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| Gimme Your Tired, Your Poor, Your Huddled Masses! |
As Jonathan Chait* points out, the authors have actually written an exposé of oligarchic-political incest without even realizing it, seeming to dwell instead upon the thrill of getting inside access to all those movers and shakers. It's a veritable Who's Who of the Ruling Class and what makes them tick. It gives a blow-by-blow account of how they plan to blow us to smithereens. Some excerpts:
Most politicians in the most powerful positions in Washington agree in private that there are a half-dozen or so big things they could and should do that could put a rocket booster on the U.S. economy — but they are too timid to say it in public. (translation: they want to steal from the poor and give so much to themselves that they'll explode with their own gaseous excess. The only thing holding them back is the thought of pitchforks and torches.)
This is the clear takeaway from conversations we have had over the past three months with top lawmakers, officials, their senior aides and the CEOs who advise and lobby all of them. Many of the conversations were private but many were not. (translation: public officials and CEOs are in it together up to their piggy little eyeballs.)
The current tax-and-spending debate only flirts with what these insiders say needs to be done. Instead, top White House and congressional leaders talk privately of the need for tax reform that goes way beyond individuals and rates; much deeper Social Security and Medicare changes than currently envisioned; quick movement on trade agreements, including a proposed one with Europe; an energy policy that exploits the oil and gas boom; and allowing foreign-born students with science expertise to stay here and start businesses. (The Fiscal Cliff is naught but a cynical smokescreen. The hysterical back and forthing over the Bush tax cuts is just cover for the planned looting of the Social Security trust fund and the raising of the Medicare age. The private insurance leeches must be further enriched. The plutocrats want those American job-killing free trade deals, and more outsourcing for cheaper labor and production costs. But they can't admit it out loud, especially the Democrats. Both parties want the tar sands pipeline and unlimited fracking. There's a growing doctor shortage, thanks to the dearth of American medical schools. Rich people, even though they're perfectly willing to cut medical care for others, are paranoically concerned about their own healthy old ages. So bring on the whip-smart immigrants trained at another country's expense, in order to benefit the American Elites.)
“Both Democrats and Republicans privately agree,” Warren Buffett told us. “They just don’t want to be the first to speak out on their side.” Erskine Bowles, a Democrat who meets regularly with officials at the White House and in Congress, said lawmakers often plead to him: “Save us from ourselves.” ( Blustering Billionaire Bullies Buffett & Bowles Bloviate: "It is the job of the Patriotic Plutocracy to wipe the original sin of acting in the interests of regular people right off the timorous little souls of the politicians.")
The country’s most influential CEOs, who have been meeting with Obama and congressional leaders on these very topics, are telling them if they do some or all of this, investment, market growth and jobs will quickly follow. (Trickle down, trickle down, trickle down. If we throw enough of our crap, maybe some of it will stick to the walls of their minds, before it inevitably trickles down to drown the people at the bottom.)
Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan said long-term commitments to measures such as tax reform and trade would provide a “certainty premium” that would help bring corporate cash off the sidelines. “If we can just allow people to keep their confidence up by getting some of these issues off the table,” he said, “you would see the economy grow and momentum continue to build, and unemployment continue to ease down, and housing starts [go] up and housing prices [go] up. All that will continue to build on itself.” (Repatriate that trillion-dollar stash we've been hiding in offshore bank accounts -- and don't tax it! Trickle down, trickle down, trickle down. The more we can hoard, the more we can lord. You're makin' us noyvous, see, and noyvous bankstahs make dangerous bankstahs. We'll keep up the shakedown, make you an offer you can't refuse because we're God. We can create a world of jobs in seven biblical days.)
Jamie Dimon, chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, is pushing immigration and tax reform. “America is poised to grow faster if we have good policy,” he said. “[Businesses] have capacity, they have liquidity, they’re well capitalized. Housing has turned. The table is being set pretty well. If we add good policy to that, it can lift off.” (Hedge funds are buying up foreclosured homes at bargain basement prices to rent them to the same people who were swindled out of them in the first place. Their elite table is set with the dregs of humanity. But they're still not satisfied. They want to extract every last ounce of blood and treasure as rocket fuel to go to that planet made of diamonds, leaving everybody else spinning without a tether in space, to be inexorably sucked into the Great Black Hole.)
By no means are any of the policy issues easy to resolve. But in almost every case, they are not new — and hardly exotic. They have been litigated by committees, commissions and think tanks for years. Next year represents the best opportunity in decades to do something about some or all of them, according to those in the trenches. ( Please see this 2006 clip of then-Senator Barack Obama pledging allegiance to the Rubinites at the Brookings tank. He will provide the perfect Democratic cover to mundanely destroy the New Deal, beginning next year. Oh, and the thought of millionaires and billionaires sweating in the trenches.... doesn't it make you want to shovel their bipartishit right back on top of them?)
The Politico pundits finally cut to the chase toward the end of their screed:
The critical problem is entitlement reform, and if taxes even have to go up to get an entitlement deal done, that still solves the vast majority of the issue,” said Kenneth Griffin, who founded Citadel LLC, a hedge fund, and is worth an estimated $3 billion. He is a Republican. (If we have to pay a few dollars more for a few years more, so be it. It's well worth the price of admission to the spectacle of watching old people starve to death in the richest country on earth.)* Chait, who recently suggested that the Medicare age be raised to 67 simply to display how magnanimous Obama and the Wall Street wing of the Democratic Party can be, actually agrees with the policies of the plutocrats. He declares himself astounded, however, at the clueless insularity of the elites who don't factor in the labor and environmental costs of their selfishness. In other words, if you're serious about being an unmitigated greedhead, the least you can do is pretend to care about how your psychopathy will look to outsiders. And above all, be wonkish, for cryin' out loud. Give us specifics and rith-ma-tic.
