Suck It In and Cope, Buddy: The Rolling WELCOME TO THE PLUTOCRACY Thread

ITT: signs, indicators, and grotesque expressions of the power and brazen contempt for the rest of us by our malefactors of great wealth.

A lot of this is previously covered in the shitbin thread or elsewhere, but i think our overlords deserve their own dedicated stream. It's unkind of us to sully them by forcing them to share a thread with the unemployed, uninsured, underpaid, or underwatered.

To begin, of course, the source of the thread title, which is pretty much "Let them eat cake," but without the cake:

“There’s danger in just shoveling out money to people who say, ‘My life is a little harder than it used to be,’” Munger said at the event, which was moderated by CNBC’s Becky Quick. “At a certain place you’ve got to say to the people, ‘Suck it in and cope, buddy. Suck it in and cope.’”

http://www.charlesmunger.com/images/pic.jpg

Seems like he's done the first part already.

and taibbi's rocket-docket exposé is an obvious must-read:

At worst, these ordinary homeowners were stupid or uninformed — while the banks that lent them the money are guilty of committing a baldfaced crime on a grand scale. These banks robbed investors and conned homeowners, blew themselves up chasing the fraud, then begged the taxpayers to bail them out. And bail them out we did: We ponied up billions to help Wells Fargo buy Wachovia, paid Bank of America to buy Merrill Lynch, and watched as the Fed opened up special facilities to buy up the assets in defective mortgage trusts at inflated prices. And after all that effort by the state to buy back these phony assets so the thieves could all stay in business and keep their bonuses, what did the banks do? They put their foot on the foreclosure gas pedal and stepped up the effort to kick people out of their homes as fast as possible, before the world caught on to how these loans were made in the first place.

xpost: yeah it's nice of so many of these guys to actually look like the jabba-huts they are. makes 'em easy to spot.

Then we have Rand Paul, helpfully explaining why we should be glad to lick those boots:

"Well, the thing is, we're all interconnected. There are no rich. There are no middle class. There are no poor," Paul explained. "You remember a few years ago, when they tried to tax the yachts, that didn’t work."

"You know who lost their jobs?" he continued. "The people making the boats, the guys making 50,000 and 60,000 dollars a year lost their jobs. We all either work for rich people or we sell stuff to rich people. So just punishing rich people is as bad for the economy as punishing anyone. Let’s not punish anyone. Let’s keep taxes low and let’s cut spending."

And if you can manage to resist whatever eyes-glazing-over reflex you might have at the combination of the names Moyers and Zinn, this is a fine speech:

Late in August I clipped another story from the Wall Street Journal. Above an op-ed piece by Robert Frank the headline asked: “Do the Rich Need the Rest of America?” The author didn’t seem ambivalent about the answer. He wrote that as stocks have boomed, “the wealthy bounced back. And while the Main Street economy” [where the Connie Brasels and Natalie Fords and most Americans live] “was wracked by high unemployment and the real-estate crash, the wealthy – whose financial fates were more tied to capital markets than jobs and houses – picked themselves up, brushed themselves off, and started buying luxury goods again.”

Citing the work of Michael Lind, at the Economic Growth Program of the New American Foundation, the article went on to describe how the super-rich earn their fortunes with overseas labor, selling to overseas consumers and managing financial transactions that have little to do with the rest of America, “while relying entirely or almost entirely on immigrant servants at one of several homes around the country.”

Right at that point I remembered another story that I had filed away three years ago, also from the Wall Street Journal. The reporter Ianthe Jeanne Dugan described how the private equity firm Blackstone Group swooped down on a travel reservation company in Colorado, bought it, laid off 841 employees, and recouped its entire investment in just seven months, one of the quickest returns on capital ever for such a deal. Blackstone made a killing while those workers were left to sift through the debris. They sold their homes, took part-time jobs making sandwiches and coffee, and lost their health insurance.

That Taibbi piece made me so fuckin' mad that I started a Facebook mini-war with my brother-in-law, the only conservative relative who's willing to engage on the subject. We've reached the "well, Barney Frank and Chris Dodd have blood on their hands too" part of the game.

