Consequences

David Dayen, at FireDogLake, takes note of a Felix Salmon post, using a data study published by the Cleveland Federal Reserve, on the plummeting share of income going to Labor. Felix Salmon notes the paradoxical trend:

Over the past three years or so, wages and salaries have been rising steadily, while interest rates have been stuck at zero. It’s never been harder to make income from capital, while incomes for people with jobs have actually kept on rising. And unemployment, while still high, has been coming down. Given all that, it would stand to reason that the share of national income going to labor should be rising, not falling. Labor incomes are going up, the number of employed people is going up, and income from savings is going down. And yet! It turns out that people with capital are so rich, and getting so much richer, that it’s not even close

. Dayen's comment:

Something happened around 2000 that separated capital income from the historical norm. It started rising at spectacular levels. I would argue that all the different deregulatory policies of the Clinton Administration’s second term – the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, the repeal of Glass-Steagall – and the general laissez-faire attitude to regulatory policy from both Alan Greenspan’s Federal Reserve and the incoming Bush Administration created a runaway environment for capital that has not abated. Furthermore, capital gains tax rates were slashed in 2001 to 15%, after going down from 28% to 20% in Clinton’s second term. Finally, you have the internationalization of finance . . .

The Time Bomb which is Zombification

The Hidden Bank Time Bomb: Interest Rate Risk « naked capitalism:

Yves Smith explains the problem of too low for too long: interest rate risk and zombification.

Basically, once the monetary system has hit the zero-bound on interest rates, there's no where to go, but up.  And, if policy is to maintain rates near the zero-bound for a long time, combined with a policy of low inflation, the effect is to push financial institutions to load up on long-term debt, which carries a lot interest-rate risk.  Any rise in nominal interest rates -- any rise in inflation in other words -- will carry with it an increasing risk of destroying the capital of financial intermediaries, destabilizing the financial system.  And, that risk is increasing, as long as the central bank is maintaining a low policy rate environment.

No Justice, No Law

Ian Welsh:

"The US does not have justice or even the rule of law and whether the public approves or disapproves is irrelevant.  Black letter law, on the books, makes most of what the banks did leading up to the subprime crisis illegal.  It was fraud.  Black letter law makes the war on Iraq a war crime, and no one went to jail for that.  Black letter law does not allow freestanding resisting arrest charges, and those happen all the time.  Basic law states that an accused has a right to face their accuser and see the evidence against them, that no longer occurs in many cases.  Basic justice says that you can’t punish someone without a trial, and the “no-fly list” indicates that is no longer true (along with being unable to face your accusers and see the evidence against you.)  The US Congress retroactively made wiretapping without a warrant “legal” and if I have to explain why retroactive immunity is wrong I give up.  Basic justice says that secret laws and secret courts are unjust, yet the US has plenty of both."

I thought that the coming political storm would so outrage the mass of people, that much of this moral obduracy would be swept away, and I was wrong. Instead of a political storm, we got a quiet political counterrevolution, and are marching down a path toward a fascist state, maybe even toward a neo-feudal order.

The Central Question

The Central Question Posed by the Great Crash | MyFDL: "The Great Crash posed one question for this country: who would bear the losses? Would it be the banks that caused the problems? The officers, directors and shareholders of those banks? Their careless counterparties? The investors who bought the fraudulent real estate mortgage-backed securities and the complex spin-offs? The owners of capital who threw money into hedge funds and other exotic investments expecting a geyser of money in return?
No.That group doesn’t lose money. They used their control over the government and the Fed to make sure that the losses would be passed on to the rest of us, pushing millions into or near poverty. The savers were trashed by the Fed’s zero interest rate policies. The national debt run up by tax cuts and wars gave the rich an opportunity to end the safety net and focus all of the efforts of government on protecting them and their interests. The rich are safe. The rest of us are in deep trouble.

