David Sirota

 By David Sirota
Newspaper columnist, radio host, bestselling author

Let me interject something in the midst of all the finger-pointing about the unfortunate results of the Massachusetts senate race tonight – something that I think has been missed in all the media punditry, activist Twittering and netroots blogging.

Various polls (here and here, as examples) have shown that a good chunk of the opposition to and/or frustration with the health care bill that played such a central role in the Massachusetts race comes from a progressive perspective – namely, a perspective that says the bill doesn’t go far enough. How much that precise kind of opposition/frustration played a role in the Massachusetts race is anyone’s guess – but among those that it did, my guess is that the feelings of demoralization are particularly intense, because those feelings are rooted in the most powerful emotion of all: humiliation.

After a 2008 campaign that saw Democrats promise to genuinely take on the health care and financial industries, we’ve seen a 2009 that has asked Democratic voters to fight for extremely small, extremely modest scraps. We’ve been relegated to having to mount fierce campaigns to keep things like the public option in the debate and not to stop trillion-dollar bailouts – but just make sure they have one or two flimsy strings attached to them.

We’ve loyally mounted these campaigns. They haven’t been fun, and worse, they haven’t been legislatively successful (at least not yet). But beyond the substantive failure is the embarrassment that comes with even having to mount such campaigns in the first place.

There is something deeply embarrassing about Democratic voters/groups having to fight with Democratic leaders to get those leaders to even seriously try (much less pass) even the smallest, most modest shreds of their promises. Having to do that evokes feelings of genuine shame – shame in front of the other voters we told to vote for Democrats because it supposedly “mattered,” and shame when we look in the mirror at a self that may have allowed itself to be unnecessarily duped.

I feel this sense of humiliation every day I am talking to regular folks here in Colorado on the radio. As a single-payer guy, I feel embarrassed that I’ve been relegated to fighting for the fulfillment of as modest a campaign promise as the public option. Likewise, as a person who opposed the bailouts from the get-go, I feel embarrassed to be relegated to simply asking for a bit of transparency and regulation from a party that promised tough New Deal-like measures against Wall Street. And my guess is that – whether consciously or not – many people who voted for Democrats in 2008 feel that same sense of shame as well.

Again, I don’t know if this deep sense of humiliation is what drove down Democratic performance in Massachusetts tonight, or is driving down President Obama’s numbers as a whole. But my bet is it has at least something to do with it, especially because the 2008 campaign had so much to do with raising people’s expectations.

That wasn’t a normal election – many of us who had stopped believing in the possibilities of American democracy said we’d be willing to believe one last time. And now, seeing that perhaps we shouldn’t have relented in our (rightful) cynicism, we are completely mortified.

Undoubtedly, Democrats and progressive media will attempt to make us ignore these feelings of humiliation by simply vilifying the extremism of Republicans (predictably, we are already seeing this rather pathetic tactic from various Democratic voices – save the always honest Howard Dean – on television tonight). And it is all but guaranteed that in typical blame-the-victim fashion, some lockstep Democratic activists and Obama supporters will find a way to blame progressives – rather than the politicians who broke their progressive promises – for the Massachusetts loss and the Democratic Party’s flagging poll numbers. Those are the tried and true formulas to stir up the base and manufacture a supposed “united front.”

But I don’t know if it will work this time, unless it is coupled with – finally – a serious effort by Democratic lawmakers to legislate their promises. And even then, I still don’t know if it will work. I don’t know because maybe it’s too little, too late – maybe the humiliation has already transformed cynicism into total and complete alienation.

***

David Sirota is the author of the best-selling books “Hostile Takeover” and “The Uprising.” He hosts the morning show on AM760 in Colorado and blogs at OpenLeft.com. E-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com or follow him on Twitter @davidsirota.