And also worth revisiting the source of the 'malefactors' line. TR, for all his other failings, knew what he was talking about when it came to the robber baron-ry:

Too much cannot be said against the men of wealth who sacrifice everything to getting wealth. There is not in the world a more ignoble character than the mere money-getting American, insensible to every duty, regardless of every principle, bent only on amassing a fortune, and putting his fortune only to the basest uses —whether these uses be to speculate in stocks and wreck railroads himself, or to allow his son to lead a life of foolish and expensive idleness and gross debauchery, or to purchase some scoundrel of high social position, foreign or native, for his daughter. Such a man is only the more dangerous if he occasionally does some deed like founding a college or endowing a church, which makes those good people who are also foolish forget his real iniquity. These men are equally careless of the working men, whom they oppress, and of the State, whose existence they imperil. There are not very many of them, but there is a very great number of men who approach more or less closely to the type, and, just in so far as they do so approach, they are curses to the country.

"well, Barney Frank and Chris Dodd have blood on their hands too" part of the game.

Well, yeah. The point of a plutocracy is to be as immune as possible to mere party politics. Here in Tennessee, we're handing off power from a millionaire Democratic governor to a millionaire Republican governor, with no particular expected shift in priority or policy.

(which is not the same as saying "Democrats are just the same as Republican" -- it's just a matter of noting that on the issues of most importance to the wealthiest tiny percentile of the country, that tiny percentile is doing everything it can, fairly successfully, to insulate itself against any serious incursion on its wealth and power)

the Taibbi piece is shocking as usual (I live not too far from Ft Myers, after all), but here's a case where his hamhandedness bothered me. Who cares whether the plaintiff's lawyer is an "asshole" who owns a "manse" in Fort Lauderdale? Those little digs are unnecessary.

On the same subject, I cannot recommend Inside Job more strongly.

anyone whose blood boils over this bullshit should check out 'inside job'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2DRm5ES-uA

looks like we had the exact same thing on our minds, alfred

A remarkable audience at the screening last Saturday -- the closest I've seen people tear up the seats.

I really want to see Inside Job, an old high school friend who now works in real estate in California has been trumpeting it all over her Facebook page.

As for Taibbi's insults, I don't know, I sort of think they are necessary. Look at TR and FDR -- OK, they didn't call people "assholes," but they used really strong, vituperative language about the wealthy, because of its effective emotional appeal. Our mainstream political discourse has all but lost the capacity to call rich assholes rich assholes, and if you ever want to organize outrage against them again, we'll need to regain it.

Our mainstream political discourse has all but lost the capacity to call rich assholes rich assholes, and if you ever want to organize outrage against them again, we'll need to regain it.

^^^

Yeah, but he's imprecise: he indicts these lawyers for being malefactors of wealth AND malefactors WITH wealth.

i'm fine with taibbi's insults; to me, they're the flipside of, and sort of leaven, a righteous indignation that produces gems like this--"Because in America, it's far more shameful to owe money than it is to steal it."

one caveat about 'inside job' -- the few times they trot out victims of the crisis, they are much different than the perpetrators. in addition to the latina who can't speak english, and the unemployed truck driver missing teeth, i'd have liked to've seen a yuppie or two who looks and talks like the wall street/DC assholes, say a local banker or a heartland high school teacher who lost everything. the impression you get if you haven't been paying attention is that old rich white guys screwed minorities, which would be bad enough, when in fact they screwed everyone

I'm sort of glad to see the word "plutocracy" showing up more, but I wonder if its effectiveness is blunted by cultural associations...

http://www.weirdspace.dk/Disney/Graphics/Pluto.gif

Oh yeah. Defending my thesis yesterday afternoon, I made sure to say "plutocrats" (referring to early twentieth century men of empire) aloud as often as I could.

i know, huffington post link, but it's by charles ferguson, the 'inside job' director, and kind of interesting
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/charles-ferguson/the-financial-crisis-and-_1_b_782927.html
Far from being in an era of brutal partisan warfare, as conventional wisdom holds and as watching the nightly television news might suggest, the United States is now in the grip of a political duopoly in which both parties are thoroughly complicit. They play a game: they agree to fight viciously over certain things to retain the allegiance of their respective bases, while agreeing not to fight about anything that seriously endangers the privileges of America's new financial elites. Whether this duopoly will endure, and what to do about it, are perhaps the most important questions facing Americans. The current arrangement all but guarantees the continuing decline of the United States as a nation, and of the welfare of the bottom 90% of its citizens.

