod Brown's vote, a vote that revealed the man's character to me. I expect more, a lot more, from self-promoted leaders like Brown, whose record has been so mostly exemplary. But he violated a core value-- Thou Shalt Not Torture Nor Tread On Habeus Corpus. No exceptions.

Just before his 2018 reelection a few months ago Brown did an interview with CNBC's John Harwood during which he disavowed his own past support for reinstating Glass-Steagall (while still trying to sound as though he's a progressive or a populist).

Harwood: But it sounds like it's more of a defensive agenda – that is, to prevent things that have been done from being dismantled, as opposed to trying to break up banks or reimposing Glass-Steagall.

Brown: Yeah, I have little interest in reimposing Glass-Steagall. That's an answer to a question that's not being asked. Breaking up the banks-- they're too big and too powerful-- that's not on my agenda. My agenda is to, as you say, play defense, to make sure we have a vibrant consumer protection agency. It's to do oversight. I mean, the appointees from the administration to be these regulators are people, some of whom had a lot to do with the housing crisis, and a lot to do with the Wall Street greed and overreach. So you're damn right I play defense when they're trying to do things to undermine the economy.

A couple of weeks ago, reporting for Splinter. Libby Watson wrote about how soft Brown has been on Medicare-For-All. She noted that it isn't just the "centrists" who are "cautioning against moving too fast or far on single-payer, worrying that focusing on Medicare for All will water down the Democrats’ message on protecting the Affordable Care Act from Republicans" and pointed out that Brown backs Medicare for retiring cops and firefighters before 65 but isn't backing Medicare for All. "Remember," she warns, that despite his left-ish credentials on issues like Wall Street, Brown took $830,000 from corporate PACs in 2018."

Giving cops and firefighters healthcare is fine, just as it would be great to give teachers or nurses or public sanitation workers healthcare, but it’s in no way an alternative to Medicare for All, and it sure is a weird way to approach the problem of the financial barriers to adequate healthcare-- expanding access one job at a time, in order of how noble Sherrod Brown deems your job to be. Similarly, Brown’s other proposed Medicare for All alternative-- a bill that would allow a Medicare buy-in at age 55, which he proposed in the last Congress-- kicks the can down the road for a lot of people, as if no one under 55 has medical debt or puts off necessary medical procedures or buying prescriptions because they can’t afford it.

You can argue that this is a matter of only proposing what’s “possible,” that Brown and other Democrats don’t believe Medicare for All is possible in one go, and so an incremental approach is needed. But a Medicare at 55 buy-in isn’t going to pass a Republican Senate, and I’d bet that even Medicare-for-Cops wouldn’t either-- this is the party that just tried to kill the Affordable Care Act and eliminate protections for preexisting conditions, after all.

Democrats like Brown don’t understand that proposals by major party members also define what’s “possible.” That’s why we’re talking about single-payer at all. If you’ve got two years of twiddling your thumbs before another shot at passing legislation, why propose these half-measures unless you really believe only people older than 55 deserve healthcare?

Brown has 2020 presidential aspirations, so it’s hard not to see this odd proposal as trying to ride cops to the White House. He’s clearly of the generation of Democrats that grew up believing the way to get Middle America to trust you is to talk a lot about cops and the troops, and the “dignity of work” over the indignity of rapacious capitalism. But “give Medicare to cops” or lowering the Medicare age to 55 doesn’t get us closer to Medicare for All, and it doesn’t make it easier to make an argument about universal care to expand eligibility to other selected groups. At this rate, lowering the Medicare age by 10 years once every 50 years (or one or two careers at a time) would get us single-payer by approximately 2300. Chuck Grassley might still be kicking around by then, but most of us won’t be.

If anything, both these proposals double down on the bizarre proposition of the current American system that only certain groups deserve healthcare. That’s awful policy, but it’s also shitty politics, as anyone who isn’t a cop or a firefighter or was born after Cheers premiered has no reason to support these policies. Brown might find that in 2019 and 2020, “Healthcare for Some” just doesn’t cut it anymore.

Now with Brown all but in, Common Dreams staff writer Jon Queally followed up on his Medicare-For-All not practical comments over the weekend. On Friday, Brown "broke from the pack of announced and expected Democrats by coming out against Medicare for All-- characterizing a system that would cover everybody and leave nobody as not 'practical'-- and was greeted by a widespread reaction of Thank you, Next and Adios from progressives no longer willing to entertain half-measures when it comes to solving the nation's healthcare crisis or bolstering the private insurance industry."

"I know most of the Democratic primary candidates are all talking about Medicare for all. I think instead we should do Medicare at 55," Brown said during a question and answer session at the Chamber of Commerce in Clear Lake, Iowa. Brown said that reducing the age or letting people over 55 buy into the existing Medicare system early would have a better chance of getting through Congress.

"I'm not going to come and make a lot of promises like President Trump did... I'm going to talk about what's practical and what we can make happen. And if that makes me different from the other candidates so be it," Brown said.

Progressive critics like Splinter's Libby Watson, however, took issue.

"You know what isn't practical?" she added. "Spending twice as much as other rich nations for worse outcomes."

"It's always 'practical' to leave people behind, and maintain corporate power," tweeted Michael Lighty, a healthcare policy expert and founding fellow at the left-leaning Sanders Institute. But ith the right kind of "leadership," he noted: "We can make the necessary possible."

Ahead of Brown's comments, Watson on Friday wrote a long and detailed column explaining why the kind of "Medicare at 55" or "Medicare buy-in" plan the senator is proposing-- basically a public option, but available only to certain segments of the population-- is not just bad policy, but bad politics.

