Rich People Have Always Been Assholes-- Prayers And Whatever For All The Folks Who Caught COVID-19 At CPAC Or AIPAC Last Week

"It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God."

From the time of Constantine-- who subjugated the values preached by Jesus to the values and needs of the Roman Empire-- onwards, influential, wealthy people have demanded, and received, reinterpretations of the passage from Matthew 19 that implies rich people won't go to Heaven. Today the anti-Jesus so-called "prosperity gospel" is the latest iteration among crackpot Protestants who insist that financial blessing and physical well-being are always the will of God. [Donate now and God will love you eternally.]





On Friday, Jezebel's Emily Alford, drilled down into rich people's inherent assholeness to bring it into Trump's #Covid19 America, although without connecting the dots between that 19 and Matthew 19. Call it a coincidence, but if you want to be saved... donate here. Alford came up with Rich People Have Always Been Assholes During Plagues. She starts with the death of King Edward III's 12 year old daughter while on her way to Spain-- during the Bubonic Plague of 1348-- to marry King Pedro. "Nearly 672 years later," wrote Alford, "rich people still want their travel and amusement even amid coronavirus fears, and in typical fashion, they’re doing everything they can to make sure sickness remains the province of the poor."

During the plague, the first round of which lasted from 1347-1351 and wiped out somewhere between 30 to 50 percent of Europe’s population, those who could afford it adopted a plague-time slogan of sorts: “cito, longe, tarde,” which translates to, “flee soon, go far, come back late.” As servants were left behind to clean the houses of the absent aristocracy, risking infection and dying at rates even higher than that of the general population, the wealthy made their wills, specifying guardians for children and dowries, and got the hell out of town. Even rich people’s plague deaths were attended by doctors and religious officiants, while reports abound of those left in cities screaming while being enclosed alive in body bags bound for the plague pits. Almshouses were quite often attended only by clergy, who blessed the dying, while physicians fled with the wealthy.

By the 16th century, Charles de Lorme had invented the bird-beak plague mask. The beak was stuffed with herbs and wormwood to filter out the bad smells thought at the time to spread bubonic plague. To his wealthy patrons, including Henri IV, Louis XIII, and Louis XIV, he prescribed “red broth” made partially of antimony, a metal used to induce vomiting, which was believed by the Romans to be conducive to good health. de Lorme obviously thought so too, as he said of the broth: “qui plus en boira, plus il vivra” or, “the more he drinks, the more he lives.”

And now, as coronavirus causes global panic... the New York Times reports that rich people are once again scrambling for expensive remedies of questionable efficacy while fleeing the infected. The 21st century version of retreating to one’s Italian villa seems to be barricading oneself in a Hamptons mansion. The new court physician is the concierge doctor, and the new plague mask is the high-end, sold-out Urban Air Mask 2.0, miasma-blocking herbs replaced by “cutting-edge filter technology with timeless Scandinavian design,” the company’s website reads.  Gwenyth Paltrow recently posted a selfie wearing the $65 modern-day plague mask en route to Paris, though doctors say they’re likely ineffective, as the masks are intended to prevent sick people from spreading coronavirus, not protect well people from catching it.

But that message hasn’t yet seemed to reach the modern-day aristocracy. Los Angeles concierge physicians say they’ve been bombarded with calls from actors, agents, directors, and other rich people asking for help getting specialty N95 masks, assuming that because they cost more, they must be better:

“It’s interesting because people say, ‘I need the N95 mask. It costs more. It sounds like it’s heavy-duty. We’re Hollywood people, we can afford it,’” one doctor told the Hollywood Reporter before explaining that the masks are hard to use and ineffective. But the higher price tag and exclusivity continue to appeal.

...In her exploration of the ways wealth influenced who fled and who died in the plague years, Shutt Up: Bubonic Plague and Quarantine in Early Modern England, Kira L.S. Newman writes, “Quarantine and its effects were not classless, and its implementation was not always in the name of public health,” an assessment that already seems equally true in the age of coronavirus. While the wealthy traveling in the age of coronavirus have not yet bought guards to make sure no poor people can cough near them, they are in the midst of leaving the sick behind to travel in sterile comfort to places where infection has not yet spread. The Guardian reports that executives have charted “evacuation flights” from China and Southeast Asia. One family chartered a private plane from Hong Kong to Bali to avoid coronavirus, according to PrivateFly chief executive Adam Tiwidell. Unlike commercial flights, where the Times says every stray cough from three rows back sounds like a ghostly greeting from Typhoid Mary,” rich people’s private planes are made safer with money:

“Each aircraft is equipped with a protective healthcare and sanitary equipment kit for passengers and crew, should it be required,” Twidell told The Guardian. “The health of crew members is being monitored very closely, including temperature checks before every flight.”

And like Edward III who refused to let a bit of plague spoil a good time, the wealthy are forgoing their vacations to Italy, where over 3,000 cases of coronavirus and more than a hundred death have been reported. But yacht rentals for the Meditteranean and the Bahamas are booming. “It totally makes sense,” Jennifer Saia, president of a yacht charter company in Rhode Island told the New York Times. “You’re keeping your family contained in a very small, should-be-clean environment. And going from your car to your F.B.O.”-- meaning fixed base operator, or private jet terminal-- “to your private jet right onto the tarmac. And from there, right onto your yacht, and not having to deal with the public.”

To the rich, perhaps it does make complete sense that the first concern in the face of coronavirus fears would be that their vacation or scheduled jousting tournament proceed uninterrupted by other people’s deaths. And if history is any indication, it probably won’t be too long before they begin hiring others to remain behind and risk exposure while protecting their stuff. In the plague years of 1593 and 1603, parish records from London show that the majority of adults who died of bubonic plague were servants. In Ben Jonson’s 1610 play The Alchemist, a wealthy gentleman leaving his London home behind to wait out the plague in the country instructs the servant left behind to mind the house to “breathe less and farther off.”

Historically speaking, it’s not surprising that rich people are already fleeing potentially contaminated breath in cities on yachts and private jets, falsely believing expensive face masks will veil them from exposure while the regular people are left behind fighting in a Walgreen’s aisle for the last bottle of hand sanitizer. It’s simply interesting to note how quickly we revert to our feudal roles the moment aristocracy gets scared.

Trump hasn't yet made baseball caps saying #MakeAmericaSickAgain-- but his campaign might as well. Financial Times reporters Kiran Stacey, James Politi and Hannah Kuchler looked into why the U.S. is more vulnerable to coronavirus than countries where Trump is not the king. They wrote, with a politeness Trump hasn't earned, that "Public health officials and academics are concerned that a mix of high numbers of uninsured people, a lack of paid sick leave and a political class that has downplayed the threat could mean it spreads more quickly than in other countries... The spread of coronavirus could be fuelled by patients reluctant to seek care because of the expense of the U.S. healthcare system. Almost 18 million Americans did not have insurance in 2018, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, a healthcare research organisation. Even those patients with insurance might struggle to pay their contributions to their care-- so-called deductibles or co-pays-- as almost 29 per cent were classified as 'underinsured' in 2018, according to a Commonwealth Fund survey... More than 800 experts also signed a letter calling for U.S. policymakers to help the uninsured, but, so far, no federal assistance plans have been announced.

One word to describe a Bernie presidency: compassion

While 11 states and 25 cities have passed laws forcing companies to provide paid sickness leave, there remains no federal requirement to do so, and campaigners say about 30 per cent of U.S. workers still have no such entitlement.

Experts say this could exacerbate the spread of coronavirus if workers end up going into work while ill and infecting others, for fear of missing out on salary payments. According to an academic study published in 2012, the lack of workplace policies such as paid sick leave led to 5m extra flu-like illnesses during the H1N1 swine flu outbreak of 2009.

Sherry Leiwant, co-president of A Better Balance, which campaigns for stronger workplace protections, said: "Studies show contagion can really be contained with paid sick leave. People cannot stay at home and self-isolate if they are going to risk their jobs by doing so."

Initially, President Donald Trump thought coronavirus was purely a Chinese problem, then he dismissed it as a "hoax" perpetrated by Democratic politicians.