 Note bolded quotations dealing directly with labor issues:

David Sirota

By David Sirota
Newspaper columnist, radio host, bestselling author

 While I’m loathe to write a top-ten list, if only for fear of falling short of Dave Letterman’s legendary bit, I’m making an exception in this first week of 2010 — a moment when we get to not only make New Year’s resolutions, but resolutions for the new decade. As we make those prospective pledges, let’s take a moment to look back at the Top Ten Quotations from the last ten years — the ones telling us some painful truths about our country, society and worldview; the ones that might inform us of what we need to do as we move forward:

10. “They frankly own the place.” — Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill. in 2009 admitting the taboo about banks’ influence in Congress.

9. “Haven’t we already given money to rich people … Shouldn’t we be giving money to the middle?” — President George W. Bush in November 2002, acknowledging to advisers that he knew his tax cuts were giveaways to the super-wealthy.

8. “Keep your government hands off my Medicare.” — Anti-health care protester at an August 2009 congressional town hall meeting in South Carolina — the single most succinct sign that our country has become an Idiocracy. 

7. “We did this for the show.” — Falcon Heene on Oct. 15, 2009, telling CNN that the Balloon Boy chase was a hoax. The declaration demonstrated that the media‘s 24-7 knee-jerk sensationalism is irresponsible and proved that America‘s culture of celebrity aspiration is completely out of control.

6. “As we know, there are known knowns. There are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns. That is to say, we know they’re some things we do not know. But there’re also unknown unknowns; the ones we don’t know we don’t know.” — Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on Feb. 12, 2002, effectively telling us that the government had no idea what it was doing by invading Iraq.

5. “Bring ‘em on.” — President George Bush on July 2, 2003, daring al-Qaida to attack U.S. troops — yet more proof that the elite defines “toughness” as politicians flippantly sacrificing young American lives for Washington’s hubristic ideologies.

4. “The investment community feels very put-upon. They feel there is no reason why they shouldn’t earn $1 million to $200 million a year, and they don’t want to be held responsible for the global financial meltdown.” — Daniel Fass, chairman of Obama’s financial-industry fundraising party on Oct. 19, 2009, insisting that despite wrecking the economy and then being handed trillions of bailout dollars, Wall Street is a victim.

3. “$500,000 is not a lot of money, particularly if there is no bonus.” — Wall Street compensation consultant James Reda on Feb. 3, 2009, giving the New York Times a good example of just how totally out of touch the super-rich really are.

2. “I didn’t campaign on the public option.” – President Obama on December 22, 2009, expecting the public to forget that his presidential campaign platform explicitly promised to pass health care legislation giving all Americans “the opportunity to enroll in [a] new public plan.”

1. “It doesn’t matter.” — Vice President Dick Cheney on Nov. 5, 2006, referring to polls repeatedly showing the majority of Americans oppose the Iraq War — a sign the ruling class truly does not care about the demands of the public. 

These epigrams expose a nation that has internalized and accepted the forces of avarice, corruption, dishonesty, incompetence and insensitivity. Some of them are darkly funny, some of them are gut-wrenchingly sad — but all of them are warnings. Whether we listen to them or not will be the difference between repeating the last decade’s folly or learning from it. 

Here’s to resolutions for the new decade that finally choose the latter.

***

David Sirota is the author of the best-selling books “Hostile Takeover” and “The Uprising.” He hosts the morning show on AM760 in Colorado and blogs at OpenLeft.com. E-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com or follow him on Twitter @davidsirota.

David Sirota

 By David Sirota
Newspaper columnist, radio host, bestselling author 

This month, a British government report admitted that one of the major rationales for invading Iraq — the claim that Saddam could deploy WMDs in 45 minutes — probably came from a cab driver. Had the public originally been told about this sketchy sourcing, there may have been a more, ahem, forceful mass opposition to preemptive war in the Middle East.

It’s a good lesson about the need for transparency. We cannot fully snuff out spin, and we will never be able to guarantee perfect results from policy choices. But we can increase the chances for successful societal decision-making when we at least know the facts.

That’s the common sense rationale behind our sunshine laws. While courts say we can’t ban politicians from raising private money, we can force politicians to disclose who their benefactors are so that we know what they really represent. We may not bar sugary foods — but we do require nutrition labels so we can know what we are eating.

