The Big Chill

Why, asks Lewis Lapham, are there no 21st century Mark Twains around to lambast the malefactors of great wealth and the corrupt politicians enabling them, making us collapse with laughter as we revel in the skewering?

Part of the reason is that independent newspapers, for which Twain once wrote, have been subsumed by six media conglomerates controlling 90% of everything we see, hear and read. And so, Lapham observes,

We have today a second Gilded Age more magnificent than the first, but our contemporary brigade of satirists doesn’t play with fire. The marketing directors who produce the commodity of humor for prime-time television aim to amuse the sheep, not shoot the elephants in the room. They prepare the sarcasm-lite in the form of freeze-dried sound bites meant to be dropped into boiling water at Gridiron dinners, Academy Award ceremonies, and Saturday Night Live. “There is a hell of a distance,” said Dorothy Parker, “between wisecracking and wit. Wit has truth in it.” George Bernard Shaw seconded the motion: “My way of joking is to tell the truth. It’s the funniest joke in the world.”

And the other elephants in the room are, of course, the NSA, the CIA, the FBI, and all the other incestuous initialized members of the surveillance state family. There are no Twains, because  writers report feeling a chill pervasive enough to impede the free flow of their thoughts. It's hard enough to be truthful, let alone bitingly humorous, with the constant specter of Big Brother peering over your shoulder.

The American Surveillance State is driving writers to self-censor.

 Even though Barack Obama, and the crypto-fascist spymasters that he only pretends are his minions, have on the surface spared the First Amendment from their wholesale shredding of the Bill of Rights, the suppression of free speech is well underway through the process of intimidation. So while the president grinned his wolfish grin, cracked his lame jokes, and strove mightily at his press con yesterday to assure us that American surveillance is benign,  warm and cozy, we are neither reassured nor amused. And that especially goes for writers.

The PEN American Center for human rights and literary expression put it this way:

We know—historically, from writers and intellectuals in the Soviet Bloc, and contemporaneously from writers, thinkers, and artists in China, Iran, and elsewhere—that aggressive surveillance regimes limit discourse and distort the flow of information and ideas. But what about the new democratic surveillance states?

The question of the harms caused by widespread surveillance in democracies, like the surveillance being conducted by the U.S. National Security Agency, is underexplored. In October 2013, PEN partnered with independent researchers at the FDR Group to conduct a survey of over 520 American writers to better understand the specific ways in which awareness of far-reaching surveillance programs influences writers’ thinking, research, and writing.

While only 44% (and that figure is slowly creeping up with every new Edward Snowden "leak") of the general public disapproves of the NSA sweeping up phone records and emails, fully two-thirds of the writers surveyed think the government is overreaching. More than one in four of them is now avoiding social media for fear of being tracked by the government. One in four is avoiding discussing certain topics in their emails and phone conversations. Most automatically assume that Big Brother is watching everything they say or write. Among the topics they're avoiding, both in their writing and their Internet searches, are mass incarceration, Middle Eastern affairs, drug policies, the Occupy movement, and pornography. The PEN report adds,

Part of what makes self-censorship so troubling is the impossibility of knowing precisely what is lost to society because of it. We will never know what books or articles may have been written that would have shaped the world’s thinking on a particular topic if they are not written because potential authors are afraid that their work would invite retribution. We do know that our studies of the private papers of generations of past luminaries have yielded valuable information that aids not only our understanding of their work and lives, but also our own thinking on contemporary problems. As one writer noted, “As a professor of literature, I lament that contemporary writers’ papers (hard copy and electronic) will potentially be less useful to future scholars because of self-censorship in the face of these governmental surveillance programs.” If today’s writers, many of whom do much of their work on computers and online, hesitate to put their thoughts in writing because of the fear of surveillance, we will lose these valuable wells of information, and future generations of scholars will find the sources available to them much impoverished due to concerns about surveillance.

One of the best American writers working today is not cowed. Dave Eggers, whose most recent novel ("The Circle")  chronicles the death of privacy via the Silicon Valley data-vacuuming industry, writes that Democrats, "caught in a web of cognitive dissonance"  are all too willing to give Barack Obama a free pass. For, despite his dwindling popularity, the personality cult persists -- as evidenced this week by a cringe-worthy op-ed in the New York Times celebrating Obama's "cool" demeanor, singing abilities and talent at strutting his bod.