When U.S. cases rose and markets tanked, and Mr Trump felt pressure to respond, he asked Mike Pence, the vice-president with a patchy record on science and medicine, to manage the crisis. The result is that there is little confidence in this U.S. administration's ability to contain the outbreak in the world's largest economy, before matters worsen sharply.

The lag in implementing widespread testing for the disease exacerbated fears that Mr Trump and his team were complacent in dealing with the outbreak, or deliberately quashed evidence of domestic spread for political purposes.

Bruce Aylward, assistant director-general at the World Health Organization, said: "There are still different messages coming from the [Trump] administration about how serious this is, right at the time when you need people to be as vigilant as possible. The population is your best surveillance system, and they need to be aware of how serious the problem is."

Health experts say the spread of the disease in the U.S. will depend heavily on whether officials respond quickly enough to the changing situation, including instituting potentially unpopular policies such as banning gatherings of over a certain number of people.

"Ultimately, the U.S. really comes together around joint threats," said Mr Aylward. "But they now have a very narrow window of time to do so."

Stinking Rich-- An Existential Danger For American Democracy

Talk of the town this week was an endlessly fascinating and somewhat startling article-- did they plan it to come out just when Romney's stinking rich, self-entitled donors would be lined up in their Porsches and Jags and Ferraris spouting off about nails ladies and how the common folk are bad for democracy?-- by Lisa Miller in New York: "The Money-Empathy Gap: New research suggests that more money makes people act less human. Or at least less humane." This is a must-read for fans of Chris Hayes' book, Twilight of the Elites and his theory about the end of he meritocracy.

[Paul] Piff, who is 30, published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that made him semi-famous. Titled “Higher Social Class Predicts Increased Unethical Behavior,” it showed through quizzes, online games, questionnaires, in-lab manipulations, and field studies that living high on the socioeconomic ladder can, colloquially speaking, dehumanize people. It can make them less ethical, more selfish, more insular, and less compassionate than other people. It can make them more likely, as Piff demonstrated in one of his experiments, to take candy from a bowl of sweets designated for children. “While having money doesn’t necessarily make anybody anything,” Piff says, “the rich are way more likely to prioritize their own self-interests above the interests of other people. It makes them more likely to exhibit characteristics that we would stereotypically associate with, say, assholes.”

...When was the last time, as Piff puts it, that you prioritized your own interests above the interests of other people? Was it yesterday, when you barked at the waitress for not delivering your cappuccino with sufficient promptness? Perhaps it was last week, when, late to work, you zoomed past a mom struggling with a stroller on the subway stairs and justified your heedlessness with a ruthless but inarguable arithmetic: Today, the 9 a.m. meeting has got to come first; that lady’s stroller can’t be my problem. Piff is one of a new generation of scientists-- psychologists, economists, marketing professors, and neurobiologists-- who are exploiting this moment of unprecedented income inequality to explore behaviors like those. As Piff’s colleague Michael Kraus explains in a forthcoming article co-authored with Piff and three other scientists in Psychological Review, their focus is on “predictable social cognitive thought patterns and world views” of the people familiarly known as “the haves.” Their field is less than ten years old, and its conclusions are thus “incomplete,” says John Dovidio, a social psychologist at Yale. Money has a million symbolic meanings and reflects as many human yearnings; wanting it, getting it, having it, using it, and abusing it are entirely different impulses with entirely different effects on personality, behavior, and interpersonal relationships, and no single researcher has yet captured all of that nuance. But in a country that likes to think that class doesn’t matter, these social scientists are beginning to prove just how determinative money is.

...[A]s the 2012 election approaches-- an election framed more than most as a referendum on how much prosperity should be shared-- those on opposite sides of the income spectrum appear not just different, but as alien tribes who have accidentally washed up on the same beach. The economic data are well known: The top 20 percent of Americans own about 87 percent of the wealth; the bottom 80 percent splits the rest. Social mobility, never as attainable as imagined, is stagnant. Forty percent of Americans inhabit the same social class as their grandparents, making the United States less socially mobile than Japan or France.

...The American Dream is really two dreams. There’s the Horatio Alger myth, in which a person with grit, ingenuity, and hard work succeeds and prospers. And there’s the firehouse dinner, the Fourth of July picnic, the common green, in which everyone gives a little so the group can get a lot. Markus’s work seems to suggest the emergence of a dream apartheid, wherein the upper class continues to chase a vision of personal success and everyone else lingers at a potluck complaining that the system is broken. (Research shows that the rich tend to blame individuals for their own failure and likewise credit themselves for their own success, whereas those in the lower classes find explanations for inequality in circumstances and events outside their control.) But the truth is much more nuanced. Every American, rich and poor, bounces back and forth between these two ideals of self, calibrating ambitions and adjusting behaviors accordingly. Nearly half of Americans between 18 and 29 believe that it’s “likely” they’ll get rich, according to Gallup-- in spite of all evidence to the contrary. Those who have already gotten wealthy wrestle openly and with real anguish over how to raise children who are productive, community-minded, and hardworking. Jamie Johnson, an heir to the Johnson & Johnson fortune, made a documentary in 2003 called Born Rich and, since then, has become a kind of confessor to the anxious wealthy. “Everyone says, ‘I don’t want my kids to turn out to be the next Paris Hilton,’?” says Johnson, “It’s weird. You know they want their kids to be superior. They want their kids’ lives to reflect the wealth and the position they have in society. But they don’t want their kids to be elitist and arrogant.”

This tweet from Rep. Brad Miller (D-NC) made me decide to write about this today-- and suggest the connection to Eduardo Porter's article in the NY Times Business Section yesterday: The Spreading Scourge of Corporate Corruption. It's the kind of stuff I was very aware of when I was president of a division of TimeWarner. Basically, soon after entering the corporate world, I realized the richer someone is the more likely they are to be greedy, selfish and avaricious. Jesus got it right when he said: "Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God." (Matthew 19:24). He wasn't foolin' around. Of course, neither are the banksters-- as we just saw in the way they've been working together to manipulate interest rates for their own benefit (the Libor scandal).

The misconduct of the financial industry no longer surprises most Americans. Only about one in five has much trust in banks, according to Gallup polls, about half the level in 2007. And it’s not just banks that are frowned upon. Trust in big business overall is declining. Sixty-two percent of Americans believe corruption is widespread across corporate America. According to Transparency International, an anticorruption watchdog, nearly three in four Americans believe that corruption has increased over the last three years.

We should be alarmed that corporate wrongdoing has come to be seen as such a routine occurrence. Capitalism cannot function without trust. As the Nobel laureate Kenneth Arrow observed, “Virtually every commercial transaction has within itself an element of trust.”

The parade of financiers accused of misdeeds, booted from the executive suite and even occasionally jailed, is undermining this essential element. Have corporations lost whatever ethical compass they once had? Or does it just look that way because we are paying more attention than we used to?

This is hard to answer because fraud and corruption are impossible to measure precisely. Perpetrators understandably do their best to hide the dirty deeds from public view. And public perceptions of fraud and corruption are often colored by people’s sense of dissatisfaction with their lives.

...Company executives are paid to maximize profits, not to behave ethically. Evidence suggests that they behave as corruptly as they can, within whatever constraints are imposed by law and reputation. In 1977, the United States Congress passed the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, to stop the rampant practice of bribing foreign officials. Business by American multinationals in the most corrupt countries dropped. But they didn’t stop bribing. And American companies have been lobbying against the law ever since.

Extrapolating from frauds that were uncovered during and after the dot-com bubble, the economists Luigi Zingales and Adair Morse of the University of Chicago and Alexander Dyck of the University of Toronto estimated conservatively that in any given year a fraud was being committed by 11 to 13 percent of the large companies in the country.

Yet it may be wrong to shrug off the latest boomlet of corporate crimes and misdemeanors as a mere reflection of the business cycle. Americans appear to believe that corruption has become more prevalent over the years. And some indicators suggest they may be right.

In 2001, Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index ranked the United States as the 16th least-corrupt country. By last year, the nation had fallen to 24th place. The World Bank also reports a weakening of corruption controls in the United States since the late 1990s, so that it is falling behind most other developed nations.

