Yep

The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition. ---Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein

Should Corporations Be Accountable for What They Say?

In a democracy the business of government needs to be open and transparent: we need to see what our elected representatives are saying and doing to make sure that they have our best interests at heart.

Given that, shouldn't the process we use to select those representatives be equally open and transparent, to make sure that we know who got those representatives elected and can judge what their motivations might be?

Since the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision, unlimited corporate spending on political ads has become a major influence on the outcomes of elections. To make sure that the electoral process remains open and fair, the FCC recently ruled that TV stations have to put detailed information on political ad purchases on line.


But Republicans in the House are trying to prevent the FCC from enforcing that rule. For people who claim to believe in personal responsibility, Republicans sure do want to make it hard to hold people accountable for the things they say in public.

Stations are already required to make this information available, but only in paper form at the stations. These stations frequently charge a substantial fee to copy the information, making it hard for non-profit public interest groups to obtain it.

Everything about Republican opposition to this transparency rule is bogus. It's not a burdensome new regulation: they already have to provide this information in hard copy. Every TV station has a website, and it's much easier to slap data into an HTML file and stick it on the website than it is to hire someone to be responsible for producing, maintaining and copying paper documents. A web-based solution can be automated to be made cheap and effortless, while hard copy will always be expensive and personnel-intensive.

The stations claim it's bad because it allows competitors to find out what their advertising rates are. But competitors can already get the data by sending a secretary over to make a paper copy; and they can deduct any costs as a business expense.

The conceit of the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision was that speech is money, and multinational corporations are people. The former is debatable, but the latter is specious nonsense: corporations are a legalistic creation of government; if you prick them they do not bleed. They do not have birth certificates. They cannot vote. Why should they be able buy political campaigns?

And why are these corporate "citizens" so afraid of being identified with the ads they're running? Why do they cower in the shadows instead of bravely speaking their minds? Why don't they want to be associated with the negative half-truths they pay to have spewed over the airwaves? Are they afraid of the wrath of well-informed voters? Or are they really shills for foreign-owned corporations (like, say, TransCanada, which is the force behind the Keystone XL pipeline)?

Due to the the lax disclosure rules after Citizens United, there's already no way to know for sure whether foreign money from multinational corporations owned by the Chinese Red Army or Cayman Island banks is influencing American politics.

And after all, the Constitution doesn't say that you have to be a citizen to enjoy free speech: the First Amendment just says "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press," without mentioning anything about the nationality or citizenship of the purveyors of that speech.

Thus, the prohibition against foreign campaign spending doesn't descend from the Constitution, it's just one of those pesky nanny-state FEC regulations.

In time Republicans will come to bitterly regret the Citizen's United decision. Corporations are fickle; they are becoming increasingly stateless, owned by foreign interests and only care about money. In ten or fifteen years, when the Republican Party consists of nothing but old, white and wizened men, the dynamic new power players from Brazil, India and China may anonymously use their fiscal might to back Democrats and shout down Republican candidates on the American airwaves.

After all, it's completely legal for foreigners to do it even today. All they need is a green card.

Bril!

The End of the Princess Fantasy?

Can you imagine? Donald Trump is involved in another controversy that has nothing to do with Barack Obama's birth certificate!

Miss Pennsylvania has stepped down because she believes Donald Trump's Miss USA pageant was rigged:

A posting on Miss Pennsylvania Sheena Monnin's Facebook page claims another contestant learned the names of the top 5 finishers on Sunday morning — hours before the show was broadcast.

Trump responded in his inimitable style, saying, "We're going to be suing her now," and "[F]rankly, in my opinion, I saw her barely a second and she didn't deserve to be in the top 15." And here I thought Miss USA was all about poise, talent and character.

Trump claims that Monnin stepped down in protest over his decision to allow transgender contestants (one such entrant in the Miss Canada pageant forced the issue). This was echoed by the winner of this year's Miss USA contest, Miss Rhode Island Olivia Culpo. In the so-called "make-or-break" interview round Culpo bravely sucked up to Trump, saying she believed transgender contestants should be allowed.

This makes me wonder: why do we still have beauty pageants like Miss USA and Miss America? I don't question it because Trump's Miss USA pageant now allows those people in, in the same way some some people believe allowing gays to marry somehow negates the meaning of heterosexual marriage.