More often than not, this was the American compromise: We fought about regulations and mandates, but there had been consensus support for transparency.

“Had been,” mind you, is the key phrase — and the cab-driver-induced war is only the beginning.

In 2008, the New York Times’ David Barstow reported that 75 retired military officers regularly appearing on television “have ties to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess on air.”

Collectively, the group represented “more than 150 military contractors either as lobbyists, senior executives, board members or consultants,” and here’s the kicker: “Those business relationships are hardly ever disclosed to viewers.”

Had networks reacted to Barstow’s blockbuster with better disclosure, we could have rested easy. Instead, the deceptions persist.

HuffPost recently showed how “major television networks continue to host retired generals as military analysts without alerting viewers to their extensive ties to defense contractors.”

Additionally, Wired magazine reports that neoconservative think-tankers who directly helped craft the Pentagon’s Afghan escalation are now appearing throughout the media as allegedly disinterested analysts of the escalation — again, without any mention of their concurrent work.

Considering the sometimes murky relationship between advertisers and newsrooms, it’s easy to think this opacity is the exclusive transgression of commercial media. Unfortunately, it’s not — it has bled into the country’s single most powerful economic institution, the Federal Reserve.

This is the bank currently lobbying against congressional oversight by arguing it must preserve its “independence” — the same institution whose regional board members are elected by the private banks they regulate and whose chairman, Ben Bernanke, quietly cavorts with the bank CEOs he’s supposed to be independent from. Even worse, the Fed is paying many of the ostensibly objective economists who sculpt the debate about Congress’s Fed policy.

HuffPost ace reporter Ryan Grim found that the Fed today doles out roughly $400 million a year for “research” — much of it to outside economists who then advocate for the Fed’s agenda without disclosing their Fed ties. For instance, seven of the eight economists on a recent anti-oversight letter to Congress failed to note they are or were on the Fed’s payroll.

That blatant chicanery, though, is not the worst of it. The real subterfuge is how the Fed’s shadowy pay scheme bakes an invisible pro-Fed consensus into our public discourse. Through its academic largesse, Grim notes the Fed “so thoroughly dominates the field of economics that real criticism of the central bank has become a career liability for members of the profession.”

Ronald Reagan, of course, warned us to “trust, but verify.” It was good advice, except for one hitch: What happens when the verifiers are the ones who can no longer be trusted?

***

David Sirota is the author of the best-selling books “Hostile Takeover” and “The Uprising.” He hosts the morning show on AM760 in Colorado and blogs at OpenLeft.com. E-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com or follow him on Twitter @davidsirota.

David Sirota

By David Sirota
Newspaper columnist, radio host, bestselling author 

 Washington’s favorite term these days is “moral hazard.” Though this buzz-phrase may seem like a complex and even intimidating idea, most of us, whether consciously or not, understand the principle because it’s basic common sense.

Applaud your kid for punching another kid — rather than grounding him — and you’ve created a moral hazard that means he’ll probably punch other kids in the future. Give your dog a treat — rather than a scolding — after he urinates in the house, and the moral hazard you’ve engineered makes it likely you’ll soon be cleaning up even more sallow stains on your rug.

In short, without consequences — or worse, with rewards — for wrongdoing, there is an incentive to do wrong. That’s moral hazard.

To date, the national discussion about this concept has revolved specifically around financial moral hazard. And, as evidenced by trillions of dollars in public loans, guarantees and subsidies given to speculators to cover their massive losses, leaders in both political parties have no interest in preventing financial moral hazard — despite stern press releases insisting the contrary.

By rewarding rather than punishing Wall Street for losing irresponsibly risky bets and by holding out the promise of similar bailout rewards in the future, politicians have incentivized even more irresponsible risk-taking for years to come.

But financial moral hazard is only half the story. The other half is political moral hazard — the mother of all other moral hazards. Consider, for instance, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke. He’s the top regulator who not only sowed financial moral hazard with the Fed’s post-meltdown bailouts, but openly admits that as the crisis developed, his Federal Reserve “should have done more — we should have required more capital, more liquidity (and) we should have required tougher risk-management controls.” 

Firing Bernanke would tell other regulators that there are consequences for negligence. Instead, President Barack Obama rewarded Bernanke with re-nomination and thus manufactured a pernicious problem. 

As economist Dean Baker says, just as bailouts create a financial moral hazard giving speculators no incentive to avoid excessive risk, Bernanke’s re-nomination creates a political moral hazard whereby regulators “will not have an incentive to do their jobs properly (because) there are no consequences” for failure. The Democratic Congress, of course, could reject Bernanke’s nomination for being “the definition of moral hazard,” as Republican Sen. Jim Bunning of Kentucky correctly noted.

But that seems unlikely, considering how many Democrats have been aggressively embracing moral hazard. 

When Senate Democrats ratified Obama’s nomination of New York Fed chief Tim Geithner as treasury secretary, they rewarded yet another shill who also fell down on the regulatory job. When those same Senate Democrats considered the nomination of Gary Gensler to head the agency regulating derivatives, they could have rejected him for championing derivatives deregulation as a Clinton official and then cashing in as a Goldman Sachs executive.

 Instead, Democrats backed his nomination and effectively told every other Gary Gensler-like parasite that misguided actions and corruption don’t prevent future promotion.

And let’s be fair — it’s not just Democratic politicians who are creating political moral hazard. Many Democratic pundits, activists and voters continued cheering on Obama while he stuffed his administration full of Wall Streeters — and many of these rank-and-file voices attacked as disloyal those progressives who raised questions. 

That told Obama he faces few consequences — and even defense — from his own base for promoting those who engineered the economic meltdown. 

The only open question is whether the public at large becomes complicit, too. Come election day, if there are no consequences at the ballot box for the politicians — Democrat or Republican — who legislated bailouts, supported these appointments and are now working to undermine proposed Wall Street reforms, then America will have created the biggest moral hazard of all.

*** 

David Sirota is the author of the best-selling books “Hostile Takeover” and “The Uprising.” He hosts the morning show on AM760 in Colorado and blogs at OpenLeft.com. E-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com or follow him on Twitter @davidsirota.

David Sirota

By David Sirota
Political journalist, best-selling author and syndicated newspaper columnist

I don’t get it.

I know that’s the simplistic refrain of every 10-year-old, but I’m 33 and I mean it: I just don’t get it.

Specifically, I don’t get why Maine Sen. Olympia Snowe (R) — or any Republican senator, for that matter — is attracting so much attention.

In the last few months, Democratic senators eliminated the public option and substantially weakened their health care proposals in order to buy insurance industry acquiescence and, thus, Snowe’s vote. Now, based on the deafening media noise, all of American politics is focused on this unaccomplished backbencher and whether or not she will endorse the final bill. It is as if Republicans control Congress — as if Snowe, not Barack Obama, won the biggest presidential landslide since Ronald Reagan.

This is bizarre for what should be obvious reasons.

First of all, Snowe’s much-celebrated initial vote this week for an embarrassingly flaccid health care initiative wasn’t necessary to pass the bill — Democrats had enough votes to move the legislation out of the Senate Finance Committee without her approval. That’s a mathematical fact, as is the fact that Democrats control the 60 votes to overcome a filibuster with or without Snowe; as is the fact that Democrats have the 51 votes to enact health care reform through a parliamentary procedure called reconciliation — again, with or without Snowe.

So the notion that Snowe’s vote — or any GOP vote — is inherently pivotal to health care reform is a fantasy created by the Beltway media and the Democratic congressional leadership. The former is desperately trying to manufacture headline-grabbing drama; the latter is looking for a Republican excuse to water down the bill and protect corporate interests — all while absolving Democrats of legislative responsibility.

Second, the idea that Snowe’s support will result in the final legislation being called “bipartisan” — and that such billing will politically protect Democrats — is absurd. How do we know this? Because Democrats themselves taught us that via the Iraq War.

Recall that with solid Democratic and Republican backing, the 2002 Iraq resolution was far more “bipartisan” than any health care bill will ever be. Yet, Democrats turned right around and used the Iraq War to criticize Republicans — and because the conflict was so wildly unpopular, Americans in 2006 and 2008 were willing to overlook the contradiction and vote for the only major party echoing any semblance of an antiwar message.

On health care, it will be the same in reverse: The GOP will invariably attempt to turn any bill into an electoral cudgel against Democrats — regardless of how many Republicans end up voting for it.

The lesson, then, is simple: If Democrats’ hypocritical Iraq criticism only worked because the war was such a disaster, then the GOP’s inevitable health care attacks — however hypocritical — can only be thwarted by making health care reform the opposite of Iraq (i.e., a major success). For Democrats, in other words, good health care policy is great politics, and bad policy is the worst politics.

Whether passed by one congressional vote or 50, real reform that improves the system (i.e., a bill with a public option, tough insurance regulation and universal coverage) will transform the Democratic Party into an election-winning force forever known as “the generous protector of middle-class interests,” as GOP strategist William Kristol admits. Conversely, even if passed unanimously, bad legislation that makes the system worse (i.e., a bill empowering insurance companies, preventing a public option and leaving millions uncovered) will make GOP criticism of Democrats extremely effective.

That’s a truism, no matter if Snowe or any other Republicans add their support to a health care bill that doesn’t actually need it in the first place.

***

David Sirota is the author of the best-selling books “Hostile Takeover” and “The Uprising.” He hosts the morning show on AM760 in Colorado and blogs at OpenLeft.com. E-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com.

I can’t tell what’s more outrageous and disgusting: The fact that lobbyists have been permitted to serve on the federal advisory boards that oversee policies affecting their clients, the fact that that has been occurring with almost no Establishment outcry for years, or the fact that lobbyists have the sheer audacity to publicly scream at the Obama administration for trying to end this form of institutionalized corruption.

That latter point is, of course, the good news announced on the White House’s website on September 23rd:

We wanted to take this opportunity to announce the next step in the President’s efforts to reduce the influence of special interests in Washington. The White House has informed executive agencies and departments that it is our aspiration that federally-registered lobbyists not be appointed to agency advisory boards and commissions. These appointees to boards and commissions, which are made by agencies and not the President, advise the federal government on a variety of policy areas.

The administration had previously been criticized – rightly, IMHO – for issuing a series of waivers on its much-touted lobbyist/ethics reforms. So this move is a welcome change in direction that suggests the White House is getting (at least a tiny a bit) more serious about rooting out some of the worst corruption in the government.

Then again, the reaction on K Street to even this minimal clean-government step shows just how institutionalized that corruption is. Though, as OMB Watch notes, there will still be many ways for corporate interests to get around this latest directive, those interests are nonetheless going crazy.

Over here and here you have corporate trade associations freaking out. Over there you have the American League of Lobbyists screaming bloody murder. And at U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk’s press conference last week, he was barraged with questions about how he could dare try to remove lobbyists from the major federal advisory boards that have shaped our destructive “free” trade policies.

Kirk answered the question judiciously, saying that while “There is a role for representatives and lobbyists in the development of the policymaking process, the president felt that that role in Washington had been enlarged to perhaps an unhealthy degree.”

That’s an understatement, if there ever was one. On trade policy alone, CongressDaily estimates that of the 700 representatives serving on government advisory panels, about one third are registered lobbyists.

To be sure, some might say that hey, it’s not a big deal for lobbyists to serve on advisory panels, because those panels are only “advisory.” But that label is deliberately deceptive.

These panels issue very influential reports and edicts with the stamp, seal and credibility of the federal government. These are documents that begin the long process of policy formation and that, for example, congresspeople hold up in floor debates as proof that they are doing the right thing. And so the reason why corporate lobbyists are going crazy about being barred from these advisory panels is because they know that those panels – despite their “advisory” billing – are extremely powerful in corrupting policy at its very origin. Remove the lobbyists from these positions, and you begin removing the spores that ultimately germinate into stuff like NAFTA, the Medicare prescription drug giveaway, corporate tax loopholes, etc.