It's not necessarily that what Brown is calling for would "make things worse," she argued, "it's that things are already catastrophically bad, and anything that just tinkers around the edges keeps us in dire straits." And by not taking the fight over healthcare to the next level by demanding a policy that would actually solve the problem, Brown is exemplifying the worst tendencies of the Democratic Party's old guard:

Democrats frequently admit defeat before they've even got their trousers on. This is one of the major differences between establishment Democrats and the newly popular leftist politicians, like Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: They understand that you don't turn up to a knife fight with a banana and a shirt that says I Am So Frightened on the front. But prominent Senate Democrats and at least one presidential candidate have already shown that they're willing to compromise on single-payer. That is not how you win a fight.

...Brown's comments on Friday appear very out of touch with national voter sentiment-- whether in the mid-west or elsewhere-- by calling a solution that garners massive (and growing) public support, and which studies show would be less expensive and more cost-efficient than the current profit-driven system, not politically realistic:

For Watson, however, not even the strong polling numbers tell the whole story. "Single-payer supporters don't say we should have the policy because people support it," she wrote. "We believe it's good, just, and more humane than our current nightmare, and that the conventional wisdom that it would be deeply unpopular is wrong."

While all the Democratic 2020 candidates will ultimately be pressed on their solution to the nation's ongoing healthcare crisis, Dr. Carol Paris, former president of Physicians for a National Health Program, which advocates for a single-payer system like Medicare for All, told Think Progress this week that anyone who runs must demonstrate they understand that only Medicare for All—a system with "No co-pays, no deductibles, no need for supplemental policies, no private insurance"—has the the ability to confront the current system's inherent failure.

"I want to know that candidates," she said, "are using that term to mean improving traditional Medicare and expanding it to everyone from birth to death residing in the United States."

Because they've taken great pains to lay it out clearly and succinctly, other Medicare for All proponents like the Democratic Socialists of America have said the American people should "accept nothing less."

In the closing argument of her column, Watson put it this way:

The American healthcare system is fundamentally broken. We spend twice what other rich nations do for much worse outcomes, with the highest infant mortality and the lowest life expectancy. Like the Affordable Care Act before it, the public option would preserve the rotten system that leads to this. It is motivated by a cowardly, straight-up wrong idea of pragmatism, the kind of half-hearted idea that Democrats—willingly bullied for 30 years by Reaganite, anti-government, Chamber of Commerce-funded slimeballs—think is all we can possibly achieve.

"Fuck that," she concluded. "Fight for single-payer or get kicked out of Washington trying."

Updated: Sen. Brown spars with Iowa Democratic voter over his refusal to embrace Medicare for All.

On Friday night at meet and greet event at the home of a local Democratic leader in Black Hawk County, Iowa, Sen. Brown was pressed on his Medicare for All stance by Ruth Walker, a 78-year-old retiree from Cedar Falls. The following transcript of the "lively exchange" was posted Saturday morning in a news story by Cleveland.com reporter Seth A. Richardson:

Walker: “It isn’t like it won’t work. I think advocating part way measures is not going to work. We tried part-way messages and it doesn’t work.”
Brown: “I want to get there, but I want to help people’s lives.”
Walker: “But we’ve been doing this forever. We need to get there.”
Brown: “I understand that. I understand that. We missed by one vote getting Medicare-at-55 because of one guy.”
Walker: “I mean Medicare-for-all. That’s the problem, though.”
Brown: “I know you did. I know you did. I understand that, but we are no closer to Medicare-for-all today than we were 15 years ago.”
Walker: “We haven’t been advocating very long.”
Brown: “OK, well, I want to improve people’s lives today. I know Congress won’t pass Medicare-for-all.”
Walker: “They will if they found out the people are brought – educate the people.”
Brown: "Well I try to educate the people. But I want to help people make their lives better right now. If we can pass Medicare-at-55 tomorrow, two things would happen: a whole lot of people’s lives would improve and a whole lot of voters would think that the next step is to do more.

"My ideology says universal coverage today, just like yours. But I want to see people’s lives better. We’ll keep having this debate and people will say, ‘Medicare-for-all. Medicare-for-all,’ and nothing will change. I think if we can make that change of Medicare-at-55 or Medicare-at-50, it will make all the difference in the world and then we get to the next step. Otherwise it’s this sort of tilting at windmills where everybody feels good saying, ‘ I’m for Medicare for all. I’m for Medicare-for-all,’ but nothing changes.

“And I want to educate people too, but I want to change people’s lives and help people now. We have a different disagreement there. We want to end up in the same place, but we’ve got to get Congress to act as quickly as we can when we were so close before.”

Is Brown worth saving? I wonder if he knows Stephanie Kelton. He should since, from 2014 until 2016, she served as Democratic chief economist for the Senate Budget Committee. Over the weekend, she wrote a column for Bloomberg thaBrown would be wise to pay attention to, The Wealthy Are Victims Of Their Own Propaganda, to avoid that kind of victimhood himself. One of her wealthy friends, she wrote, was complaining to her about AOC's 70% marginal tax rate and about the new wealth tax proposed by Elizabeth Warren. She's argued in the past that we can pay for a Green New Deal and that the obsession with finding a dollar of new 'revenue' to offset every new dollar of spending is the wrong way to approach the federal budgeting process. She worries that we have a long way to go before politicians and the journalists who interview them stop demanding a road map to the source of funding for every new spending proposal. "My wealthy friend," she wrote, "doesn’t want to pay for your child care. He doesn’t want to help pay off your student loans. And he sure as heck doesn’t want to shell out the big bucks for a multi-trillion-dollar Green New Deal. So where does that leave Democrats, who insist that they need the rich to pay for their progressive agenda? Here’s what I told him."