The most pointed evidence that breaking the rules has become standard behavior in the corporate world is how routine the wrongdoing seems to its participants. “Dude. I owe you big time!... I’m opening a bottle of Bollinger,” e-mailed one Barclays trader to a colleague for fiddling with the rate and improving the apparent profit of his derivatives book.

It’s difficult to know why corruption may be spreading. But there are a few plausible explanations. From globalization to rising income inequality to the growing role of corporate money in political campaigns, political and economic dynamics may have increased both the scope of corporate wrongdoing and the incentives for business executives to bend, or break, the rules.

Just consider the scale of recent wrongdoing. Libor is one of the most important rates in the economy. It determines the return on the savings of millions of people, as well as the rate they pay on their mortgage and car loans. It is the benchmark for hundreds of trillions of dollars worth of financial contracts.

Bigger markets allow bigger frauds. Bigger companies, with more complex balance sheets, have more places to hide them. And banks, when they get big enough that no government will let them fail, have the biggest incentive of all. A 20-year-old study by the economists Paul Romer and George Akerlof pointed out that the most lucrative strategy for executives at too-big-to-fail banks would be to loot them to pay themselves vast rewards — knowing full well that the government would save them from bankruptcy.

Globalization can encourage corruption, as companies compete tooth and claw for new markets. And the furious rush of corporate cash into the political process-- which differs from bribery in that companies pay politicians to change laws rather than bureaucrats to ignore them-- is unlikely to foment ethical behavior.

The inexorable rise of income inequality is also likely to encourage fraud, fostering resentment and undermining trust in capitalism’s institutions and rules. Economic research shows that participants in contests in which the winner takes all are much more likely to cheat. And the United States is becoming a winner-takes-all economy.

It’s hard to fathom the broader social implications of corporate wrongdoing. But its most long-lasting impact may be on Americans’ trust in the institutions that underpin the nation’s liberal market democracy.

This is Mitt Romney's world. This is the Republican Party's world. This is the world of Blue Dogs and New Dems. People shouldn't vote for them-- not any of them... not ever.

Willard Romney-- The Candidate Of The One Percent Of The One Percent

By now you probably heard about the Pew Research poll showing how angry voters are with Congress-- and mostly blaming the Republicans for a body that isn't working for the people at all. They actually conclude that next year could bring some unpleasant surprises for a number of incumbents, especially Republican incumbents in swing districts (like Paul Ryan, which could explain his abandonment of his plan to kill Medicare this week).

The Republican Party is taking more of the blame than the Democrats for a do-nothing Congress. A record-high 50% say that the current Congress has accomplished less than other recent Congresses, and by nearly two-to-one (40% to 23%) more blame Republican leaders than Democratic leaders for this. By wide margins, the GOP is seen as the party that is more extreme in its positions, less willing to work with the other side to get things done, and less honest and ethical in the way it governs. And for the first time in over two years, the Democratic Party has gained the edge as the party better able to manage the federal government.

...The level of anti-incumbent sentiment among Republican voters is particularly notable. Despite having won a majority in the House of Representatives-- though not the Senate-- last year, most Republicans continue to advocate a sweeping overhaul of congressional membership. Fully 70% say that most members should be replaced. This stands in stark contrast to how members of the party with a House majority have felt in recent elections. Republicans in 2006, and Democrats in 2008 and 2010, favored keeping most members in office, with only a few advocating a sweeping overhaul as Republicans do today. In those years, one party controlled both the House and Senate, unlike today.

...By a 44% to 35% margin, more Americans support than oppose the Occupy Wall Street movement overall, and by 48% to 30%, more say they agree than disagree with the concerns the protests have raised. But when it comes to the way the protests are being conducted, significantly more disapprove (49%) than approve (29%).

Many of the themes of the Occupy Wall Street protests resonate with the public. About half (51%) say that Wall Street hurts the American economy more than it helps it; 36% are of the view that Wall Street helps more than it hurts. A 61% majority say the economic system in this country unfairly favors the wealthy, while 36% say it is generally fair to most Americans. And fully 77% say that a few rich people and corporations have too much power in this country. While still a minority view, the current survey finds 40% saying that hard work and determination are no guarantee of success, higher than in any other survey conducted over the past 17 years.

...Roughly three-quarters of the public (77%) say that they think there is too much power in the hands of a few rich people and large corporations in the United States. In a 1941 Gallup poll, six-in-ten (60%) Americans expressed this view. About nine-in-ten (91%) Democrats and eight-in-ten (80%) of independents assert that power is too concentrated among the rich and large corporations, but this view is shared by a much narrower majority (53%) of Republicans.

Reflecting a parallel sentiment, 61% of Americans now say the economic system in this country unfairly favors the wealthy and just 36% say the system is generally fair to most Americans. About three-quarters (76%) of Democrats and 61% of independents say the economic system is tilted in favor of the wealthy; a majority (58%) of Republicans say that the system is generally fair to most Americans.

The public also views Wall Street negatively, little changed from opinions in March. Currently, just 36% say Wall Street helps the American economy more than it hurts-- 51% say it hurts more than helps. Majorities of both Democrats (60%) and independents (54%) say Wall Street hurts more than helps, while nearly half of Republicans say Wall Street helps the economy (49%).

Wow... even Republicans! Not that that stopped Romney from spending Wednesday evening with his only real non-Mormon base-- the Wall Street fatcats. Right-wing crooks Paul Singer (the rich hedge fund slimeball who has finally given up on trying to recruit Chris Christie to save the GOP from Romney), Roger Hertog, Sander Gerber and Daniel Loeb hosted a $1.2 million fundraiser for him-- one of 4 he did during the day. That said, this NPR report from yesterday on the 1% of the 1%-- just 26,783 donors who gave more than $10,000 each in the 2010 midterms-- explains a lot about why American politics is so corrupt and so skewered away from the interests of the 99%.

Combined, these donors spent $774 million. That's 24.3% of the total from individuals to politicians, parties, PACs, and independent expenditure groups.

...The One Percent of the One Percent are not average Americans. Overwhelmingly, they are corporate executives, investors, lobbyists, and lawyers. A good number appear to be highly ideological. They give to multiple candidates and to parties and independent issue groups. They tend to cluster in a limited number of metropolitan zip codes, especially in New York, Washington, Chicago, and Los Angeles.

In the 2010 election cycle, the average One Percent of One Percenter spent $28,913, more than the median individual income of $26,364.

At the top of this elite group are individuals such as Bob Perry, CEO of Perry Homes, who gave $7.3 million to Karl Rove’s American Crossroads in 2010 and $4.4 million to Swift Vets and POWs for Truth in 2004, and Wayne Hughes, owner and chairman of Public Storage Inc., who gave $3.25 million to American Crossroads in 2010, and Fred Eshelman, CEO of Pharmaceutical Product Development who spent $3 million in 2010 on his own group, RightChange. Sunlight’s Ryan Sibley writes more about the top donors here.

Unlike the other 99.99% of Americans who do not make these contributions, these elite donors have unique access. In a world of increasingly expensive campaigns, The One Percent of the One Percent effectively play the role of political gatekeepers. Prospective candidates need to be able to tap into these networks if they want to be taken seriously. And party leaders on both sides are keenly aware that more than 80% of party committee money now comes from these elite donors.

...Unlike the 99.99% of Americans who do not spend ten grand of their own money on an election cycle (mostly because they can’t afford to do so), The One Percent of the One Percent have unique access to candidates and party leaders. They know that candidates and parties need their money, and this presumably allows them to play a kind of gatekeeper role, allowing them to set the parameters of priorities of “legitimate” politics.

They congregate in a limited number of elite zip codes. Their concerns are not the concerns of ordinary Americans.

Some are motivated by ideological reasons. For others, the motivation is less partisan and more pragmatic: Many are lawyers and lobbyists, and even more are corporate executives, all seeking to influence legislation and policy.

Over time, more individuals are choosing to spend $10,000 or more on politics, and candidates and especially parties are becoming more reliant on them. With new vehicles for unlimited money in the 2012 election, a small number of individuals with both the means and the motive to spend lavishly on elections are poised to play an even greater role. To the extent that the priorities and interests of these elite donors are not representative of the country, there are good reasons to be concerned that their unique access is having a distorting impact on our politics.