A writer's job, Eggers counters, is to look for trouble. That goes hand in hand with my own personal favorite journalistic motto: afflict the comfortable. But President Obama, judging from his latest act of performance art depravity before the White House press corps yesterday, is not discomfited nearly enough yet. He ingratiates himself with the access-seeking media, who prefaced almost every softball question with "Merry Christmas, Mr. President!" and laughed appreciatively when he said his New Years resolution was to be nicer to them. He'll be taking recommendations to stop the NSA dragnet on vacation with him for some leisurely beach reading. So relax.

And thus does the latest Times editorial proclaim itself merely "disappointed" in the president. If anybody knows how to self-censor, it's the Gray Lady.

We need outrage. We need resistance. And yes, we need to laugh at them. Because when you take away their toys, their security details, their trappings of wealth, they are merely thin-skinned human beings in need of a good swift kick in the ass. Followed by a rapid repeal of the Patriot Act and a derailment of their money train.

On that note, have a happy Solstice, everybody! (It's always darkest right before the Enlightenment.)

A Big Money Cabal of Bench-Slappers

Vindication is sweet today for fans of the Fourth Amendment. But let's be realistic. With billions and billions, even trillions, of dollars at stake, the NSA and the private contractors enriched by the fascistic Deep State will not be going gently into that good night.

I imagine that the Obama administration is busily judge-shopping even as we speak, and will find some compliant fellow or lady to knock down the somewhat passive-aggressive (delayed, pending Obama judge-shopping)  ruling yesterday against the mass collection of phone records of United States persons.

Because, let's  remember what happened when another federal judge issued her own preliminary injunction last year which knocked down the supreme right of Temp Emp Obama to detain anyone, anywhere without benefit of charge or trial.

He went judge-shopping. And so, the National Defense Authorization Act still stands as a monument to totalitarianism. Both right wings of the Money Party are ready and willing to renew it once again during this joyous holiday season when nobody is paying much attention. Obama will again robo-sign it into law from the safe distance of his Hawaii vacation abode.

Let's remember when still another judge ruled against the illegal stop and frisk campaign of departing NYC billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg. He went judge-shopping. Not only was her ruling overturned, but Judge Shira Sheindlin was kicked off the whole case by a three-judge state appellate panel.

And then there was the case of Judge Jed Rakoff, who threw out a cozy mortgage fraud settlement between Citigroup and the SEC, and demanded that banksters be held criminally accountable. And predictably, Rakoff soon joined the ranks of the bench-slapped. But sweet vindication does abide, because he just penned a scathing indictment of the Obama administration's coziness with the malefactors of great wealth.  

We still have the First Amendment. So far.

I'm sure there are plenty of other similar cases out there in the great marketplace known as the American Judicial System. A long time ago, I got a parking ticket and decided to fight it in court because the return envelope requesting my ten bucks (I told you it was a long time ago!) gave no instructions about how to fight it in court. Not only did the late great Newburgh City Judge Albert S. MacDowell throw out my ticket, he declared the whole municipal parking ticket system unconstitutional because it denied due process. And guess what? A couple of years later, he was removed from the bench on grounds of mental instability and insulting lawyers.

So the handwriting is probably on the wall for Richard J. Leon, the judge who slapped down the NSA and the president in public yesterday. The whisper campaign is already beginning. Sheryl Gay Stolberg of the New York Times wrote a fun personality profile, characterizing him as a feisty old coot representing a "thorn in the side" of the government:

With his use of exclamation points (“How utterly disappointing!” he once wrote, excoriating the Food and Drug Administration) and cultural references (he mentioned the Beatles and Ringo Starr in a footnote in Monday’s ruling), Judge Leon does not seem bound by judicial sobriety.

And how about his metaphors, "so devastating to the government?" Uh-oh. The handwriting's not only on the wall, it's permanently engraved. The inevitable bench-slap is coming. If not from the Supreme Court, then from some Supremely Secret Court which has probably already declared the Fourth Amendment itself unconstitutional.

