Schlaraffenland

Schlaraffenland is a mythical land of milk and honey and idleness. The kind of thing charismatic tyrants promise the peasantry to keep them docile and obedient.

Promises are a kind of narcotic. Democracies do their own promising but because the people are in charge of their government and have to pay for the things they enact they tend to be less lavish. This self-denial can be redirected to withhold the good life from the people who work for a living and deliver it only to those who own for a living. The wealthy few become the inhabitants of this utopia we meant for ourselves. This has been the end-result of Reagan's sunny promises, a wonderland for the lucky few and a diminished reality for the many.

Your Daily Trump

Dana Milbank repeats what he wrote six months ago: Trump is a bigot and a racist. He is, always has been, and will be a racist and a bigot if elected. Worth reading.

Josh Marshall explains the Trump grift, which is the aggressive use of his bigger wealth against those with less. He uses his wealth to intimidate those he has cheated and to hypnotize those he looks forward to cheating. The art of the deal is breaking it and threatening anyone who thinks there was a contract. Trump’s counterparties are expected to abide by contracts but Trump, never.

I also read George Will’s Olympian sneer at Trump and at Paul Ryan for having endorsed him. George Will helped create the party that vomited up this nominee. He’s one of Trump’s many creators in the GOP brain trust. Trump is the natural result of what George Will has spent the past decades selling. If you demand a government that can’t and won’t do what the people expect it to do you naturally will nominate a vandal-in-chief to supervise the implosion. I won’t link to Will until he apologizes.

Two Examples Show How The Legal System Is Stacked In Favor Of The Rich

This is what happens to people at the bottom of the justice system. Reported today at VOX.

This is what happens to the people at the top. Reported today in the New Yorker.

A 75 year old disabled man in Mississippi who did time many years ago for robbery is tried for marijuana possession. He is convicted and sentenced to life in prison, a mandatory sentence because of his 20-year old conviction for robbery. The Supreme Court refuses to consider his appeal. Apparently life imprisonment for marijuana possession is not cruel and unusual punishment. Or the Supreme Court can’t be bothered. This is what happens to people at the bottom of the system.

Meanwhile the SEC, the agency charged with investigating and bringing charges against the largest financial companies, hesitates to prosecute individuals who made billions by defrauding millions of ordinary Americans during the financial crisis.

Why?

Because the man at the SEC who was in charge of the case had seen the “devasting [sic] impact our little ol’ civil actions reap on real people more often than I care to remember. It is the least favorite part of the job. Most of our civil defendants are good people who have done one bad thing.”

People at the top level of massive multi-billion dollar frauds that ruined thousands of ordinary people’s lives are “real people” who “have done one bad thing” but a sad old disabled onetime felon who possesses pot is nobody.

The poor man in Mississippi is nobody that anybody running the system knows personally. Nobody the prosecutors care about. Prosecutors mingle with “real people” who earn massive fortunes, sometimes by fraud. The fraudulent seem very plausible, that is how they are able to commit the fraud. The larger the fraud, the more plausible and real they seem. Prosecutors don’t enjoy mingling with people at the lower end of the criminal spectrum where their misfortune and desperation makes them less plausible and less deserving.

Successful criminals who have massive fortunes and fabulous Manhattan apartments plus expensive homes in various luxury enclaves are real people but ex-cons who live quietly on a farm in Mississippi are not real people––at least in the eyes of the law. There have been multiple cases rejected by the right hand side of the Supreme Court, cases where a man has been proved innocent but is still facing the death penalty. The conservatives on the court shrug and say No. But the criminal who has stolen massive amounts of money from millions of unsuspecting Americans gets a pass. Someone who seems that real and that plausible must not have meant any harm. He can keep his houses and his money.