Rich Man, Poor Man-- No Room For One In American Politics... Even On The So-Called Left

Yesterday I was a guest on Nicole Sandler's program, and one of the topics we discussed was why the DCCC and DSCC back such dreadful candidates, who are such unconvincing champions of working families. Nicole asked how much ideology went into their decisions to get behind reactionary wretches like Ed Case (HI) and Marty Chavez (NM). "Not as much as I once feared," I answered. "All they care about is the ability of the candidates to raise large amounts of cash." That's why we have so few non-millionaires in the Senate and fewer and fewer in the House.

When Blue America endorsed Ed Potosnak (D-NJ) the other day, I sent out a notice to a listserv of gay activists. One responded by asking how I expected a schoolteacher to raise the $2-3 million that would be needed to dislodge career politician and corporate hack Leonard Lance. Since Ed is a brilliant, committed progressive-- and an out gay man-- one might expect gay activists to rally around his campaign instead of whining about how only millionaires in blue T-shirts can raise enough money to fight millionaires in red T-shirts. (Plug: You can donate to Ed's campaign here.)

Paulette Garin comes from a proud union background and has been a stalwart opponent of Wall Street golden boy Paul Ryan in southeast Wisconsin. Yesterday she sent me this post by Alyssa Battistoni at Alternet that asks the question Are Well-Off Progressives Standing in the Way of a Real Movement for Economic Justice? She wants to know why it took so long for the American "left" to notice that income and wealth disparity has been growing gigantically in this country for decades-- to a point where it is, once again, threatening democracy itself. "Surely," she writes, "the trends of decreasing social mobility and increasing social stratification in the supposed 'land of opportunity' call for serious resistance-- where has it been? As thoroughly reprehensible as the Right’s slavishness to wealth and power is, the fact that it took a financial meltdown for economic justice to even begin to replace welfare reform on the political agenda suggests progressives need to do a bit of navel-gazing."

By now it should come as no surprise that most Democratic politicians are more responsive to the interests of more affluent voters than to the working class, even if they’re nominally better than Republicans with regard to middle-class interests. But the fact of the matter is that it’s not just Democratic politicians who are operating from a position of privilege, but the broader progressive leadership. Perhaps this isn’t surprising either, but for a party purporting to defend the economic interests of the working and middle class-- to say nothing of the poor (as per usual)-- it’s a fatal weakness. By and large, the people who work at progressive think tanks, media outlets and policy centers are well-compensated -- some extravagantly so-- and staggeringly well-educated; they have solid health-care benefits and 401(k)s. As genuinely as they may care about social justice, their caring is largely based on principle rather than self-interest.

That has a great deal to do with why Republicans-- and other right-wing parties all through history-- always seem willing to fight so much harder than bourgeois social democratic parties that may be labeled "left" by the corporately owned mass media but are at best centrist, like most of the Democratic Party. Motivated by greed and avarice, Republican politicians are fighting for wealth and privilege; Democratic politicians, for ideals.

[A]ny attempt to truly tackle the injustice of our current economic system will require movement building and organizing. The political power of the wealthy is immense, and the waning of union power has left little in the way of institutions that can defend the interests of the nonrich. But advocacy from the comfortable position of the liberal establishment on behalf of the working class isn’t going to get the job done; the push needs to come from the people whose lives are directly affected. Indeed, the reason things like career pressures, blogosphere culture, and pet policies of the progressive middle class matter at all is that the Democrats no longer have a working-class base with the power to push for economic justice.

...Yet thus far, progressives by and large haven’t done the serious work of building new organizations and institutions to replace unions in protecting the interests of poor and working-class Americans in their stead, nor to support groups that can challenge the status quo.

But it’s not too late to build a real movement against neoliberal cuts and in favor of a more just and equitable economy. Recent events offer a vision of a possible new direction: the most exciting activism the Left has seen in decades didn’t take place on the Mall or Capitol Hill, but rather, in places-- Wisconsin, Indiana, Ohio-- where drastic anti-union proposals spurred thousands of citizens to come together over issues of mutual concern.  

The recession is making people from different backgrounds and walks of life realize that the challenges they face are structurally similar; that not only blue- but white-collar jobs have been degraded and outsourced, and in fields from administration to academia the jobs that remain are increasingly insecure, contingent, and contractual. The looseness and spontaneity of these reactions speaks to a growing energy without an effective outlet, suggesting that progressives need to think about how to better support grassroots organizing, encourage experimentation with new forms of organizing, and create a connected but independent network of diverse organizations and campaigns chipping away at the powers that be. 

I sometimes suspect that some progressives see President Obama’s decision to leave community organizing for Harvard Law as validation of policy and legal approaches to tackling injustice over movement-building. But Obama’s career trajectory is actually a case in point for why the Left can’t be led primarily by progressives with middle-class backgrounds and elite educations, even if they’re genuinely concerned with social justice. Organizing is hard work, and it takes a long time. It can’t be done by people who have the option of leaving for greener pastures; it has to be done by people who are embedded within and committed to the communities they’re organizing for the long run.  

Because one thing is for sure: a movement consisting of middle-class supporters with a vague commitment to social justice will not succeed in addressing the root causes of its decline on its own, and it will certainly not succeed in addressing-- or perhaps even in identifying-- the issues that plague the poor and working class. As Vivien Labaton and Gara Lamarche of the Atlantic Philanthropies argue in the American Prospect, "Too often, debates unfold without the voices of those most affected informing them. To win the message wars and, more important, to make the strongest case possible for change, we need to put those voices front and center.”

Figuring out how to do this-- how to expand leadership and build a new type of movement that can not only lend power to progressive politics but help form and shape it-- is perhaps the most important challenge facing the American Left today.

It's why Blue America supports people like Nick Ruiz, Ed Potosnak, Eric Griego and Raúl Grijalva and Bernie Sanders and why we always ask candidates we interview if they're a union member. It means a lot more to us than it does to the DCCC, let alone the DSCC.

You Can't Trust The Rich-- Dominique Strauss-Kahn Is The French Equivalent Of A Blue Dog

From 1885 to 1958 it always cost between two and three cents to mail a letter. That's right, for millions of Americans alive today, born in the '40s and '50s, the price of a postage stamp was steady at three cents. In 1958 it went to four cents... and it's been rising ever since. Today it costs 44 cents to mail a letter, not much of a burden for businesses (or for rich people who have their businesses send their mail) because it's a deductible expense. In other words, the cost of sending letters-- if you're rich-- is paid for by the taxpayers. If you're poor and want to mail a letter... well, it used to be subsidized too. But somewhere along the line after the New Deal days the wealthy started getting more and more control over government, and started making it work for themselves. Congress is filled with millionaires-- and not just the despicable House of Lords, even the People's House. The GOP shill running for Congress in NY-26 a week from today, Jane Corwin, is "worth" $150 million.

You think these people know anything about the problems the rest of us feel? They don't. For the most part, they have no empathy and little interest in the trials and tribulations of "the little people." And we keep electing them. I want to persuade myself that Democratic Party millionaires and billionaires in Congress aren't as bad as Republican millionaires and billionaires. And to some extent-- the extent that they hew to party principles-- it's sometimes true. But there's something wrong with these rich people. I know it's a weekday and I usually save these kinds of stories for the weekends, but stick with me if you have the time.

When I moved to Los Angeles from San Francisco, I moved from running my own small indie label and making-- at best-- $10,000 a year (after many years of making $5,000) to what seemed to me like a gargantuan annual salary of $90,000 a year, more than my father ever made. I felt like I was the richest guy evah! And my spirits were high. I'm workin' at Warner Brothers, running Sire (the coolest label) and feeling great and feeling rich.

My two best friends were not nearly as ebullient. One was making a million a year, and he was bitter and angry that so many others made so much more than he did. He put all his energy into stealing everything he could from the company. The other guy was already making $250,000 a year, and he was pissed off too. I was shocked when he told me, "One day we'll break free from these chains of poverty." He wasn't kidding. It was a good warning for me that these rich people were all insane and completely divorced from the reality I had lived my whole life in. I vowed to never let that happen to me.