But in this day and age what is the point of lining up a bunch of women in bathing suits, then evening gowns, then have them do a little talent show, and then ask them a bunch of questions to find out if they're really as vapid as they look?


In the early days of television beauty pageants were a great excuse for TV execs to show lots of scantily clad women. But these days we've got an infinite supply of Victoria's Secret and Sports Illustrated swimsuit specials, salacious network shows, cable porn channels, and an entire Internet dedicated to serving up pictures of naked women.


In its heyday the beauty pageant was the American princess fantasy, one of the few venues where "ladies" could compete against each other. But these days women participate in sports, go to college and med school, compete with men for the same jobs in the real world and by some measures are starting to outperform them. And though I'm no fan of them, highly-produced "reality" shows like Dancing with the Stars and American Idol have supplanted the princess fantasy with dreams of success that require real talent.

Beauty contests like Miss USA are dinosaurs from a bygone era. The only apparent point of Trump's pageant is to scout for his next wife.

Wisconsin Post Mortem

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker survived the recall effort and won 1,334,430 to Barrett's 1,161, 870. These results pretty much jibe with the polls and are nearly identical to the 2010 election with about 300,00 more people voting. So, what does all this say? Nikto has offered his take below and here's mine.

First of all, Walker may not have an across the board GOP legislature with which to work. In District 21, John Lehman (a Democrat) has prevailed over Van Waggaard in the town where I grew up (Racine). Of course, this matters little unless there is a special session before November when 11 of the 16 seats will be up again for election before the session next year. But it is something. The Democrats have control of the State Senate pending a recall.

In addition, I don't think this means much for the national election as these exit polls indicate people who voted for Walker also will vote for President Obama.

The president polled ahead of Mitt Romney by a wide margin – 51 percent to 44 percent, according to the exit poll conducted by Edison Research

Wisconsin voters also preferred Mr. Obama over Mr. Romney to deal with the economy, 43 percent to 37 percent, according to the ABC News exit poll. 

On “helping the middle class,” Obama beat Romney, the presumptive GOP presidential nominee, 47 percent to 36 percent.

The polls also show that 18 percent of the people that voted for Walker support the president. Why is this? My thought is that both Scott Walker and Barack Obama have effectively captured the perception that each of them are for the working man. Obviously, the former is not true. It will be interesting to see how or if the numbers change in Wisconsin over the next few weeks. If you click on the icon to the right, you can see the latest polls show Wisconsin to be a "Lean Democrat" with the president ahead 50 to 43 percent, according to the latest Marquette poll.

Bottom line, Romney is a weak candidate in Wisconsin and has a lot of work to do. The last time the GOP won the state was in 1984. Heck, the GOP couldn't even win it when Bush the elder beat the snot out of Tank Boy! The next few days will see a lot of hay made by the right wing media industrial complex but just like hay, it will be light in actual substance. People simply like the president more than the like Governor Romney.

Some other thoughts...

As Nikto said below, you don't run the same candidate twice. You think the Democrats would have learned their lesson 60 years ago with Adlai Stevenson. Barrett was a poor candidate.

Is Wisconsin the first state to be purchased by the Koch Brothers? In this day and age of Citizen's United, it sure does look that way. I am seriously bummed about this.

It's going to be interesting to see what comes out of this criminal investigation with Walker. Could it end up being Nixon lite? I guess time will tell...

Even though there are a few rays of light out of all of this, I'm still pretty bummed. For those of you who are happy about this, where's the victory?

Wisconsin: a Referendum on Unions

I was expecting Scott Walker to survive the Wisconsin recall vote, and he did. There were basically three reasons:

First: money, money, money, money, money, money, money. Walker took in seven times more money than his opponent, Tom Barrett. Most of that money came from outside Wisconsin, from corporate honchos like the Koch brothers.

Second: Walker just got done beating Barrett in 2010. It was a mistake for Democrats to rerun the loser of the last election.

Third: the election was really Walker vs. The Unions. Walker won by turning the election into a referendum on unions.

