Progressive Plutocrats Ltd

From the Department of Putting Lipstick on a Neoliberal Pig:

An exclusive cartel of wealthy Democratic donors imagine that the way to win back the presidency in 2020 is to back more progressive candidates who can attract the black and brown working class from the Sunbelt and the Southwest. Their abandonment of the deplorable white working class from the Rust Belt who went for Trump leaves a big vacuum that has to be filled. To that end, they held a private strategy session at a luxury Washington D.C. hotel last week. And with only a few token exceptions, the voters whom they hope to attract were themselves barred from the discussions. To make matters even more anti-democratic, journalists were barred from covering the discussions and not invited to partake of the pricey hors d'oevres.

 Kenneth Vogel of the New York Times was escorted out of the exclusive affair after he sneaked in anyway. Vogel has been covering the secretive Plutocratic Progressives for quite some time now, and they apparently aren't fond of him. In his most recent article about the billionaire-run Democracy Alliance and its offshoots, he described how the wealthy donors have quietly been co-opting such erstwhile grassroots organizations as Black Voters Matter, BlackPAC and Color of Change. Although the rabble and reporters were barred from the recent strategy session reception, a few carefully selected minority leaders were graciously allowed a seat at the gourmet table.

Vogel writes:

Since its creation in 2005, the Democracy Alliance has played a significant role in shaping the institutional ecosystem of the political left by steering more than $1.6 billion to recommended liberal and Democratic groups, according to an alliance official.It has helped to fund an array of new nonprofit groups dedicated to taking on Mr. Trump. Its ranks include some of the left’s most prolific donors, such as the billionaire investors George Soros and Tom Steyer. This past week’s meeting drew appearances from several Democratic politicians, including Representatives Adam B. Schiff of California and Pramila Jayapal of Washington, as well as Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon and Governor-elect Jared Polis of Colorado, a former Democracy Alliance donor.

 Schiff, who voted for the Iraq War and has also legislatively backed the US-assisted Saudi genocidal war on Yemen, is a member of the right-wing New Democrat Coalition, an offshoot of the Clintons' Democratic Leadership Council, which was instrumental in moving the party to the right as a way to join the arch-conservative and anti-labor Reagan Revolution. He is also at the forefront of the congressional #Russiagate investigation of Donald Trump and as such, is a ubiquitous rising political star on the cable shows.

Polis, the owner of a network of for-profit charter schools and the founder of ProFlowers, is also a member of the conservative New Democrats. As a  congressional representative, he was at the forefront of the Obama administration's punishing neoliberal Race to the Top agenda, which predicates government funding of public schools and teacher retention on the scores of standardized tests administered by private, for-profit corporations. Although he opposed the 2016 Colorado ballot initiative for single payer health care, his winning gubernatorial campaign included mealy-mouthed support for "some kind of universal health system" that would "expand access and reduce costs." In other words, he is not for single payer and not for Medicare For All.

If these guys are positioning themselves in what the New Democratic Alliance considers a big bold new "lefty" roster of candidates, then the Democrats have moved further right than even I had imagined.  

Just because the plutocratic donors of the Democratic Gentry Party see, as the New York Times headline announced, "a leftward path to beating Trump"  this does not mean they are embracing democratic socialism as an actual mode of governance. Far from it. In barring the press from their events, they're even less fond of the First Amendment than they are of the actual bodies of distressed people seeking physical entree to closed receptions guarded by private security forces.

Without a hint of irony, in fact, Tory Gavito of the NDA offshoot "Way to Win" said that "the concentration of young people, poor people and people of color who used to sit on the sidelines because Democrats have not inspired them will upend the map.” (if not the heavily armed gates of the fabulously wealthy themselves.)

Among the donors spotted by Vogel at the closed reception were Susan Pritzker, heiress of the Hyatt hotel chain, where employees have been striking against low wages and poor working conditions, and Leah Hunt, scion of the Texas oil dynasty.

As he pointed out in his Times article, while these billionaires are making a big show of criticizing the neoliberal deficit-hawk Clintonism espoused by Pete Peterson's Third Way think tank and centrist operatives like David Brock, their Democracy Alliance continues to give money to them. Just as Wall Street does, the Progressive Plutocrats are hedging their bets.