Last Christmas I rented a riad for a month in Marrakech. It was a pretty tony neighborhood. Right next door was the king's private residence, and across the alley was the former villa of one of Marrakech's most distinguished and beloved residents, Yves Saint Laurent. Around the corner: the palatial residences of Bernard-Henri Lévy (English version here) and Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who until this weekend was favored to be the next President of France, and who was denied bail while awaiting trial for raping a maid at a Midtown New York City hotel.

Prosecutors had asked the judge, Melissa C. Jackson, supervising judge of Manhattan Criminal Court, to remand Mr. Strauss-Kahn, 62, contending that he was a flight risk. They also indicated that a similar attack may have occurred.

“Some of this information include reports that he has in fact engaged in conduct similar to the conduct alleged in this complaint on at least one other occasion,” said John McConnell, an assistant district attorney, adding that the district attorney’s office was still investigating the other occasion, which occurred outside the United States.

In opposing bail, prosecutors highlighted the serious nature of the allegations.
“The defendant restrained a hotel employee inside of his room,” Mr. McConnell said. “He sexually assaulted her and attempted to forcibly rape her,” and when that failed, Mr. McConnell said, he forced her to perform oral sex.

There's a reason Jesus said, "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God." They're crazy and overwhelmed with feelings of entitlement.

Dominique Gaston André Strauss-Kahn is a member of the Socialist Party-- albeit the right wing of the Socialist Party (kind of a Blue Dog equivalent)-- but the man is a billionaire. He was born into a wealthy family in a wealthy Paris suburb, Neuilly-sur-Seine. They moved to Monaco, a place rich people would go to avoid taxes and financial regulations. Young Dominique wasn't a brilliant student; he flunked the entrance examination for the École Nationale d'Administration.

He became a lobbyist for French plutocrats before being appointed Minister for Economics, Finance and Industry, where he implemented a disastrous privatization program on behalf of his former employers. In 1999, he was accused of corruption in two financial scandals related to Elf Aquitaine and the MNEF, a student mutual health insurance scheme, and he resigned in disgrace. One of his most important achievements was getting the Thomas Act repealed so that hedge funds could "flower."

He's been involved in several sex scandals in the past and is clearly a dangerous sociopath who has been allowed to skate because of his great wealth and power. Yesterday's NY Post described him as whiny:

The IMF chief who allegedly sodomized a Manhattan hotel maid proved the height of pompous arrogance yesterday, throwing a fit over a battle on his bail -- which left him parked on a wooden bench in an East Harlem station house the whole day, sources said.

Leading French presidential contender and accused sex attacker Dominique Strauss-Kahn, 63, was finally led out of the NYPD's Special Victims Unit at around 11 p.m. in handcuffs, scowling and red-faced.

Sporting a long navy-blue coat and an open collar, he refused to acknowledge reporters as he was placed in the back of a police car and whisked off to Kings County Hospital in Brooklyn.

Sources said he was taken out of the police station house only after finally agreeing to a medical exam -- and only after cops had moved to obtain a warrant to gather potential DNA evidence.
Clues they're looking for include possible DNA from his alleged victim that might be found in scratches on his body.

He had been set for arraignment last night, but one of his lawyers, Bill Taylor, at a hastily called press conference outside Manhattan Criminal Court, said:

"Our client willingly consented to a scientific and forensic examination... at the request of the government. It's being done. In light of the hour, we've agreed to postpone the arraignment until [this morning], and we expect to be in court with him."

And, of course-- being rich and married to an heiress-- he has denied any wrongdoing. According to the Post Strauss-Kahn "was outraged that he wasn't getting the VIP treatment he's accustomed to" and pissed off the cops, who have taken to referring to him as "the French idiot." He's particularly angry that he's only allotted $1.80 per meal. His passport was confiscated.

Let me end this very simply. Don't vote for wealthy people running for office. There are too many of them already. It's one of the reasons I hate the DCCC so fervently; being rich is their #1 criterion for getting behind a candidate. It's as though they were Republicans or something!

If We Can't Get Some Working Class Gang Members Into The Gang Of Six... How About A Reasonable Conservative Like David Frum?

Trump Change was on TV bragging the other day how he's much, much richer than Mitt Romney. All those bankruptcy restructurings worked out well for sleazy the blowhard. And Romney... being in the vulture-capital business brought in hundreds of millions of dollars. Most members of Congress are millionaires, even if not on a level of serial auto thief Darrell Issa (between $303,575,011 and $451,100,000 according to his 2009 reports). Does it make any difference what a politician is "worth?" You bet... but that depends how you define "worth." We talking about talent, intelligence, moral fiber? Or, the way worth is commonly used in our culture, financial assets? I was talking with someone-- a decent guy-- from the Wisconsin Democratic Party over the weekend. He was trying to convince me that a candidate with no record was good and the first thing out of his mouth was an assertion that the guy is wealthy. In this case, I don't think he was even trying to say-- as Trump Change had been insinuating-- that wealth in and of itself was an allure to the average voter. I think he meant the guy could finance-- between himself and his wealthy associates-- his own campaign.

Open Secrets asked the question rhetorically when they reported the net worth of members of Congress. "Why should Americans care about the personal finances of their federal lawmakers? There are several key reasons"

• Thousands of companies and special interests groups have business before Congress each year or lobby Congress directly. Some of these businesses may also find themselves the targets of congressional scrutiny for questionable business practices, accidents, even disasters. All the while, lawmakers themselves sometimes have stock holdings or other financial relationships with these corporations and associations, raising the specter of conflicts of interest.

• About 1 percent of all Americans are millionaires. In Congress, that number regularly hovers between 40 percent and 50 percent, meaning elected leaders generally need not worry about the economic pressures many Americans face-- from securing gainful employment to grappling with keeping a family financially afloat. Decide for yourself if these congressional millionaires are adequately representing your financial interests.

• Congressional members' personal wealth keeps expanding year after year, typically at rates well beyond inflation and any tax increases. The same cannot be said for most Americans. Are your representatives getting rich in Congress and, if so, how?

The self-selected Gang of Six-- Richard Durbin (D-IL), Saxby Chambliss (R-GA), Kent Conrad (D-ND), Tom Coburn (R-OK), Mark Warner (D-VA), Michael Crapo (R-ID)-- is trying to set the overall policy path for this country right now, even deciding whether or not to hang onto Medicare and Social Security in some form and who should be taxed and how much. They're all wealthy men, half of them fabulously wealthy.


Mark Warner is the second richest member of the Senate, with something north of $170 million in assets. Coburn reported his net worth in 2009 between $1,174,164 and $4,616,000-- #49th richest senator and just above fellow gang-member Kent Conrad ($1,456,035 to $3,376,000 ). Durbin might be a millionaire; hard to tell from his report. I'd feel more comfortable in the Gang was dominated by working class members instead of by men overly sympathetic to the wealthy. (Might be nice to have a woman or three in there too.) Over the weekend, conservative pundit David Frum wrote, from a conservative point of view, why shredding the social safety net-- as the House-passed Ryan budget would do-- is such a terrible idea.

Since the economic and electoral disasters of 2006-2009, Republicans have veered in a sharply libertarian direction. Why not put that new direction to the test of democracy? Perhaps Paul Ryan is right, and Americans (or anyway: voting Americans) have abruptly changed their minds during this economic crisis about their expectations from government.

I’ll admit: I’ve also changed my mind during this crisis, but in the opposite direction.

...The radical free-market economics I embraced in the late 1970s offered a trade:

Yes, there would be less social provision. In return, Americans would receive an economy that was simultaneously more dynamic and also more stable.

There would be less inflation (because the Federal Reserve would have one job: price stability).

There would be fewer and milder recessions (because the Federal Reserve would no longer have to extinguish the inflation it did not create).

The financial sector could finance faster growth with less risk (because risks would be cushioned by diversification rather than prohibited by regulation).

Economic growth would accelerate (because the reduced tax burden would induce entrepreneurial innovation).

Faster growth would raise incomes for all (because a rising tide lifts all boats).

More opportunity in the private economy would abundantly offset the curbing of welfare benefits (because the best social program is always a job).

More opportunity would end the caste-like isolation of the poorest of the poor by drawing them out of the underclass into paid employment (because all human beings respond more or less rationally to positive incentives).