The government threw money at banks with abandon, leaving incompetent failed executives in place. When it turned out that banks lied about the quality of the notes and mortgages transferred to the RMBS Trusts, the SEC and the Department of Justice refused to investigate, let alone prosecute.

Banks didn’t complete the transfer of those worthless notes and mortgages into the Trusts, so the IRS announced it wouldn’t enforce the requirements for pass-through non-taxable status. The servicing arms of those banks cheated and lied to courts around the nation about ownership, and when they got caught, they talked the government into a sleazy settlement that gives nothing to the people damaged by the frauds and allows the banks to continue to lie and cheat, if at lower levels.

This list could be expanded indefinitely, with the same outcome: the Fed, Congress and the White House have only done those things that protected the money of the rich, whether or not the settlement was consistent with the law or not.

It didn’t have to be this way. From the outset, there were things that could have been done that would have placed the losses where they belonged: on Wall Street and its criminal denizens and its careless clients. The bailouts could have come with constraints and requirements, firings, lawsuits, and indictments. The entire rotten structure could have been pushed into a form that would not threaten the lives and incomes of the middle class, a group whose responsibility for the problems was minimal in contrast to that of crooked lenders and swindlers.

No. Not in this country. Not in a nation ruled by oligarchs and a government in thrall to economic theories years after those theories revealed themselves as nonsense, or to the rich who endow those irrational theories with sanctity of revealed truth, or both. There was never a day when the primary or even subsidiary consideration was the middle class, or the rule of law, or even the pretend values of the free market. The only consideration from the outset was the protection of the rich.

Even two years later, the government showed no interest in raising taxes on the richest Americans. Both parties explained that they couldn’t raise taxes even on the rich in a recession, and that the only solution was cutting out unemployment benefits, lowering the minimum wage, slashing Social Security and Medicare, and removing people from Medicare and the shredded remnants of help for the worst off.

The current lousy economy is a result of deliberately chosen policies. The government could have chosen policies that would have protected the middle class at the expense of rich criminals and their clients and their hedge funds and their off-shore trusts and their tax-avoidance schemes, the people and entities that wrecked the economy. It didn’t.

It’s not that we don’t know what to do to make the economy work for the middle class. We do. The government and the elites and the rich won’t allow it. They go house to house, from Bangor to Bakersfield, saying to the inhabitants, What part of this sentence don’t you understand? You think we’re going to eat our losses? You think we don’t care about our money? Well. Suck. On. This."

I didn't originally intend to quote this whole, wonderful rant, but I couldn't stop. Sort of like eating cashews.

The Death of Facts

Facts, 360 B.C.-A.D. 2012 - chicagotribune.com:

To the shock of most sentient beings, Facts died Wednesday, April 18, after a long battle for relevancy with the 24-hour news cycle, blogs and the Internet. Though few expected Facts to pull out of its years-long downward spiral, the official cause of death was from injuries suffered last week when Florida Republican Rep. Allen West steadfastly declared that as many as 81 of his fellow members of theU.S. House of Representatives are communists.
Facts held on for several days after that assault — brought on without a scrap of evidence or reason — before expiring peacefully at its home in a high school physics book. 

Wanker Time

Atrios recalls that the last decade has been

a time when this country stopped even bothering to pretend to live up to many of its supposed ideals. We go to war and kill lots of people for no good reason, elites have eliminated any accountability for themselves for criminal wrongdoing, we've tortured and assassinated people, and the response to massive economic suffering and related criminal fraud has been to give lots of free money to the people who caused it all.

