Cordially Yours, Jeb Bush

Flailing presidential candidate Jeb Bush has apologized for his odious suggestion that only Christian refugees be allowed sanctuary in his America.

"This was a horribly insensitive gaffe on my part," the scion of one of the country's premier crime families was heard to sheepishly admit on Tuesday. "What I meant to say was, only conservative folks with money, dynastic connections, elite degrees and professions or trust funds have an absolute guarantee of asylum in these, my United States. It's just a plus if they're High Church Christians, is all I'm saying. I didn't mean all Christians, fer chrissake. Baptists and Seventh Day Adventists, especially, might be sadly out of luck when it comes to the political vetting process. Do you hear me, Ted Cruz and Ben Carson? And forget about the secular humanists. I'm handing those atheist folks a one-way ticket to the hell that my born-again brother created to keep y'all safe."

OK, so I made that quote up. Despite his attempted dehumanization of refugees as pesky "challenges of the world," Jeb Bush did not verbally condemn them to hell based solely upon religion or lack thereof. All he said is that Syrians and Iraqis should present some sort of Christian I.D. prior to crossing the border into Exceptional USA. 

 Discrimination, which they grotesquely call "compassionate conservatism," has always has been an integral part of the Bush Family's ideological DNA. Simply read his bogus trickle-down platform and listen to his speeches, and you will discover that Jeb has devised a hell on earth for all poor atheists, all poor agnostics, all poor Catholics, all poor Jews, all poor Protestants, all poor Muslims, all poor Hindus, all poor Sikhs, all poor Jains and all poor Buddhists, regardless of where they come from, no matter whom they love.  He is an equal opportunity plutocratic class warrior. Muslims and immigrants are among the more recent convenient scapegoats for the rabid right wing, especially in the wake of the terrorist attacks in France.

Jeb and his cohort simply feel a little freer to spew the fear and the hatred and the sanctimony these days. All he has to do is open his mouth and cable news is there in a flash to give him endless campaign air time at no cost to Jeb and much cost to the refugees.

And not to be outdone on the domestic front, even by himself, Jeb also just managed to mangle the fable that illustrates precisely why most poor, doomed, white, angry voters still get fooled most of the time by the likes of him, Donald Trump and Ted Cruz.

Responding to a question at a campaign event about Bernie Sanders' call for free college tuition, Jeb lit right up. "This is a great question, I’m glad you brought it up! Because this notion that earned success in life, that the government can just take care of us, if we keep taking steps down that path, we’re in danger. And it’s insidious, because you don’t see it until it’s over. That’s the problem with this. It’s like the crabs in the, you know, whatever —the crabs in the boiling water."

(To be fair to Jeb, he was probably suffering from the congenital Bush family trait of not being able to maintain more than one picture-bubble in his head at a time. He was probably seeing the corporate media's cartoon caricature of "Crabby Bernie" as he struggled in vain to answer yet another unfair liberal "gotcha!" question.)

Luckily, a sympathetic audience member heard his silent cry for help, and yelled out: "Frogs!" 

(To be fair to Jeb, he probably didn't want to bring up frogs in his mangled metaphor, lest it dredge up memories about how W. used to stick firecrackers up frogs' butts just to watch them explode, a juvenile prelude to his blowing-up of the entire Middle East.)

But to further outdo even himself, Jeb gamely lumbered on with his gruesome tale:

“The frogs. You think it’s warm, and it feels pretty good and then it feels like you’re in a whirlpool—you know, a Jacuzzi or something. And then you’re dead. That’s how this works.”

Translation: Subsidized higher education for the masses is a clear and present danger to the Republican Party. Beware the functioning brain and the independent thought. Look at the Bushes, for whom congenital intellectual and moral deficits are worn like badges of honor and they got filthy rich anyway. If they can do it, you can do it. And if you still insist on college, debt peonage till the day you die will be your lot and your loss, and their gain.

Jeb might not be the Smartest Bush. But when it comes to disclosing the Right's true fascist agenda, he is at least an inadvertently Honest Bush. They make you feel all warm and wet and turgid, and then zap. They do you.

That's how it works, crabby frog-people. The oligarchy is tossing you into an epic maelstrom right out of Edgar Allan Poe. Life sucks, and then you die. That's exactly how it works. That's the Republican plan for America. 

GOP Jacuzzi for the Poor

Propaganda On Steroids

Silly, sleepy me.