"I am with the Democrats. I want to see us build a cleaner, safer, more prosperous world. I agree with billionaire hedge-fund manager Ray Dalio, who argues that inequality has become so extreme that it should be declared a “national emergency” and dealt with by presidential action.

"And I worry very much that it may prove impossible to raise taxes on the ultra-wealthy (who have enormous political power). Then what? The planet burns, our third-world infrastructure falls into total disrepair, and our society becomes ever more bifurcated until the tensions reach a boiling point and... The pitchforks are coming.



"The problem is that every politician is confronted with the question, “How are you going to pay for it?” What these journalists are really asking is, ‘Who’s going to pay for it?’

"The question is designed to stop any meaningful policy debate by dividing us up, and get us fighting over where the money is going to come from. Since none of the headline politicians has really figured out how to respond-- by explaining that when Congress approves a budget, the Treasury Department instructs the Federal Reserve to credit a seller’s bank account-- they all end up trying to answer it by pointing to some new revenue source.

"And then there are self-imposed constraints, like PAYGO, that require lawmakers to offset any new spending with higher taxes or cuts to some other part of the budget. That means you can’t even get a piece of legislation to the floor for a vote if isn’t fully “paid for.” It also makes passing anything that much harder, since it requires politicians to raise taxes or carve out money from other programs. And don’t even get me started on CBO.

"So that’s why you see people like Representative Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Warren looking at the ultra-rich to fund their agendas. Billionaires are the magic money tree!

"To be blunt, the super-rich have become victims of their own successful marketing campaign. Conservative billionaires like Pete Peterson spent decades complaining about debt and deficits, putting enormous sums of money into a PR campaign to turn politicians and the public against deficit spending.

"So here we are. As Hillary Clinton said during the 2016 campaign, ‘You have to go where the money is.’ That means you!

"What can higher-income taxpayers do? I guess they could point the finger at Congress and say: “Don’t look at us! That’s where the money comes from!” Because the truth is, funding a Green New Deal with some deficit spending means we get good-paying jobs, a cleaner world and more safe assets (Treasuries) for everyone, including wealthier taxpayers."

To help my friend see the choices we face, I sent him a sketch that is shown here in a chart.

You don’t need precise data to make the point. Just think of it, loosely, as a reflection of the gap between the top and the bottom. Start off with today’s degree of disparity, represented by the black bar on the left.

Now suppose someone offers you three different ways to reduce inequality, shown in bars A, B and C. Each will leave you with a less unequal society but the same absolute disparity between the top and the bottom.

To get outcome A, you simply tax money away from the rich (the part shown in gray at the top). This does nothing to improve the material well-being of anyone below, but it does compress the distribution, so inequality is diminished.

Option B is your standard Robin Hood redistribution. Money is taxed away from those at the top, and money is invested in programs to lift everyone else (shown in blue). Again, the distance (or degree of disparity) between the top and the bottom is the same as under Option A, but this time the top lost and the bottom gained.

Finally, consider what happens if we simply invest in programs to benefit the non-rich (student-debt forgiveness, free child care and so on) without treating the super-rich as our piggy bank. In Option C, the top doesn’t move, but the bottom is boosted to new heights.

It’s sort of incredible that the option that is clearly better for both groups is the one we’re most afraid of. But that’s what happens when deficit phobias force politicians to “pay for” everything by going where the money is.

Economic Inequality-- Not Just Public Policy... It Starts On A Personal Level

A lot of voters-- voters who don't know rich people, I always thought-- were impressed with Trump's claims that because he was so rich he wouldn't be susceptible to taking bribes and being a crook. Personally, I know lots of rich people so I recognized Trump was lying-- lying egregiously, tricking voters by design.

At the end of 2013, Paul Piff, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology and Social Behavior at UC Irvine gave the TED talk above, which I urge you to watch. Piff describes his primary academic interest as "how social hierarchy, economic inequality and social class, and social emotion shape relations between individuals and groups." Conclusion seems to be that rich people have a great tendency towards greed, avarice, entitlement, delusion about their own abilities and general sociopathic behavior. I guess it's why the French and Russian revolutions killed so many of them. It's why the year after Piff's TED Talk, billionaire Nick Hanauer warned fellow plutocrats that the pitchforks are coming. "I have," he admitted, "been rewarded obscenely for that with a life that most of you all can't even imagine: multiple homes, a yacht, my own plane, etc., etc., etc." He went on:

But let's be honest: I am not the smartest person you've ever met. I am certainly not the hardest working. I was a mediocre student. I'm not technical at all. I can't write a word of code. Truly, my success is the consequence of spectacular luck, of birth, of circumstance and of timing. But I am actually pretty good at a couple of things. One, I have an unusually high tolerance for risk, and the other is I have a good sense, a good intuition about what will happen in the future, and I think that that intuition about the future is the essence of good entrepreneurship.

So what do I see in our future today, you ask? I see pitchforks, as in angry mobs with pitchforks, because while people like us plutocrats are living beyond the dreams of avarice, the other 99 percent of our fellow citizens are falling farther and farther behind. In 1980, the top one percent of Americans shared about eight percent of national [income], while the bottom 50 percent of Americans shared 18 percent. Thirty years later, today, the top one percent shares over 20 percent of national [income], while the bottom 50 percent of Americans share 12 or 13. If the trend continues, the top one percent will share over 30 percent of national [income] in another 30 years, while the bottom 50 percent of Americans will share just six.