I believe that the fundamental philosophy of the Left is to regulate in order to protect individuals from corporations, and that the fundamental philosopy of the Right is to DEregulate in order to protect corporations from individuals. I stand on the side I consider more just and more moral.

Yeah, I went there -- I told my Bro-in-Law that I think I'm a better person than he is.

I pretty much agree with that. I say I'm all for class warfare of the poor against the rich. It's a feared and hated idea and that is why the only time you hear of 'Class Warfare' it is to denigrate the very meager - nearly insignificant - efforts of the working class against the plutocracy. Often it is used to describe an attempt or even simply the formulation of these ideas.

Over the years I've grown more cynical of the thought of America ever truly 'providing for the general welfare' or representing anything close to a true democracy. But it does work for those with the power, and it can be gamed, as long as you don't mind being a Godless narcissist. It's the dark shadow of the American Dream, of wanting to better your lot in life and be a free individual. The rights of many people over the past few centuries have been abused, cast aside, and cleared away (namely through Native genocide) all in search of Success.

Now, raised as an American I am going to say you can live your life how you want to, as long as it doesnt fuck with mine. If you want to lie through business and put people in debt to get rich, well, that sort of thing isn't exactly illegal in this country. And if it is, it doesnt mean squat if you're rich.

But yeah, I'm seeing more and more of a reason to get away from that kind of thinking.

lol end rant. Sorry guys, ive been reading my Subgenius books lately!

long live "bob"

frank rich, bringing it
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/14/opinion/14rich.html?_r=2
The wealthy Americans we should worry about [. . .] are the ones who implicitly won the election — those who take far more from America than they give back. They were not on the ballot, and most of them are not household names.

and of course, the "deficit reduction commission" turned out to be just a plutocratic stalking horse. krugman:

Under the guise of facing our fiscal problems, Mr. Bowles and Mr. Simpson are trying to smuggle in the same old, same old — tax cuts for the rich and erosion of the social safety net.

It boogles my mind that people with spending money (union members, the elderly, anyone with a decent hourly wage) are like enemies of the plutocrats. I still don't understand one wealthy guy buying three cars is better for the economy than 100 people buying one car. I mean, they can co-exist, it's not a zero sum game.

er, poorly worded but I hope u get the drift

then there's this story:

hedge fund dude runs over a cyclist, leaves, doesn't get a felony charge

http://criminaljustice.change.org/blog/view/prosecutor_in_hit-and-run_case_felonies_arent_as_bad_as_misdemeanors

That latter statement of course doesn't gel with what he said last week in a statement that set off the national outrage. “Felony convictions have some pretty serious job implications for someone in Mr. Erzinger's profession, and that entered into it,” he told The Vail Daily, explaining the decision not to pursue the felonies. “When you're talking about restitution, you don't want to take away his ability to pay."

jesus, i missed that one.

i just saw this commercial:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pg4D94YDKqI

ally bank is the old GMAC, which changed its name and status in order to take TARP money

yeah, bonfire of the rockies. local sirota has been pushing it hard, but no traction in local media that i've seen.

xpost

“When you're talking about restitution, you don't want to take away his ability to pay."

I don't know how much you get in civil damages for getting run over nowadays, but I'm willing to bet hedge fund dude could liquidate some assets and cover it, even if his earning potential were limited by being in the clink.

This is the part where I point out that he wouldn't be facing the loss of his professional bona fides if he'd stayed at the accident scene. So fuck him, basically.

