Actually, They ARE Evil

They made "their" money not through talent or merit but through gaming the system and outright theft, and they want a bigger share of the financial pie.

I am not sure I would want to buy this book if the author really thinks the ultra-rich aren't evil as a group.

Although short of solutions, Freeland highlights the danger when a small, self-serving and self-satisfied group dominate public discourse, then seek a system tilted even more in their favour. "I think the ultra-wealthy actually have an insufficient influence," says one billionaire Republican donor. Another says taxes should be virtually abolished, arguing that the government should pay the likes of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs for their contributions to society. "It's that top 1% that probably contributes more to making the world a better place than the 99%," he concludes outrageously.

Of course, it is the 99 percent who make the one percent possible, not the other way around. Labor creates wealth.

Here is an interview of the author and Matt Taibbi with Bill Moyers from a couple of weeks ago:



She does sound pretty good, though, in this interview. Taibbi always is good.

Why in the HELL is Matt Taibbi

shocked Obama is the neoliberal he ALWAYS was, not the pseudoliberal, pseudoprogressive rock star hero of the election campaign?

Why should ANYBODY be surprised he's giving handouts to Wall Street (while of course screwing over Main Street)? Why should anybody be surprised he is marginalizing or asking those who care about Main Street to hit the road? Why should anybody be surprised he is further manning his administration with Wall Street hacks? Why should anybody be surprised he's doing little about job creation, which is necessary to get this economy out of the ditch? Just ask WHERE all of the money donated to his campaign came from, and it wasn't just from small donors, either.

My initial belief of Obama being a "ringer" is coming to pass, I am afraid. I don't want it to be so.

Taibbi:

These are the kinds of voters whom Obama's gang of Wall Street advisers is counting on: idiots. People whose votes depend not on whether the party in power delivers them jobs or protects them from economic villains, but on what cultural markers the candidate flashes on TV. Finance reform has become to Obama what Iraq War coffins were to Bush: something to be tucked safely out of sight.

Around the same time that finance reform was being watered down in Congress at the behest of his Treasury secretary, Obama was making a pit stop to raise money from Wall Street. On October 20th, the president went to the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in New York and addressed some 200 financiers and business moguls, each of whom paid the maximum allowable contribution of $30,400 to the Democratic Party. But an organizer of the event, Daniel Fass, announced in advance that support for the president might be lighter than expected — bailed-out firms like JP Morgan Chase and Goldman Sachs were expected to contribute a meager $91,000 to the event — because bankers were tired of being lectured about their misdeeds.

"The investment community feels very put-upon," Fass explained. "They feel there is no reason why they shouldn't earn $1 million to $200 million a year, and they don't want to be held responsible for the global financial meltdown."

Which makes sense. Shit, who could blame the investment community for the meltdown? What kind of assholes are we to put any of this on them?

This is the kind of person who is working for the Obama administration, which makes it unsurprising that we're getting no real reform of the finance industry. There's no other way to say it: Barack Obama, a once-in-a-generation political talent whose graceful conquest of America's racial dragons en route to the White House inspired the entire world, has for some reason allowed his presidency to be hijacked by sniveling, low-rent shitheads. Instead of reining in Wall Street, Obama has allowed himself to be seduced by it, leaving even his erstwhile campaign adviser, ex-Fed chief Paul Volcker, concerned about a "moral hazard" creeping over his administration.

Since the GOP is on the ropes and has run out of gas, it's time for the corporate/Wall Street interests to contaminate the Democratic Party. Obama was their tool.

Matt Taibbi

talked about the "change we can believe in," which is nothing more than the same old, same old:

Why Is It the Media Persists

in treating Sarah Palin like shit? Probably no politician, not even the previous so-called president or former president Clinton, have been treated so horribly by the media.

It is true some of it is her fault, but there is prejudice against her for many other reasons, and I don't think it has a lot to do with "qualifications." After all, President Obama didn't have much in the way of experience either when he ran for president.

One is the most obvious, and that she is female, and female politicians have their own unique problems in getting support and money for their campaigns. Hillary Clinton knows this very well. Another problem, and it isn't trivial, is the fact Sarah Palin is attractive. She has to prove herself to not be a bimbo, and unfortunately, there are things she has said which give many people pause about her intellect. Which leads to another factor, and it may be the most critical of all, and that's the fact Sarah Palin is not an Ivy League graduate; indeed, she bounced around in a few state colleges before getting her degree. There is a mentality in the eastern media centers and which is common among many people in that region but not in other parts of the country which says it is very important what college you attended and graduated. The only schools that really count among the eastern establishment are the Ivy League universities. And even among the Ivies, there is a hierarchy of prestige. Universities such as Cornell, Columbia, Dartmouth, and the University of Pennsylvania aren't highly thought of by the elite media; they are little "better" than the despised state universities which the vast majority of college students attend. Princeton is a little more prestigious. The truly important colleges in the eyes of the media are Harvard and Yale, the former being the most important of all. Never mind the fact once a student can get into one of these colleges, the colleges aren't any more rigorous than the garden variety state university. People don't apply and attend those colleges for the "rigor"; they are buying connections which these colleges have in abundance. Anyway, Sarah Palin didn't bother with attending an Ivy League school, and this on top of being from the West disqualifies her from being taken seriously.