You see, the problem isn't that we have some inequality. Some inequality is necessary for a high-functioning capitalist democracy. The problem is that inequality is at historic highs today and it's getting worse every day. And if wealth, power, and income continue to concentrate at the very tippy top, our society will change from a capitalist democracy to a neo-feudalist rentier society like 18th-century France. That was France before the revolution and the mobs with the pitchforks.

So I have a message for my fellow plutocrats and zillionaires and for anyone who lives in a gated bubble world: Wake up. Wake up. It cannot last. Because if we do not do something to fix the glaring economic inequities in our society, the pitchforks will come for us, for no free and open society can long sustain this kind of rising economic inequality. It has never happened. There are no examples. You show me a highly unequal society, and I will show you a police state or an uprising. The pitchforks will come for us if we do not address this. It's not a matter of if, it's when. And it will be terrible when they come for everyone, but particularly for people like us plutocrats."

Piff found in his studies the same thing that Hanauer found in his own social observations: "We're at unprecedented levels of economic inequality. What that means is that wealth is not only becoming increasingly concentrated in the hands of a select group of individuals, but the American dream is becoming increasingly unattainable for an increasing majority of us. And if it's the case, as we've been finding, that the wealthier you are, the more entitled you feel to that wealth, and the more likely you are to prioritize your own interests above the interests of other people, and be willing to do things to serve that self-interest, well, then, there's no reason to think that those patterns will change. In fact, there's every reason to think that they'll only get worse, and that's what it would look like if things just stayed the same, at the same linear rate, over the next 20 years." Why is that important? He doesn't talk about pitchforks or guillotines or firing squads.

[I]nequality-- economic inequality-- is something we should all be concerned about, and not just because of those at the bottom of the social hierarchy, but because individuals and groups with lots of economic inequality do worse ... not just the people at the bottom, everyone. There's a lot of really compelling research coming out from top labs all over the world, showcasing the range of things that are undermined as economic inequality gets worse. Social mobility, things we really care about, physical health, social trust, all go down as inequality goes up. Similarly, negative things in social collectives and societies, things like obesity, and violence, imprisonment, and punishment, are exacerbated as economic inequality increases. Again, these are outcomes not just experienced by a few, but that resound across all strata of society. Even people at the top experience these outcomes.

So what do we do? This cascade of self-perpetuating, pernicious, negative effects could seem like something that's spun out of control, and there's nothing we can do about it, certainly nothing we as individuals could do. But in fact, we've been finding in our own laboratory research that small psychological interventions, small changes to people's values, small nudges in certain directions, can restore levels of egalitarianism and empathy. For instance, reminding people of the benefits of cooperation or the advantages of community, cause wealthier individuals to be just as egalitarian as poor people.

This is the kind of solidarity Randy "IronStache" Bryce's campaign-- in fact his whole brand-- is all about. The DCCC is desperate to figure out how to duplicate Bryce's brand. Ben Ray Lujan himself showed up in Racine to see what he could discern. He couldn't discern anything, of course. Bryce has a more powerful brand than any DCCC candidate. He's raising more campaign funds-- from more people-- than any DCCC candidate. Why? Bryce, a union activist, is all about solidarity. The DCCC New Dems and Blue Dogs from the Republican wing of the Democratic Party don't know what solidarity is. They've never felt it, not for a moment in their lives. They won't ever represent us. Randy and candidates like him will represent real people DCCC-New Dem garbage careerist candidates are the enemy of regular people. They stink. Are they better than Republicans? Sure-- more or less. Are they worth a bucket of spit? No? A bucket of piss? No. Should you vote for them? Certainly not in a primary. Against a Republican in November? Make up your own mind about that. I wouldn't. I've never voted for my Blue Dog-New Dem congressman, Adam Schiff, since he was first elected. And I never will. I've never voted for California Senator Dianne Feinstein, not when she ran for the Board of Supervisors, for mayor of San Francisco, for governor or for senator. She represents wealthy special interests, not me and not the issues or values I care about.

There's a reason I asked Kansas Democrat James Thompson to put an exclamation point on the end of this post. This is heavy... and if you find it as compelling as I do, please consider contributing to his campaign at the ActBlue 2018 congressional thermometer on the right.

As someone who was once homeless, I understand better than most the pain and struggle of being truly poor. As I have climbed the ladder of success, I witnessed firsthand that the ladders are not equal; they are not the same for every person. Some are shorter, some are longer, and some don't have a ladder at all, but rather an elevator that only stops at the penthouse. I do not hate the rich. I want to be rich myself. What I find offensive is not the wealth but the greed. The type of greed that pushes people down rather than pulling everyone up. Income inequality is the greatest injustice of our time because it creates so much other injustice in its wake in areas such as criminal justice reform, healthcare, sex trafficking, racism, sexism, employment, campaign finances etc. When our children are sick, should we not be able to get them care? When men and women give of themselves a full days labor for the betterment of our society, should they not enjoy a full days wages that allows them the basic dignity of taking care of themselves and their family. Shouldn't a poor man's vote count just as much as the rich man's?

The true battle for our country's future is not between the left and the right, but between the top and the bottom. Charles Koch is credited with saying "I only want my fair share. ALL OF IT!", which highlights the greed of the privileged princes of Wall Street. Through corporate socialism over the past 40 years, a/k/a "trickle down economics," the billionaire boys club redistributed the wealth of this country to themselves and now use that wealth to pay for the oppression of working people by sewing division and keeping the masses in disarray. The shadow oligarchy controlling this country knows that a populace divided by racism, sexism and xenophobia cannot unite sufficiently to wrest power from them or their puppets in Congress. However, while much of our country's wealth is concentrated in a relative few individuals such as the KOCH brothers, the real power of this country is located in the people, working class people, but only if we unite, for with unity comes great strength and power to demand change.