Meanwhile, Temp Emp Obama is meeting with telecom and Internet CEOs today. Marcy Wheeler thinks The One will try mightily to divide, conquer, and co-opt them into compliance for the Greater Good of the Big Money Deep State. Sounds about right to me.

***

 

David Brooks looked in the mirror and actually wrote a pretty amusing takedown of that sleazy group of marketing pros calling themselves "Thought Leaders." My comment:

 

I have to admit that this column about thought leaders initially gave me brain freeze. Then I realized my mind had gone blank because the first time I'd heard this Orwellian term, it was in reference to Lloyd Blankfein.

This past fall, there was a slight uproar when NBC dubbed Blankfein a Thought Leader for its Education Nation forum. Actual educators were incensed that the CEO of a too big to fail or jail bank would have anything constructive at all to say about educating kids.

Because, besides being coated with Teflon, Blankfein's other claim to fame had been acting as a spokesman for the billionaire deficit hawk cult called Fix the Debt. That is the group dedicated to the creative destruction of the New Deal. He was going on TV telling us we'd better lower our expectations about collecting Social Security and start tightening our belts for his future. He was a big cheerleader for the Sequester, which kicked 57,000 kids out of Head Start.

Blankfein also spoke at the Clinton Global Initiative as a Thought Leader, later paying Hillary Clinton several hundred thousand dollars for her own thoughtful and leaderly assurances that their fears of a populist uprising were merely bad thoughts in their thoughtful little heads.

Oh, and speaking of Orwell -- the term "thought leader" was invented by PR guru Joel Kurtzman when he worked for Booz Allen Hamilton. That outfit, you may remember, is the NSA contractor that once employed a fine and thoughtful patriot named Edward Snowden.

Murder Ruins Christmas for One Percenters

 A guy gets shot to death at an upscale mall, and the ensuing investigation is interfering with conspicuous consumption at the only emporium in Jersey that caters to the obscenely wealthy. Oh the humanity.

This was the actual headline in today's New York Times:

Fatal Carjacking Makes Christmas Shopping at US Mall a Nightmare 

Police on Monday were seeking an armed pair of suspected carjackers who a day earlier shot to death a man Christmas shopping with his wife at a high-end New Jersey mall and then fled in the couple's luxury SUV, prosecutors said.  

Never mind a lifetime of nightmares for the young widow who had to witness the carnage. But the article goes on to explain that murder in their midst presents a real dilemma for shoppers, because the only other Giorgio Armani and Cartier outlets are an unseemly 40 miles distant, in New York City. That yellow police tape is just too, too tacky. What a bore. And how about the Christmas retail stats, which would have been artificially pumped up via purchases by the One Percent and used as a propaganda tool by the corporate media to inform the rest of us slurping our Yule Gruel that the economy is just booming right along and this was the best Season evah?

***

Sorry about the light posting the past few days.... been battling a head cold, which has put a damper on the enraged output.

I did manage to post a comment last night to Paul Krugman's column on Inequality, in which he asks (purely as a rhetorical exercise) if there is anything we can do about it. Well.....

Respondents in the Very Wealthy Survey report enjoying a lot of private face time with the politicians, the better to whisper sweet deficit-hawk nothings in their ears.

Until we get the money out of politics, the grotesque inequality will only get worse. The Forbes 400, with more wealth than the bottom half of us combined, are our de facto masters. The CEOs of the Business Roundtable have an average of $14.6 million in their retirement accounts, enough to pay out $86,043 a month. And then there's David Cote of the Simpson-Bowles Catfood Commission, who holds a cool $134.5 million in his Honeywell account. That's $795,134 a month. Yet it seems he's on TV all the time, begrudging retirees their own meager $1200 Social Security checks.

So how do we break this pathological cycle of money begetting power begetting more money begetting more power? Term limits. And Citizens United could be overturned if we had rotating Supremes.

Tax the rich. Tax their capital gains, their carried interest, their high speed Wall Street trades, their offshore stashes. Scrap the cap on FICA contributions.

People are getting more enraged by the day, so the elites are eagerly making income inequality all the rage. By giving speeches. By passive-aggressively "studying the issue," pretending to be confused at how this ghastly turn of events could ever have come to pass in the Feudal States of America.

Oh, and by passing another budget that further enriches the wealthy on the backs of the poor.