Kristof sounding the plutocracy alarm today:

The truth is that Latin America has matured and become more equal in recent decades, even as the distribution in the United States has become steadily more unequal.

The best data series I could find is for Argentina. In the 1940s, the top 1 percent there controlled more than 20 percent of incomes. That was roughly double the share at that time in the United States.

Since then, we’ve reversed places. The share controlled by the top 1 percent in Argentina has fallen to a bit more than 15 percent. Meanwhile, inequality in the United States has soared to levels comparable to those in Argentina six decades ago — with 1 percent controlling 24 percent of American income in 2007.

For some reason Democrats have treated class like the proverbial third rail in recent years, which surely ties into their reputation as ball-less wonders. How can they fight for the working class when they seem so afraid to discuss what makes the working class the working class relative to all the assholes calling the shots? Dems too often seem satisfied alluding to the problem rather than making it explicit, which is maybe why the Republican lies gain so much traction: because dishonest or not, they're packaged and delivered like the truth the Dems should be speaking.

Well, yeah. "For some reason" = welcome to the plutocracy.

Yeah, fuck term limits. We should revise the constitution to ensure a certain percentage of congress is poor.

Via John Cole:

In 2008, Obama managed to win over both the financial sector and the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. Now he seems to have pissed off both ends of that coalition.

Hart: There’s a fascinating point from the exit polls that supports part of what Matt is saying. When you ask voters who is most to blame for the current economic crisis, 35 percent say it’s Wall Street bankers, 29 percent say it’s George W. Bush and 23 percent say it’s Barack Obama. However, among those who say it’s Wall Street bankers, 56 percent voted for the Republicans in this election. So go figure.

That said, I worry that if the president and the Democrats were to follow Matt’s advice, they would be appealing to the smallest segment of the electorate. Right now Obama has the support of 85 percent of Democrats. If you want to get America back to work, you don’t want to put the people who have the ability to invest on the other side of their fence.

Taibbi: So if we put people in jail for committing fraud during the mortgage bubble, we’re endangering our ability to win over the CEOs? Obama should have made sure that there are consequences for people who committed crimes. Instead, he pursued a policy of nonaction, and that left him vulnerable with ordinary people who wanted an explanation for why the economy went off the cliff.

Gergen: I don’t think his problem is he hasn’t put enough people in jail. I agree that when people commit fraud, they ought to spend some time in the slammer. But there’s a tendency in today’s Democratic Party to turn away from someone like Bob Rubin because of his time at Citigroup. I served with him during the Clinton administration, when the country added 22 million new jobs, and Bob Rubin was right at the center of that. He was an invaluable adviser to the president, and he is now arguing that one of the reasons this economy is not coming back is that the business community is sitting on money because of the hostility they feel coming from Washington.

Taibbi: I’m sorry, but Bob Rubin is exactly what I’m talking about. Under Clinton, he pushed this enormous remaking of the rules for Wall Street specifically so the Citigroup merger could go through, then he went to work for Citigroup and made $120 million over the next 10 years. He helped push through the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000, which deregulated the derivatives market and created the mortgage bubble. Then Obama brings him back into the government during the transition and surrounds himself with people who are close to Bob Rubin. That’s exactly the wrong message to be sending to ordinary voters: that we’re bringing back this same crew of Wall Street-friendly guys who screwed up and got us in this mess in the first place.

Gergen: That sentiment is exactly what the business community objects to.

Taibbi: Fuck the business community!

Gergen: Fuck the business community? That’s what you said? That’s the very attitude the business community feels is coming from many Democrats in Washington, including some in the White House. There’s a good reason why they feel many Democrats are hostile — because they are.

Taibbi: It’s hard to see how this administration is hostile to business when the guy it turns to for economic advice is the same guy who pushed through a merger and then went right off and made $120 million from a decision that helped wreck the entire economy.

lol -- is this the first time David Gergen's wisdom has been challenged?