Consequently, campaign finance reform is probably the most pressing issue confronting Americans in 2018 and 2020. We must fix the system, before we can fix the problems in the system. We must remove the ability of corporations to control our political arenas and representatives by reversing Citizen's United.  We must than ensure that working people are paid a fair days pay for a fair days labor and moving our minimum wages to $15 and adjusting it annually based on inflation.  Next, we must make sure that the product of our labor is no longer amassed by the rich but instead remains with us through a fair and progressive tax policy. Passing a Medicare-for-all policy that at minimum contains a public option, will guarantee working Americans are no longer slaves to the grind simply working for their healthcare and instead are free to move from job to job and maximize the fruit of their labor. Finally, we must guarantee education for all citizens at public universities to remove the anchor of student loans from around the neck of our populace. To "make America great again" we must restore our democracy to one that again enables social mobilization instead of the veiled caste system that we have become. United we stand, divided we fall.

The 21st Century Will Be The Most Unequal Period In Human History

Progressives think Obama could have done more-- much more-- to further the legitimate economic interests of the American working class. Others think he did as much as he could under the political constraints in Washington. His record is a mixed bag. Yesterday, the unemployment continued its downward trend, dipping to 5.6%, the best numbers since Bush tanked the economy in 2008...in fact, the best numbers since Bill Clinton was president. Despite dogged, systematic obstruction by the GOP, Obama's policies have worked to drag the country back from the brink of Republican apocalypse. On the other hand, he has continued coddling Wall Street banksters instead of prosecuting them and his race-to-the-bottom, job-destroying trade agenda is straight out of Wall Street boardrooms and Republican Party think tanks. Obama's plan, also announced yesterday, to make two years of college as free and universal as high school is clearly meant to close gaps that lead straight to the unconscionable wealth disparity that threatens American democracy.

Had McCain or Romney won it would have been far worse in every way. If Jeb Bush wins, he'll prove that once again. But we don't need to speculate or peer into a crystal ball to see the toxic impact of conservative governance on working people. Just look at our pals the British. They have a Conservative government and their own income and wealth inequality is, if anything, even worse than our own! In fact, David Cameron's trickle-down policies have made the U.K. the most attractive location as a tax haven for the super-rich. Parasites from around the world are flocking to Britain-- and buying up everything. Jacques Peretti investigates why in a new 3-part BBC series, The Super-Rich and Us, Part 1 embedded above.

How about this little factoid? "Since the '08 Crash, there's been 80 billion pounds ($120 billion dollars) of Austerity cuts, the same amount bankers will have been given in bonuses." Or this one, which sounds a lot like a Bernie Sanders speech: "In 2013 the UK’s thousand richest people saw their wealth increase by a sum equivalent to the combined earnings of the country’s fulltime workforce: £70 billion." The reviews have been pretty scathing. This is from yesterday's New Statesman:

It’s not the vulgarity that makes you want to puke so much as the asininity. The super- rich, it seems, really are different from the rest of us, their stupidity extending to the purchase of such fatuous me-treats as £30,000 sessions at the spa and brassieres encrusted with diamonds. Here’s an image for you. On a private Caribbean island, a pink, bald, loaded Brummie slashes the sand again and again with a golf club, every ball flying straight out into the ocean where, being made of fish food, it soon dissolves to nothing. As several novelists have discovered to their detriment just lately, this is a world far beyond satire, the symbolism so powerful and obvious that it requires not the slightest literary gussying-up.

...“We used to call it divine right,” said Nick Hanauer, a Seattle-based entrepreneur who earns £12,000 an hour. “Now we call it trickle-down economics.” Wealth like his own, he pointed out, just doesn’t convert into jobs, or even into high-street sales (though he earns a thousand times more than other people he doesn’t buy a thousand times more stuff). A lone voice among the super-rich, Hanauer would love to pay more tax. You could say that he regards doing so as a matter of life or death, because he fears the pitchforks will be coming for his kind pretty soon. But his government, like our own, won’t allow it. For the time being, the thinking goes, the gates-- electronic, 24-hour CCTV, panic buttons-- are plenty sturdy enough to keep out the barbarians.

The rich, though, have a different vision of reality than normal people do. And they can afford to force their vision into public policy. In the light of the widely-discussed report this week from the Pew Research Center, The Politics of Financial Insecurity. As Roberto Ferdman reported for the Washington Post, "There is little empathy at the top. Most of America's richest think poor people have it easy in this country."

Why the surprising lack of compassion? It's hard to say. At the very top, the sentiment is likely tied to conservatism, which traditionally bemoans government programs that redistribute wealth, calling them safety nets. Some 40 percent of the financially secure are politically conservative, according to Pew. And conservatives are even more likely to say the "poor have it easy" than the rich-- a recent Pew survey found that more than three quarters of conservatives feel that way.

More broadly, the prevalence of the view might reflect an inability to understand the plight of those who have no choice but to seek help from the government. A quarter of the country, after all, feels that the leading reason for inequality in America is that the poor don't work hard enough.