This is what Americans are angry about. This is what Bernie Sanders is listening to. This might be the kind of non-violent marijuana "offender" President Obama pardons. But we need to repair the system, not simply hope that occasionally a hand reaches down from the sky and corrects one or a handful of the terrible injustices. This is why electing a Democrat president is so vital this year. It would begin to redress the harm and rebalance the scales in favor of regular people.

The Levitation of the Owning Classes

A conference was convened at Harvard Business School recently to sort out the problems with the theory of the corporation. I have suggested in numerous essays on this blog that many of our recent problems have been caused by shifts in corporate theory, which have led to shifts in our moral philosophy. Shifts that have made our moral philosophy less moral.

I think a tipping point was reached at around the time of the Lewis Powell memo, when the owning class (the minority of people who own for a living) decided that the working classes (the majority of people who work for a living) were controlling politics and policies and the legal system.

They may have had a point. After all, in a democracy it is contradictory for a minority of people to overrule the majority, especially based upon wealth and income. A certain amount of deception is required to achieve the desired contradiction. What made the regaining of power most distasteful was the means by which the wealthy classes did so: they did it via hate politics, via the Southern Strategy of dividing working class people by racial and religious animosities and suspicions.

(This practice did not die with Lee Atwater’s deathbed confession and apology; it persists with the baldfaced racism of the current Republican Party in Washington and the states where anything and everything proposed or espoused by the black man in the White House is automatically anathema. Because he is black, Obama is “other”, he is foreign, not-Christian, a half-breed, the antiChrist. The ugliness of this was barely discussed in the press out of deference to the party of Lincoln. All of this ugliness was financed out of the vast reservoir of wealth accumulated during 35 years of Reaganomics, which meant mouths were kept shut on the ugliness of the politics of the right out of deference to the vast accumulated wealth: it is unwise, even dangerous, to speak ill of the system that controls the money.)

But this is the political side of the problem. The important shift took place in the moral and ethical side. Our sense of morality changed during the Reagan and post-Reagan period. For most of the 20th century corporations were progressive innovators. They tended to be more evolved on issues of gender and race and the rights and security of the worker. Healthcare became a right at corporations. Whole packages of benefits emerged through a sometimes tense partnership with unions, but the benefits were not all to the employee: the company benefited too, and the idea of mutuality emerged and became part of the corporate DNA. Corporations had obligations to employees first, then to shareholders, then to the community and the customer. Sometimes the ranking shifted but a rough parity was maintained because the three categories overlapped and their interests overlapped.

At some point, however––and here I cite the Powell memo––the worker and his “pushy” demands became the enemy of the corporate elite and the shareholder. A new calculation became an ethical determinant. Efficiency was the sole imperative, efficiency being achieved by eliminating all obligations not payable to the shareholder by way of profit. Anything that subtracted from immediate profit was counted as a negative, a loss, a harm to the corporation. Worker income and benefits subtracted from profits and were counted as a negative, almost a moral wrong. Benefits to the community could be disguised as public relations but even these charges were harmful. Unless they could be used to subtract from taxes––which meant a benefit to the community could be used as an instrument to avoid paying taxes to the community. Obligations to anything but profit and shareholder dividend had become a moral wrong. Whatever made a rich person richer was morally imperative. It was either stupid or unethical to not maximize the profit stream, which also meant avoiding obligations outside of one’s self interest that would subtract from profit. Even if it made the economy healthier and fairer and might increase future profit, if it subtracted from immediate profit it was wrong and should be avoided.

To rationalize this evasion other “moral reasonings” were invented: the community and its government and its bureaucracies were labelled “inefficient” or wasteful or corrupt––which some were to varying degrees, but reform was not the goal. The corrupting influences were, after all, money and power, which the monied could not disparage or repudiate. The problem, according to the new wealth-centric philosophy, was simple: the public sector was less moral and correct than the private sector. The public sector was not “properly” focused on profit, an incorruptible and pure goal, but was focused instead on an impure goal of public good, one that did not obey the profit imperative. That was the corruption.