Face Time Sweepstakes: David Cote and What's His Name Share Intimate Moment

 
 

Shocked, Shocked, I Tell You

As the outrages pile up, so does the outrage fatigue. So I'll be brief:

Rich people get away with it.  When plutocrats misbehave, they get special meetings with the attorney general and set the terms for their own deferred prosecution agreements. When garden variety rich people and spoiled brats misbehave they either go to celebrity rehab, or get off on a novel defense called Affluenza.

So here's an idea for all you poor slobs out there. Next time you get arrested for robbing a bank because your unemployment and food stamps got cut off, try pleading not guilty on grounds of Indigentsion.

***

 

The Affordable Care Act is an oxymoron. The worst lie of 2013 was not, as Politifact proclaimed, "If you like your insurance, you can keep it." The worst lie is Obama's continuing insinuation that going bankrupt while sick will be a thing of the past once you get your magical O-Care card. The website glitches are nothing compared to the eruption of Sticker Shock Mayhem coming down the pike. Who knows -- National Outrage Fatigue Syndrome might even have a chance of being cured because of the ACA.

***

The Obama Selfie to end all Selfies: out of pure sleazy political self-interest, the president delayed a whole bunch of regulations designed to protect the health and well-being of the American people.  Anonymous administration sources are spilling their guts to the Washington Post about a creepy "Mother May I" procedure that weighed the right of citizens to drink clean water and breathe unpolluted air against Obama's re-election chances. I imagine that the president will now order his "Insider Threat" program ratcheted up into high gear to catch out those disloyal leakers.

***

 

Big Brother sucks at navel-gazing: the NSA has no idea
what Edward Snowden took because they forgot to spy on themselves.

***

 

 

On the Good Ship Lollipop

The Democrats are taking their We Suck Less 2012 campaign slogan to the next level:

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi told Democratic House members at a meeting Thursday morning to “embrace the suck” and encouraged enough members to back the budget deal on the floor to allow passage, according to an attendee of the meeting. 

“We need to get this off the table so we can go forward,” Pelosi told her members, according to someone inside the closed meeting of the caucus.

Pelosi pushed for including in the budget deal an extension of the unemployment benefits that are set to expire at the end of the month. While she expressed a continued unhappiness that there will be no vote on those benefits before the House heads home Friday, she said that it wasn’t worth holding up the deal.

Pelosi (net worth $35.5 million) is at least honest in admitting that more than a million chronically jobless people getting thrown to the curb to be ground into mulch like discarded Christmas trees are not worth holding up a deal that restores Pentagon funding and continues austerity for all but the obscene rich. Not worth letting poor kids back into Head Start. Not worth protecting veterans' benefits.

Although she is, on the surface, loyal to Barack Obama's Bush war crime-enabling mantra of Look Forward, and MSNBC's corporate slogan of Lean Forward/don't question authority, and Obama Jobs Council tax-evading billionaire feminist Sheryl Sandberg's cloying Lean In, what Pelosi essentially just announced is that from here on out, the Dems will be Bending Over.

Embracing The Suck is also another way of saying if the vampire elites are determined to bite us, we should simply proffer our throats and get it over with. People who need suckers are the luckiest suckers in the world. Nancy neglected to mention that if you eat devils food cake you'll awake with with a tummy ache. Ooh, ooh.

 
So here's an idea. You know the guy who's getting all the bad press for his fake sign language "gibberish" during the Nelson Mandela death rally? Give him a job right here in America. Put him next to all the speechifying politicians, turn down the sound, and let him rip. His interpretations are guaranteed to be perfectly accurate. Because flailing and posturing is all they've got.

***

 

Naturally, the corporate media are falling all over themselves to praise the Stars of the Deal: Patty Murray and Paul Ryan and their improbable bipartisan romance. Gail Collins even thinks that the rapprochement between the Sadism Wing and the Masochism Wing of the Money Party represents a victory for female politicians. Read her column. It's a masterpiece of insider-y identity politics, perhaps unintentionally revealing how these jokers are as thick as thieves, merely pretending to hate each other's guts when they're in front of the cameras, flailing and posturing and appealing for money money money.  My comment: 

This column touched upon the main problem in the insular world of Washington: bipartisanship and camaraderie amongst politicians trump the common good of this country. 