Until I read all about it in today's New York Times, I'd been totally, unforgivably oblivious to having just lived through a monumental event called "The Liberal Spring."

In the space of just one week, a tsunami from "the left" has apparently changed the entire ideological landscape of America!

Jonathan Martin explains it all to ignoramuses like me:

A cascade of events suggests that 2015 could be remembered as a Liberal Spring: the moment when deeply divisive and consuming questions of race, sexuality and broadened access to health care were settled in quick succession, and social tolerance was cemented as a cornerstone of American public life.

Happy days are here again! The skies above are clear again! We can sing a song of cheer again! We all have guaranteed health care for life,  gender and sexual equality is here to stay, and institutional racism has disappeared as quick as you can tear down a Confederate flag.

And lest we be deemed ungrateful, we must give all the credit for our unexpected salvation to Obama Triumphans.  He is being widely portrayed in the corporate media as a latter-day Joshua. The president miraculously escaped from the Egypt of Lameduckville to finish leading the refugees of America into the neoliberal promised land of brand-name milk and honey. All it took was one off-key but sonorous rendition of We Shall Overcome to further cement mass delusion as a cornerstone of public life.

The Times piece continues,

Yet what appears, in headlines and celebrations across the country, to represent an unalloyed victory for Democrats, in which lawmakers and judges alike seemed to give in to the leftward shift of public opinion, may contain an opening for the Republican Party to move beyond losing battles and seemingly lost causes.

OK, now that we got spring out of the way, we can get into the nitty-gritty of what the permanent ruling class really wants. And that is the GOP repudiating the Tea Party in order to get back to its big business roots. As fast as pro-market forces once tore down the Berlin Wall, as fast as Obama tore down the walls of racism, John Boehner is purging Congressional committees of those anti-trade, anti-government, anti-corporate welfare ideologues. Newly empowered by their partnership with Obama's Wall Street Democrats, the Wall Street Republicans aim to make the world safe for plutocracy.

But even as conservatives appear under siege, some Republicans predict that this moment will be remembered as an effective wiping of the slate before the nation begins focusing in earnest on the presidential race.

 As important as some of these issues may be to the most conservative elements of the party’s base and in the primaries ahead, few Republican leaders want to contest the 2016 elections on social or cultural grounds, where polls suggest that they are sharply out of step with the American public.

Polls, shmolls. More than measuring public opinion, polls actually serve to influence it. Witness the recent Pew Poll purporting to show widespread domestic and international support for the anti-democracy job-destroying Trans-Pacific Partnership. What reasonable person doesn't support free trade? Never mind that the respondents were not allowed to actually see what is in the classified TPP  Nor did the pollsters bother to inform the people whom they called about the various leaked portions of the agreements.
 
As G. William Domhoff further elucidates in Who Rules America?:

Polls also can be used to suggest that a public opinion exists on issues for which there is none. This does not mean people do not have general opinions, but that they often make it up as they go along when responding to specific questions about policy preferences. If questions about affirmative action or oil drilling are framed in one way, they yield one answer, but framed in another way, they yield a different answer, especially for those without knowledge or firm opinions.

Obama the Joshua-Josher and his plutopals know full well that ordinary people would never support the replacement of  local and national justice courts with fascist Investor State Dispute Tribunals. They know that people would never agree to become personally financially liable for the "lost" corporate profits of Big Oil, Big Pharma and Big Tobacco. Therefore they keep the whole deal secret while at the same time cynically ordering rigged polls which falsely show public support for programs that are precisely antithetical to the public interest.

The Pew polls are funded by the Pew Charitable Trust,  a think tank originally funded and still largely controlled by the conservative heirs of the Sun Oil Company. They're also in the astroturf business, hiring advocates to appear on TV and before congressional committees, poll results clutched tightly in their hands as evidence of public support for filthy rich interests.

Now, back to the latest Times propaganda effort in the service of the plutocracy:

“Every once in a while, we bring down the curtain on the politics of a prior era,” said David Frum, the conservative writer. “The stage is now cleared for the next generation of issues. And Republicans can say, ‘Whether you’re gay, black or a recent migrant to our country, we are going to welcome you as a fully cherished member of our coalition.’ ”

The critical question is whether the Republican Party will embrace such a message in order to seize what many party officials see as an opening to turn the election toward economic and national security issues.