Unions aren't very popular these days. Private-sector unions are nearly extinct, and people like Walker are well on their way to castrating public-sector unions. The problem is inherent: the only real bargaining chip unions have is the strike, and strikes inconvenience everyone. Strikes make union members seem selfish and obstructionist. No one remembers how company thugs, often with the help of law enforcement, beat and killed union organizers back in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These days people perceive union members as thugs who threaten people at picket lines.

Unions don't help themselves by pushing for work rules that appear to be featherbedding, demanding unsustainable levels of retirement and health care benefits and opposing changes necessitated by new technologies and shifting business conditions worldwide. The past association of some unions with organized crime is a stigma that is hard to beat, no matter that corruption in corporate management is far more pervasive.

Unions are messy democratic institutions that hold elections and conduct most of their business in public. Corporations are tidy oligarchic dictatorships that do all their conniving out of the public eye, have slick PR people issuing carefully crafted statements, and plenty of money to pay off anyone who might reveal embarrassing facts (as. for example, Rupert Murdoch has spent millions upon millions of dollars in hush money to cover up the phone hacking scandal in Britain).

To survive, the labor movement has to turn public sentiment around and convince Americans that unions are a public good. As union membership has declined, so has the average worker's salary, in real terms. It's simple economics: if there are fewer high-paying union jobs, other employers will be able to offer lower salaries, which non-union workers will have to take. American workers have been in this downward wage spiral for the last 40 years.

Many people perceive union members as doing less work for more money. The truth is that union workers did work harder to earn higher salaries: they organized and used their collective power to achieve better pay and working conditions.

Most of us think of our workplaces as a home away from home and consider our coworkers to be friends or family, and some even consider employers to be like parents. But non-union workers who put all their hard work into doing the actual job in the hopes that they will be rewarded for their devotion and loyalty are making a sentimental mistake.

At the end of the day employers, particularly large corporations, don't care about loyalty. It's all about the money. I'll be the first to admit that it has to be that way. But they will fire your ass the instant it pays for them to do so. Your immediate supervisor might be a nice guy and almost like a father, but he takes his orders from the guys on top, and if he won't fire you his replacement will.

But money also perverts good corporate stewardship. Many corporations will fire your ass even if it materially harms the ability of the company to do its work, as long as it makes the stock price jump and earns the CEO a multi-million dollar bonus.

If it's okay for employers to have this mercenary money-money-money mindset, why shouldn't employees have it as well? Unions do: they're essentially employee-owned corporations that sell labor. They know that employers will pit employees against each other and pick them off one by one unless the employees are organized and stick together.

But until unions clean up their act and show Americans they are a force for economic growth and fairness, corporate surrogates like Scott Walker will continue to make unions the issue. And Americans will be forced to work longer hours, for lower salaries, under even less desirable conditions.

Hey, Check Out The New Sidebar

Thanks to Nikto (and me a little) we have a link to Electoral-Vote.com, the premier site for election year goings-on. Andy does a great job of keeping his polls and numbers up to date as well as offering a no nonsense look at election news. The numbers for the presidential race and the Senate change frequently so enjoy!

You will also notice The Most Popular Posts list as well as a Google share thing. Isn't the most popular one interesting? That one has had over a thousand page loads since I put it up. Crazy!

Not Coming From The White House

The editorial board of Bloomberg News put up a recent piece which perfectly summarized the answer to "Who's to blame" for our economy.

CEOs broadly point to overregulation as the biggest economic damper. But the raw numbers of new regulations don't support the uncertainty purveyors, either. The Office of Management and Budget says 931 major regulations -- those with enough economic significance to require OMB review -- were issued by the executive branch during the first three years of George W. Bush's first term, more than the 886 from Obama's first three years.

Right. So why wasn't this a problem during the Bush Administration? But let's get to the main answer.

Companies are also sitting on cash or refusing to hire because, paradoxically, unemployment is a drag on consumer demand, a problem they lay at the president's feet. It's important to note that historical data collected by economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff show that it takes almost five years for employment to recover from the wreckage of a deep financial crisis. 

Hiring is down because consumer demand remains low as households continue to deleverage. Employers are also using technology and other productivity enhancements to make do with fewer workers.

If there are fewer workers in an economy that is 70 percent consumer driven, then demand is going to suffer because there are less consumers. If the government does not stimulate demand, what entity does it?

The article also has a couple of other things to say of note.