To that end, I expect this story isn’t over by a long shot. The anger about this modest proposal is so intense on K Street, you may see the administration back off. I sure hope not – and I give the White House a lot of credit for moving forward knowing full well this would be the reaction.

But that gets back to the original point of this post: just how deeply rooted corruption really is in Washington. It has become such a part of Beltway culture that lobbyists now feel fully entitled to be able to corrupt public policy with the seal of the government – they expect it so much, in fact, that they spaz out whenever anyone tries to stop it.

***

David Sirota is the bestselling author of the books “Hostile Takeover” (2006) and “The Uprising” (2008). Find his blog at OpenLeft.com or e-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com

David Sirota

By David Sirota
Political journalist, best-selling author and syndicated newspaper columnist

I wrote a newspaper column this week noting the rank hypocrisy in political and media circles when it comes to their supposed concerns about the deficit. I noted that Tea Party protesters are among the biggest hypocrites – and chief among them is political terrorist Glenn Beck, because, as you’ll see, the truth is the bailout is the Beck Bank Bailout.

As Frank Rich notes, Beck has been promoting himself not only as a racist culture warrior, but as an economic populist who rails on government giveaways to Wall Street. In that sense, he’s sort of trying to be a neo-Buchananite…except, there’s just one problem with his economic argument: Glenn Beck championed the Wall Street bailout he claims to be leading the fight against. In fact, when progressives were fighting tooth and nail against the bailout (and taking significant criticism for doing so) Beck was promoting it, offering criticism only for it not being bigger:

“I think the bailout is the right thing do. The “REAL STORY” is the $700 billion that you’re hearing about now is not only, I believe, necessary, it is also not nearly enough, and all of the weasels in Washington know it.” – Glenn Beck, CNN, 9/22/08

That’s right – this is the Beck Bank Bailout. So the next time you hear Glenn Beck railing on government spending and corporate giveaways and the failure to crack down on Wall Street largesse, remember – Glenn Beck is railing on the very largesse that Glenn Beck intensely promoted and supported on the national Glenn Beck television show.

(huge h/t to Jenkins Ear and ThinkProgress)

NOTE: Beck sometimes calls the stimulus bill a “bailout” – but let’s be clear: As you can see from the transcript, he’s referring not to the stimulus bill, but to the TARP bailout that he now rails on.

UPDATE: Time magazine, and its reporter David Von Drehle, just published a cover story puff piece on Beck. The fact that the magazine devoted substantial resources to such a piece – and didn’t bother to even mention this central hypocrisy of Beck – is not only an absolute embarrassment, it shows exactly why journalism is in a severe crisis.

***

David Sirota is the bestselling author of the books “Hostile Takeover” (2006) and “The Uprising” (2008). Find his blog at OpenLeft.com or e-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com

David Sirota

By David Sirota
Political journalist, best-selling author and syndicated newspaper columnist

In the months following the Wall Street meltdown, we’ve seen a stealth marketing campaign that is profound for its boldness — a marketing campaign designed to make us believe that very wealthy people are suffering the most.

We’ve seen this campaign in Wall Street spokespeople insisting that a $500,000-a-year salary isn’t very big, in a New York Times style section that asserts that it’s impossible to live in the city on a half million dollars; in a punditburo that says millionaires are oppressed and can’t afford to pay $9,000 a year more in taxes for universal health care; and in a national press corps that seeks to portray any effort to raise taxes on the richest 1 percent as unfair; and a business press that threatens a class war if President Obama moves forward with his promise to make the payroll tax more progressive. As I said, this is a marketing campaign, and a fairly well coordinated one.

That’s why I wasn’t surprised to see this audacious Washington Post piece over the weekend which reports — with a straight face — that those making $300,000 a year are “barely squeaking by” in this economy. I s*** you not:

Laura Steins doesn’t mind saying that she is barely squeaking by on $300,000 a year… As a vice president at MasterCard’s corporate office in Purchase, N.Y., she earns a base pay of $150,000 plus a bonus. This year she’ll take home 10 percent less because of a smaller bonus. She receives $75,000 a year in child support from her ex-husband. She figures she will pull an additional $50,000 from a personal investment account to “pick up the slack.”