And while Vogel, in the politest Timesian way possible, is exposing them for who they are, his colleague Paul Krugman is spreading their message for them -- without, of course, ever mentioning them by name.

His latest column is worth quoting at length to fully appreciate its underlying Progressive Plutocrats Ltd message:

Even if they’re personally doing well, many voters in lagging regions have a sense of grievance, a feeling that they’re being disrespected by the glittering elites of superstar cities; this sense of grievance all too easily turns into racial antagonism. Conversely, however, the transformation of the G.O.P. into a white nationalist party alienates voters — even white voters — in those big, successful metropolitan areas. So the regional economic divide becomes a political chasm.
Can this chasm be bridged? Honestly, I doubt it.
We can and should do a lot to improve the lives of Americans in lagging regions. We can guarantee access to health care and raise their incomes with wage subsidies and other policies (in fact, the earned-income tax credit, which helps low-wage workers, already disproportionally benefits workers in low-income states).
But restoring these regions’ dynamism is much harder, because it means swimming against a powerful economic tide.

Economic grievance has turned into racial antagonism. Rust Belt voters who lost their jobs to corporate trade deals are not only resentful, they're racist. Therefore it's not worth it for the wealthy liberal oligarchs of the Gentry Party to even bother wooing them back into their Big Gilded Tent. The chasm is just too wide! Therefore, besides the Black and Brown voters of the South and West, the Gentries might also have a shot at wooing the upper class white Republicans from the Coasts by using the wedge issue of Trump, rather than promising to improve people's lives in any meaningful way.

 But still, to show what a good liberal he is, Krugman does deign to offer the Laggards "access to health care"  - which is plutocrat-speak for No Medicare For All, Not Ever, No Way.  And as usual, he doesn't explore the reasons why these regions became so distressed in the first place. If it's not those mysterious Headwinds, it's the Powerful Economic Tide which keeps washing over people with no cruel policy decisions by the ruling class racketeers of the Duopoly having had anything to do with it.

Stuff just happens. Too bad, so sad. And so extremely, sickeningly smug.

My (not well-received) published response to Krugman:

"Guaranteeing access to health care" is not the same thing as guaranteed, universal, single payer health care. And the vast majority of Americans (70%) who now support Medicare for All know it. They even include those "deplorable" Rust Belt voters who refused to come out for Hillary Clinton, despite many having cast their votes for Barack Obama in 2012. Clinton announced on the campaign trail, in no uncertain terms, that single payer "will never, ever come to pass."

Nothing attracts desperate people like telling them they'll just have to "shop around" each year for ever more restrictive, expensive private insurance. And even if they do scrape together the premiums, there's no guarantee that they'll be able to afford the co-pays and deductibles, which can reach thousands of dollars annually. As it is, 63% of us don't even have $250 in savings.

It was George Bush who once snarkily observed: "I mean, people have access to health care in America. After all, you just go to an emergency room."

Sure, and then you get an exorbitant bill. You can still go bankrupt if you get sick or hurt, even if you do have insurance. And 30 million Americans still don't.

Democrats will have stop sounding like Republicans if they want to win hearts, minds and elections. Marketing wonkish incremental policy proposals didn't work in 2016, and it won't work in 2020. There was a reason that many incumbent Dems lost this month, and it wasn't because they were too progressive or radical.
 

How To Buy An Impeachment

It is a truth now universally acknowledged that the very rich usually get what they want from elected politicians.

And so if a hedge fund billionaire wants Donald Trump to be impeached, he'll  spend whatever it takes to make his dream come true. Just ask Democratic mega-donor Tom Steyer, who's already forked over $10 million for TV ads to inform the already converted that Trump needs to go. He's spending another 10 mil or so on social media ad buys, or at least 10 times what the Russians allegedly invested in order to magically propel Impeachy Don directly into the White House. And if you only count the $10,000 that Russian troll farms spent on Facebook ads, the total Steyer ad buy would amount to a whopping 20 times of that foreign expenditure.

Still, his impeachment campaign doesn't come anywhere close to the $5 billion worth of free TV coverage  which Trump got from the mainstream media during his endless campaign, nor the $2 billion in estimated cash raised by the Clinton machine.