I also believe the fact she had a Down syndrome child is a major factor in the hostility towards her although less by the traditional media than by the blogs. Palin didn't do the politically correct thing and have an abortion while at the same time having a high-profile political career. She has called herself a feminist and has lived that idea for years, but many so-called liberals hate her guts and laugh at her insistence she is a feminist. Where is "choice" in all of this, by the way? "Choice" is as much the right to have a child as it is the right to have an abortion.

A snip from Taibbi's article:

The tone for all this behavior is always set somewhere way up the corporate totem pole, and it always reflects some dreary combination of simple business considerations (i.e. what’s the best story and sells the most ads) and internalized political calculus (i.e. who is a “legitimate” candidate and who is an “insurgent” or a “second-tier” hopeful). It’s not that the reporters are making this judgment themselves, it’s that they have to listen to what the apparatus Up There is saying all day long — not just their bosses but the think-tank talking heads they interview for comments, the party insiders who buy them beers at night, the pollsters and so on.

And when all these people start getting in their ears about this or that guy doesn’t have “winnability,” or doesn’t have enough money to run, or has negatives that are insurmountable, all that thinking inevitably bleeds into the coverage. It’s not that the reporters are “biased.” They just don’t have the stones, for the most part, to ignore all the verbal and non-verbal cues they get from authority figures about who is “legitimate” and who isn’t.

Once the signal comes down that this or that politician doesn’t have the backing of anyone who matters, that’s when the knives really come out. When a politician has powerful allies and powerful friends, you won’t see reporters brazenly kicking him in the crotch the way they did to Dean and they’re doing now to Sarah Palin. The only time they do this is when they know there won’t be consequences, meaning when the politician’s only supporters are non-entities (read: voters), as in the case of Ron Paul or Kucinich. Like America in general, the press corps never attacks any enemy that can fight back...

(H/T to commenter Mary Louise for this good piece.)

Although the "Tea Bag" Protests of Yesterday

seemed like exercises in futility if not stupidity, it would be foolish to write them off altogether.

Obama is hardly any kind of radical, or, for that matter, much of a liberal, but if he doesn't make some substantial changes, he will fail. And THEN we will be in deep shit.

People of all political persuasions are distressed by what is going on economically. We know the Republicans have NO intention of improving the lot of the vast majority of people because they represent the interests of the few parasites at the top feeding off of everybody else. They WANT this country to be a third world country. But it doesn't help when Democrats like Obama often ape the Republicans.

People who underestimate the anger of the "tea baggers" do so at their peril.

A Couple of Articles

about the crappy economy:

Obama's biggest problem is his advisors, who are still part of the same old cadre that got us into this mess in the first place, and they are in denial.

Galbraith has some good historical background, and his solutions are good. Social Security and Medicare should NOT be cut but strengthened, for starters:

We should offset the violent drop in the wealth of the elderly population as a whole. The squeeze on the elderly has been little noted so far, but it hits in three separate ways: through the fall in the stock market; through the collapse of home values; and through the drop in interest rates, which reduces interest income on accumulated cash. For an increasing number of the elderly, Social Security and Medicare wealth are all they have.

That means that the entitlement reformers have it backward: instead of cutting Social Security benefits, we should increase them, especially for those at the bottom of the benefit scale. Indeed, in this crisis, precisely because it is universal and efficient, Social Security is an economic recovery ace in the hole. Increasing benefits is a simple, direct, progressive, and highly efficient way to prevent poverty and sustain purchasing power for this vulnerable population. I would also argue for lowering the age of eligibility for Medicare to (say) fifty-five, to permit workers to retire earlier and to free firms from the burden of managing health plans for older workers.

Let me tell you, at 54 I would take Medicare at 55 in a heartbeat.

Of course tax policy needs to be changed where the very wealthiest and corporations pay FAR more than they do now. Changing it would go a long way in reversing the disastrous path this country is now on.

And just what about this current global meltdown? Is Wall Street using all of the bailout money to stage a revolution of sorts?

And if this is true then we really are truly fucked.

Matt Taibbi

is so in love with Obama he doesn't see the utter absurdity of his candidacy; instead, he thinks it's proof there isn't any rigging going on.

Oh, yeah? Why are the media mavens pushing him then, especially given the fact Obama actually stands for nothing?

The answer is obvious.