But as my colleague Christopher Ingraham pointed out last year, to say that the poor have it easy is to ignore how serious their struggle is in comparison to the rest of the population, and especially those with money to spare. The poor are much less likely to have health insurance, much more likely to be the victim of a crime. They don't get the same level of education or have the same food options. Inequality, as my colleague Matt O'Brien wrote, "starts in the crib," and it plays out even in what babies of different socioeconomic backgrounds are fed. And that's just the tip of the iceberg.

Will The Republicans Impeach Obama If He Moves Unilaterally To Stop Wage Theft?

The poll last week by NBC and the Wall Street Journal confirmed that most Americans support a progressive vision of our country beyond what the fractured, sclerotic Beltway Establishment Democrats have the guts to push-- and on another planet from the reactionary Republican vision of a mean, crabbed country divided in perpetual class war. 82% want to lower the cost of student debt. 75% want to spend more money on infrastructure. 65% want to raise the minimum wage. 59% support addressing climate change by limiting carbon emissions. Conservatives and Wall Street whores oppose all of these things. Only a third of Americans back the conservative push to raise the Social Security retirement age to 69 and only 41% want the Federal government to stop funding Obamacare, core Republican agenda items backed by more than a few from the Republican wing of the Democratic Party.

There isn't much President Obama can do to do about the progressive things, although it's likely he'll veto two years worth of Republican efforts to further annihilate the middle class with their Koch-inspired ideological extremism. But there is another piece of the progressive puzzle that Obama can and should move on unilaterally, one that has widespread support from the American people: overtime pay. "With a stroke of the pen," wrote venture capitalist Nick Hanauer, "President Obama can make sure you get what you earned, without any congressional action at all. If it feels like you're struggling harder than your parents did, working longer hours for less money, it's because you are. Meanwhile, a handful of capitalists like me are growing wealthy beyond our parents' wildest dreams."

When I first got into the workforce, over 65% of salaried workers earned overtime pay-- today, just 11% do. Overtime was a fact of life... a good fact of life and I used to relish those awesome time-and-a-half bumps in my paychecks when they came. Now workers are looking an an entirely different phenomenon, wage theft, "which occurs when an employer withholds pay rightfully earned by an hourly worker. It happens in a variety of ways, from not paying for overtime, to denying mandated breaks, to subtracting hours from employees' weekly total."

A recent poll commissioned by labor group Fast Food Forward estimates that a stunning 89 percent of fast-food workers have experienced at least one form of wage theft. A previous study, conducted in the first half of 2008 before the recession, found 68 percent of low-wage workers had been victims of wage theft in their previous work week, and estimated that wage theft cost workers an average of $2,634 annually.

...Wage theft can become increasingly common in times of high unemployment, experts say. "When people are desperate for jobs, they're afraid to risk them by taking on their boss," said Ross Eisenbrey, of the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank.

And because the amounts of wages being withheld are often small, it can be hard for a low-wage worker to find an attorney willing to take their case.

For their part, fast-food managers are under "tremendous pressure" to keep labor costs low, especially when sales are sluggish, said Nelson Lichtenstein, the director of the Center for the Study of Work, Labor, and Democracy at the University of California Santa Barbara.

Companies may also engage in the practice when the risk of getting caught is low. There aren't nearly enough U.S. Department of Labor investigators to enforce the laws, said Gebreselassie. He added, "The chance any worksite will be investigated is miniscule."

Nevertheless, the issue of wage theft has been getting increased attention in recent months. In March, the owner of seven McDonald's restaurants in New York was ordered to pay almost $500,000 to more than 1,000 employees who performed work off the clock and had other pay illegally withheld.

Now back to our friendly, enlightened capitalist Nick Hanauer and his suggestion to President Obama to remedy this without letting conservatives stand in the way. He;s working with DFA, which has a petition you can sign if you agree. Hanauer wants the Department of Labor to simply raise the overtime threshold to $69,000. In other words, if you earn $69,000 or less, the law would require that you be paid time-and-a-half for every hour worked over 40 hours a week. Hanauer:

That would mean 10.4 million middle-class Americans with more money in your pockets or more time to spend with friends and family. And if corporate America didn't want to pay you time and a half, it would need to hire hundreds of thousands of additional workers to pick up the slack-- slashing the unemployment rate and forcing up wages.

President Obama could also expand the ranks of workers eligible for overtime pay by ending the exemption that denies overtime to teachers, doctors, computer professionals, and many others. And he can do all this simply by instructing the Department of Labor to change the rules-- immediately putting money into the pockets of millions of American workers.

...Many of my fellow capitalists will warn you that a higher overtime threshold would be a job killer, but the truth is, we already have more capital than we know what to do with. Corporate profits have doubled over the past 40 years to more than 12 percent of GDP; that’s about a $1 trillion a year in extra profits.

But rather than invest in creating jobs or raising wages, executives like me are mostly spending our windfall profits manipulating the price of our own shares through stock buybacks. In fact, over the past decade, public U.S. corporations have spent an astounding $6.9 trillion buying back shares, reducing the total outstanding, and increasing the value of the remaining shares owned by capitalists like me.

We get richer. You get nothing. Again, sorry. But we're only playing by the rules-- rules that President Obama has the power to change.

President Obama is showing that he isn't shy about using his executive powers to do good things for the American people. But the White House needs a strong public push-- the president needs to hear from as many of you as possible that overtime pay is to the middle class what the minimum wage is to the working poor, and that a stronger middle class is good for business and good for America.

Again, here's the DFA petition.