[Rubin] is now arguing that one of the reasons this economy is not coming back is that the business community is sitting on money because of the hostility they feel coming from Washington

The "business community" is refusing to spend or loan money because federal politicians aren't being NICE enough to them?? What in the world?

fuck the business community

Yeah, that is the actual standard line on the right these days: businesses are so scared of Obama's radical agenda that they're sitting on their cash until they're sure he's not about to nationalize them all or whatever it is marxist nazi socialists do. I have had this actual argument with people. I always start by saying, "OK, so, you realize that's a total fantasy that has nothing to do with how economies work, right?" Not that that has any effect.

How in the hell is David Gergen still taken seriously?

He's in the club. Like Broder, like all of them.

yeah tipsy I mean it would be weird enough - and borderline criminal - if that were in fact what is happening, but yeah.... no

I find Gergen more obnoxious than Broder because Gergen is always there, always on TV, always yapping, always lamenting a loss age of bipartisanship.

the "actual standard line" is just another distraction from the cold hard fact that tax cuts failed epically to do anybody any good but the already rich

david leonhardt lays it out pretty well

http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/18/were-the-bush-tax-cuts-good-for-growth/

why people aren't screaming this from the rooftops, is beyond me

not only that, but the top 1% who pulled away from the rest of us over the last 10 years, by several orders of magnitude, are now not being asked to shoulder any of the responsibility of our massive economic mess! the worst anyone is proposing is that they go back to paying what they were paying during the clinton years!!

the globe got massively more wealthy over the past decade, yet massively more unequal - incomes stayed relatively flat except for that top 1%. now that the speculative bubble sustaining that wealth has burst, we're told by the deficit commission that it's the rest of us who have to pick up the fucking pieces??

"shoulder responsibility" = puritan, hippie bullshit (to the GOP at least, to many Americans I believe).

"puritan, hippie"

does not compute?

"we can be together"

if I gotta spell it out, I mean those were do-gooders, word of God or Krishna or whatever types. Today's GOP and the broad stretch of America that is motivated primarily by opposing redistribution, they're not do-gooders: this is a game where you gotta yours. We're not all in this together.

gop/conservatives = "i've got mine, fuck you"

not that the democratic establishment is that much better. they're more, "i've got mine, it's too bad you can't have yours, but the world is unfair"

hmm i think the current slump sorta makes explicit how connected everything is

Right, they're the slightly-less uncaring plutocrats---though at least locally the Dems support things like public schools & parks, the common good, whereas local GOPers are just looking to loot DeLay and Hastert-style.

xp

Tracer I think it is explicit how connected everything is; what's also explicit is that the GOP and their supporters see this "everything" as something to be pilfered for themselves, and for the mess to be left to the losers.

challenging opinions I know

i don't really follow actually

well I was making fun of myself for just laying out a pretty standard line I think: that conservatives today see the acquisition of political power as an opportunity to secure economic prosperity for themselves/their kind: they want to take everyone's money & property & keep it for themselves.

businesses are so scared of Obama's radical agenda

This really makes sense if you believe big business also controls the content of TV and therefore popular political narratives in the US, which of course they do. How do we know Obama's agenda is radical? Well, it's a phrase that's been repeated on the TV news programs ever since he signed his first bill!

[Rubin] is now arguing that one of the reasons this economy is not coming back is that the business community is sitting on money because of the hostility they feel coming from Washington

The "business community" is refusing to spend or loan money because federal politicians aren't being NICE enough to them?? What in the world?

― progressive cuts (Tracer Hand), Friday, November 19, 2010 6:30 AM (4 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

the terrifying prospect is that this is in fact true

xxp: Small business people don't know what their federal tax rate will be in 2011, less than two months away. Nor do they know how much the PPACA mandate for employer paid health care will cost, as insurers are ramping up prices following passage. So there's definitely a lot of uncertainty leading to delayed hiring decisions.