We began to see the movement on the Right to demolish the public sector altogether, to privatize it, to place it into “more responsible hands” where its responsibilities could be properly carried out not for the benefit of the public but for the purer moral benefit of profit. This ultimately meant the crude profitization of public needs and vulnerabilities. That was the ultimate goal––see a need or a vulnerability and squeeze that for profit, because where will you find a more pliable and obedient consumer than one that is hungry or ill-housed or ignorant or in pain or afraid of death (or all of the above)? The new corporate “morality” applauded this new predatory model.

Another shift occurred. The responsibility for paying for public needs that would now be more profitably (and expensively) satisfied by private companies needed to be borne by someone other than the private companies themselves via taxes––tax obligation would erase the gain achieved by the newly appropriated area of profit. The taxes needed to be borne by the public, by the individual, and preferably by the individual who worked for a living rather than the individual who owned for a living.

In the past three decades the owning classes have achieved a rare kind of levitation above public obligations, above the worries of ordinary people, above any concern for the needs or sufferings of the world––unless that concern could be converted into cash via a tax deduction. (An entire industry emerged to feed and fleece the generous and helpful impulses of humanity rather than efficiently managing those obligations as a public sector function, where they would be managed for usefulness. Profit subtracted from the useful mission but the mission and usefulness were no longer the goal; profit was the goal.)

The shift of wealth from the many to the few and the shift of obligations from the wealthy to the working poor has been achieved almost invisibly. Certainly the public watches and is entertained by various forms of wealth porn on television and in print but the effect on their lives is blurred and obscured. Instead the wealthy few are portrayed as admirable and enviable, the poor as ridiculous and blamed for their squalor. The rich lives are the lives to aspire to. These are the moral paragons. What they have is justified by the new morality described above. And what others suffer is justified by their inability or refusal to behave in a sufficiently moral way that would make them rich. Television preachers extoll the righteousness of selfishness and greed and parade their expensive suits and cars and jets and mansions before their worshippers, all of it tax free, because all public need is immoral and inefficient and corrupt.

We saw the inefficiency and corruption of this “efficient and less corruptible” rearrangement of wealth in the financial crisis of 2008-2009. How did this emerge without warning? I suggest that paying attention only in one direction, toward what serves shareholders and concentrates wealth, leaves us two thirds blind. We ignore the interests and rational demands and considerable contributions of the greater part of our system. When corporations devote all their attention to shareholders and ignore and deprive the employee and the consumer/community constituencies they are planning and acting on dangerously limited information. If you are a human being you judge this as a less moral way of behaving. If you are a money minded corporate mandarin you should see this as less efficient and shortsighted. A longterm shift in corporate and political thinking over-rewarded one narrow part of our population and under-rewarded the majority. By depriving and impoverishing workers by slow degrees it subtracted economic vigor from our markets. The result being (and only a 2/3 blind ruling class would fail to see this) that the hugely increased pools of investment capital in the owning classes were left in a difficult situation: too much investible capital was chasing too few plausible investments––plausible investments being ones based on robust consumer demand––because consumer demand was no longer as robust. What robustness remained was fueled by debt which was quickly seized as a new category for implausible investment which spawned a whole menagerie of implausible fabricated instruments backed by unsupportable debt.

This was damnfoolishness and overreach and hubris and unreason on a far greater scale than could ever have been attributed to the “overreaching” working classes that had precipitated the Lewis Powell memo. There is a reason for a balance of powers in an economy and a society as much as in a government. The overreach of the owning classes had created a top-heavy and fragile edifice. One that had changed its function from serving people to one that preyed on them; eventually it would eat itself out of a food supply. The collapse was avoided in 2009, but the rescue saved the perpetrators first, blamed the victims, and kept the malfunctioning system in place, compounding the wealth of the too-rich and enlarging the too large. This is the sort of foolishness that causes revolutions. We can see from the present political scene that revolution can arise in benign or dangerous forms. We have one revolution that seeks to repair and reform the wrongs of the Reagan revolution. We have another that seems bent on compounding them with a bizarre mixture of fascism, know-nothing-ism, gangsterism, hucksterism, and fraud.