Joe Stiglitz: "We Are Not Embracing A Politics Of Envy If We Reverse A Politics Of Greed"

The word on the street: rigged. It's certainly the central theme of what we're hearing from Elizabeth Warren-- and has a lot to do with why voters in Massachusetts replaced Wall Street's favorite senator with her. Yesterday we read, watched and listened to Nick Hanauer warn his fellow billionaires of the dangers inherent in too much and too blatant rigging. And today let's look at it from the perspective of one of the world's foremost economists, Joseph Stiglitz, who seems to believe we've already reached the inequality tipping point and that rigging is sending America down an ugly, scary road. It doesn't augur well for our democratic system of government when he can write that "We can more aptly be described as having a political system with '$1, one vote' than 'one person, one vote.'"

A new Pew Survey this week tells us that most conservatives believe the poor have it too easy. When asked which proposition they agree with more-- "poor people have hard lives because government benefits don’t go far enough to help them live decently" or "poor people have it easy because they can get government benefits without doing anything," conservatives overwhelmingly agreed with the latter, that the poor "have it easy." Apparently they haven't ready Thomas Piketty's new book, Capital in the 21st Century, which warns that "the natural state of capitalism seems to be one of great inequality" and that the situation is likely to get worse-- not better as it had when the "inequalities of the 19th and early 20th centuries seemed to be diminishing... during the period from World War II to 1980, when the fortunes of the wealthy and the middle class rose together.

[T]he evidence of the last third of a century suggests this period was an aberration. It was a time of war-induced solidarity when the government kept the playing field level, and the GI Bill of Rights and subsequent civil rights advances meant that there was something to the American dream. Today, inequality is growing dramatically again, and the past three decades or so have proved conclusively that one of the major culprits is trickle-down economics-- the idea that the government can just step back and if the rich get richer and use their talents and resources to create jobs, everyone will benefit. It just doesn’t work; the historical data now prove that.

But it has taken us far too long as a country to understand this danger. Changes in the distribution of income and wealth occur slowly, which is why it requires a grand historical perspective of the kind that Piketty provides to get a feel for what is happening.

Ironically enough, the final proof debunking this very Republican idea of trickle-down economics has come from a Democratic administration. President Barack Obama’s banks-first approach to saving the nation from another Great Depression held that by giving money to the banks (rather than to homeowners who had been preyed upon by the banks), the economy would be saved. The administration poured billions into the banks that had brought the country to the brink of ruin, without setting conditions in return. When the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank engage in a rescue, they virtually always impose requirements to ensure the money is used in the way intended. But here, the government merely expressed the hope that the banks would keep credit, the lifeblood of the economy, flowing. And so the banks shrank lending, and paid their executives megabonuses, even though they had almost destroyed their businesses. Even then, we knew that much of the banks’ profits had been earned not by increasing the efficiency of the economy but by exploitation-- through predatory lending, abusive credit-card practices and monopolistic pricing. The full extent of their misdeeds-- for instance, the illegal manipulation of key interest rates and foreign exchange, affecting derivatives and mortgages in the amount of hundreds of trillions of dollars-- was only just beginning to be fathomed.

Obama promised to stop these abuses, but so far only a single senior banker has gone to jail (along with a very few mid- and low-level employees). The president’s former Treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, in his recent book, Stress Test, made a valiant but unsuccessful attempt to defend the administration’s actions, suggesting that there were no alternatives. But Geithner clearly worried excessively about the “moral hazard” of helping underwater homeowners—in other words, encouraging lax borrowing habits—while seeming to care far less about the moral hazard of helping banks, or the culpability of the banks in encouraging excessive indebtedness and in marketing mortgages that put unbearable risks on the poor and middle classes.

In fact, Geithner’s attempts to justify what the administration did only reinforce my belief that the system is rigged. If those who are in charge of making the critical decisions are so “cognitively captured” by the 1 percent, by the bankers, that they see that the only alternative is to give those who caused the crisis hundreds of billions of dollars while leaving workers and homeowners in the lurch, the system is unfair.

This approach also exacerbated one of the country’s most pressing problems: its growing inequality. Only with a vibrant middle class can the economy fully recover and grow faster. The more inequality, the slower the growth-- a conclusion now endorsed even by the IMF. Because the less wealthy consume a greater share of their income than do the rich, they expand demand when they have more income. When demand is expanded, jobs are created: In this sense, it is ordinary Americans who are the real job creators. So inequality commands a high price: a weaker economy, marked by lower growth and more instability. It is not very complicated.

None of this is the outcome of inexorable economic forces, either; it’s the result of policies and politics-- what we did and didn’t do. If our politics leads to preferential taxation of those who earn income from capital; to an education system in which the children of the rich have access to the best schools, but the children of the poor go to mediocre ones; to exclusive access by the wealthy to talented tax lawyers and offshore banking centers to avoid paying a fair share of taxes-- then it is not surprising that there will be a high level of inequality and a low level of opportunity. And that these conditions will grow even worse.

And now it’s also clear that the high level of economic inequality has translated into gross new forms of political inequality-- to the point where we can more aptly be described as having a political system with “one dollar, one vote” than “one person, one vote.” The Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision in January 2010 gave corporations more rights to influence politics than ordinary individuals--without making them, or their officers, really accountable. This year’s follow-on McCutcheon decision eliminated aggregate limits on individual contributions to national candidates and parties. So today, the richer you are, the more you are able to influence the political process and the economic decisions that stem from it, and to rig it all in favor of the 1 percent. Is it any wonder the rich keep getting richer?

…[L]ower taxes on capital and lower inheritance taxes are allowing the accumulation of inherited wealth-- in effect, the creation of a new American plutocracy. It is even possible, as I pointed out long ago in my Ph.D. thesis and as Piketty has emphasized, that wealth will be increasingly concentrated among a select few. The shared prosperity that marked the country in that golden age of my youth-- in which every group saw its income growing but those at the bottom saw it rise the fastest-- is long gone.