But thanks to the power of even lesser - but still obscenely excessive - cash, Steyer is also getting plenty of free press to boost his ad campaign investment, most recently in a prominently-placed column by the New York Times' new hire, Michelle Goldberg. It's so awesome what tens of millions of dollars will do to "control the narrative" with little to no independent reporting even needed from the stenographer in question.

All Michelle Goldberg had to do to write her column was to elicit a little confirmation bias from other Democratic operatives and "thought leaders" who operate in Steyer's cash-rich political milieu. These experts are here to urge the cash-needy Congressional Democrats to get off their hands for a change, and hold out those hands for all the great ideas and policies and outcomes that progressive billionaires have to offer them. They should then absolutely embrace their donors impeachment.

Why wait for Robert Mueller to complete his criminal investigation into the Trump Empire's wheelings and dealings? Goldberg scrolled down the Times's speed-dial list to find out:

But as the Harvard Law scholar Cass Sunstein, author of the recent book “Impeachment: A Citizen’s Guide,” told me, that doesn’t mean Congress can impeach only a president who is caught breaking the law. “Crime is neither necessary nor sufficient,” said Sunstein, who emphasizes that his book is not about Trump. “If the president went on vacation in Madagascar for six months, that’s not a crime, but that’s impeachable.”

If you're going to use an establishment Democrat as the main supplementary source of your piece, you must also plug his book while letting him deny that he is plugging his book and also letting him deny that his book is even about Trump. This makes your column seem very plausible, and nowhere close to the Russian propaganda spreading its tentacles into our hearts and minds on a daily basis. It also artificially limits the "terror" that US citizens feel, restricted to only Trump and Russia as the roots of all evil.

  "And the best way to show Trump that people are serious about impeaching him is to put the message on television," sagely concludes Michelle Goldberg.

My published response:

Before they think about impeachment, Congress should take the keys to the nuclear code right out of his little hands. They should stop spending 70% of their time raising money, and start passing emergency legislation which rescinds the unitary executive powers instigated by Dick Cheney. They should repeal the Patriot Act at the earliest opportunity, strengthen shield laws for reporters, and rescind the blanket authorization for military force they give to presidents every single year, with virtually no serious debate.

The same congress critters who clutch their pearls over every last Trumpian faux pas just handed his perpetual war machine three quarters of a trillion dollars to play around with.

Senior Senate leaders Chuck Schumer and Lindsay Graham both admitted in recent days that they had no idea we had nearly a thousand troops in Niger, and at least six thousand in other African countries. Huh?

So methinks that Donald Trump isn't the only guy who isn't up to the job. The way the Pentagon and the CIA and corporations run roughshod over the legislative branch, you'd think they were only a millionaire social club whose job is to go on TV and complain helplessly when they aren't begging us to elect them to just two more years, six more years, a lifetime's worth of years.
 And while Mr. Steyer's heart might be in the right place, he exemplifies the dangerously outsize power that billionaires now have in running the country.

And then there's Mike Pence. God help us all.

Smart Money, Stupid Money, and Flatulence

Let's cut to the cheese, I mean the chase. This presidential contest, at which we the plebeians are reduced to mere spectators, has officially devolved into a battle between elitism and vulgarity.

The headlines in the mainstream media blast out the story that the Clintonites desperately want you to hear. This is a battle between piles of cash. There's good, plentiful cash and then there's bad skimpy cash. None of it will ever actually be yours, or even used to improve your lives, but they do want you to root for it anyway.

And at this point, the smart liberal money (elite Clinton) is beating the stupid reactionary money (vulgar Trump.)

Trump is getting crushed, not by the allegedly superior and more humanitarian policies of Hillary Clinton, but by her big fat mean Money Machine. It really is a Dollarocracy, people!

Trump Starts Summer Push With Crippling Money Deficit  jeers the headline in today's New York Times:  

Mr. Trump began June with just $1.3 million in cash on hand, a figure more typical for a campaign for the House of Representatives than the White House. He trailed Hillary Clinton, who raised more than $28 million in May, by more than $41 million, according to reports filed late Monday night with the Federal Election Commission.He has a staff of around 70 people — compared with nearly 700 for Mrs. Clinton — suggesting only the barest effort toward preparing to contest swing states this fall. And he fired his campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, on Monday, after concerns among allies and donors about his abili a competitive race.