Meanwhile, short of a violent upheaval, what persists is a brutal concentration of wealth and power that enforces its primacy over all the machinery of public life, legal, financial, political, compounding that dour money minded force I call The Rule of Accumulated Advantage.

Kiss Up, Kick Down

We have an economy that distorts our sympathies and our solutions to problems. It’s all part of The Rule Of Accumulated Advantage, which says the more you have the more you get, the less you have the more we take away. The more you have the more we care about you, the less you have the less we give a damn.

Let's call this Kiss Up, Kick Down.

Examples from today’s news:

Wealth Therapy. Nobody cares about them because they’re rich. So now there are therapists who can soothe their pain. Adding another client class to the retinue, rather than distributing some of that obscene wealth down to the people who actually do the work around here, whose worries are real, whose illnesses can bankrupt them..

The story about Wealth Therapy, in the Guardian.

Down at the other end of the scale, where advantages disappear and disadvantages accrue and reinforce each other, we have a different dynamic at work. We find ways to compound disadvantages. We bill the relatives of the people who die in prison for the cost of imprisoning them. Why charge the families who have already suffered a punishment alongside their kin? Because costs of public necessities are increasingly sorted downward to be paid by people who work for a living, and since people who work for a living have seen their incomes decline there is a persistent deficit. But we must never ever ask the advantaged to pay that deficit. Because that deficit was created by putting a larger and larger portion of our economy into their pockets, and that greater portion deserves its immunity.

The story about charging the imprisoned for their imprisonment, from Vox.

A similar punishing burden falls upon young people who want to go to college. Young people with rich parents have money set aside tax free, but there is very little to be set aside in working families, so they take out loans, which have punitive interest rates, and that money flows daily, monthly and yearly into the pockets of the rich people who own the financial industry. Of course it would be wrong to tax the people who benefit vastly and unequally from our economy to take the load off the people who are trying to better themselves. This is why college debt follows graduates for the rest of their lives, especially those whose education does not lead them into hugely lucrative jobs in the financial industry.

An article about how college loans are our most unforgivable sin, in the Fiscal Times.

The bankruptcy laws allow billionaires like Donald Trump to declare bankruptcy multiple times and walk away from their speculative losses. But the debt incurred by going to college? No that is not something you can walk away from if your life doesn’t fall into place or if misfortune strikes you. Imagine if you graduate from college and unplanned injury or disease prevents you from rising immediately to a lucrative career. You’re outa luck, pal.

The tale of Trump's multiple bankruptcies in the Washington Post.

And in Vanity Fair.

In a way, felons are luckier than college graduates. Felons can be paroled or pardoned. Crimes can be forgiven or plead down. But college debt is never forgivable. The rich can bargain themselves out of their debts to society, but regular people? Never.

CEOs Buying Their Way Out Of Jail

David Cay Johnston reports on GM executives' ability to buy their freedom with corporate funds.

It should be illegal to barter cash for an executive's free ride. It's like permanent bail offered to criminals with infinite cash.

How is bartering company cash to avoid executive jail time not unlike bribing officials?

How is an executive in such a leverage position not essentially bargaining with employees or the wider economy as a hostage?

I realize the complexities of the case and the odds of a conviction play into these bargains, but the amount of money a CEO has to bargain with distorts the justice system and enables the distortion of the economy.

Another example of the Rule of Accumulated Advantage.

At the other end of the justice system, the low end where people have very little money, justice is distorted by the mechanisms prosecutors use to extort fines and penalties. In an inverse fashion, the leverage of money works against the person charged. At the low end of the economy lack of money leverages a person’s other disadvantages.