Stigliz had a similar message yesterday in an OpEd for the NY Times, Inequality Is Not Inevitable, in which he points out that our "brand of capitalism is an ersatz capitalism… where we socialized losses, even as we privatized gains. Perfect competition should drive profits to zero, at least theoretically, but we have monopolies and oligopolies making persistently high profits. C.E.O.s enjoy incomes that are on average 295 times that of the typical worker, a much higher ratio than in the past, without any evidence of a proportionate increase in productivity."

If it is not the inexorable laws of economics that have led to America’s great divide, what is it? The straightforward answer: our policies and our politics. People get tired of hearing about Scandinavian success stories, but the fact of the matter is that Sweden, Finland and Norway have all succeeded in having about as much or faster growth in per capita incomes than the United States and with far greater equality.

So why has America chosen these inequality-enhancing policies? Part of the answer is that as World War II faded into memory, so too did the solidarity it had engendered. As America triumphed in the Cold War, there didn’t seem to be a viable competitor to our economic model. Without this international competition, we no longer had to show that our system could deliver for most of our citizens.

Ideology and interests combined nefariously. Some drew the wrong lesson from the collapse of the Soviet system. The pendulum swung from much too much government there to much too little here. Corporate interests argued for getting rid of regulations, even when those regulations had done so much to protect and improve our environment, our safety, our health and the economy itself.

But this ideology was hypocritical. The bankers, among the strongest advocates of laissez-faire economics, were only too willing to accept hundreds of billions of dollars from the government in the bailouts that have been a recurring feature of the global economy since the beginning of the Thatcher-Reagan era of “free” markets and deregulation.

The American political system is overrun by money. Economic inequality translates into political inequality, and political inequality yields increasing economic inequality. In fact, as he recognizes, Mr. Piketty’s argument rests on the ability of wealth-holders to keep their after-tax rate of return high relative to economic growth. How do they do this? By designing the rules of the game to ensure this outcome; that is, through politics.

So corporate welfare increases as we curtail welfare for the poor. Congress maintains subsidies for rich farmers as we cut back on nutritional support for the needy. Drug companies have been given hundreds of billions of dollars as we limit Medicaid benefits. The banks that brought on the global financial crisis got billions while a pittance went to the homeowners and victims of the same banks’ predatory lending practices. This last decision was particularly foolish. There were alternatives to throwing money at the banks and hoping it would circulate through increased lending. We could have helped underwater homeowners and the victims of predatory behavior directly. This would not only have helped the economy, it would have put us on the path to robust recovery.

OUR divisions are deep. Economic and geographic segregation have immunized those at the top from the problems of those down below. Like the kings of yore, they have come to perceive their privileged positions essentially as a natural right. How else to explain the recent comments of the venture capitalist Tom Perkins, who suggested that criticism of the 1 percent was akin to Nazi fascism, or those coming from the private equity titan Stephen A. Schwarzman, who compared asking financiers to pay taxes at the same rate as those who work for a living to Hitler’s invasion of Poland.

…We have located the underlying source of the problem: political inequities and policies that have commodified and corrupted our democracy. It is only engaged citizens who can fight to restore a fairer America, and they can do so only if they understand the depths and dimensions of the challenge. It is not too late to restore our position in the world and recapture our sense of who we are as a nation. Widening and deepening inequality is not driven by immutable economic laws, but by laws we have written ourselves.

Stiglitz asserts that it is "disturbing" when the realization sinks in "that the American dream-- the notion that we are living in the land of opportunity—is a myth. The life chances of a young American today are more dependent on the income and education of his parents than in many other advanced countries, including 'old Europe.'" But Rick Newman, writing for Yahoo Finance, insists the 1% have nothing to worry about from the passive, preoccupied masses.

The rich ought to chill out. While the masses may envy their wealth, there’s no evidence of a revolution brewing, or even a well-behaved civil disturbance. Americans are clearly dismayed at the direction the country seems to be heading, but they are also docile in the face of decline and confused about possible solutions. Hanauer fears mobs heading for the castles of Greenwich and Palo Alto, but America’s disaffected these days are more likely to vent their rage behind closed doors as they shake their fists at Fox News or MSNBC and leave cranky comments on websites such as this one. If there’s a populist threat to the plutocrats, it’s years or even decades away.

Here’s the proof: Before the pitchforks, there will be higher taxes on the wealthy-- yet there’s meager support for more redistribution of wealth. Polls show that slightly more than half of Americans favor raising taxes on the wealthy for specific causes such as helping reduce poverty, which makes it sound like tax hikes have widespread support and are inevitable. But here’s the catch: An even higher portion of Americans are disgusted with the government, with little trust that it spends tax money wisely. That’s why Republicans can consistently block tax hikes on the wealthy with little payback at the voting booth.

He doesn't see a revolution coming the way Hanauer predicts. He seems pretty sure America will just muddle along, the rich demanding a greater and greater share of the pie for a smaller and more avaricious elite protected by the GOP, by the Republican wing of the Democratic Party and by a carefully selected Supreme Court, until "solutions… probably materialize in the usual American way-- right before disaster strikes… The rich," he assures his readers, "will have to pay more, but they’ll still be rich. And they still won't have to worry about pitchforks." We'll see… But remember, Hillary is likely to be much worse than Obama has been and Ted Cruz is likely to much worse than Bush was. Ancient history: