Excerpt: "There are plenty of very rich Americans who have a sense of perspective, who take pride in their achievements without believing that their success entitles them to live by different rules. But Mitt Romney, it seems, isn't one of those people."
Portrait, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, 06/15/09. (photo: Fred R. Conrad/NYT)
Pathos of the Plutocrat
20 July 12
“Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.” So wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald — and he didn’t just mean that they have more money. What he meant instead, at least in part, was that many of the very rich expect a level of deference that the rest of us never experience and are deeply distressed when they don’t get the special treatment they consider their birthright; their wealth “makes them soft where we are hard.”
And because money talks, this softness — call it the pathos of the plutocrats — has become a major factor in America’s political life.
It’s no secret that, at this point, many of America’s richest men — including some former Obama supporters — hate, just hate, President Obama. Why? Well, according to them, it’s because he “demonizes” business — or as Mitt Romney put it earlier this week, he “attacks success.” Listening to them, you’d think that the president was the second coming of Huey Long, preaching class hatred and the need to soak the rich.
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(side note, watch this season's first episode of Leverage to see an example of Selfish Hubris)
But they do think different, in fact it borders on a form of insanity. They hire people, so therefore they create jobs. In their minds the SH folks ignore the fact that the only reason they hired someone was because it creates more wealth for them. It creates more wealth because that new person will allow them to sell more of whatever they are selling.
When they cannot find a way to increase their cut of a company's income by increasing the sales, they simply cut pay and benefits and take more for themselves. Then they pat themselves on the back for doing so. SH.
And what we end up having is a process by which the rich more or less not only control how much their workers make, they also control how much they make themselves.
This is a process that can only be described as redistribution of wealth. Somehow enacting taxes that balance off that redistribution is in the SH minds an attack on them. Insane.
Romney is proving himself to be one of the borderline insane SH rich people, and his pretty wife too. Do we need a President that can only function in terms of what is best for him?
The plutocratic phenomenon has ruined many a civilization, now it's ravaging ours. Nothing really new. Same old, same old. And history teaches how to fix that.
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/
Obama firmly is one of them.... if not in resource in heart..... clearly
Why then hate him....they hate themselves so much is they key.
..anything that has the slightest hint of being not them, looking speaking in any manner not like them, but is really them......must be removed from the central stage at any cost.
Such is their vehement hatred of great source and power...this seeing they are despicable....t hey cannot allow to stand anything that even hints that things may be different then as they see them, and be them.
Those who are most unsecured in a position or belief are those who are most securely holding that position.
As a hitler is found to have jewish ancestry, the most vehement racist I know personally...is of mixed race..
This is the rule not the exception.
So they hate him vehemently..it is their hate of themselves so producing this thing, not him...he is them....slightl y different with some new wrinkles and dips and eddys but really..them.
So threatened are they to be considered not human in their own eyes(and others)...any variation to humanness cannot be tolerated.
Essentially they are not acting human in their heart of hearts
They know that...so are not quite rational in this thing. And hate mostly variance in their human perception.
They can accept variance..just not variance of themselves.
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Politics in this country is like a game of poker among gentlemen. They play for big stakes and they play to win, but that doesn't mean any of them are going to let YOU into the clubhouse. Except as a waiter. IF you behave yourself very very nicely.
Has anyone(everyone )seen the "DON'T RENIG" bumper sticker? For sale from someplace in the southern US, and viral for a time on youtube.
That is what decency is up against in this election. And do not ever think that the dragoons of the conservative right are going to renounce this kind of evil emotional politics willingly. Either we beat them now, in this election, however minimal the margin is, or God Help Us.
This will get better.
And it will get EXTREMELY UGLY first.
But I'd be careful about embracing a "soak the rich" attitude. As Krugman points out, lots of rich people actually did "create wealth." And while they need to pay taxes "progressively proportionate" to their incomes, we start to sound a little greedy ourselves when we demand that "the rich" pay for every need we can imagine while we pay for nothing.
It's bad politics as well as unhealthy thinking.
Which is why generally we should never call another race or type of peoples by any belief, ethnicity culture or birth lesser...it creates a evil which invariably will present.
Top or bottom.....whit e or black or any shade of pink or gray.....monied or not.
I would not say it is right...but go to any walmart on a sale day of a item.... stand in line perhaps and look around...and tell me you also do not feel a bit of aversion to those standing around you......or perhaps just sit in the stands of a loosing teams football in the NFL.....it is just that feeling taken to a extreme extent...
but do we not all feel that a bit in certain circumstances.. ...aversion to what is common humanity? .
Crowds being base or baser usually by behaviors.
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you may be on to something. at least i think "we" are always a little fearful of people who have less than us. after all, they might ask us for something. or take it by force.
but the Republicans appeal to this fear... among people who have very little themselves, and are in fact being robbed by those who have much.
what is truly sad is that the Democrats who used to represent the opposite point of view... care about those with less... appear to be only talking "left" while acting "right"... where the money comes from.
and for the rest of us it is very hard to talk against the rich robbing the poor without sounding like we advocate the poor robbing the rich.
The laws in this country benefit the wealthy. I don't want to "soak the rich" as you put it. I'm just looking for more equal footing for all Americans.
mostly i am talking to some people, rather loud at times, who DO talk about taxing the evil rich. The rich need to pay their fair share... about 10% MORE than now I think. But the attitude that the answer to all our problems is to tax the rich just plays into the hands of those who call it "class warfare" and think we are all Bolsheviks.
SS and Medicare are your insurance. You need to pay for that yourself. Once the rich start paying for it,they will own it. And then it won't be long before they find a way to cut it the way they cut all 'welfare.'
you are quite right that some of the rich are criminals, and those happen to be the ones that are now running our government. but try to make a distinction between them and everyone who has more than you.
The very rich hate ANYONE who wishes to interfere with their feeding habits.
They hate Obama because Obama gives them indigestion. Give him another 4 years and hopefully they will really get sick.
Where I live are two groups...very very rich and poor, I live on a actual junction of roads to these two differing places..
Both are by majority republican, or libertarian.
A federal project of tree thinning came to be heard about...the rich with their neighborhood group met with the forest service in a proactive fashion, helped to fashion the program had it serve as model and had the work quickly done.
The poor thought the federal government wanted to steal their lands(this was a ruse)...met with the forest service, a near riot ensued and the project was never initiated.
The poor coming from circumstances where your neighbor may be your biggest problem(trailer parks and such)...hate neighbors.
The rich as neighbors may be a revenue source for them to buy things are at worst neutral but may actually favor neighbors.
The poor as consequence of their feelings burn their garbage outdoors, filling the sky with acrid smoke, and have dogs that yap all night cause violence when they can...they hate all neighbors, they care not what impact they do to them...the rich do neither..they like their neighbors..
These are generalizations ...I find both human as me, the same as me and do not hold these views..but it is easy to see how the rich come to feel the poor are inferior, and thusly feel right in abusing them ..and this becomes the politic..
But it reactor #4 goes in Japan we will all be radiated 85 times more than Gernobyl anyway so anyway we slice it we are cooked. But rich people think they are immune to radiation. I have news for them it doesn't care. It's just like them. Modern man has only been on Earth for about 200,000 yrs and look at the mess we have made. Apes gone wild!
F. Scott Fitzgerald said it all and grew up with the pampered rich, one's he envied but simultaneously unveiled their selfish loutish vapid values. Willard and Ann Romney, hypocrisy incarnate, and their nouveau riche culture less, clueless sycophant supporters make Daisy and Tom Buchanan in "Gatsby" seem merely morbid.
Krugman should be Sec'y of the Treasury if a President had the smarts to appoint him. We need no more bankers or Wall Street aligned types ever again in that post.
"The effect of Mr. Krugman’s suggestions is for the government to subsidize the existing financial and tax structures, not write down debts or make the tax system more efficient. So I am afraid that his book might as well have been subtitled “How the Economy can Borrow its Way Out of Debt.” That is what budget deficits do: they add to the debt overhead."
Read more at http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/05/michael-hudson-paul-krugmans-economic-blinders.html#j2tzCzE5PrCCF4tY.99
Are you familiar enough with the contributions of John Maynard Keynes to compare PK with the former? Too bad you are not President, then you could have PK as your Secretary of Whatever!
If Europe no longer buys much from us, how would a slowdown there have a great effect here?
As to the national debt it is a bit of a joke really....inter est rates being what they are.... the debt is being sold in treasuries at rates way below normal inflation. Basically peoples and governments for the security of treasuries are paying to buy and hold them......if I could personally get loans of money at a no interest rate(way below sustained inflation rates)...and be paid to do so......I would be a idiot not to take as many of those loans as possible.
Like the ideas of oil being secure(prices and amounts) because of the fact it is mined in the US, and companies being US companies being US as their corporate offices are here...thinking debt itself is a negative on a balance sheet.....is from another time and place(world war 2 era thinking).....i t does not apply to no interest paid to hold debts.....every treasury auction continues to go off like clockwork.
The dollar (US) is safety...why not profit from it in loan rates and status???? We pay in other ways to make it safe. Why not reap what we sow....safety.. others pay for ours in loan rates(treasury rates).
Stimulus is often compared with priming an engine that is stalled. That assumes the engine is basically OK. Our economic engine lacks compression. Prime it, and it will turn over a few times then quit again. Without system reforms, transfers of wealth to the 99% through tax reform, debt forgiveness, de-militarizing the economy in favor of consumer production, the engine will continue to konk-out.
Remember, too, most people are still employed and have some savings. They will be paying for the stimulus. They will lose more than the unemployed will gain.
It was a falsely built economy credit based upon a false wealth perception that never actually was....the result....lots of consumption, lots of jobs lots of money.....
so now we measure ourselves against that false thing and say...why are we not measuring up to it...
It was false....never existed that wealth perception only....so we of course have unemployment and a lowering of wealth perception now....it is the real world. We are that poor and were not that rich.
All those things mentioned are good things I favor. But...they are not the actual cause of this crisis....at base of it...as consumer consumption is the base..but those are not the immediate cause of the immediate crisis since 08....false perception of value caused by credit derivative value being over appreciated was and is.
We are returned to our real value....
Stimulus....Krugman as you know was a major proponent.....
Paying for the stimulus as I mention....it is we are getting this thing for nothing...will it solve the problem in the immediate or long term...yes you are right it will not. I would add medicare for all to that list as major mover of the economy...
Not surprising that this same church that the Romneys give 10% of their income to, refuses to release any kind of financial report to their membership or anyone else that reveals where the millions of dollars in tithes and profits from church-owned corporations goes to.
It just occurred to me that for any available investigative reporter, struck as I was by the little glimpses into Romney's Mormon 'leadership' and lifestyle - which includes giving a 'tithe' of 'income' to the church, which pays no taxes either....
Just how does Romney give his due to his own Church? Does he parse out what is actually "income" from capital gains, foreign hidden accounts, complex instruments, 'blind' trusts, etc.?
My instincts tell me there may be a story in once again "following the money" and seeing if Romney's ideas of paying fair taxes (or any) differs in the case of his religious duty to give a percentage of his "income" to the CLDS. Think he's honest? Charitable? Conscientious? Religious? I'd love to hear more about not only his hiding of wealth and failure to pay fair share to the country he would lead, but how he feels/acts with regard to his religious calling to 'share the wealth'. (I'm sure it's very secret, but...)
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