I see pitchforks...

I see pitchforks...

But the problem isn’t that we have inequality. Some inequality is intrinsic to any high-functioning capitalist economy. The problem is that inequality is at historically high levels and getting worse every day. Our country is rapidly becoming less a capitalist society and more a feudal society. Unless our policies change dramatically, the middle class will disappear, and we will be back to late 18th-century France. Before the revolution.
And so I have a message for my fellow filthy rich, for all of us who live in our gated bubble worlds: Wake up, people. It won’t last.

If we don’t do something to fix the glaring inequities in this economy, the pitchforks are going to come for us. No society can sustain this kind of rising inequality. In fact, there is no example in human history where wealth accumulated like this and the pitchforks didn’t eventually come out. You show me a highly unequal society, and I will show you a police state. Or an uprising. There are no counterexamples. None. It’s not if, it’s when....

It’s the long-overdue rebuttal to the trickle-down economics worldview that has become economic orthodoxy across party lines—and has so screwed the American middle class and our economy generally. Middle-out economics rejects the old misconception that an economy is a perfectly efficient, mechanistic system and embraces the much more accurate idea of an economy as a complex ecosystem made up of real people who are dependent on one another.

Which is why the fundamental law of capitalism must be: If workers have more money, businesses have more customers. Which makes middle-class consumers, not rich businesspeople like us, the true job creators. Which means a thriving middle class is the source of American prosperity, not a consequence of it. The middle class creates us rich people, not the other way around....

The thing about us businesspeople is that we love our customers rich and our employees poor. So for as long as there has been capitalism, capitalists have said the same thing about any effort to raise wages. We’ve had 75 years of complaints from big business—when the minimum wage was instituted, when women had to be paid equitable amounts, when child labor laws were created. Every time the capitalists said exactly the same thing in the same way: We’re all going to go bankrupt. I’ll have to close. I’ll have to lay everyone off. It hasn’t happened. In fact, the data show that when workers are better treated, business gets better. The naysayers are just wrong.




MORE:
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/06/the-pitchforks-are-coming-for-us-plutocrats-108014.html#.U60lUfldV_k
http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2014/06/just-go-read-hanauer-today-by.html

More In Sorrow Than In Anger...

Grover Norquist: - nothing is more pro family than shooting your old lady

Degenerate Gandhi
?@Bro_Pair
@GroverNorquist What is your favorite song by Janis Joplin and Jimi?
https://twitter.com/Bro_Pair/status/481894144529276930

Grover Norquist ✔ @GroverNorquist
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@Bro_Pair Hendrix: "Hey joe..where you going with that gun in your hand." pro-family, pro-2nd amendment. Janis: anything. Everything.
5:53 PM - 25 Jun 2014
https://twitter.com/GroverNorquist/statuses/481963335231889408

http://www.balloon-juice.com/2014/06/26/im-going-way-down-south-way-down-where-i-can-be-free/
https://twitter.com/constantvelocit

Liz Cheney couldn’t get elected in Wyoming, but w 10th Circuit decision, now Mary can get married

Virginia's Republican legislators broke into Governor's office to block ACA coverage for poor

WED JUN 25, 2014 AT 03:00 PM PDT
Virginia's Republican legislators broke into Governor's office to block ACA coverage for poor
by Horace Boothroyd III for The Fourth Estate


In their fervor to ensure that the least amongst their citizens keep getting kicked in the teeth, the Republicans of Virginia have stooped to breaking and entering an executive office in order to block Medicaid expansion.

There is a time limit between delivery of documents and the Governor's need to authorize them. So the Republican House Speaker William J. Howell authorized security to illegally enter the Governor's office during a holiday break to ensure the clock started ticking before the Governor even knew the bill was delivered.

Is there anything the Republicans won't do to harm the 47%?

Army Clears Bergdahl of Any Misconduct During Captivity

Source: The Wire



As the Army continues to investigate whether Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl is guilty of deserting his unit, this afternoon they said there is no reason to believe that Bergdahl engaged in any misconduct during his five years in captivity.

In fact, that's all that the Army said:


We have no reason to believe that he engaged in any misconduct."


Bergdahl electrified the national discourse last month after he was freed in a prisoner swap involving five members of the Taliban held at Guantanamo Bay. As charges against his character emerged, the narrative quickly shifted from Bergdahl as POW to Bergdahl as despicable deserter, unworthy bargaining chip, unwitting endangerer of America, and worse.

Here's what else we're learning about Bergdahl:

-- For now, he's on full Army pay, including $200,000 during his time in captivity, all of which he may ultimately have to return.

-- Military investigators have not read Bergdahl his rights.

-- Bergdahl has not yet spoken to his parents.

Read more: http://www.thewire.com/national/2014/06/army-clears-bergdahl-of-any-misconduct-during-captivity/373485/

PALIN: "If Republicans are going to act like Democrats, what's the use in getting all gung ho...?"