There should be an algorithm to calculate how money buys freedom at the high end of the wealth spectrum and how lack of money is used against defendants at the low end. There is a key difference between how it works. At the upper end these CEOs buy freedom with their company's money; at the low end the people prosecuted for the various crimes associated with being poor are invariably paying their fines and bail bonds by mortgaging all they have.

This is not a new phenomenon. During the Middle Ages the extortion racket was conducted by the Church. It was the selling of indulgences and got people shorter terms in Purgatory.

This disparity between rich man's justice and poor man's justice does make you wonder. Do CEOs and others in the so-called "leadership class" (those who own for a living), do they possess sovereign status? Are they immune from the laws and hazards that govern the rest of us? Are they above the law? Does Might, after all, make you Right? This was a belief that democracy was supposed to make obsolete, but our society has delegated so many moral decisions to our money. We've let our money take the place of our conscience, and our courts of law and our politics have been corrupted by this.

Diagramming the Modern Confederacy

Think of this as a map of the Civil War. Picture America as if that sad conflict never really ended. What you’re looking at is the last die-hard remnant of the old Confederacy.

(From VOX)

For 150 years we’ve continued oppressing Americans of color, compounding 450 years of organized theft.

(Yes Magazine has put all of America's racist injustices into a simple illustrated story.)

An interesting graphing of the Confederacy's… I mean the GOP’s… demographic trend. Whoa! Can that really be happening?

(Graphs courtesy of the Washington Post)

Of course, a lot of Americans are unaware of America’s lack of racial uniformity because they get very blonde news.

(New York Magazine examines FoxNews's complaint that we envy their gorgeous blondness)

The Supreme Court is there to fix problems. Say, for instance, you’re frustrated that it’s getting harder every year to keep darker people from electing non-white and non-conservative people into office. Say you preferred it when America looked like the boxes of whiteness in the opening credits of the Brady Bunch. Realizing America isn’t Wonder Bread would make you very sad and disoriented. The Supreme Court is there to make sure people of different colors don’t upset your narrow racist right wing notion of how America should be…

(SLATE analyzes the judicial gymnastics of the Supreme Court in aid of white folks and rich folks)

Think of the Supreme Court as the Big Way Back machine. The Big Fixeroo. A sanctioned Do-Over for people born with privileges who feel cheated by life. Like in 2000 the way they kept the guy who got the most votes from being president on the grounds that letting the votes be counted would deprive George Bush Jr. of “equal protection.” Letting votes be counted would harm the wealthy heir of a political dynasty that had conspired to overthrow FDR back in the thirties. The Supremes worried all kinds of bad things might happen if Bush were not appointed president.

The Rule of Accumulated Disadvantage

The rule of accumulated disadvantage causes one disadvantage to kick other disadvantages into play, compounding them and leveraging them against you.

Voting is one advantage all Americans are supposed to be born with. They get the vote at adulthood and surrender it at death. All equal. But as Orwell’s pig observed, all may be equal but some are more equal than others. It’s the mission of one of our political parties to suppress the vote, because a full electorate would not vote for them. Imprisoning the poor is one method. Discouraging the poor is another. Misleading them, threatening them, miscounting them, gerrymandering them. Lots of ways of cutting the poor voter out of things. Killing them is seldom spoken about, but deliberate policies can ensure that the poor will die young.

This recent study shows how earlier deaths among black voters decreased black turnout by a million in 2004. A million more living voters of color would have changed the outcome in several recent elections. In a good way. And poverty doesn't kill without careful instructions in terms of public policy. Industrial poisons seldom rain on Bel Air or Boca Raton. The Republican Party is damn sure the medical profession will never look at gun deaths as a public health problem. All these poisonous policies flow from the election of politicians who don’t care about the poor because they are employed by the rich.

There are maps of life expectancy in Chicago and Los Angeles and elsewhere that have a strong race and poverty correlation. Experts are not ignorant about this but the public is.