The nanny and property taxes take $75,000 right off the top, but Steins considers both non-negotiable facts of her life and not discretionary. When she bought out her husband’s share of the house after their 2006 divorce, she assumed the costs of keeping it afloat — $8,000 to $10,000 a month. There’s a pool man, a gardener and someone to plow the snow from the quarter-mile-long driveway.

As tight as money is, she has decided that living in a 4,000-square-foot house on three acres is the practical thing to do.

I’m not going to take up text space going off about how absurd this all is, except to say (as I have before) that in a country where the recession is obviously most crushing the middle-class, I’m playing the smallest violin in the world for those making $300,000 a year (ie. the top 5 percent of the country) — especially those who whine about their plight while refusing to cut back on their nannys and gardeners.

What’s fascinating here is not how incredibly out of touch with Middle American reality the super wealthy are, but how willing the media are to promote the super wealthy’s whines as legitimate and justified. The entire economic narrative on Main Street is about how the average family making $50,000 a year is going to put food on the table — and the entire economic narrative in the elite media is about the top 5 percent’s concerns that they might have to cut back on mansion expenses.

This is the real “Two Americas” — the elites and the media outlets they control, and the Rest of Us. And clearly, the former doesn’t give a s*** about the latter. David Sirota is the bestselling author of the books “Hostile Takeover” (2006) and “The Uprising” (2008). Find his blog at OpenLeft.com or e-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com

David Sirota

By David Sirota
Political journalist, best-selling author and syndicated newspaper columnist

I know I should be mortified by the lobbyist-organized mobs of angry Brooks Brothers mannequins who are now making headlines by shutting down congressional town hall meetings. I know I should be despondent during this, the Khaki Pants Offensive in the Great American Health Care and Tax War. And yet, I’m euphorically repeating one word over and over again with a big grin on my face.

Finally.

Finally, there’s no pretense. Finally, the Me-First, Forget-Everyone-Else Crowd’s ugliest traits are there for all to behold.

The group’s core gripe is summarized in a letter I received that denounces a proposed surtax on the wealthy and corporations to pay for universal health care:

“Until recently, my family was in the top 3 percent of wage earners,” the affluent businessperson fumed in response to my July column on taxes. “We are in the group that pays close to 60 percent of this nation’s taxes … Think for a second how you would feel if you built a business and contributed more than your share to this country only to be treated like a pariah.”

This sob story about the persecuted rich fuels today’s “Tea Parties” – and I’m sure you’ve heard some version of it in your community.

I’m also fairly certain that when many of you run into the Me-First, Forget-Everyone-Else Crowd, you don’t feel like confronting the faux outrage. But on the off chance you do muster the masochistic impulse to engage, here’s a guide to navigating the conversation:

What They Will Scream: We can’t raise business taxes, because American businesses already pay excessively high taxes!

What You Should Say: Here’s the smallest violin in the world playing for the businesses. The Government Accountability Office reports that most U.S. corporations pay zero federal income tax. Additionally, as even the Bush Treasury Department admitted, America’s effective corporate tax rate is the third lowest in the industrialized world.

What They Will Scream: But the rich still “pay close to 60 percent of this nation’s taxes!”

What You Should Say: Such statistics refer only to the federal income tax. When considering all of “this nation’s taxes” including payroll, state and local levies, the top 5 percent pay just 38.5 percent of the taxes.

What They Will Scream: But 38.5 percent is disproportionately high! See? You’ve proved that the rich “contribute more than their share” of taxes!

What You Should Say: Actually, they are paying almost exactly “their share.” According to the data, the wealthiest 5 percent of America pays 38.5 percent of the total taxes precisely because they make just about that share – a whopping 36.5 percent! – of total national income. Asking these folks to pay slightly more in taxes – and still less than they did during the go-go 1990s – is hardly extreme.