Nothing insults and weakens a narcissistic tycoon more than accusing him of being flat broke. Not accusations of bigotry, or misogyny, or xenophobia, or con artistry, or sprayed-on tan, or fake hair. In Trump World, honest and direct personal groveling before members of one's own class is tantamount to panhandling and an admission of failure. It's a slap in the face to the Art of the Deal. It's a blow to Trump's super-ego, or more accurately, to his super-id. His self-worth is based entirely upon his net worth. And his net worth is looking more and more like a Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme by the minute.

Fund-raising efforts for Mr. Trump have been hampered by the candidate’s own erratic public comments. He has repeatedly said he will pay for his own campaign even as his volunteers fan out around the country to solicit six-figure checks, confusing allies and potential donors alike.

“Two days ago, he said, ‘I may fund it myself,’” Mr. (GOP Operative Ed) Rollins said. “Donors are all being cautious about what’s going to happen here.”

And if Hillary Clinton is labeled a rich elitist candidate in the process, solely defined by her bank account, that suits her just fine. It deflects attention away from the essential vulgarity of her own rise to power, her subsequent self-enrichment from her family foundation, political influence-peddling, paid speeches, and various venal SuperPacs.

She has no Trumpian qualms. After all, she heartily admitted that she and Bill were "dead broke" when they left the White House, just barely scraping by with a new estate in Westchester County and multimillions in book advances, not to mention a Senate seat representing Wall Street for Hill and the lucrative speaking circuit for Bill.

Her virtue, they want all of you poor slobs out there to know, lies in her superior ability to handle her money and get an endless supply it by expertly stroking and grooming an endless supply of eager donors. Trump's vice is not only his mishandling of his own possibly fraudulent fortune, it's also his inability to hire the right people to handle, and get, the billions in campaign cash that he so desperately needs to win. Schmoozing well with others doesn't come naturally to a media bully whose main claim to fame is firing people when he's not kicking them out of his Nuremberg-style campaign rallies.

Hillary knows how to take advantage of the Citizens United Supreme Court decision. As leaked DNC documents show, her bundlers are even furnished with a delicate script to help coax the mega-rich from their money. Donald hasn't  figured how to flatter too many people besides himself yet, and time's running out. Therefore, as the media narrative has it this week, he should be disqualified on the basis of his puny finances as well as on the basis of his policies (whatever they really are; he hasn't figured that out either.) The handful of wealthy donors who select the candidates, win the elections and buy the government policies and tax breaks they want, certainly don't want to invest in an incompetent or lying gasbag with attention deficit disorder.

 The self-dealing benignity of the educated wealthy has been an integral part of the mythology of American liberalism since the founding of the Republic - just as dissing greater-evil barbarians like Trump has always been part of their public relations campaign to hold on to power. They claim to abhor his boorish divide-and-conquer rhetoric, even as they themselves are just fine with the status quo of Planned Political Gridlock for Plutocratic Gain. Similarly, the smart Founders justified owning other human beings by simply pointing across the pond at those vulgar Brits, who had the poor inhumane taste to banish people to workhouses and debtors' prisons.

Not that everything is calm and cool in Clintoncashland, of course. Otherwise it wouldn't be Clintonian. Even with her premature "clinching" of the nomination, Hillary is strangely still paranoid about Bernie Sanders.

On Monday, for example, the New Jersey Democratic Committee unceremoniously purged its own former chairman just because he is a Bernie Sanders delegate. The booted official, State Assemblyman John Wisniewski, wryly called the move ironic, given that right before he was dumped, the committee had been discussing ways to unify Clinton and Sanders supporters.

This move came right on the heels of the Congressional Black Caucus vowing to fight Sanders's proposal to abolish the super-delegate system, in which both elected officials and unelected donors and lobbyists get weighted votes to put establishment candidates over the top in intra-party contests. The CBC is also vehemently against holding open primaries in states that currently bar Republican and independent voters from casting ballots in Democratic primary contests. "We wouldn't want to have to run against our own constituents," protested Rep. G.K. Butterfield (D-N.C.), somewhat feebly and undemocratically.

Apparently, Hillary's campaign slogan of "breaking down barriers" doesn't quite extend to opening doors to more marginalized voters. 