Some of the name calling is hyperbole. Obama and Pelosi aren't socialists. They're corporatists. That's not neccessarily in our interests either. Democrats, unfortunately, cannot represent any constituency besides public sector unions and trial lawyers effectively, because doing so would risk corporate campaign funding.

i don't buy that uncertainty is "leading" to delayed hiring decisions. it might be a minor consideration at most. job growth has been anemic for ten years now

i knew we'd had a conversation like this before:

it's a royally shitty situation. the basic idea on the left is that the only way to dig ourselves out of our various holes is to knock the spoiled, crybaby rich people into line (or at least, the path to solutions will require doing so). the right-wing answer is that these people are the ones making crucial purchasing and hiring decisions, so the more you freak them out, the worse the recovery is going to be.

it's possible that both of these things are true. the rich aren't any more or less rational that anyone else, and if they believe they are beset by a hostile neo-new-deal gov't, they will act accordingly, even if that's bullshit.

i still think for the long-term health of the country the bush tax cuts need to be scrapped, but since when has anyone in power been able to act with an eye on the long-term?

i'm reminded of this tyler cowen post:

http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/08/is-policy-the-problem.html

I would be more convinced by the uncertainty view if it were combined into a larger, coherent story, consistent with reported corporate profits being fairly high.

Do the implicit volatilities embedded in option prices show a lot of expected uncertainty? Maybe, but again I'm waiting to see the evidence. If so, this one should be staring us right in the face.

On the other side of the ledger, the tax code remains highly uncertain, to our detriment, and monetary policy is some mix of uncertain and baffling (though see the above point on implicit volatilities).

There is also behavioral economics. An image or speech or proposed law can crush a mood, whether or not that is rational. I can't cite a lot of systematic evidence for this having happened, but I know from talking to people how many of them think, rightly or wrongly, that Obama is very very bad for the American economy. I believe that is a factor in our slow recovery.

― goole, Thursday, September 2, 2010 4:00 PM (2 months ago) Bookmark

in a roundabout way, you can blame the rightwing grievance-paranoia complex for the slow recovery [winky face]

i know self-quoting is a kinda lame but eh

business leaders are no less irrational than anyone else, and their information environment right now is shot through with absolutely insane garbage. is "policy uncertainty" the primary problem? sure, if that's what they think it is...

xp:

Yes, there are structural problems that have nothing to do with any Obama administration actions. Perot told us about a "giant sucking sound" should NAFTA be passed 16 years ago, and in the aftermath we still ratified MFN trading status for China and GATT/WTO.

Anyone thoughtful paying attention at the time would have recognized that there was no opposition party. Manufacturing, and all jobs dependent on it, were not a protected class. We were to become a nation of financiers directing capital flows for the globe, and marketing professionals exporting the U.S. debt-financed consumer lifestyle. Congratulations if you got on the boat at the time - you got another couple of decades of American exceptionalism but even your trade can be learned.

true enough, but can't it be characterized that the world is in the middle of a long grind out of colonialism?

if i were an educated indian or argentinian and could provide intellectual labor for (as my dad might have been able to provide physical labor for, and my grandfather may have left the country to be a part of) far away markets, well shit, why shouldn't i? i feel like this is a harder question to say no to rather than "shipping jobs overseas"

From way up there:

In 2008, Obama managed to win over both the financial sector and the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. Now he seems to have pissed off both ends of that coalition.

That was no "coalition". That was the financial sector seeing which way the wind blew and covering their bets. It has paid off handsomely for them. If they are pissed off now, it's because they were used to more bjs for their money under GWB.

Right b4 2008 election i remember all these stories about which way Wall Street was swinging and they were all for Obama. I think at the time there was really big doubt about McCain's economic prowess or something.

Anyways I dont think theres any possible president that you could elect and have Big Business say "We're happy with this guy! We're not going to push for any more reduced regulations!"

big business LOVED bush. his biggest campaign contributors were those enron assholes. and cheney was halliburton's ceo. and the cheney energy task force resulted in sick utilities monopolies. and the medicare giveaway they had bill thomas engineer in 2003 was a huge bounty for big pharma. and on and on and on

feels so good feelin' good again:

“Wall Street is back spending as much if not more than before,” said the New York cosmetic surgeon Dr. Francesca J. Fusco, whose business is booming again after a difficult few years.

Christie’s auction house says investors from the financial world who fell out of the bidding market during the 2008 credit crisis are “pouring” back in.