This was the trade, and it was engineered jointly by Republicans and Democrats: in fact some of the most important elements of the trade were adopted during the Clinton years.

Some of the terms of that trade were honored. From 1983 through 2008, the US enjoyed a quarter-century of economic expansion, punctuated by only two relatively mild recessions. In the late 1980s, the country was hit by the savings & loan crisis, the worst financial crisis to that point since the 1930s – and although the S&L crisis did deliver a blow, the country rapidly recovered and came up smiling. New industries were born, new jobs created on an epic scale, incomes did improve, and the urban poor were drawn into the working economy.

But of course, other terms of the trade were not honored.

Especially after 2000, incomes did not much improve for middle-class Americans. The promise of macroeconomic stability proved a mirage: America and the world were hit in 2008 by the sharpest and widest financial crisis since the 1930s. Conservatives do not like to hear it, but the crisis originated in the malfunctioning of an under-regulated financial sector, not in government overspending or government over-generosity to less affluent homebuyers. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were bad actors, yes, but they could not have capsized the world economy by themselves. It took Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, AIG, and-- maybe above all-- Standard & Poor’s and Moody’s to do that.

In the aftermath of the catastrophe, the free-market assumption and expectation that an unemployed person could always find work somewhere has been massively falsified: at the trough of this recession, there were almost 6 jobseekers in the US for every unfilled job. Nothing like such a disparity had been seen since the 1930s. The young faced the worst job odds. But some of the most dismal outcomes were endured by workers in their 50s, laid off from middle-class jobs likely never to see middle-class employment again.

GK Chesterton once wrote that we should never tear down a fence until we knew why it had been built. In the calamity after 2008, we rediscovered why the fences of the old social insurance state had been built.

Speaking only personally, I cannot take seriously the idea that the worst thing that has happened in the past three years is that government got bigger. Or that money was borrowed. Or that the number of people on food stamps and unemployment insurance and Medicaid increased. The worst thing was that tens of millions of Americans-- and not only Americans-- were plunged into unemployment, foreclosure, poverty. If food stamps and unemployment insurance, and Medicaid mitigated those disasters, then two cheers for food stamps, unemployment insurance, and Medicaid.

Which does not mean that I have become suddenly indifferent to the growth of government. Not at all. Paul Ryan is absolutely right that the present trend is unsustainable and must be corrected. The free marketeers of the 1980s were right that taxes on enterprise must be restrained to leave room for private-sector-led expansion. Over-generous social insurance has all kinds of negative consequences. Private saving must be encouraged. Work must pay better than idleness. The job of designing the right kind of social insurance state is hugely important and hugely difficult, and the conservative sensibility-- with its respect for markets and less sentimental view of human nature-- is the right sensibility for that job.

Yet that same conservative sensibility is also properly distrustful of the fantasy that society can be remade according to a preconceived plan. We have to start from where we are, and we have to take people as we find them. Ronald Reagan liked to quote a line of Tom Paine’s, “We have it in our power to make the world new again.” George Will-- although a great Reagan admirer-- correctly complained at the time, “No, we don’t.”

I strongly suspect that today’s Ayn Rand moment will end in frustration or worse for Republicans. The future beyond the welfare state imagined by Yuval Levin will not arrive. At that point, Republicans will face a choice. (I’d argue we face that choice now, whether we recognize it or not.) We can fulminate against unchangeable realities, alienate ourselves from a country that will not accede to the changes we demand. That way lies bitterness and irrelevance. Or we can go back to work on the core questions facing all center right parties in the advanced economies since World War II: how do we champion entrepreneurship and individualism within the context of a social insurance state?

UPDATE: Dick Durbin Picks Sides-- And It Isn't The Same Side Bernie Sanders Is On

Yesterday I was reading some apologia about how six self-selected wealthy white men-- AKA- The Gang of Six-- was deciding the social and political future of America in the most profound ways. The only excuse the article could make about this not being a complete takeover by the wealthy was that one of them, Dick Durbin is "friends" with Bernie Sanders, a socialist. No one thought to have Sanders in the Gang. The fact that he speaks for the other 95% who the Gang doesn't speak for seems irrelevant. As irrelevant as Dick Durbin's "friendship" with him. Durbin has often been identified with some worthy causes and may liberals saw him as a more progressive successor to Harry Reid than Wall Street-dominated Chuck Schumer. I was always ambivalent. Until this morning-- when Durbin unmasked himself. Is this what he's always been down deep or did zombies capture him and suck out his brains and replace them with pig shit?

Senator Dick Durbin, D-Ill., says the bi-partisan group of senators working to find a way to reduce the deficit-- the so-called "Gang of Six"-- is near agreement on a plan that will chart a middle ground between the House Republican budget and the plan outlined last week by President Obama.

And while other top Democrats say Social Security should be untouched, Durbin says Social Security changes should be made now.

"You have the House Republican budget from Congressman Paul Ryan, who I know and like, which is going to be placed somewhere on the right side of the spectrum. You have the president's suggestion, which will be on the other side of the spectrum. And if and when we reach an agreement, it will be in the middle, a bipartisan effort, which I think has a chance to succeed," Durbin said in an interview for ABC News' Subway Series.

So now we have a "friend of Bernie" wanting to split the difference between Obama's very conservative plan and Ryan's wildly insane reactionary plan. God forbid anyone mention a progressive plan-- you know, like the only kind of plan that has ever worked to lift up this country and make it great and powerful and empower the middle class.

Durbin criticized a resolution put forward by Sen. Bernie Sanders, a liberal independent from Vermont, that says Social Security should not be cut under a deficit reduction plan. Durbin said he would not vote for such a resolution.

"I think Bernie is going too far with his language," Durbin said.

People Who Can Afford This Offer From Delta To Travel By Private Jet Owe Obama Big Time-- But Won't Support Him Regardless

Over at TheAroundTheWorldBlog, the contention for years is that Delta is #1, the #1 worst airline in the entire known universe. And in the midst of an excruciating recession and a Republican Party filibuster of an unemployment insurance extension and a concerted move by conservatives of both parties to dismantle Social Security, Delta isn't winning many new friends with their brand new holiday offer:

Hello Mr. Klein,

This holiday season, treat family, friends and yourself to the ultimate gift of luxury and flexibility-- private jet travel.

The 5-hour Fleet Membership Card from Delta Private Jets makes the perfect present, and is now available starting at $27,500 for the light jet category.*

You don't have to travel with your party to use the card, so anyone you choose can enjoy the comfort and freedom of private jet travel. And with Delta Private Jets, you can always count on guaranteed availability, around-the-clock customer service, and the highest standards of operational excellence.

But hurry. The 5-hour Fleet Membership Card is only available through December 31st. Visit DeltaPrivateJets.com or call 1-877-323-JETS (5387) to purchase the 5-hour Jet Card today.

*Pricing includes fuel and taxes, and membership will be valid for 12 months from effective date of agreement.

The other day Ken suggested a picture of an empty bench could well be the emblem of the Obama judiciary. Delta private jets for rich people with extra tax refunds they don't know what to do with could be the emblem of his shockingly corporate "bipartisan" domestic agenda. It's an agenda so straight out of the Bush era that die-hard Obama supporters like NY Congressman Anthony Weiner and former Martin Luther King friend/attorney/speech writer Clarence Jones are coming to the same conclusion Paul Krugman wrote last week: progressives need to look elsewhere for leadership than the White House. Blue America has suggested Bernie Sanders. Jones endorsed the idea of a primary against Obama! First Weiner:

Governing is more than a series of transactions. This is a competition of ideas on how we make the country better."

"Middle class Americans need someone to fight for them. They see this deal as punting on 3rd down-- it seems the President is not seeing the value of being on offense."

"Democrats should welcome the chance to tell the American people what we will fight for. We should be standing up for the middle class and extending unemployment insurance for out-of-work Americans. If Republicans want to add to our deficit and defend the interests of billionaires, make them stand up in Congress and tell that to the public loud and clear."

"Deals come after we fight for ideals-- let's do that first.