Civilization

John Robb at Global Guerillas has some speculation about the rise and fall of civilizations. The truth is that we know so little about the ancient Roman world, its politics and its economics, that we are more likely to simply project our own obsessions and preoccupations on their history, as we are to gain genuine insight from their example. But, it is still fun to speculate and draw parallels. Like anything organic, I suppose that civilizations can be said to have something like a natural lifecycle: birth, growth and death. The ancient Hellenic world lasted about 1200-1300 years or so, from its emergence at the end of the Dark Age that followed the collapse of Bronze Age civilization, around 750 BC, down to the Fall of Rome in 476 AD, or, if you prefer, the Plague of Justinian in 541-542 AD. As others have noted the Eastern Empire went on, though, there were severe strains there as well -- severe enough to mark out a Dark Age of at least a couple of centuries, even in the East, even where the institutional Empire and the City of Constantinople appeared to survive. I find the handwaving over an opaque "complexity", as well as the analytically empty complaints about high taxes and a debased currency to be unsatisfying. The early city-state culture of trading cities, and of Rome's Empire, was a hungry and expanding beast, bringing new lands under cultivation and extending the scope of peaceful trade throughout the Mediterranean basin and beyond. There must have been gains to economic productivity from the Magna Gracia project and the Carthaginian expansion into Spain, as well as Rome's methodical conquest of Italy and its founding of new cities. Solon's reforms in Athens, planting olive groves, etc., must have unleashed energies comparable to those released by the French Revolution, energies, which would have been capped and finally extinguished by the short-sighted plutocracy of Rome and its latifundia. Reducing Sicily from the breadbasket of Rome to a wasteland must have required centuries of poor farming practice, soil erosion, pestilence, famine and plague. The ancient Romans, in the latter days, were not technically inventive. They never seemed to grasp the potential of windmills. They failed to invent the stirrup or a workable horse collar or really good heavy plow. The Empire was big enough to afford the kind specialization of labor, which might yield technical advance, to meliorate the shortage of new slaves and declining yield of soils under cultivation. Instead domination by the rich of the poor masses seems to have deepened to the point that the poor were liable to extinction in plagues and famines, while the competition for power among the elites became ever more lethal. Our modern civilization emerged from the Dark Ages around 800 or 900 AD, with a fusion of the Franks and Vikings, and the invention of the motte and bailey castle. A predatory military caste began an expansion that ended in something close to world conquest by the end of the 19th century. Accelerating technological advance has marked its character, but it is worth remembering that the predatory character of the elite, at this culture's core, was there from the beginning. William the Conqueror, the Angevin Henry II, the Crusaders who sacked Constantinople -- these were ruthless, violent bandits, whose first order of business was to exploit the mass of farmers everywhere, from their walled castles. The normal state of Western states over the centuries has been a low-performance equilibrium, in which oppression and domination by parasitic elites was often just short of collapsing the society. France in the 17th century was the richest and most powerful country in the world, seemingly on the verge of ruling North America, India and much of Europe, but by the end of the reign of the Sun King, the country lay prostrate. It would struggle on fitfully for another 75 years, before its feudal parasites were overthrown. The outburst of egalitarian energy would catapult France back into contention for the domination of Europe, if not the world, before the forces of reaction again gained the upper hand. Feudal Empire would dominate much Europe right up to the conflagration of World War I, in the 20th century. That we are again seeing a parasitic elite emerge, in a neo-feudal order, should not be seen as anything but a renewed expression of Western Civilization's DNA.

70% Income Tax Rate

I take this to be a hopeful sign: Alan Reynolds, one of those useful idiots that pollute the public discourse on behalf of the plutocracy, devotes a column -- in the Wall Street Journal! -- to fighting against a proposal for a 70% tax bracket.

no utility whatsoever

Gretchen Morgenson reports in the NY Times: In an interview, Mr. Hosier [an investor who received $17 million punitive damages as part of an arbitration against Citibank] said the experience had opened his eyes to the disturbing ways of Wall Street.

“Instead of the financial world being the lubricant for business, they are out there manufacturing products with no utility whatsoever except for generating fees,” he said. “Somebody’s got to do something about Wall Street. It is destroying the country.”

The dysfunction of the financial system culminated in a major financial crisis in 2008, and the political response was to mortgage the country to preserve the dysfunction. The political elite simply refuses to understand. And, yet, there it is.