Nita Lowey and Paul Ryan are bosom buds? He calls her Mom and she calls him Naughty Boy? That has got to be the worst dollop of Oedipal depravity I've heard all day. 

But what's even sicker than these "frenemies" regaling each other with mutual high-fives, (and worse) when they overcome their phony gridlock for a minute, is who really pays for these bipartisan deals from hell. It's the unemployed. It's the poor. It's federal workers already suffering under a wage freeze being forced to contribute more of their wages to the pension plans that may or may not be there when they retire. It's Medicare providers' reimbursements being cut (translated into higher bills for health care "consumers.") It's veterans whose own benefits will be cut under chained CPI. It's airline travelers slapped with a surcharge and effectively having to foot the bill for being groped by the TSA. 

Who doesn't pay? Rich people and the eternal war machine. 

It's pretty sad that Patty Murray is being praised for being the patient adult in the room who lets the spoiled brats blather their way to exhaustion and still get most of what they want. I nominate Elizabeth Warren to take her place. Paul Ryan would be more than pooped when she got done with him. He'd be writhing on the floor, begging for mercy.

Charles Blow, meanwhile, again spoke up for the poor and blasted Republican callousness while pretty much giving the Suck-Lovers a pass. My response:

The GOP myth that people falling on hard times become trapped in a "culture of dependency" is as old as the bigoted hills from whence it sprang. From Reagan's welfare queen, to Paul Ryan's hammock for deadbeats, to David Brooks's latest column insinuating that jobless people lack a moral compass, the song remains the same.

What's really scary is the sangfroid with which some Democrats (including the president) greeted this latest bipartisan proposal that punishes the poor and rewards the rich. They see the partial and merely temporary reversal of the Sequester as "a step in the right direction." Of course, most Pentagon cuts have been restored, to be offset by reduced benefits to veterans, increased pension contributions from federal workers already suffering under an effective wage freeze, cuts to Medicare providers, and a surcharge on airline travelers who must now pay for the privilege of being groped by the TSA.

The rich, meanwhile, pay nothing. So much for the battle against extreme wealth inequality.

The nauseating self-congratulations by both corporate parties for their assault on struggling people is just the latest proof that these politicians live a world divorced from reality. They exist to serve somebody, all right, but that somebody is definitely not us. If any one of them is demanding the restoration of food stamp cuts and low income heating assistance rather than trying to find the compromise between a machete and a scalpel, I haven't heard about it.

 

The Pain Consensus

Prosperity for the ruling class, austerity for the rest of you. So declared the two right wings of the Money Party yesterday as they rolled out a budget agreement that made a mockery of President Obama's recent vow to make alleviating the scourge of record wealth inequality the overriding issue of his second term.

A deal which passive-aggressively condemns more than a million chronically unemployed Americans to lives of destitution while it restores most of the Pentagon sequester cuts actually won praise from the fiscally conservative commander in chief --  by virtue of the fact that the pretend-enemy factions were able to come together to make a deal, any deal, ending the "gridlock" which nobody but the wealthy Beltway insiders pretend to care about.

The 113th Congress

The austerians won another round. The Big Money decreed it, the Big Money guaranteed it. And so, while military spending increases, younger veterans will be subject to chained CPI reductions on their future benefits. Federal workers will contribute more to their pension plans, on top of the effective wage reduction occasioned by the president's three-year pay freeze. Airline travelers already abused by stop and frisk tactics will now be charged an extra fee to defray the cost of the groping experience.

The wealthy will pay nothing. Their tax loopholes will enlarge into gaping chasms. If anything, they will get even richer.

And Congress isn't done yet. If you thought the Democrats would be clamoring for an expansion of the food stamp program at a time when an historic number of people are experiencing food insecurity, think again. The two right wings are currently negotiating over how much money to cut from benefits.  