It's almost enough to make you root for the Tea Party. What the Establishment really fears is the extra-partisan, left-right coalition against the TPP and other corporate coups, along with widespread transpartisan, populist disgust with mass surveillance, the bloated Pentagon and Wall Street crime. What the Establishment really loves is Obama-style bipartisanship in the service of those who run the place and who matter only to themselves. Remember that it was the Tea Party "crazies" who put the kibosh on the Boehner-Obama Grand Bargain of Social Security and Medicare cuts.

The reason that marriage equality has sailed through in record time has just as much to do with gay rights being a non-issue for the hyper-rich as it does with popular demand. Either marriage equality doesn't affect the interests of the Power Elite, or it has affected them personally enough to make them devote their money and their influence to getting it done. If millionaires and billionaires aren't gay themselves, they statistically have a family member, friend or business associate who belongs to the LGBT community. Granting marriage equality in all 50 states, regardless of class, has the double advantage of being no skin off their uplifted noses and a deflective public relations ploy. The granting and mass celebration of "diversity" by the Imperium gives the Imperium a false patina of morality as a cosmetic healing of class divides is broadcast by media conglomerates. Rich gays and poor gays join together to march in parades. Even lowly cannon fodder has been granted marriage equality. (although sex crimes in the military have now reached epidemic proportions, due in part to Obama's strange refusal to take prosecution of them out of the corrupt chain of command. But, hooray anyway.)

So on with Extreme Centrism, as told by the New York Times for the benefit of #WealthyLivesMatter:

While acknowledging that the country has become more tolerant and, in some ways, culturally liberal, many Republicans contend that America is still receptive to a more conservative approach on economics and national security. After all, the same week that highlighted the ascent of cultural liberalism also illustrated the limitations of economic populism, as organized labor was unable to block a measure giving President Obama expansive trade authority.

"America," aka the rich, is more open to a "conservative approach", aka austerity for the masses. It is in the interest of both wings of the Big Business Party to marginalize organized labor, which, despite the fact that it's been marginalized for nearly half a century, still occasionally manages to be a pesky thorn in the side of the GOP-New Democrat partnership. Therefore, if the presidential debates can be restricted to scaring the voters to death over phony foreign terror threats while deflecting our attention from the real economic and social threat of a global oligarchy gone wild, it won't much matter to the ruling class whether Hillary Clinton or Jeb Bush gets "elected". The oligarchy will not only have won, it will be able to claim with a straight, stuffed face that it was a legitimate populist victory.

(Needless to say, despite his growing popularity with the actual populace, Bernie Sanders' name did not appear one single time in today's Power Elite-dictated, fair & balanced front page Times "news analysis.")

Campaign 2016: When Bribery Meets Coercion

*Updated below

More than a year before the actual election, presidential politics and personalities have supplanted all else in what we love to call our Great National Narrative. The big plot twist this time around is how the hoi polloi have discovered, much to our great chagrin, that our democracy has suddenly turned into an oligarchy while we were glued to Dancing With the Stars. Political dynasties and big money have supplanted untold hordes of poor but deserving and qualified candidates aspiring to higher office. It's all the fault of that Supreme Court and its hideous Citizens United ruling. The Republicans are crazy and corrupt, and the Democrats are just plain corrupt.

Say what?

We've never had a true representative democracy in this country. Long before the Supreme Court decreed that money is speech, the oligarchy has ruled. It was decreed by design when a very tiny group of 18th century plantation owners and aristocrats and lawyers broke ranks with their fellow elites in the British Empire and cobbled together a constitution, which even they allowed was probably only a temporary fix to an out-and-out monarchy.

The reason that we're noticing the inbred corruption especially hard this campaign season is because for the first time in a long time, not one but two crazy-rich political families -- the Bushes and the Clintons --  are the current front-runners (at least according to the pundit and journalistic class which serves them.) But wealth in and of itself isn't bad. Nor are dynasties. Witness the Adamses and the Roosevelts, who by and large were at least semi-decent plutocrats despite their various racist and imperialistic proclivities. Where was the populist outrage during their heydays?

Although Hillary Clinton is oh-so delicately tip-toeing around class war semantics, she is certainly not lambasting the "malefactors of great wealth" as T.R. did, nor "welcoming their hatred" as did FDR. She is not even admitting that the permanent ruling class, or oligarchy, is running the show and always has done. She doesn't need to change or even acknowledge the status quo, even though Bernie Sanders keeps inconveniently nudging her in that direction. That may be because she is still merely nouveau-rich and hasn't yet developed the good aristocratic sense to keep her excess money under wraps instead of complaining how broke she recently was, and instead of Hubby whining about charging the oligarchs for his fondling of them because he has "bills to pay." (And they have Bill to pay.)