Compare the clear-eyed Hosier, an investor who was wronged, to the pompous but powerful Larry Summers, Director of the White House National Economic Council for President Barack Obama until late 2010, Charles W. Eliot Professor at Harvard, Secretary of the Treasury at the end of the Clinton Administration.

Stephan Richter reports on Larry Summers response, when asked a pertinent question:

For example, when the irrepressible Yves Smith asked Larry Summers about whether banking risks in the United States could not be helpfully diminished if its large institutions were run (read: compensated at the top) more like utility companies, he immediately aborted any effort at an intellectually honest answer by making it sound as if she were proposing to bring state socialism to banking.

Indeed, the tape shows him suggesting that if we went "down the path" of increased public intermediation, "we would still have U.S. Steel as one of our flagship companies and we would not have seen the kind of dynamism that we've seen".

I'd like to think that Summers is merely dodging the question, so to speak, as Richter suggests, but a more likely explanation is that he is so completely corrupt and arrogant, so little concerned by critical challenge, that he simply does not see the irony of celebrating the "dynamism" of financial crisis and rapid economic decline.

Imperial Decline

Tom Engelhardt, Sleepwalking Into the Imperial Dark

. . . The United States is, of course, an imperial power, however much we might prefer not to utter the word. We still have our globe-spanning array of semi-client states; our military continues to garrison much of the planet; and we are waging war abroad more continuously than at any time in memory. Yet who doesn't sense that the sun is now setting on us?

Not so many years ago, we were proud enough of our global strength to regularly refer to ourselves as the Earth’s "sole superpower." In those years, our president and his top officials dreamed of establishing a worldwide 'Pax Americana', while making speeches and issuing official documents proclaiming that the United States would be militarily "beyond challenge" by any and all powers for eons to come. So little time has passed and yet who speaks like that today? Who could?

. . . Disillusionment, depression, and dismay flow ever more strongly through the American bloodstream. Just look at any polling data on whether this country, once the quintessential land of optimists, is heading in "the right direction" or on "the wrong track", and you'll find that the "wrong track" numbers are staggering, and growing by the month. On the rare occasions when Americans have been asked by pollsters whether they think the country is "in decline," the figures have been similarly over the top.

It’s not hard to see why. A loss of faith in the American political system is palpable. For many Americans, it's no longer "our government" but "the bureaucracy." Washington is visibly in gridlock and incapable of doing much of significance, while state governments, facing the "steepest decline in state tax receipts on record," are, along with local governments, staggering under massive deficits and cutting back in areas -- education, policing, firefighting -- that matter to daily life. . . the United States looks increasingly incapable of coping. It no longer invests in its young, or plans effectively for the future, or sets off on new paths. It literally can't do. And this is not just a domestic crisis, but part of imperial decline.

If you doubt this, just pull into your nearest gas station and fill up the tank. Of course, who doesn't know that this country, once such a generator of wealth, is now living with unemployment figures not seen since the Great Depression, as well as unheard of levels of debt, that it's hooked on foreign energy (and like most addicts has next to no capacity for planning how to get off that drug), or that it's living through the worst period of income inequality in modern history? And who doesn't know that a crew of financial fabulists, corporate honchos, lobbyists, and politicians have been fattening themselves off the faltering body politic?

And if you don't think any of this has anything to do with imperial power in decline, ask yourself why the options for our country so often seem to have shrunk to what our military is capable of, or that the only significant part of the government whose budget is still on the rise is the Pentagon. Or why, when something is needed, this administration, like its predecessor, regularly turns to that same military.

Tom Engelhardt goes on to point out the absurdity of sending the military on "humanitarian" missions, and the remarkable proofs of military impotence in Iraq, Afganistan and Libya, as the same failed tactics are applied again and again.

America, sclerotic empire, stumbling toward collapse. As Englehardrt says, first and last, "this will not end well".