Meanwhile, the cash-strapped marginalia plan to fight the political hot air with some potent gas of their own. Vulgarity is as vulgarity does, as my mama used to say. So former Green Party vice presidential candidate Cheri Honkala has announced an epic Fart-In to counteract Hillary's acceptance speech next month in Philly.

Honkala, a single mom who has personally dealt with poverty and homelessness, told Truthdig: 

“We will be holding a massive bean supper for Bernie Sanders delegates on American Street in my Kensington neighborhood on the afternoon of July 28,” she said. “We are setting up a Clintonville there, modeled on the Hoovervilles of the 1930s where the poor and unemployed built shanty towns. The Sanders delegates, their bellies full of beans, will be able to return to the Wells Fargo Center and greet the rhetorical flatulence of Hillary Clinton with the real thing.”

Honkala said she would issue an invitation to Sanders to join the bean supper, which she is calling Beans for Hillary. She has asked donors to send cans of beans to 1301-W Porter Street, Philadelphia, Pa., 19148.

“Any remaining beans will be served to the homeless, although we will, of course, be urging Sanders delegates to eat as much as possible,” Honkala said.

This kind of flips the noxious advice to hold your nose and vote for the lesser evil right on its butt.

How about making the Evils hold their own noses for a change?  

 Jonathan Swift, writing under the pseudonym Don Fartando, may have been the first to warn the proles of the severe health hazards of bottling up your gas. He  wrote a satiric pamphlet, called "The Benefit of Farting" way back in 1722, to counter a scolding sadistic screed published by the austerians of the wealthy ruling class, advising the poor on "The Benefit of Fasting."

Confronting the bombastic Clintonian winds of war with a mass outbreak of popular bumbast might be just the therapy that everybody needs.

The Fart of the Deal

Party Like It's 2016

The modern Establishment has been weirdly successful in getting Americans to believe that even though we live in an oligarchy, there's still enough democracy left to make sure that every vote counts.

Not this year, though. Two upstart candidates, Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, are knocking that supposition for one big loop. Citizen-consumers are discovering that our "democratic" system has very sneaky, fail-safe ways of purging unwanted candidates from its private Duopoly. Of course, the outsiders are not being imprisoned or vaporized  as they would be in blatantly totalitarian regimes. In our system  -- which the late Sheldon Wolin  dubbed "inverted totalitarianism" -- the purging is accomplished through more subtle, but still ham-fisted, means.

Methods to the madness are employed by the method actors of the media-political complex.  Six major corporations control 90 percent of all disseminated content, in TV, movies and print. Access to the powerful has become more important than holding the powerful to account. When ownership becomes more consolidated, public accountability slides down the memory hole.

 Then there's the authoritarian infrastructure of the parties themselves. Super-delegates are given weighted votes in order to prevent gains by independent or grassroots candidates. The public-spirited League of Women Voters no longer controls the general election debates. A privately funded and owned commission does that now. The previews of primary town halls and televised bicker-fests are controlled by the parties themselves,  and they're sponsored by the corporate-funded networks. The GOP has held too many, while the Democrats have held too few. But the ads are legion. The ratings are high and the record profits are beyond the wildest dreams of the owners.

 And finally, there is the ever increasing influence of the direct cash "gifts" to the candidates. It now costs more than a billion dollars to run for president. And the ultra-rich who foot the bill, as Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page have established, usually get what they want from the candidates they fund. No matter that the majority of us want expanded Social Security and universal health care. Since the rich do not want or need these benefits, the good life is not to be had by anyone but themselves. The richer that people get, the more paranoid they seem to become about some poor person stealing even the tiniest morsel from their dinner plates.

The fact that billionaire Trump is (allegedly) self-funding his campaign, and millions of ordinary people really are funding Bernie's is more of a direct challenge to Citizens United than any public interest group could ever have imagined. Money has finally arrived as a major campaign theme for perhaps the first time since bribery was legalized by the Supreme Court. And Big Money is not too happy about all this sunlight. It threatens to disinfect the whole sordid process.