Stripped of facts, your conversation partner will soon turn to unscientific terrain, claiming it is immoral to “steal” and “redistribute” income via taxes. Of course, he will be specifically railing on “stealing” for stuff like health care, which he insists gets “redistributed” only to the undeserving and the “lazy” (a classic codeword for “minorities”). But he will also say it’s OK that government sent trillions of dollars to Wall Streeters.

And that’s when you should stop wasting your breath.

What you’ve discovered is that the Me-First, Forget-Everyone-Else Crowd isn’t interested in fairness, empiricism or morality.

With 22,000 of their fellow countrymen dying annually for lack of health insurance and with Warren Buffett paying a lower effective tax rate than his secretary, the Me-First, Forget-Everyone-Else Crowd is merely using the argot of fairness, empiricism and morality to hide its real motive: selfish greed.

No argument, however rational, is going to cure these narcissists of that grotesque disease.

***

David Sirota is the bestselling author of the books “Hostile Takeover” (2006) and “The Uprising” (2008). Find his blog at OpenLeft.com or e-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com<–>

David Sirota

By David Sirota
Political journalist, best-selling author and syndicated newspaper columnist

For those still clinging to quaint notions of the American ideal, these have been a faith-shaking 10 years. Just as evolutionary science once got in the way of creationists’ catechism, so has politics now undermined patriots’ naive belief that the United States is a functioning democracy.

The 21st century opened with a handful of Supreme Court puppets appointing George W. Bush president after he lost the popular vote – and we all know the costs in blood and treasure that insult wrought. Now the decade closes with another cabal of stooges assaulting the “one person, one vote” principle – and potentially bringing about another disaster.

Here we have a major congressional push to fix a health care system that leaves one-sixth of the country without coverage. Here we have 535 House and Senate delegates elected to give all 300 million of us a voice in the solution. And here we have just 13 of those delegates holding the initiative hostage.

In the Senate, both parties have outsourced health care legislation to six Finance Committee lawmakers: Max Baucus, D-Mont.; Kent Conrad, D-N.D.; Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M.; Mike Enzi, R-Wyo.; Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, and Olympia Snowe, R-Maine. The group recently announced it is rejecting essential provisions like a public insurance option that surveys show the public supports. Meanwhile, seven mostly Southern House Democrats have been threatening to use their Commerce Committee votes to gut any health care bill, regardless of what the American majority wants.

This, however, isn’t about the majority. These lawmakers, hailing mostly from small states and rural areas, together represent only 13 million people, meaning those speaking for just 4 percent of America are maneuvering to impose their health care will on the other 96 percent of us.

Census figures show that the poverty rates are far higher and per-capita incomes far lower in the 13 legislators’ specific districts than in the nation as a whole. Put another way, these politicians represent exactly the kinds of districts whose constituents would most benefit from universal health care. So why are they leading the fight to stop – rather than pass – reform?

Because when tyranny mixes with legalized bribery, constituents’ economic concerns stop mattering.

Thanks to our undemocratic system and our corrupt campaign finance laws, the health care industry doesn’t have to fight a 50-state battle. It can simply buy a tiny group of congresspeople, which is what it’s done. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, health interests have given these 13 members of Congress $12 million in campaign contributions – a huge sum further enhanced by geography.

Remember, politicians trade favors for re-election support – and the best way to ensure re-election is to raise money to for TV airtime (read: commercials). The result is an amplifier of tyranny: Precisely because the undemocratic system unduly empowers legislators from sparsely populated (and hence cheap) media markets, industry cash can more easily purchase tyrannical obstruction from those same legislators. In this case, that means congresspeople blocking health care reform that would most help their own voters.

Of course, there is talk of circumventing the 13 obstructionists and forcing a un-filibuster-able vote of the full Congress. Inside the Washington palace, the media court jesters and political aides-de-camp have reacted to such plans by raising predictable charges of improper procedure, poor manners, bad etiquette and other Versailles transgressions.

But the real crime would be letting the tyrants block that vote, trample democracy and kill health care reform in the process.

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David Sirota is the bestselling author of the books “Hostile Takeover” (2006) and “The Uprising” (2008). Find his blog at OpenLeft.com or e-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com