Much of the problem is self-inflicted by Congress. Lawmakers are putting off until after November's elections a crush of expiring Bush-era tax cuts, the payroll tax reduction and dozens of other tax breaks and spending programs. If they expire, and if an approved $100 billion in spending cuts occur at the same time, economic growth would slow to 0.5 percent next year, the Congressional Budget Office says.

This is the elephant in the room that no one wants to tackle. Letting all the tax cuts expire and cutting spending would be a disaster for our economy and we would likely dip into another recession.

Those invoking the uncertainty principle fail to mention that inflation and interest rates are historically low. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has repeatedly pledged not to raise rates at least through late 2014 -- a gold-plated certainty guarantee if we ever saw one.

Yeah, where's the uncertainty again? And how about all those folks that keep saying that inflation is going to happen? Any day now...

So, the issue of uncertainty is not coming from the White House. It's coming from the private sector and, to a certain extent, Congress, for failing to move before the election. Of course, we all know what the goal of the House is so I guess I don't blame them:)

Uh...I'll go out on a limb here and say...because he's white?

Who Would Be Able to Fix Our Finances?

Over at the Washington Post, Fred Hiatt asks whether Obama or Romney would be more likely to fix the nation's budget problems. He spends an entire column without arriving at any conclusion, though he does define success as a budget resembling the Simpson-Bowles plan. That plan involves a combination of increased revenues and entitlement cuts.

In the piece Hiatt basically accuses both Obama and Romney of being morally weak. Then he says:

Both men surely understand what has to be done, and both would have an incentive to do it. You could argue that Obama, believing in a larger role for government, has a larger incentive; none of his “winning the future” agenda will be imaginable except on a foundation of stable long-term finances. But no more would Romney want to govern through four years of recurring debt-ceiling crises and rising interest costs.

It's ridiculous to talk about Obama's and Romney's incentives: of course they want to fix the budget. But it's really about what's possible. The practical politics of the situation will decide what will happen, not what the president wants.

In a second term, Obama is freed from the pressures of reelection and having to cater to every special interest group in the Democratic Party. Like most moderate and Blue-Dog Democrats, Obama has already accepted the premise of the Simpson-Bowles plan. Which means that even if he can't get the most intransigent Democrats to work with him, with the help of a relatively small number of reasonable, truly patriotic Republicans could get some significant entitlement cuts enacted.

Romney, on the other hand, has already rejected the Simpson-Bowles plan out of hand because it includes tax increases. So, out of the gate, Romney simply cannot be successful by Hiatt's standard. Romney is campaigning with promises of even more tax cuts and increased military spending. These will vastly exceed the savings we could get from even the most draconian entitlement cuts. Romney can't flip-flop on these promises because he would have the cloud of a 2016 reelection run hanging over him. People like Grover Norquist would never allow Romney and the Republicans in Congress to consider anything remotely resembling a tax increase.

But let's say Romney does the unthinkable and proposes something like Simpson-Bowles. The vast majority of his party would revile him. Thus, just like Obama, Romney would have very little Republican support and would have to count on Democrats to provide most of the votes. The problem is, those Democrats would have no incentive to help Romney. For the last three years they've suffered from Republican filibuster, sabotage, obstructionism and intransigence. And because Romney's first actions in office would be to gut many of the programs Democrats favor (health care, etc.), they will be in no mood to compromise with him.

But that's all moot, because there's zero chance Romney would ever propose a plan like Simpson-Bowles in the first place. Which makes me wonder why Hiatt even bothered to ask the question.


In the end a lot will depend on what happens in Senate and House elections, and whether the Senate fixes the filibuster rule. But as long as Grover Norquist and the Tea Partisans control the party, any future under Republican control looks bleak.

Uh...Huh?

Chamber’s Donohue Grades Obama on Economy: C+

Not an F? Not Armageddon? I don't get it.

Considering the source of this rating, the president should consider this winning the jackpot!

:---)

Capitalism is too important to be left to ... capitalists.

It turns out that capitalism is a marvelous creation for efficiently producing and distributing goods and services. It is the genius that unleashes creativity through human energy and effort. It satisfies the human need to build something, for people to say "this is what I accomplished."

Yep.