Maybe by the time granddaughter Charlotte is old enough to run for office, she'll have done an Adams Family pivot. Maybe, like Brooks Adams, great-grandson of John and grandson of John Quincy, she will publicly rail against unbridled capitalism and call for a revolution. Maybe, unlike Grandma and Grandpa Clinton, she will realize that extreme wealth inequality is just as dangerous to the rich as it is to the poor.

Brooks Adams, who was considered something of a Marxist crackpot by his First Gilded Age peers a century ago, presaged Bernie Sanders when he wrote in The Theory of Social Revolutions, "Roosevelt's offense in the eyes of the capitalistic class was not what he had actually done, for he had done nothing seriously to injure them. The crime they resented was the assertion of the principle of equality before the law, for equality before the law signified the end of privilege to operate beyond the range of law."

He added, "Sooner or later almost every successive ruling class has had this dilemma in one of its innumerable forms presented to them, and few have had the genius to compromise while compromise was possible.... the privileged classes seldom have the intelligence to protect themselves by adaptation when nature turns against them, and up to the present moment (1913) the old privileged class in the United States has shown little promise of being an exception to the rule."

Brooks Adams

It is just this insatiable, pathological hunger for sovereignty by the rich that is encompassed in the impending Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and related coups d'etat operating under the guise of free trade deals.

Are you holding your breath for somebody -- anybody -- to go on TV and call the current claque of godzillionaire Waltons, Kochs, Adelsons, Bloombergs and Pritzkers as dumb as a bucket of rocks? Me neither. Even Bernie Sanders, bless his socialist heart, has been way too polite and politically correct to dare insult the pathocrats by each of their names. At least, as of today. Maybe his mind can be changed about that.

Since the political-media complex still likes to pretend that we live in a functioning democracy, the main dilemma facing the ruling class, as Brooks Adams saw it, is whether to coerce or to bribe the powerless majority. Under a de facto permanent campaign season, they can now do both simultaneously. Hillary Clinton by self-interested necessity is in full bribery mode, calling for, among other treats for the masses, radical voting rights reform and the automatic inclusion of every citizen on the rolls. With record non-participation of eligible voters in the 2014 midterms, it is beginning to dawn on the politicians that without this participation, our government can claim neither legitimacy nor credibility. There is no consent of the governed, so let's toss the poor the privilege of choosing which corrupt politician they'd prefer to service the rich, and then call it a populist victory.

The corporate Democrats and Republicans running for office are going the bribery route, while the corporate Democrats and Republicans currently holding office are going the coercion route. The security state spies on all our communications. We have the highest incarceration rate in the world, maintain nearly a thousand military bases around the globe and spend the highest percentage of our GDP on vicious aggression. Despite the fact that polled majorities favor single payer health care, the insurance predators are alive and well and feasting on our misery. The looming TPP, meanwhile, is at the top of this year's plutocratic Christmas wish list, even going so far as to embrace Malaysian slave trade as a means for them become richer and more powerful. And all of this is being plotted by Barack Obama & Co. while the salivating potential slave-owners headquartered in the USA have plummeted their own country of origin to close to dead last in nearly every measurement of social well-being. And our Democratic president still stupidly and Reaganistically insists that his now-abandoned  austerity crusade and deficit reduction, post-economic meltdown, were net positive things for the economy. (Has anybody ever asked Obama if he voted for Reagan? He would have been just old enough.)

"The so-called Great Society bribed," wrote another prescient scribe named Gore Vidal several decades ago. "Today coercion is very much in the air."

We gasp. We choke. And then we revolt.

* Update, 6/8. I should have added that bribery and coercion work not just against the voters, but against the members of a politician's own party. The AP  mentions in passing, in a largely stenographic piece, that Barack Obama effectively bribed four Democratic congress critters for their Yea votes giving him secretive fast-track authority to ram though the various "trade" deals benefiting the hyper-rich. He gave  them free luxury rides on Air Force One to the G-7 meeting at a luxurious Bavarian Alps spa that was once aptly the site for a group of artistic Nazi sympathizers to get together to unwind and schmooze. There was also a lot of apt sausage-making and the usual fear-mongering, with one state aggression-funded think tank honcho (Richard Fontaine of the CNAS) urging passage of more riches for the rich, because China might win "the race" otherwise. As far as Fast Track for Obama is concerned, the AP takes dictation writes,

While the Senate already has sided with Obama, the House is another matter. Just 18 Democrats have expressed support publicly, and that is short of what the White House is believed to need in order to supplement affirmative GOP votes.