Republicans, of course, prefer to look on the bright side: if poor people die earlier they cost less. In their philosophy if you ignore a problem it doesn’t cost any money. And if it doesn’t cost any money it doesn’t exist.

Race does put you in a safe box or an unsafe one. Race can mark you as less equal than others. Even if you are a law enforcement professional, if you are black you are the enemy, you are the suspect.

Meanwhile, Republicans, acting on the beliefs of their billionaire clients, do whatever they can to limit government spending, especially that spending not directed toward large corporate contractors but directed at alleviating poverty and its associated ills. Fixable problems like poisonous environment, poor health, poor education, poor food, prejudiced policing and justice. Republicans would like “Charity” to handle all that “stuff.” They love charity, but hate government spending, which requires taxes.

Speaking of taxes and charity.

Billionaires get enormous tax deductions for “giving to charity.” What exactly is a charity? It’s whatever the billionaire wants to give to. Like an exclusive club for their Princetonian children to eat and entertain in.

The Poor Pay. The Rich Don't.

"Johnny is a cheating teacher on a train traveling 80 mph west, to jail. Charlie is a cheating Wall Street executive on a train traveling 40 mph…. I'm kidding, it's a helicopter and he's going to a party where a giant ice sculpture of David is peeing vodka." ~Jon Stewart

Jon Stewart examines with his usual sharp wit and perceptiveness how the rich get away with everything.

The working stiff pays for his crime by doing time. The rich are given a pass… Heck, they’re rich and therefore not culpable.

You may remember this story about the rich kid excused for killing someone with his car while driving drunk because he was also driving while rich. Wealth was the excuse.

We have high-end crime in America because they are rich enough to ignore the law. For them Crime Pays.

In Scandinavia they can at least wipe that smug look off their faces. (The Atlantic reports)

This demonstrates again that the biggest force in the economy is something no news story will report on and no news anchor ever mentions.

It’s called THE RULE OF ACCUMULATED ADVANTAGE.

The more advantages you have the more they leverage every other advantage you have.

The more disadvantaged you are the more those disadvantages leverage other disadvantages to keep you down.

The rich defy gravity. The poor sink.

Does Poverty Make You Less Moral?

Greece is in a worse position re Europe than Germany was after WW2. Germany had invaded and destroyed much of the continent. Greece has simply suffered a financial setback. Why is Greece in a worse position? (The New York Times discusses the Greek situation succinctly here.)

Germany could at least argue that failure to forgive its debts would cause it to invade its neighbors a third time. Would Greece be better off if it was an armed aggressor?

Why do we associate solvency with morality? Why are you more moral when you have more money?

It has to do with the hostages you hold.

Wall Street banks created havoc in the world economy by committing crimes, but they were bailed out. Why? Were they Too Big To Fail or Too Big To Jail or both?

(A judge writes about this in the LATimes. And Rolling Stone did an excellent piece about this in 2013.)

Germany may not have been solely guilty for the First World War, but it did cause and perpetrate the Second. And yet their argument in 1953 was valid. So is Greece’s. Germany of all countries should know this. Having a strong hand doesn’t make you the best moral arbiter.

In Ferguson, Missouri the mostly black citizens were targeted by police and city government as an easy revenue source. That revenue source meant the city could take less in taxes from property owners. If you are rich the system does you favors. If you are poor the system sees you as prey. Greece is the people of Ferguson, and the people of Ferguson are Greece.

Are the systems of government there to serve people? There’s a verb that has two possible meanings. There was a Twilight Zone episode where a book treasured by a ruling class of aliens was titled To Serve Man. It ended up being a cookbook, instructions how to serve humans as food in different and interesting ways.

Economics and justice sometimes turn on this kind of convenient misunderstanding. The powerful find it easier to misunderstand these things and profit from the misunderstanding.