But there is also a dark side of capitalism. When its excesses have been left unchecked, as they have been at times in our history and were again preceding the Great Recession, government leadership has emerged to save capitalism from itself. It took the analyses of historians to appreciate what Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin Roosevelt accomplished. At the time of their courageous leadership, they were hated by business leaders. It is a classic case of the dogs of capitalism biting the hand that preserved their existence. 


Hmm...that sounds familiar:)

Unfortunately, the previously mentioned dark side of capitalism is the outcome of a system without constraints, the necessary regulations that serve to check the negative consequences. The harm to society has been legendary. Examples are child labor, acid rain, rivers catching fire, destruction of our atmosphere's life-protecting ozone, lead poisoning, black lung disease, mountaintop removal, the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, toxic waste dumps, selling lethal tainted meat and produce, the destruction of urban rail transit systems, and lung cancer induced by cigarettes. This last example calls to memory the tobacco CEOs arrogantly telling Congress that "no, we don't believe cigarettes are addictive or cancer causing."

Yep.

You see, capitalism is too important to be left to the whims of capitalists. When Barack Obama took the oath of president, his inbox came straight from hell. Over the objections of a GOP that wanted government to imitate the disastrous inaction of Herbert Hoover, Obama and the Federal Reserve unfroze the panicked financial system and averted a collapse into another economic depression. The lessons of the 1930s were not forgotten. 

These lessons again teach that the temptation to put a businessman in the White House should be rejected. It would be courting disaster.

No shit. And it's nice to hear that what I have been saying all along comes from a retired engineer and business executive.

Since It Is OK to Compare the Federal Budget to a Family Budget

The Alternative?

Yesterday's tough economic news has sent the media into a tizzy. How can the president possibly win re-election now? After all, it's June...five months before the election...and this is when voters make up their minds, right? Hee hee hee....

I've always been amazed by the emotional maturity of the media (see: 13 year old girl) but I guess I'd like to look at this from a practical point of view. Let's assume that our economic woes are all President Obama's fault. His policies have brought us to this sluggish place and we need a change. So...what's the alternative?

First up, we have Mitt Romney. Here is his plan to fix our economic woes.  After reading all of his various ideas, the first question that came into my head was...how is this different from President Obama's plans exactly? Oh, right. Less spending and less taxes.

But wait. That doesn't make any sense because we are still under the Bush Tax plan and look at the results. We also are spending less than in the past so where's the growth? Moreover, nowhere do I see a scoring by the CBO or any other neutral entity that gives us an idea as to what Mitt's plan will do for the economy.

The other main alternative we have is Paul Ryan's budget.  This offers even less than Mitt's plan in the way of a real plan and reads more like a cross between Ayn Rand and Thomas Sowell. Again, where's the scoring of this plan by the CBO or a similar entity?

Further, neither of these plans cut defense spending-a key contributor to our nation's debt and deficit-so how can anyone take this stuff seriously?

Looking past Romney and Ryan, what do we have? Well, we have the anarcho-capitalist views of the right wing blogsphere. Does anyone really think that a return to the 1890s is a good idea?  So, really, we don't have much in the way of a substantive alternative to the Democrat's policies.

To put it simply, no one on the right really knows what the fuck to do. Please correct me if I am wrong or offer a plan (of your own or someone else's) that I may have missed because I don't see it. All I see is the president's jobs bill stalled out in Congress because they are more concerned with beating him than enacting policies that would help the economy.

Meanwhile, Paul Krugman continues to call for increased government spending in the short term as the only real solution. Is he right? If not, why not?

Here Comes Their Hero

I'm still amazed when I hear the right whine about the liberal media. To begin with, isn't that playing the victim card?

Yes. Yes it is.

But the real stunner is that they think it even exists in the first place. Take a look at this recent piece about Scott Walker in The New York Times.

On a recent afternoon, Mr. Walker, who is only the third governor in the nation to face a recall election, dashed onto a makeshift stage on a loading dock here as supporters screamed, the song “Only in America” pounded from loudspeakers, a bank of television cameras rolled and Mr. Jindal, the governor of Louisiana, beamed behind him. 

With the remnants of a sinus infection and round-the-clock campaign stops lingering in his voice, Mr. Walker urged the crowd not to let up, declaring that union bosses were pouring money into the state to remove him because, he said, “they don’t like the fact that we’ve got a governor here who stood up and took on the powerful special interests.”