Weltschmerz

john c halasz has taught me a new word, weltschmerz

Wikipedia says, weltschmerz

denotes the kind of feeling experienced by someone who understands that physical reality can never satisfy the demands of the mind. . . . It is also used to denote the feeling of sadness when thinking about the evils of the world.

The modern meaning of Weltschmerz . . . is the psychological pain caused by sadness that can occur when realizing that someone's own weaknesses are caused by the inappropriateness and cruelty of the world and (physical and social) circumstances.

Partisans

If the so-called "independents" -- or some of them, at least -- know little about politics, and blow in the prevailing winds, the dedicated partisans pose the opposite problem: they know a lot more about politics, but tend to a "my party, right or wrong, but my party" attitude, that knows loyalty, but no principle.  Or, it knows a consistent fear of the greater evil of the other party, but, in the case of the Democrats and their liberal base if not Republicans and their wingnut base, remains powerless to influence the course actually adopted by their Party leadership.

Glenn Greenwald puzzles over how to change the dynamic:

. . . whatever else is true, one thing is for certain: dedicated partisans who pledge their unbreakable, eternally loyal support for any Party or politician are going to be steadfastly ignored (or worse) by that Party or politician, and rightfully so. If you spend two years vehemently objecting that certain acts so profoundly offend your principles but then pledge unequivocal support no matter what almost two years in advance to the politicians who engage in them, why would you expect your objections to be heeded? Any rational person would ignore them, and stomp on your beliefs whenever doing so benefited them.

"these independents"

what digby said,

It seems that the vaunted "independent" voters who allegedly believed that Obama had gone way too far by passing health care and the stimulus and so voted out the Democrats are unhappy with the Republicans now --- also for going too far. . . .

There's an epic political battle going on in this country and these independents don't seem to get that it won't be solved by "punishing" the party that's in office every two years when it does what it promised it was going to do.

If people really feel that the stimulus and health care plans are as radical and destructive as shutting down the government and destroying the safety net, then there's no getting through to them until we have a depression or worse. Until they actively engage and figure out what's what instead of mindlessly swinging back and forth like a pendulum, this will probably continue for some time.

Democracy cannot long survive the arbitrary ignorance of the "independent" voter.  The dominance of money, which has made our government responsive only to the plutocrats, rests, ultimately, not on direct bribes, but on "campaign contributions", which, in turn, go to finance the manipulation of these "independent voters" via mass media.
The great mass of the public does not pay enough attention to politics, does not have the time or capacity to make critical judgements, without the support of trustworthy tribunes among those with access to mass media, and those tribunes do not exist.

Will there be a fight?

Eleanor Heartney, art critic,
Art & Money:
UMBILICAL CORD OF GOLD:

I was very active in the effort to elect Obama, and like many others I feel let down — duped into thinking things could change by an administration that seems completely co-opted by the corporate class. I still believe that Obama’s basic instincts are good, but somehow that doesn’t seem to matter. Why is it so much easier to take things in oligarchic directions than in democratic ones? George W. Bush profoundly changed America, but restoring the nation’s democratic values seems virtually impossible.

But I’m still not willing to accept the argument that voting is futile or that everything is predetermined by a small group at the top. And oddly, the most encouraging signs these days have come from outside our borders — from the revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia (the outcomes in Libya and Bahrain seem more uncertain) and in the faith that protesters in places like Iran and the Arab world place in the ideas of democracy. Here in this country the fight to preserve collective bargaining for state employees in Wisconsin appears to have failed (though at this writing a court has issued a stay on the law passed by the Republican lawmakers pending an examination of its constitutionality). Nevertheless, it is a small sign that people may be waking up to dangerous inequality that has been allowed to permeate this country.

Which leaves me with one final question. If there is to be a fight, which side will we be on?

Lesson of the Week; Central Issue of Our Time

What digby said,

The big lesson of this past week of nuclear accidents and air strikes in the Middle East is obvious: we are entering a new phase of our ongoing energy crisis. With half of America now not believing in climate change and thinking everything can be solved with drill, baby, drill I'm not too optimistic. It's closely related to the plutocratic dominance of our political system and is the central issue of our time.