Although my pal Roland works in an inner city school and has been telling me that the African-American women in the teachers union there are all sorry they ever supported Obama over Hillary Clinton, most progressives are afraid of African-American reaction if they start responding to Obama in the way they would respond to any other conservative. Perhaps Jones' post will wake a few people up in that regard. Once accused of being an apologist for Obama, Jones is disappointed by his abysmal lack of leadership on just about every issue facing Americans, including on specific ones he campaigned on.

It is not easy to consider challenging the first African-American to be elected as President of the United States. But, regrettably, I believe that the time has come to do this.

It is time for Progressives to stop "whining" and arguing among themselves about whether President Obama will or will not do this or that. Obama is no different than any other President, nominated by his national party. He was elected with the hard work and 24/7 commitment of persons who believed and enlisted in his campaign for "Hope" and "Change."

You don't have to be a rocket scientist nor have a PhD in political science and sociology to see clearly that Obama has abandoned much of the base that elected him. He has done this because he no longer respects, fears or believes those persons who elected him have any alternative, but to accept what he does, whether they like it or not.

It is time for those persons who constituted the "Movement" that enabled Senator Barack Obama to be elected to "break their silence"; to indicate that they no longer will sit on their hands, and only let off verbal steam and ineffective sound and fury, and "hope" for the best.

The answer is blowin' in the wind.

The pursuit of the war in Afghanistan in support of a certifiably corrupt Afghan government and the apparent willingness to retreat from his campaign commitment of no further tax cuts for the rich, his equivocal and foot dragging leadership to end DADT, his TARP for Wall Street, but, equivocal insufficient attention to the unemployment and housing foreclosures of Main Street, suggest that the template of the 1968 challenge to the reelection of President Lyndon Johnson now must be thoughtfully considered for Obama in 2012.

And, as Mike Konczal pointed out yesterday, Obama's policy thrust seems less about being forced to compromise with big bad Republicans-- who are still in the minority in both Houses of Congress-- as it is about an Administration conservative gameplan laid out very clearly over time by Peter Orszag, "the best barometer for what the Obama administration is currently doing in terms of the economy and budget." Yesterday Krugman tried again, practically begging Obama-- for his own sake, the sake of the Democratic Party and, most important, the sake of the American people-- especially the ones who elected him president, to Let's Not Make A Deal.

Back in 2001, former President George W. Bush pulled a fast one. He wanted to enact an irresponsible tax cut, largely for the benefit of the wealthiest Americans. But there were Senate rules in place designed to prevent that kind of irresponsibility. So Mr. Bush evaded the rules by making the tax cut temporary, with the whole thing scheduled to expire on the last day of 2010.

The plan, of course, was to come back later and make the thing permanent, never mind the impact on the deficit. But that never happened. And so here we are, with 2010 almost over and nothing resolved.

Democrats have tried to push a compromise: let tax cuts for the wealthy expire, but extend tax cuts for the middle class. Republicans, however, are having none of it. They have been filibustering Democratic attempts to separate tax cuts that mainly benefit a tiny group of wealthy Americans from those that mainly help the middle class. It’s all or nothing, they say: all the Bush tax cuts must be extended. What should Democrats do?

The answer is that they should just say no. If G.O.P. intransigence means that taxes rise at the end of this month, so be it.

Think about the logic of the situation. Right now, the Republicans see themselves as successful blackmailers, holding a clear upper hand. President Obama, they believe, wouldn’t dare preside over a broad tax increase while the economy is depressed. And they therefore believe that he will give in to their demands.

But while raising taxes when unemployment is high is a bad thing, there are worse things. And a cold, hard look at the consequences of giving in to the G.O.P. now suggests that saying no, and letting the Bush tax cuts expire on schedule, is the lesser of two evils.

Bear in mind that Republicans want to make those tax cuts permanent. They might agree to a two- or three-year extension-- but only because they believe that this would set up the conditions for a permanent extension later. And they may well be right: if tax-cut blackmail works now, why shouldn’t it work again later?

America, however, cannot afford to make those cuts permanent. We’re talking about almost $4 trillion in lost revenue just over the next decade; over the next 75 years, the revenue loss would be more than three times the entire projected Social Security shortfall. So giving in to Republican demands would mean risking a major fiscal crisis-- a crisis that could be resolved only by making savage cuts in federal spending.

And we’re not talking about government programs nobody cares about: the only way to cut spending enough to pay for the Bush tax cuts in the long run would be to dismantle large parts of Social Security and Medicare.

...[I]f Democrats give in to the blackmailers now, they’ll just face more demands in the future. As long as Republicans believe that Mr. Obama will do anything to avoid short-term pain, they’ll have every incentive to keep taking hostages. If the president will endanger America’s fiscal future to avoid a tax increase, what will he give to avoid a government shutdown?

So Mr. Obama should draw a line in the sand, right here, right now. If Republicans hold out, and taxes go up, he should tell the nation the truth, and denounce the blackmail attempt for what it is.

Yes, letting taxes go up would be politically risky. But giving in would be risky, too-- especially for a president whom voters are starting to write off as a man too timid to take a stand. Now is the time for him to prove them wrong.

And the guys who can use their tax cuts for the Delta private jets? They all hate Obama anyway and have no intention of voting for him unless Palin is the only alternative. So who will vote for Obama? The people he's betraying on a daily basis? He shouldn't count on it because he's going to wind up as a one-termer just like Steve Driehaus did-- and for the same reasons-- and not as a one-termer who took a hit for doing the right thing for America, one termer for doing the bidding of the Big Business interests who financed his political career.

Feelin' Rich?

About a year into Bush's second term, times started getting exceptionally rough, not just for the working poor-- after all Bush's economic and fiscal plans were designed to make them suffer-- but for the middle class as well. You can argue that things are slowly-- glacially-- turning around under Obama but most families will tell you nothing has improved. Most... but not all. For a few wealthy families everyone else's tough economic times has been a financial bonanza.

During the depths of the recession in 2009, as millions of Americans lost their jobs, homes and life savings, the highest-paid earners in the United States saw their average incomes increase more than five-fold from 2008, according to new data from the federal government.

The 74 people who earned more than $50 million last year-- the highest income category measured by the Social Security Administration-- saw their average incomes skyrocket from $91.8 million in 2008 to a mind-boggling $518.8 million in 2009.

These 74 people earned an average of $10 million-- per week. Meanwhile, half of all American wage-earners, or about 75 million people, earned less than $505 per week.

Even though the absolute number of earners in the over-$50 million income category decreased from 131 to 74 in 2009, the combined wages of that group increased by an astonishing $26.5 billion, from $11.9 billion in 2008 to $38.4 billion in 2009.

These 74 people earned a combined $38.4 billion last year, or as much as the 19 million lowest-paid American workers, combined. In 2009, the average income earned by all Americans fell by $384 to $39,269 and the median income fell by $253 to $26,261.

Many of these people, if not all of them, are social parasites. They don't CREATE anything-- including employment (other than for servants and golf caddies); they suck the blood of working people. If most of them and their spawn were to die tomorrow, there would be no negative social impact on anything. In fact, the country and the world would be a far better place. David Cay Johnson, a Pulitzer Prize-winner NY Times journalist covered this story on his blog, Tax.com and he pointed out that many of them are "most likely Wall Street traders who earned bonuses or corporate executives cashing in deferred compensation that accumulated over the years, or even highly paid athletes," though not hedge fund managers "because much of their 'investment' [gambling] income is not counted as wages.

"This systematic destruction of the working class and middle class has come during an era notable for celebrating the super-rich just for being super-rich," Johnston wrote. "From the Forbes 400 launch in 1982 and Robin Leach's Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous in 1984 to the faux reality of the multiplying Real Housewives shows, money voyeurism has grown in tandem with stagnant to falling incomes for the vast majority. There has also been huge income growth at the top and the economic children of income inequality: budget deficits and malign neglect of our commonwealth."

"This orgy of money exhibitionism has created a society in which commas-- it takes three to be a billionaire-- count more than character," Johnston continued. "We have gone so far down this path that we bailed out bankers, allowing them to keep the untaxed wealth in their deferral accounts and, with a few exceptions, retaining shareholder value, while wiping out investors in General Motors and Chrysler as a condition of their bailouts. And while autoworkers had to take severe pay cuts, bonus time on Wall Street is at new record levels."