Taking a cue from the double-talking Barack Obama and his crusade to end human misery by imposing more of it, Senate Agriculture Committee Chair Debbie Stabenow proclaims herself a champion of the downtrodden by dividing the deserving hungry from the undeserving hungry. She is suggesting another $8 billion in SNAP cuts on top of the already $5 billion yanked from the program last month.  In Bipartisan Austerity World, there apparently exists out in the hinterland a secret cabal of lottery winners and other cheats  stuffing their faces with groceries on the public dime. And even worse, some of them are unfairly staying warm in what's looking to be a colder than normal winter. There's apparently a "loophole" that  qualifies people in some states for automatic low income heating assistance, and Stabenow wants to sew it up tight. Her theory must be that people will be shivering so much that they'll forget their stomachs are empty. Oh, and since the Obama budget already had cut LIHEAP by 30% anyway, just think of the added savings when poor families ratchet down the heat from 60 to 55. It'll tie in so nicely with Michelle's Let's Move campaign when the kids have to do jumping jacks just to keep warm.

 Joel Berg, director of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger, trenchantly observes:

As chair of the Agriculture Committee, she (Stabenow) has it well within her power to propose a farm bill with no additional SNAP cuts whatsoever. The House Republicans have no legal ability to pass additional cuts unless the Senate Democrats and President Obama consent to such cuts. The Democrats should join together in scrapping this horrible bill that slashes food for struggling families while boosting corporate welfare, and instead start from scratch with a brand new farm bill that aids small- to mid-sized family farmers, slashes hunger and boosts rural economic development.

The Democrats are no longer even pretending to represent ordinary people. The only question remaining is how much pain people are willing to endure before they finally SNAP.

Judging from the radio silence, despair reigns over the Feudal States of the Homeland this holiday season.

And here is the third part of the New York Times series on Dasani, the homeless urban child that Barack Obama, Debbie Stabenow and the bipartisan pain caucus want to put on another diet.

Vampires of the Gilded Age

Financial gurus advise never spending more than a quarter of your income on housing, so as to have plenty of cash left over for food, heat, transportation and other niceties. But if you live in certain parts of the country (D.C., New York, San Francisco) that little bromide has always been a joke. Not for nothing does NYC actually have a political party called "The Rent is Too Damned High."

Since the financial meltdown and collapse of the housing market and record foreclosures, we have become a nation of renters. And Wall Street has become a cabal of landlords, buying up all those distressed properties they had a big hand in distressing, and then leasing them out to the same middle class refugees who once owned them. There's a new housing bubble. But instead of giving out subprime liar loans to unqualified buyers and thus inflating home prices, the banks and the wealthy investor class are snatching up housing inventory with scads of easy money provided through the Fed's quantitative easing welfare program/continued bailout of Wall Street.

And so where does that leave the poor, who were always renters? Pretty much in high-rent hell. Even vermin-infested slum properties are desirable these days, prime fodder for a new breed of urban renewalists and gentrification entrepreneurs and landlord investors. And when your landlord is Wall Street and you're late with the rent, they cut you no slack. They're evicting tenants as fast as they're sucking up their last dime as security deposits.

From the New York Times:

“We are in the midst of the worst rental affordability crisis that this country has known,” Shaun Donovan, the secretary of housing and urban development, said at a conference here (New York) on Monday.

And the less income a household has, the harder the sting. “These are the people with the fewest financial resources,” said Sheila Crowley, the president of the National Low Income Housing Coalition, a research and advocacy group based in Washington. “These are the people in danger of becoming homeless.”

The problem is national, and particularly acute among the working poor. The number of renters with very low incomes — less than 30 percent of the local median income, or about $19,000 nationally — surged by 3 million to 11.8 million between 2001 and 2011, according to a report released Monday by the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard. But the number of affordable rentals available to those households held steady at about 7 million. And by 2011, about 2.6 million of those rentals were occupied by higher-income households.

As a result, the share of renters paying more than 30 percent of their income for housing jumped to 50 percent in 2010 from 38 percent in 2000. For renters with incomes of less than $15,000 a year, 83 percent pay more than 30 percent of their income in rent.

During the soon-to-blessedly-end Bloomberg era, the division of the city into the haves and have-nots proceeded at breakneck speed. An example is the Hudson Yards Project, in which low income people were kicked out of their apartments through eminent domain in order to make room for green spaces and nice views for the rich.