This strikes me as summing up the zeitgeist, the spirit of the age, quite nicely.

When I began (the predecessor of) this blog, I actually naively believed that the country and the world might come to some positive, reasonable consciousness about the coincidence peak oil, climate change, ecological catastrophe. I thought the inevitable disasters (my "coming perfect storm") -- later manifest as Iraq, Katrina, the Global Financial Crisis -- would prompt a revolution of sorts, as the old elite and a discredited philosophy gave way to a new generation, and a new awareness. (Hah!)

Instead, the storm came, and what was revealed was that a predatory financial system had taken over the government, in league with big oil and the military-industrial complex. What was revealed was the incompetence of the elite, their sheer inability to prepare for, or deal sensibly, with any political or economic development.

Paul Krugman noted an instance of Obama rewriting Social Security history, and, of course, there was also the Amity-Schlaes-like smear of FDR, for sitting on his hands while Hoover did his lame duck waddle.

I was an early and enthusiastic Obama supporter, as well as a life-long Democrat; I'm very much aware both of "being taken" and of being trapped by the structure of our politics, which carries on a made-for-cable kabuki-cum-extortion play, featuring the threat of a ludicrously bad Republican as "the alternative" to re-electing Obama. It is interesting to me that so many commenters feel themselves committed to not-voting-for Obama; I feel the same way, but I wonder how many we are, and whether it can make any difference. Our powerlessness is the problem; if that powerlessness is as real and deep as it appears, voting is already an empty, pointless ritual.

The Era of Responsibility

The LA Times reports:

Federal prosecutors have shelved a criminal investigation of Angelo R. Mozilo after determining that his actions in the mortgage meltdown — which led to $67.5-million settlement against him — did not amount to criminal wrongdoing.

As the former chairman of Countrywide Financial Corp., Mozilo helped fuel the boom in risky subprime loans that led to the crippling of the banking industry and the near-collapse of the financial system.

What was it, that Obama said in his inaugural, about beginning a new Era of Responsibility?

As Atrios says, "One would think that the people in charge could be held responsible, but as we've learned, the people in charge are never responsible."

The Smart Play

A split developed in the Democratic Party, prompted by disappointment and disillusion in the Obama Presidency, and the limited achievements of the Democratic Congressional majorities in place, 2007-2010.

Ian Welsh noted it, in his observations on Netroots Nation convention in July 2010. As he explained it, one side sees Obama as little better than Bush, Part Deux, while the other side defends Obama as pragmatic.

This was never a stable divide. Each group forms a hypothesis, and revises its estimates, as new data emerge. More Obama was not going to confirm Democrats in their beliefs, in equal measure.

Digby notes the moving frontier on reaction Obama's Grand Bargain with the Republicans:
I

It appears that the Obama supporters in the political establishment have awakened to the fact that he really does want to enact a Grand Bargain and that it's highly likely that it will end up being a bad deal for Democrats.

Obama has an interesting political problem. On the one hand, he wants to serve the kleptocrats well enough that they do not turn to the Republican candidate in 2012. On the other, he is vulnerable to being deserted by his own Party. It is an asymmetric dilemma, because of "vote for the lesser evil" two-party system. Obama is actually aided with both the corporate center and its money, and with distressed Democrats, since both groups, for differing reasons, fear the worst from a crazy Republican.

Obama is likely to continue to do his best to serve the plutocracy, knowing that this keeps the smart money out of Republican politics, increasing the chances that the Republicans do the wild thang! Which, in turn, increases Obama's stranglehold on the Democrats, including the left of the Democratic Party, which has no alternative course of action, save to give up hope altogether.

Giving up hope might be the smart play.

Recognizing the plutocracy

Bob Herbert, NY Times:

While millions of ordinary Americans are struggling with unemployment and declining standards of living, the levers of real power have been all but completely commandeered by the financial and corporate elite. It doesn’t really matter what ordinary people want. The wealthy call the tune, and the politicians dance.

