Samantha Eyler-Driscoll — Who Are the Top 1 Percent in America? The Answer from New Research Might Surprise You

A new paper challenges Thomas Piketty’s portrayal of an income distribution dominated at the top by passive rentiers who do nothing to earn their money, arguing that income inequality in America today is driven by the working rich.

ProMarket — The blog of the Stigler Center at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business
Who Are the Top 1 Percent in America? The Answer from New Research Might Surprise You

Samantha Eyler-Driscoll

Peter Turchin — Intra-Elite Competition: A Key Concept for Understanding the Dynamics of Complex Societies

Intra-elite competition is one of the most important factors explaining massive waves of social and political instability, which periodically afflict complex, state-level societies. This idea was proposed by Jack Goldstone nearly 30 years ago. Goldstone tested it empirically by analyzing the structural precursors of the English Civil War, the French Revolution, and seventeenth century’s crises in Turkey and China. Other researchers (including Sergey Nefedov, Andrey Korotayev, and myself) extended Goldstone’s theory and tested it in such different societies as Ancient Rome, Egypt, and Mesopotamia; medieval England, France, and China; the European revolutions of 1848 and the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917; and the Arab Spring uprisings. Closer to home, recent research indicates that the stability of modern democratic societies is also undermined by excessive competition among the elites (see Ages of Discord for a structural-demographic analysis of American history). Why is intra-elite competition such an important driver of instability?...

Cliodynamica — A Blog about the Evolution of Civilizations
Intra-Elite Competition: A Key Concept for Understanding the Dynamics of Complex Societies
Peter Turchin | Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Connecticut, Research Associate in the School of Anthropology, University of Oxford, and Vice-President of the Evolution Institute

David F. Ruccio — Sanders and Veblen

David Ruccio schools Adam Davidson, following Bill Black.

Occasional Links & Commentary
Sanders and Veblen
David F. Ruccio | Professor of Economics, University of Notre Dame

Reddit — Member of the 1% Shocks Reddit: ‘I’m Voting for Bernie Sanders. Here’s Why’

Michael Hudson has argued this for years.  Taxing rent would be economically beneficial for growth and better for everyone. The !% would still enjoy the same lifestyle but would not hoard save as much. The difference to them would be marginal rather than substantial. Most would not notice it — only the misers.

Why? Economic performance is a matter of maintaining circular flow at dynamic equilibrium with respect to population growth, and increasing per capital product to the degree possible through innovation.

Rent detracts from circular flow, as does hoarding. If this were invested, especially in innovation, it would not make any substantial difference to the economy other than distributively. But it is not, regardless of the intense propaganda to the contrary.

The pie is smaller than it could be as a result, and distribution is adversely affected too, starving the bottom unless the bottom is subsidized.

Every economist is well aware of this.

AlterNet
Member of the 1% Shocks Reddit: ‘I’m Voting for Bernie Sanders. Here’s Why’
Reddit

Austerity is not going to go away even though the whole world now knows it's a total disaster

There's been a lot of talk about the beginning of the end of austerity because everyone now knows that it's been a total, complete, disaster.

(Look at Obama's response when asked about the Greek vote and austerity. He was silent because his benefactors want him to stay out of it and leave THEIR interests alone!)

Reporters pressed Josh Earnest, President Barack Obama’s spokesman, for details of what his boss thought of the vote and of the bailout deal, and whether he agreed with 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders that the latter was outrageous. Earnest answered with streams of polite words that added up to ... nothing. Obama was staying out of the issue, as he apparently had promised German Chancellor Angela Merkel he would when they met at the G-7 summit recently.

However, don't believe this. Austerity ABSOLUTELY is in the interests of the "Powers That Be." It benefits the oligarchs, finance capitalists and big business and they are the OWNERS of government everywhere.

Do not think that because you vote you have a voice. You have no voice unless you are in that club that I mentioned above.

Austerity will continue.

Chris Dillow — The problem of greater equality

Like GDP, Gini is only one indicator. Neither tells the full story of income and wealth distribution.

Inequality has fallen in the UK - which might be worrying.

This sounds like an odd thing to say. But it's the natural implication of what Ben Chu rightly says. He notes that whilst the Gini coefficient hasn't changed much since the early 90s, the share of income going to the top 1% has risen.

However, we can think of the Gini coefficient as a single measure of all inequalities: the gap between the top 1% and the second percentile, plus the gap between the second and third percentiles, and so on. For this reason, the same Gini coefficient can describe very different societies.

The Gini coefficient can therefore be stable if one inequality increases and another diminishes. As Ben says, inequality has risen in the sense that the top 1% has gotten relatively better off. But it follows, therefore, that some other inequality has fallen.

Stumbling and Mumbling
The problem of greater equality
Chris Dillow | Investors Chronicle

Jared Bernstein — Opportunity, Inequality, Public Opinion, and Power

Class power on the table, along with rents.

Why does it matter that we as a nation understand this causal linkage [between economic inequality and lack of social mobility]? The answer has to do with both policy and power. One way of summarizing the fundamental problem of narrowly distributed growth is that those whose incomes are asset-driven hold disproportionate political power relative to those whose incomes depend on paychecks.

Thus, anti-inequality measures that threaten the top 1%–that attempt to reduce their economic “rents”—like collective bargaining, higher minimum wages, trade policy that protects workers’ rights and wages, full employment, robust safety nets, progressive taxation, are attacked as counterproductive to growth and jobs. 