That sounds to me more like a description of Bruce Springsteen's latest concert than a political event. I'll leave Walker's line about special interests and pouring money alone...for now:)

Of course, the Times isn't the only paper doing it. My local paper, the Minneapolis Star and Tribune, which has been called the Star and Sickle on more than one occasion, has this article in today's paper.

The right finds its champion: Wisconsin Gov. Walker

"People recognize you've got to have bold and courageous people in politics to take on the status quo and say, 'This isn't working,'" said Kurt Bauer, president of the organization. "If we can't do it in Wisconsin -- if we recall Governor Walker for doing something that was difficult but necessary -- it's a bad omen for the rest of the nation."

The whole piece is one giant love fest for Governor Walker.

Here's another piece from Politico  which essentially makes Scott Walker look like a victim. And here's a list from RCP with the same general themes I have mentioned thus far.  Hell, even the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel has endorsed Walker! 

So, I'm wondering...where's that liberal media again?

Need or Greed?

A central tenet of Mitt Romney's presidential campaign and conservative orthodoxy in general is that taxes on wealthy "job creators" at the very top must be lowered, preferably to zero. It is their contention that given this extra money these "job creators" would immediately turn around and invest this money in extra productive capacity, which would require them to hire additional workers.

The logic is that high taxes discourage these guys from working, and low taxes lure them to work harder to get even richer. Since these folks already have all the money they could possibly need, so their primary motivator must be greed.

Other tenets of the conservative orthodoxy are that even the poorest people should be forced to pay taxes to make them feel "vested," that they don't need the payroll tax cut President Obama instituted, that the minimum wage should be eliminated and that unemployment and welfare benefits are inherently evil. Even Medicare and Social Security should be abolished in the long run.

The logic is that the more money these lazy poor people have, the less inclined they will be to work. That is, their primary motivator must be need.

This is a false dichotomy. People are people, and their motivations are the same no matter what their income level. The real difference is the means that they have at their disposal to act upon their motivations.

Corporate profits have been up in the last few years and many companies are just sitting on tons of cash. Tax rates are down significantly from what they were 15 years ago (halved on capital gains!). That was the last time our economy was doing really well, and people at all income levels were doing better.

The fact is, dozens of large corporations already pay no taxes at all and hundreds pay very little. Lowering their taxes will provide no additional motivation. But corporations are not creating lots of jobs in the United States, even though they could easily afford to. Why?

They don't need to. CEOs are swimming in corporate profits and getting bonuses out the wazoo. It's easier for them to sit on their duffs, make their current employees work more hours, offshore more jobs, and take no risks.

As a motivator, need trumps greed every time. By conservative logic, since greed is failing as a motivator we must enlist need. In other words, the laziness and overweening sense of entitlement that conservatives insist permeates the lower classes has become even more pervasive in the upper crust "job creators," and should be slapped down with equal force.

The obvious answer? Raise taxes on "job creators" unless they actually create jobs. In particular, companies that funnel jobs and profits overseas to escape US taxes should be hammered. That will make them work harder, the same way cutting off welfare and unemployment benefits forces the poor to work harder. To maintain profit margins the CEOs will have to expand their businesses and create more jobs. And if they're like Ayn Rand's ostensible heroes and just take their ball and go home? Corporate shareholders will just replace them, or ambitious newcomers will rise up to do the job they're too lazy to do.

There's plenty of evidence that higher taxes (within reason) don't hurt the economy. The US economy performed much better from the 1950s through the 1990s when taxes were higher (much higher in the 50s) than after the Bush tax cuts. As Paul Krugman points out, high-tax Sweden and Austria are doing better today than the United States and the rest of Europe.

With more people earning more money, there will be more customers for those companies, which will mean more profits.

Thus, satisfying need and greed at the same time.

What amazes the most about these figures is not the disparity but the willful ignorance of the right and the cries of "class warfare" and "wealth envy." With an economy that is 70 percent consumer spending, it's no wonder ours is stagnant with so much wealth at the top.

In addition, I fear that if this trend continues we may indeed have a socialist revolution and it will be the real ones, not the make believe ones that exist only in the minds of guys like Bill Whittle and Kevin Baker.

And it will all be because we had to manage their fantasies...