When I started this blog, I thought that the failures of George W. Bush were likely to become evident in his second term on a grand scale, and, naively, I expected an equally grand political shift. I had great hopes for Obama as the leader of such a shift.

What I did not anticipate is that the great political storm would leave us recognizing -- not the failures of the Reagan Revolution and its long aftermath -- but, its enduring success.

The political shift in the country, among the politically aware Left, is the dawning recognition that liberal democracy in America is close to death.

Aftermath: Distraction

The political storm following George W. Bush's reign of error brought us not relief from the drought of reason, but Obama.

Now, the Republicans have become a clown show.  And, the reason is clearly to make Obama look good, by comparison, as the President and his party strip the country naked.  Avedon Carol explains all:

why [does] the entire media - not just the Murdoch and Moonie media - stay[] so focused on the right-wing crazies[?]. It's the circus that deflects attention from what's really going on while everyone is playing games like "Beck is crazy" and "Look - Sarah Palin!" Well, yes, they've pretty much consistently done that sort of thing for the last 20 years, but I mean going even deeper than that, to why it is so consistent - enough that even some of our best liberal, independent bloggers just can't seem to pull their eyes away sometimes. Somebody out there wants us to keep watching the clown show for an even bigger reason.
I've touched on this before, but I don't think people really get how tricky the game really is. If you listen to a lot of the things Limbaugh and Rush and even Palin say, they always carry enough of a grain of truth with them to make them compelling to their audience even while they also carry enough crazy to make it easy for everyone from Katarina to Dancin' Dave to even Bill Kristol point at them and say they are going overboard.
People are hurting and our economy is tanking and the White House keeps telling us how things are fine even though all the rest of us can see that they are not. And though they blame it all on Obama as if Bush and the GOP leadership had nothing to do with it, the fact is that Obama and the Dems spent two years in charge and absolutely refusing to do what Americans wanted them to do. And what Americans want them to do is get out of stupid wars (not just change the names from "combat troops" to something else), give them a better health care system (not just pass something called a health care bill), protect Social Security benefits (not just the existence of some program that still retains the name "Social Security"), and, yes, tax the rich a lot more than they tax people who actually have to work for a living. What Americans certainly didn't want them to do was protect cut-throat loan sharks who are stealing their money and their homes, and protect anti-American transnational corporations who are stealing their time and money and exporting their jobs.
And what has Obama chosen to do? What has Obama chosen to whip the Democrats into doing? Ask yourself who it was, exactly, who thought it would be a great idea to get Markos Moulitsas to go on TV and threaten to primary Dennis Kucinich, of all people, for trying to stand up for a the public option.
So Limbaugh and Beck aren't exactly wrong when they suggest that Obama is trying to wreck our way of life - because he is.
(Well, okay, maybe he doesn't realize that's what he's trying to do. Maybe he really does believe all that Reaganist crap he spouts, but it's as plain as the nose on my face that Reagan is the guy who put this train-wreck into high gear, and can he really be stupid enough not to have noticed? Did he hang out with the Chicago boys all that time without understanding what their underlying theory of elitism is? He's gotta know he's destroying our way of life.)
So I see a more important problem in the charade of having people like Bill Kristol or whoever this week's "serious" conservative/centrist is point to the Becks and Palins and Limbaughs and says this right-wing whacko or that one is over the top.
And that problem is that they are taking a lot of liberal/left criticism of Obama and wrapping it up in right-wing crazy, so that all criticism of Obama gets wrapped up with crazy. Anyone who suggests that the Obama administration doesn't have the best interests of the American people at heart (which it doesn't) must be one of those crazy birther types who believe the Caliphate is a scimitar pointed at the heart of Brownsville.

I probably quoted way too much.  My apologies to the copyright police and Avedon Carol.  It was too clearly articulated to edit down.