Expensive restaurants report a pickup in bookings. At the Porter House restaurant in the Time Warner Center across from Central Park, the head chef, Michael Lomonaco, says business is up about 10 percent over a year ago and “people are starting to shake off what happened.” The restaurant is a favorite of A-list Wall Street executives, including Goldman Sachs’s chief executive, Lloyd C. Blankfein.

Real estate agents say Wall Street executives have already begun lining up rentals in the Hamptons for next summer. Dolly Lenz of Prudential Douglas Elliman said the bidding this year was “hotter and heavier” than previous years. “There is a passion now in the market I haven’t seen in a while,” she said.

She said her clients, almost exclusively from Wall Street, were afraid to lose out. Just recently, Ms. Lenz said, she had three people bidding more than $400,000 for a summer rental in Southampton.

Feel that trickle-down!

what's being done to the people of Ireland should certainly fall under this topic.

The rich are hard taskmasters and the lash falls upon all within their reach. /wobbly

what's being done to the people of Ireland should certainly fall under this topic.

― deutsche Scheisse prawns (Eisbaer), Saturday, November 27, 2010 1:13 PM (4 hours ago)

Atrios/Duncan Black is just irritating for the most part anymore, but he had a great line the other day: "Here's how Ireland plans to lower dirt onto itself from inside the grave."

whatever else there is to say about folks who work on Wall Street, for the most part they aren't Jesus Freaks who seethe with hatred for gays, Muslims or people of color. an individual Wall Streeter may be at least one of those three groups. some of them may not even mind paying a little additional tax (as long as the tax rates don't go back to pre-Reagan levels). so as long as elections aren't about Wall Street's malfeasance, they could comfortably vote Democratic on the cultural issues alone.

i hate "wall street people" 100x more than social conservatives

possibly

the plutocracy is a much smaller group than 'wall street people' tho

id be for eating the rich if they didnt look so unappetizing

frank rich's turn today, including the awfulness of the New Democrat Coalition:

Such is the ethos in his own party that Senator Jim Webb, Democrat of Virginia, complained this month that he “couldn’t even get a vote” for his proposal for a one-time windfall profits tax on Wall Street bonuses. Republicans “obviously weren’t going to vote for it,” he told Real Clear Politics, but Democrats also demurred, “saying that any vote like that was going to screw up fund-raising.”

(no love for webb, but at least he's sort of an economic populist.) rich also links to this sort-of-obvious but worthwhile new yorker article.

New house finance chairman: regulators exist "to serve the banks." (He later "clarified" his remarks, but I think they were pretty clear to start with.)

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2011/04/19/business/economy/economix-19taxgallup/economix-19taxgallup-custom4.jpg

So members of a group that is, statistically speaking, “upper income” are very unlikely to think their taxes are “too low,” but are five times as likely to say that “upper-income people” as a group pay “too little.”

http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/19/rich-people-still-dont-realize-theyre-rich/?partner=rss&emc=rss

So apparently (by way of hurting on the quiddities thread) the Very Respected Economist Mark Zandi is now suggesting that the whole recession happened because rich people stopped spending.

“This group is key because the top 5 percent of income earners accounts for about one-third of spending, and the top 20 percent accounts for close to 60 percent of spending,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Analytics. “That was key to why we suffered such a bad recession — their spending fell very sharply.”

omg they're magic! They can turn the economy on and off with the wave of a wallet!

whatever the truth of Zandi's assertion, i for one certainly didn't notice much of a drop-off in plutocratic conspicuous over-consumption during the Great Recession. those TARP-protected bonuses went somewhere.

i thought we suffered such a sharp recession bc the EPA handcuffed businesses... er, because Fannie Mae gave loans to people of color... um, because from 2000-2006 Moody's couldn't slip on a dog turd without flagging it as investment-grade.

That the ratings agencies are still in business at all (instead of in jail) is just another sign of everything. Those guys are like the Vatican -- they figure if they can condemn enough other people, nobody'll notice the recent unpleasantness.