The immorality and viciousness of the city government of Ferguson has been demonstrated and certified by the Justice Department. But it’s happening all over the country. Poverty or alienness makes innocent people easy prey, allowing police and city governments to take their property and extract fines from them with no law broken and no charges placed.

(The New Yorker described this in a riveting piece last year. I didn't believe such things happened legally in this country. They do.)

Being poor or being less than rich is becoming a crime in this country. Who and what have we become?

The Systematic Looting of the American Dream

Who owns the shining new residential towers going up in New York and other major cities? Don't answer; you wouldn't know them. The dream home used to be a widely shared American Dream, but this is no longer the case. (Because of Citizens United our political system is now owned the same way by secretive billionaires, many of them foreign, using piles of hoarded cash to buy residency and public policy.)

Increasingly the American Dream of homeownership is reserved for billionaires. They have extremely expensive pieds a terre in places all over the world, where they may only live a few days a year thereby evading the usual obligations to pay for local infrastructure and public services. What do you want to bet their real estate fees and taxes, if any, are paid by their companies and deducted from their income taxes, again, if any. The top 1% have learned to levitate above ordinary concerns and obligations of citizenship. What they want, they buy. What they don't want to do, they buy out of.

And what has happened to middle class homeownership? The opposite. Going, going, gone. Homeownership has become a privilege of the few who own for a living and those who work for a living are increasingly excluded.

The daily sermon fed to us for years by the banking industry and by the Republican Party was that homeownership was next to godliness. It was a measure of how responsible and hardworking you were. Now they seem to be saying that working class homeowners are to blame for the recent financial collapse. Not true, in fact. Middle class homeowners are the playthings of the 1%. The investment schemes that benefit people who own for a living are devised to skim fees and penalties and ownership from people who work for a living.

With incomes down we see more working people looking for ways to make ends meet. Reverse mortgages are advertised as a simple way to balance the family budget. By looting the family’s wealth. What choice do some families have? Looting of this kind happens when there is an exploitable advantage. Incomes have lowered for most Americans since 1980, a gift of Reaganomics. That has made most Americans exploitable.

Where have we seen this systematic looting of value before? We used to read about mobsters who took over small companies and looted their value at the point of a gun. It was a crime back then.

But more recently we’ve seen this same model used by the great heroic Venture Capitalist. The gun isn’t necessary because the middle and working class household is already being made insecure and exploitable by the decline of working incomes.

The Venture Capitalist looks for decent companies who pay their employees decently and maybe have a fully funded retirement plan for them––companies that have been untouched by Reaganomics. What does this Venture Capitalist do? He charms the company’s owner, offers him a nice check, and then he buys the company. Before the check clears he sucks all the money out of the pension fund and uses it to pay the former owner. Then he lays off employees and pockets those savings. Then he has a balance sheet that shows all of this “profit” which he uses to sell the company at an inflated price.

I realize the Nazi analogy is completely forbidden today. But the Nazi miracle was financed in a similar way, by confiscation from Jews and liberals. Someday we may be able to see the criminality of what is going on, or at least its unfairness and dishonesty. But right now it is legal. And it is also sanctified by the sacred memory of Ronald Reagan who set this middle class decline in motion.

"Leadership" Is The Answer To Everything (or maybe not)

The Atlantic posted an interesting piece about the obsessive focus on "Leadership" at colleges and universities. As a talisman, a holy grail, the one true quality sought in all applicants and sold in brochures and seminars.

My feeling about this? (Thanks for asking.)

I think colleges' obsession with "leadership" has a lot to do with the class of people colleges cultivate for cash donations. At some point the accumulated advantages enjoyed by fewer and fewer people shift respect into reverence and then worship.