Ballots aren't the only things that are weighted. Even sincere, popular, and legitimately elected politicians are prone to forget the voters once they are safely esconced in office. The corporate-controlled shadow governments of the CIA and the NSA and the Pentagon come knocking at the Oval Office door on Day One, extending their tentacles to give a welcoming squeeze and an offer the new dude cannot possibly refuse. Then there are the armies of lobbyists, euphemized as "consultants." These militarists and operatives are also regular guests on the corporate talk shows, the better to spread the propaganda and the news stories within the extremely narrow parameters which the ruling class allows.

Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders still presents a threat to the status quo, as the bigwigs strive to limit him, despite a recent slew of wins, to the bit part of the far-out fringe-dweller challenging Hillary Clinton. Donald Trump, once so inordinately elevated and showcased by the greedy media at rallies which sometimes resemble violent racial cleansing sites, suddenly finds his own racist self on the receiving end of an attempted purge. First, the elites pretended to be disgusted by the guy as he raked in the bucks for them. Now, they pretend to realize that their spectacle has gone on for way too long. Why? Because  the corporations funding the politics are beginning to withdraw their brands and money from a potentially violent brokered convention. The delegates might even get denied their complimentary cans of Coke.

Trump's own children can't even vote for him in New York's closed primary next week. Anyone who forgot to change his party affiliation before an arbitrary deadline expiring many months ago will not be permitted to vote. This punishes the independents who have elected Bernie Sanders in eight out of the last nine contests, but it will also depress turnout from Trump fans who are not registered Republicans. This scenario especially rewards Hillary Clinton, whose main support in the state comes from older, registered Democrats.

Party elders did forget, though, to bar never-registered young people, who were given more time to pose as members of either party in order to participate in New York's election. So we shall see.

Even in a democracy, political parties were never meant to be democratic. I've written before about French philosopher Simone Weil's call (immediately post-Hitler) to abolish all political parties. Parties exist for purely selfish reasons: to grow without end, to gain new consumers, and to make tons of money.

 Nothing in the Constitution or the Bill of Rights says anything about citizens having to elect representatives from within the confines of parties.

Tellingly, it was the post-French Revolution Reign of Terror that spawned the modern political party system. So is it any surprise that variations on the fear factor are always on the platforms of both Republicans and Democrats? The war on terror, the war on drugs, the war on women, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.... and guns, guns and more guns -- the controlling of them, the wearing of them, the proliferation of them. Where would American political parties be without violence and paranoia as the glue holding the teetering duopoly together?

The three characteristics of political parties that Simone Weil outlined 70 years ago apply just as well to the modern Democratic and Republican machines:

1. A political party is a machine to generate collective passions.

2. A political party is an organisation designed to exert collective pressure upon the minds of all its individual members.

3. The first objective and also the ultimate goal of any political party is its own growth, without limit. 

She continued:

Because of these three characteristics, every party is totalitarian - potentially and by aspiration. If one party is not actually totalitarian, it is simply because those parties that surround it are no less so....

No man, even if he had conducted advanced research in political studies, would ever be able to provide a clear and precise description of the doctrine of any party, including (should he belong to one) his own.

People are generally reluctant to acknowledge such a thing. If they were to confess it, they would naively be inclined to attribute their incapacity to their own intellectual limitations, whereas, in fact, the very phrase 'a political party's doctrine' cannot have any meaning.

An individual, even if he spends his entire life writing and pondering problems of ideas, only rarely elaborates a doctrine. A group of people can never do so. A doctrine cannot be a collective product.

Extrapolating from those words of wisdom, it is thus patently dishonest for "party elders" to claim that the current popular outsider candidates are not a Real Republican or a Real Democrat. There is no such thing.

And, given the totalitarian nature of the two-party system in the United States, it really is something of a miracle that two outsider candidates have turned the tables and essentially co-opted them, instead of the other way around.

Maybe there's life in the old Democratic gal yet. Maybe the Duopoly is on the way to the dustbin of history.

Parasites on Parade

All you have to do is part with one million George Washington smackeroos, and your corporation people will get exclusive access to the festivities at the Second Coming of Obama next month. This means that all the little people will be excluded and will not be around to breathe on you or otherwise disturb your VIP exclusivity during your foray inside the Beltway.  

If you didn't get your invitation yet, don't despair. They were delivered, en masse, via email, and merely give the illusion of being engraved. They are actually kind of cheap and tawdry-looking. And the spelling skills of whatever Social Secretary of Snobbery designed them leave something to be desired too. For example, the ultra-exclusive George Washington Premium Partner Package includes Inaugural Parade "bleecher" seats. Not only is the lack of custom-upholstered seating de trop, the offer is downright insulting. It sounds like they're going to stuff the corporate welfare leeches up in the nosebleed section.