The Times may be running a Pulitzer-worthy series of stories on extreme poverty and homelessness, but record wealth inequality is in no way impeding their business-as-usual shilling of lifestyles of the rich and famous. The editorial board just warned public workers and newly-elected Bill De Blasio that they'll have to face reality and stifle their expectations of a more egalitarian Big Apple. The Gray Lady suggests municipal workers contribute more to their own medical costs, but says nary a word about taxing the rich. In the midst of their holiday noblesse-obliging, the vampire elites are still pushing austerity on the masses while sucking up more for themselves.

 Sardonicky contributor Nan Socolow (who used to work in New York real estate) sent along this piece about River House, yet another residential tower for billionaires. The article fondly reminisces about the gilded age of the robber barons, and how it is making a comeback at long last. Property is getting so tight that even rich people are getting squeezed --- a historic luxury bar for wealthy boozehounds in the district is being closed to make room for one more plutocratic apartment. Nan writes in her scathing published comment:

The venerable New York real estate firm, Brown, Harris, Stevens (est. 1873) is offering the River House "residence" for sale at 130 Million Dollars. This egregiously grotesque price for an apartment - no matter the 'mod cons" and 82' swimming pool, right next to the East River (FDR) Drive - beggars comprehension!

This property needs a real go-getter pistol of a broker - someone like Leona Mindy Roberts before she became Mrs."just wild about Harry" Helmsley, and crowned herself Queen of the Helmsley Palace (Napoleon Bonaparte crowned himself Emperor of France). It will be interesting to see who has $130,000,000 walking around money to pay for this offering with its ineradicahble clangour of traffic noise and pall of air pollution. How good it is to see that hubris, chutzpah, and gall are alive and well in Manhattan's real estate market!

For the average billionaire, I suspect that $130 million is spare change, well in keeping with the gurus' advice to spend no more than a quarter of one's income on housing. If you're a Walton or a Koch, it's tantamount to throwing a nickel into a Salvation Army bell-ringers cup for Christmas. Not that these types would ever part with one plug nickel to ease the pain of the lesser people.

On that theme, be sure to read (or better yet, avoid)  scribe-to-the-plutocrats David Brooks's latest effort, a review of economist-to-the-plutocrats Tyler Cowen's latest book. Nobody can agitate for sadism in a more sensible-sounding philosophical manner than Our Mr. Brooks. His last two paragraphs are a veritable ode to Ebenezer Scrooge before his nightmare conversion:

Economizers. The bottom 85 percent is likely to be made up of people with less marketable workplace skills. Some of these people may struggle financially but not socially or intellectually. That is, they may not make much running a food truck, but they can lead rich lives, using the free bounty of the Internet. They could use a class of advisers on how to preserve rich lives on a small income.

Weavers. Many of the people who struggle economically will lack the self-motivation to build rich inner lives for themselves. Many are already dropping out of the labor force in record numbers and drifting into disorganized, disaffected lifestyles. Public and private institutions are going to hire more people to fight this social disintegration. There will be jobs for people who combat the dangerous inegalitarian tendencies of this new world.

My response: (he admits he never reads the comments because of his sensitive feelings)

So now David Brooks is shilling for the Koch Brothers.

Tyler Cowen, author of the book that he's salivating over, runs the libertarian think tank known as the Mercatus Center. Founded and funded by the Koch Family to the tune of almost $30 million, it's been called "Ground Zero for deregulation policy in Washington."

The Kochs' sole aim is extraction -- despoiling the planet as they relentlessly steal from every man, woman and child living on it. They're among just 250 individuals who have more money than the total annual living expenses of almost half the world -- three billion people. Or put another way, the richest 5% own about two-thirds of the $15 trillion gained since the recession.

So all this recent talk of wealth disparity and rising progressivism must be making them nervous. From the Kochs' vault to Cowen's brain to Brooks's Rx pad comes this cheery prescription:

It's a servant economy, stupid. And if you won't toil for the rich at subsistence wages, then you're a lazy low-life. And if you find yourself relegated to the margins through your own fault, there are plenty of your fellow citizens desperate enough to persuade you to get with the Brave New World program. Private for-profit prisons beckon those who can't embrace the joy of poverty and find fulfillment in licking the same boots that won't stop kicking them in the teeth.

It must be hard out there for a columnist needing new ways of preaching Social Darwinism week after stultifying week.