Four of those lawmakers traveled with Obama to Germany: Reps. Gerry Connolly of Virginia, Jim Himes of Connecticut, Eddie Bernice Johnson of Texas and Mike Quigley of Illinois. Their invitation appeared aimed both at rewarding lawmakers backing one of Obama's priorities and showing G-7 leaders that he is getting some Democrats to join the effort.

OK... make that bribing and coercing the citizens, bribing and coercing the politicians, and bribing and coercing the rest of the free world. The Hegemon's desperation is showing. 

TPP = Total Plutocratic Predation

The fact that the Obama administration has threatened to prosecute any member of Congress who shares the contents of the Trans-Pacific Partnership with the public is all the proof you need that this is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad deal.

Through Wikileaks, though, we’ve been made privy to its wish list of corporate power grabs. These include, but are by no means limited to: global pharmaceutical price-fixing; putting the world's casino banking cartel on a steady diet of crack cocaine; scrapping the Fair Use doctrine and the free Internet and by extension, free speech; and riding roughshod over a whole panoply of food safety, public health, environmental, and labor laws.

Even if all the above were to be removed from the deal, the mere survival of a clause that replaces sovereign court systems with investor state dispute tribunals ruled by corporate lawyers is heinous enough. It's so bad that Obama and his Wall Street cronies need it to stay a classified secret for at least four years, lest the frogs wake up in their simmering soaking tubs, hop out in the nick of time, run wild, and eat the rent-seeking rich.

Joe Firestone has just published a masterful 23-count indictment of the TPP -- or as he calls it, a Dayenu Seder chant with 23 stanzas. Read, croak or intone the whole thing, then call your congress critter and repeat. A litany repeated often enough can be even more powerful than a bribe, especially when each stanza rings true.

 Obama and the Republicans are orchestrating an act of aggression, not only against American citizens, but against 40% of the world’s economy. This is a president, after all, who has given himself the right to kill anyone at any time in any place. This is a Congress which not only gives him a blank check to kill, but has its members regularly attend snuff films showing people getting blown up by presidential fiat. This is a Supreme Court which has declared money to be speech and political bribery to be legal. This is a Fourth Estate which now holds that accessing the comfortable and the powerful is easier and more career-rewarding than afflicting them.

So, think of the TPP as an invisible predator drone buzzing over your head. Once it strikes, it’ll be too late to run or hide. Protest will be futile. Because despite Obama’s derisive comparison of TPP opponents to Sarah Palin, it is indeed a death panel. By virtue of both its opacity and its toxicity, it effectively condemns democracy to an early grave. Did I mention another clause which guarantees that the entire treaty is designed to remain ironclad for at least the next several administrations?

Obama recently revealed his true inner Joe Wilson pissiness when he publicly shrilled out to TPP critic Elizabeth Warren:"You lie!"  He is absolutely shameless in slapping the “progressive” label on this deal and falsely claiming it supports millions of American jobs --  when it is specifically designed to offshore millions of jobs, effectively depressing wages and ramping up mass precarity.

Can you imagine, as Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown did recently, if Obama had expended half as much energy pushing for a jobs bill and living wage legislation and universal health care and student debt forgiveness as he is in cramming this latest corporate tyranny grab down our throats?

The White House openly and chillingly admits that the neoliberal overthrow of state sovereignty is one of the "pillars of his presidency". At the expense of our own future, he has supreme visions of his own:

Finalists, Obama Library and Shrine design contest (credit: Curbed Chicago)

Tell your congressional reps to vote against fast track, and tell them today. Our time is running out. Remind them that regardless of their powerful donors, they still rely on ordinary human voters for their continued employment.

 We won’t ever forget. Ribbit, ribbit, ribbit.

Cutting Throught the Biparticrap

Now that the gossip rag known as Politico no longer has the Contest Between Two Evils to slobber over, they've taken to slobbering over the imminent bipartisan gutting of the New Deal. Read between the lines of Crafting a Boom Economy by Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen, and you will get a frightful peek at the slimy greed creature lurking just beneath the surface of the Beltway Black Lagoon.

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.