Kicking the Poor: An American Pastime

Barbara Ehrenreich has a trenchant and disturbing piece in this morning's Guardian. It is a well-reported piece, thoroughly footnoted and linked to sources of further information. So why is it labelled "opinion" rather than published as fact? (And why did Ehrenreich have to cross the Atlantic to get it published?) Fact editors have to be extra careful not to lay blame. Fact reporting is one more thing under the thumb of the advantaged. Journalism, which once took appropriate pride in discomforting the comfortable, is now especially careful not to offend. It's one more advantage in the powerful system of Accumulated Advantage and Disadvantage.

This journalistic caution has increased as the comfortable class has narrowed and grown comfortable beyond the dreams of avarice. Their comfort must not be disturbed, and reining in these systems that prey on the poor might result in the comfortable having to pony up their rightful share of public costs. The rich might have their puny taxes increased if we stopped hitting up the poor for the costs of being poor.

The bizarre injustices Ms. Ehrenreich describes here are positively Dickensian, but in a time so rich with injustice, too many of our best writers devote themselves to chronicling the struggles and ennui of the moneyed, the leisure classes.

The Rule of Accumulated Advantage

The Wall Street Journal, usually the megaphone of Wall Street's more devout worshippers, has a very readable cranky counter-argument today. It seems most of what you read about stocks and investments is tailored to please the large company offering them. This happened with the private rating agencies who tailored their assessments to their customers' demands, which is like an oncologist asking you whether you'd like him to see cancer on your x-ray or something nice. Financial analysts and journalists have been far too nice to Wall Street for years. This is how bubbles are made.

Love, money, admiration, credit ratings, applause, sexual favors, media coverage, protection, immunity, security, and (apparently) the blessings of God, Jesus and the Holy Ghost all increase as you move up the scale. The bigger and richer you are the more you get, the more help you get, the more sympathy you get, the more everything. (The Queen always gets the most presents, not only because everybody wants to please her but because, unlike other mortals, she has two birthdays every year.)

The rich today are handled with the gentle concern the vulnerable once could beg for. The poor and vulnerable are increasingly scorned. Is this because of the Prosperity Gospel? It's strange to think that Darwin and Herbert Spencer's bleakest thoughts are now the guiding principles of the followers of Jesus. (As Herman Cain says "If you aren't rich, blame yourself!") The most popular churches say that riches are a sure signal that God loves you more than other people. No wonder they're popular; they tell their biggest donors exactly what they want to hear. Churches kiss up, not down like they used to. We always knew the rich really inherit the earth, but now it's part of the gospel, preached from the pulpit and included in the holy decrees from the Wall Street Journal op-ed pages.

The Vatican's careful protection of its shepherds is nothing compared to the protection financial journalists and analysts give to the enormous banks. They praise bad investments and cover up dubious ones. They praise those who reward them for their praise. Is this their job? Is the priesthood meant to interpret and warn or is it there to uphold the almighty? It's a sad and dangerous fact that all favors and advantages accrue upward unless something corrects the system. Peer review applies the corrective rigor to the scientific community, where even consensus has its contrarians who insist on the alternate possibility.

Competition used to apply this rigor to free enterprise. Competition gave the entire system greater stability. Failures, a natural event, still happened but they were smaller. Now we have Too Big To Fail. Now failure and consequences are only dished out to regular people––whose only mistake was believing a corporation's annual report or the admiring words of a financial analyst who privately wanted the love of the CEO and the board. Increasingly, rewards are privatized upward while risks are socialized to everybody else, to ordinary people, less exalted people, to laid off employees and to us as taxpayers.

In a quarter when Goldman Sachs announced a half billion dollar loss it also announced ten billion dollars in bonuses to the executives who delivered that loss. How many billions did the US Treasury throw at Goldman during the recent crisis? Did Goldman absorb any losses from the havoc it helped create? What is wrong with this picture? We once had restrictions on this kind of thing; we demanded them and they served us well. Until we forgot why they were there, and began believing the Reaganite fairy tale about the self-regulating genius of Wall Street. About how our economy was magically protected by fairies and elves. The bigger they are the more regulation they need. It would give the rest of us more freedom and less to worry about.