And now they're buying themselves a Congress to cement their power in place. That's the conservative way.

Is This Going To Be The Year Wealthy Executives Dominate The Political System Even More Than Usual?

It doesn't seem very remarkable that the American political elite is filled with multimillionaires and that they have a distinct tendency to represent the point of view of their own class. It should be remarkable-- I mean we're kinda/sorta a democracy with a system of universal education-- but it's not. The political elite did its best to make sure the public education system would shy away from the whole critical thinking thing and concentrate on turning out minimally educated worker drones/consumers who could partially read the fine print.

Last week Michael Luo and Damien Cave presented a little report in the NY Times on how even the wealthiest and most selfish among us can-- and do-- run as populist outsiders. And this isn't just an essay about Republicans or just about egregiously deceitful crooks like Darrell Issa, the richest man in the House, a crazy demagogue and teabagger, or the only California congressman to join Michele Bachmann's demented Tea Party Caucus, real estate swindler Gary Miller (with a net worth of at least $14 million at last count). Ostensibly, Jeff Greene is a billionaire and a Democrat... kinda/sorta.

When Jeff Greene, a k a the Meltdown Mogul, recently brought his Democratic campaign for the United States Senate to a poor Miami neighborhood rife with the kinds of subprime mortgages that he became a billionaire betting against, did he:

A) Arrive in a Cadillac Escalade S.U.V., before stumping for energy conservation;

B) Tell the crowd that he was “fed up and frustrated” with Washington while suggesting job-creation ideas previously proposed by Washington politicians;

C) Receive a raucous welcome as an outsider who could turn Florida around.
The answer? All of the above, of course.

Call it the Great Recession paradox. Even as voters express outrage at the insider culture of big bailouts and bonuses, their search for political saviors has led them to this: a growing crowd of über-rich candidates, comfortable in boardrooms and country clubs, spending a fortune to remake themselves into populist insurgents.

The number of self-financed candidates has crept up the last few election cycles, and this year seems to be on pace for another uptick.

Through just the second quarter of the year, at least 42 House and Senate candidates-- 7 Democrats and 35 Republicans-- in 23 states had already donated $500,000 or more of their own money to their campaigns, according to the most recent data available from the Center for Responsive Politics. That list does not even include governors’ races, and the roster promises to grow as the campaign season progresses and spending escalates.

...Having gobs of personal cash to toss into a race seems to be especially potent in California and Florida, with their expensive media markets. The governors’ races are a prime example. In California, Meg Whitman, a Republican and former chief executive of eBay, has swamped all other self-financed candidates across the country, using $90 million of her own money to trounce Steve Poizner, who contributed $24 million from his own pocket, in the Republican primary.

And in Florida, Rick Scott, the former head of Columbia/HCA Healthcare-- a large hospital chain that paid $1.7 billion in fines for fraudulently billing government programs like Medicare-- has become so visible on television that his latest ads start with him saying “Me again.” Mr. Scott has shocked the Republican establishment by becoming the clear front-runner after spending more than $20 million on advertisements.

Mr. Greene, though, is the biggest surprise so far. A Democrat who had been a Republican; a brash, gold-watch-and-Prada-sunglasses-wearing investor with friends like Mike Tyson and Heidi Fleiss, even he admits he has been surprised by how quickly his campaign has picked up support. He entered just before the filing deadline in April. Democratic officials laughed him off initially. But not anymore.

Recent polls show that Mr. Greene, 55, has pulled roughly even in the primary with Representative Kendrick B. Meek, the Miami Democrat who had been the party favorite, though Gov. Charlie Crist still leads as an independent in a three-way general election.

Mr. Greene’s campaign finance report filed last week starkly illustrates the impact of his wealth. He took in just $3,036 in outside contributions, while lending himself-- and spending-- $5.9 million in the second quarter, not far off from what Mr. Meek has raised in 18 months.

Mr. Greene insists that for self-financed candidates, now is the moment. “If 2008 was the year of change, 2010 is the year of frustration,” he said in an interview.

His approach, like that of many other rich candidates, is simple: tap into voter anger (“I’m fed up,” Mr. Greene tells crowds) then argue that only those who have succeeded in business can drive economic recovery, without kowtowing to special interests.

Multimillionaire crooked businessmen and women from Linda McMahon in Connecticut to Carly Fiorina and Meg Whitman in California are counting on the same thing-- suckering voters justifiably angry at professional politicians that autocratic and pampered business executives aren't as bad. Even though they're worse-- much, much, much worse. Fernando Espuelas grappled with the notion at HuffPo last week in a look at the California governor's race which pits billionaire Meg Whitman against career-long politician Jerry Brown. "Questions about Whitman," he writes, "persist. Beyond her Goldman Sachs connection (strangely under played by the Brown campaign), allegations that she was physically abusive to an E-Bay employee, and serious doubts about her real position on immigration (a keystone issue for the king or queen-making Latino electorate)-- there is the CEO question."

Whitman has told the electorate that she is the person to fix California. And boy, does California need fixing. The litany of problems sounds like a Biblical list of divine plagues and punishments-- the yawning budget deficit, the uber-powerful public employee unions and the equally influential business special interest that run through Sacramento like ants at a picnic, the massively under-invested state infrastructure, and, of course, an education system that has deteriorated to the point where only 50% of the students actually graduate from the state's largest public school district (Los Angeles).

To these and many other problems, Whitman has prescribed a simple solution: run the state government like a good business. Cut costs, invest in opportunities, fix the state like you would restructure an ailing corporation.

And who better than a successful, big company CEO to do it?

But as Jerry Brown is fond of pointing out, a state government is not at all like a corporation.

The CEO of a company is a kind of beneficent dictator. She wakes up in the morning with an idea (build a product, acquire a company, restructure the business) and faster than you can say "Let's get it done!" well trained executives are implementing actions.

Vision becomes mission through the exercise of executive power.

But California, and specifically the institutional power of the Governor of the state, are far from that corporate construct.

The division of powers, not just between the executive, legislative, and judicial, but also among the competing elected state-wide officers (the state comptroller, the treasurer, the insurance commissioner, et al), plus the muti-layered municipal and county centers of power, combine to make the governing of California an exercise in constant compromise if not outright frustration. (Just ask Arnold.)

...[C]an a common sense, business approach to governing the state actually work? Is the projection of vision into the marketplace (a talent clearly demonstrated by Whitman's success at E-Bay) analogous to actually governing a massive state, with colossal problems and a diffused power structure that has stymied governors for decades?

Of course, Jerry Brown, a former governor and perpetual fixture in state politics says no. In a recent interview with Time magazine, Brown blasted the notion that running a corporation would prepare one to run California:

He is quick to contrast himself with Whitman, pointing out every instance where her theories crumble against the realities of actually governing. "I've done this," he explains. "I've been in government and overseen thousands of businesses. I've run charter schools. Those are businesses. She ran her ... her website. She can say whatever she wants. But if you have never worked in government...It's a different world. That's like someone who's never dove in a river and says, I know what swimming in a river is like."

Of course, this is the crux of the election. Will Whitman's government-as-business approach trump Jerry Brown's deep experience in state governing? Will voters, sick and tired of the deeply corrupt California political scene, flee from Brown's experience because it may mean business as usual? Will they buy Whitman's technocratic proposals?

And in many of these cases it isn't just a professional politician vs a flashy businessman. Some of these business leaders have failed spectacularly-- like Carly Fiorina, a bad joke in the business world-- or have been convicted of criminal behavior, Rick Scott being only the worst of many, or are both corrupt wealthy businessmen and corrupt wealthy career politicians like Issa and Miller. And in the end, ill-educated-- purposely ill-educated-- voters decide. Are they also masochists? Jason Linkins put up an excellent HuffPo rundown of the big self-funders Friday-- a motley array of crooks and thieves eager to get their hands on the levers of power-- and focussed on sociopaths like Tim D'Annunzio (R-NC), Steve Poizner (R-CA) and Terrence Wall (R-WI) who have already been eliminated by the voters. We'll find out in November how many more creepy business types trying to buy political seats will be rejected-- and, meanwhile, I get to play my favorite video of the year, one voters in the U.K. seem to have ignored: