Why I fear for the Republic, cont'd.

MANIFESTO

Just a few things to irritate me even more than the leaky roof does.

The revolution has not been in technology. The revolution has been that the immorally rich have finally rebelled against the very possibility of democracy and equality and are making sure to nail down any hole in their walls against the rabble, eliminate any possibility of clever "little people" being able to better themselves with hard work or clever ideas. It has become increasingly difficult for any small business to emerge or survive, for poor kids to work their way up to a decent living. And it's not an accident.

A government's policies determine who lives and who dies, who earns and who starves. Government makes the money and decides where to spend it. It can give to rich people and buy nothing in return, or it can give it to the rest of us and give us roads and jobs and a stable base of government-employed public servants whose steady income results in steady spending in the real economy and thus creates the private sector jobs. A government can set policies that protect its workers, or one that forces them to compete with the worst, most corrupt slave economies.

And

[W]e have spent the past thirty years doing everything we could to transfer the wealth of the nation into the bank accounts of the affluent, to send them victorious, happy and glorious, long to reign over us.

Oh, we’ve cut their taxes, gladly transferring much of the cost of keeping their holdings safe onto our own shoulders. We’ve furnished them with special megaphones so that their voices might be heard over the hubbub of the crowd. We have conferred upon them separate and better schools, their very own transportation system, and a full complement of private security guards. We’ve built an entire culture of courtiers and sycophants to make their every waking hour an otherworldly delight.

We let them build a system of bonuses and “executive compensation” on the theory that it would be good for everyone if the people on top got to take home much, much more. And when it turned out that the theory was wrong—that in the most famous cases the rich chased bonuses not to the shareholders’ benefit but at their expense—why, we promptly bailed them out. We allowed them to step up to the Fed’s discount window and fill their pockets, we generously transferred their dumb investments to our balance sheet, and we sent them off with little more than a request that they please not do it again.

BO implied in 2008 that this situation was going to "change," but when he asks the plutocratic Jeff Immelt to head his Economic Advisory Panel, it's pretty clear what we'll be ending up with.

Or, to put it another, much more famous, way: "The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which."