The only surprising thing about President Obama shilling for tax-shielded corporate money to fund his extravaganza is that a lot of people are actually surprised about it. After all, this is the guy who sold exclusive access to his corpus throughout his campaign, for a grand total of a billion dollars. The proceeds from his Inaugural balls will be mere chump change in the grand scheme of things. 

But I guess you can't blame the victims of the Surprise. After all, in 2009, Team Obama made a big righteous deal about not taking any corporate lucre for the swearing-in festivities. Those were the days when our president was still fresh from his victorious marketing campaign based on a "grassroots movement." One of his PR flacks, a guy oxymoronically named Josh Earnest, sincerely joked at the time that the banning of corporate money was only the beginning to changing "the way business as usual is done in Washington."

 The pretense at pretense is all gone now. Still, as Public Citizen puts it, we the people should have the right to not have "our" inauguration brought to us by the likes of Bank of America:

 That the corporate-funded inaugural festivities will fall on the anniversary (Jan. 21) of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, is not just ironic given President Obama’s stated support for a constitutional amendment to overturn the decision holding that corporations can spend unlimited amounts on elections, it undermines the case for corporate-free elections.

The Presidential Inaugural Committee has stated that it will not accept funds from lobbyists, foreign corporations, TARP recipients that have not repaid their government loans or others that do not pass its vetting process. But every corporation’s donations create a conflict of interest, because they all have business before the government in one way or the other. The problem with donations from lobbyists is that they expect something in return for their contribution. The situation is exactly the same with corporate contributors, virtually all of whom employ lobbyists.
 

Of course, it has long been known that the Obama Administration has a nifty work-around to its anti-lobbyist rule. Either the lobbyists don't even bother registering as lobbyists, thereby gaining unfettered access to the White House, or the Obama people just meet with the influence peddlers across the street at the Caribou Cafe. From the New York Times:

On the agenda over espressos and lattes, according to more than a dozen lobbyists and political operatives who have taken part in the sessions, have been front-burner issues like Wall Street regulation, health care rules, federal stimulus money, energy policy and climate control — and their impact on the lobbyists’ corporate clients.

But because the discussions are not taking place at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, they are not subject to disclosure on the visitors’ log that the White House releases as part of its pledge to be the “most transparent presidential administration in history.”
 

So it's not so much the graft and corruption --  we have cynically come to expect that in our politicians. It's the continuing hypocrisy of a president who lectures the country on the need for austerity at the same time he wines and dines with the elites. Those "bleechers for leechers" -- the seating arrangements for the exclusive corporate rumps -- are being constructed at taxpayer expense, by carpenters who now may have to wait a few more years to retire and collect Medicare. Those people cannot afford tickets to Candlelight Receptions and Benefactors Brunches and Children's Balls.

Writes John Wonderlich of the Sunlight Foundation,

Even if Sheldon Adelson doesn't throw a casino-themed gala in Obama's honor, there's a whole machinery in DC built on brokering wealth and influence, and a good party feeds the scene. Neither defending the celebrations nor priming the check-writers presents a good public interest case for this move.

(snip)

The Obama administration is likely to, again, justify their behavior by saying that they're following the law. Whenever their accountability policies have loopholes or problems, rather than fixing them, the administration asks to be judged in comparison to Bush, saying their record speaks for itself. At some point, though, it's time to judge Obama in his own words. Obama said unlimited donations sully our democracy, threaten public service, and weaken representation -- and has now chosen to embrace them.
Maybe Obama's setting the tone for his second term: we're not worried about whether we look like reformers at all.
 

Like I said -- they're giving up pretending at pretending. I wonder if the crowds in the exclusive bleechers (sic) will cheer when the president praises the free market in his Second Inaugural Address?  I wonder if they'll send me an email asking me to donate $3 for a chance to win one of the nosebleed seats?

One thing's for sure: if Barack Obama channels FDR and says "I welcome their hatred", he won't be talking about banksters. He'll be talking about his own base.

The Class War Ain't Got No Class!