"If Republicans are going to act like Democrats, what's the use in getting all gung ho about getting other Republicans in there?"

-- Sarah Palin, in an interview on Fox News.

http://video.foxnews.com/v/3640594018001/sarah-palin-talks-primary-elections-across-the-us/#sp=show-clips
http://politicalwire.com/archives/2014/06/25/extra_bonus_quote_of_the_day.html

Dare You Peer Into the Secret Files of Dick Cheney?

Dare You Peer Into the Secret Files of Dick Cheney?

Tom the Dancing Bug, IN WHICH former Vice President Dick Cheney assumes human form in order to taunt and enrage actual humans.


http://boingboing.net/2014/06/25/tom-the-dancing-bug-dare-you.html

What is a Republican These Days? (from an inside source)

The problem for those who call themselves Republicans is that it is harder and harder to say exactly what a Republican is these days. The great lesson from Mississippi is that Republican means, more or less, that if elected the party will reward its major donors, who are just different than the Democrats' major donors. Policy differences are about different donors, not an actual agenda to shift the country in a different direction."


"I continue to oppose a third party. I'm just not sure what the Republican Party really stands for any more other than telling Obama no and telling our own corporate interests yes. That's not much of a platform.

We practice fiscal cruelty and call it an economy. We practice legal cruelty and call it justice

THE UNITED STATES OF CRUELTY
By Charles P. Pierce on June 24, 2014


.........................................


There is a new kind of systematized cruelty in our daily lives, in how we relate to each other, and in how we treat our fellow citizens, and, therefore, there is a new kind of systematized cruelty in our politics as well. It is not as though there haven't been times in the history of our country in which cruelty was practiced for political or pecuniary advantage. It is not as though there haven't been times in our history when the circumstances in people's lives did not conspire cruelly against them, or when the various systems that influenced those lives did not conspire in their collective cruelty against their seeking any succor or relief. There was slavery, and the cruel war that ended it. There was the organized cruelty that followed Reconstruction, and the modern, grinding cruelty of the Industrial Revolution and the Gilded Age that followed it. There were two World Wars, the first one featuring a new era in mechanized slaughter and the second featuring a new era in industrialized genocide. There was the Great Depression. There was McCarthyism, and the cruelty that was practiced in Southeast Asia that ended up partly dehumanizingthe entire country. There always has been the cruelty of poverty and disease.

But there is something different abroad in the politics now, perhaps because we are in the middle of an era of scarcity and because we have invested ourselves in a timid culture of austerity and doubt. The system seems too full now of opportunities to grind and to bully. We have politicians, most of whom will never have to work another day in their lives, making the argument seriously that there is no role in self-government for the protection and welfare of the political commonwealth as that term applies to the poorest among us. We have politicians, most of whom have gilt-edged health care plans, making the argument seriously that an insurance-friendly system of health-care reform is in some way bad for the people whom it is helping the most, and we have politicians seriously arguing that those without health-care somehow are more free than the people who have turned to their government, their self-government, for help in this area. In the wake of a horrific outbreak of violence in a Connecticut elementary school, we have enacted gun laws now that make it easier to shoot our fellow citizens and not harder to do so. Our police forces equip themselves with weapons of war and then go out and look for wars to fight. We are cheap. We are suspicious. We will shoot first, and we will do it with hearts grown cold and, yes, cruel.

We cheer for cruelty and say that we are asking for personal responsibility among those people who are not us, because the people who are not us do not deserve the same benefits of the political commonwealth that we have. In our politics, we have become masters of camouflage. We practice fiscal cruelty and call it an economy. We practice legal cruelty and call it justice. We practice environmental cruelty and call it opportunity. We practice vicarious cruelty and call it entertainment. We practice rhetorical cruelty and call it debate. We set the best instincts of ourselves in conflict with each other until they tear each other to ribbons, and until they are no longer our best instincts but something dark and bitter and corroborate with itself. And then it fights all the institutions that our best instincts once supported, all the elements of the political commonwealth that we once thought permanent, all the arguments that we once thought settled -- until there is a terrible kind of moral self-destruction that touches those institutions and leaves them soft and fragile and, eventually, evanescent. We do all these things, cruelty running through them like hot blood, and we call it our politics.

Because of that, the daily gunplay no longer surprises us. The rising rates of poverty no longer surprise us. The chaos of our lunatic public discourse no longer surprises us. We make war based on lies and deceit because cruelty is seen to be enough, seen to be the immutable law of the modern world. We make policy based on being as tough as we can on the weakest among us, because cruelty is seen to be enough, seen to be the fundamental morality behind what ultimately is merely the law of the jungle. We do all these things, cruelty running through them like a cold river, and we call it our politics.

...............


MORE:
http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/Cruelty_In_Excelsis