That leaves us stuck in a cul-de-sac: we can’t increase opportunity because we can’t decrease inequality....

Bingo!

Unfortunately, I fear there are more Baltimores in our future.

Jared Bernstein | On the Economy

Opportunity, Inequality, Public Opinion, and Power
Jared Bernstein

Translation For J&J Sixpack: "No, Really. You're Better Off If You Let Us Rich Control Frauds Own Everything. Trust Us. YOU Don't Know How To Manage Your Country Anyway."

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

I just received this brazen propaganda by email. It's so breathtakingly revealing that it's worth sharing, with in-line commentary. It's also nearly too cruel and mean to observe, without coming to tears. These people don't seem to think that J&J Sixpack are very intelligent. Where do we find obsessive, compulsive "advisors" like this? Under a crock?

Michael Likosky via cmail2.com
to rge 

I want to pass along a quick update and a piece that I just published in the NY Times (see below). 

A China-led Infrastructure Bank is being created to promote private investment by Europeans and others into the Asia region.
The type of thing that we've been doing globally for a couple decades.
Those private investments have produced pretty good results, lots of quality infrastructure and many countries now giving us a run for our money as a result. Investors have gotten good returns as a result of the successes of these competitors.

While a lot of exciting stuff is happening right now at home - I will send a note on that soon - we are still having trouble figuring out whether to let private investors get some of our infrastructure built. Is American infrastructure a good investment for our pension funds, or is the future of Asia a better bet.
I include here a piece that I just published in the New York Times, related.
(clipped in below my signature)
More soon on progress happening.
- Michael

[RGE: Smooth, sweet, soothing ... just like strychnine-laced saccharine. :(  Since we trusted them on tax policy, why not trust them on ownership of The Commons too? ps: Michael somehow forgot to include this old image.]  

 So of course:

Taxpayers Benefit If Investors Absorb Risks of Infrastructure Projects

[RGE: Come again? Wow! If anyone believes this, I've got some Medieval Futility in the Dark Ages to sell to them. What's that old quote about the bigger the lie, the easier it is to get the naive to swallow? This is a double-blind test, America. Just how naive ARE you? And please note that an invisible government doesn't require an outright conspiracy. An expanding lobby of avaricious fools can easily lead a trusting aggregate astray, purely by blind drift alone. Speaking of which .... ]

Michael Likosky is the co-head of infrastructure at 32 Advisors. 

Few would dispute that America faces an infrastructure crisis as cities, states and the nation remain cash-strapped. Just look at the pending transportation bill, which would vastly underfund our needs, to see how low a priority infrastructure is in Washington. 

[RGE: Ooh, he's good! Note the classic propaganda technique. Baldly mingle an obvious truth linked directly to the biggest lie, and all IN THE OPENING SENTENCE! Then the reader is half accomplice, and playing his own devils advocate, as the price for reading the rest of the bullshit. Once they continue past the 1st line, the rest is downhill for the reader. Who knew that "32 Advisors" was a euphemism for "30 pieces of silver?"]

But investors see opportunities to finance the difference between what we need and what we can afford to pay by, say, upgrading a port and being repaid by fees from shippers. 

This is distinct from traditionally financed projects in that the investor can only recoup costs, and profit, as long as the port performs well. And the investor would only pay contractors when the job is done to spec. The contractor would have to cover any cost overruns themselves, rather than going back to the government for pay to complete a project. Ultimately, the private investor, not taxpayers, would bear the risk of poor performance or unexpected delays.
America's infrastructure needs vary greatly from project to project. Different investors have grown up to finance distinct needs. Private investment can present a genuine opportunity for governments and communities as long as both sides are attuned to the needs and requirements of the other and the right match is made. 

Some want only mature infrastructure assets that they can fix up and sell. Some pursue high risk/high return projects in which they will get paid only if their projections are realized and, if not, the government gets a cost-free project. A pension fund, for instance, might be willing to build a project from scratch even if they don't realize their return for a number of years. Other investors may agree to invest in infrastructure unable to be supported from user fees such as structurally deficient bridges, in exchange for regular payments from government over a period of time. 

Solving our infrastructure crisis can be as much about politics as about money, though. Labor groups might be wary of privately financed projects that pay lower wages than the ones several generations of workers have fought to gain. Rural communities might want water, but not if investors demand a high rate of return. 

But is being locked in a fight with no winner worth being passed over for investment that supports our economic competitiveness, growth and basic health? We do not simply need more money in the system, but more targeted investment opportunities where the key stakeholders, including financiers, are also willing to think innovatively and work through challenges that often derail projects.



BIO
Michael Likosky is the co-Head of Infrastructure at 32 Advisors. He has over fifteen years of experience providing advice to many of our nation's leaders and acting as an expert in infrastructure and public and private partnerships. 

Likosky holds a JD and DPhil (Oxford Law). He is an expert on infrastructure, oil and gas, mining, free zones, human rights, foreign investment, and high technology growth strategies. He has published five books in these areas including three with Cambridge University Press. His most recent book, Obama's Bank: Financing a Durable New Deal, looks at the Obama Administration's approach to public-private partnerships. His other books are: Law, Infrastructure and Human Rights; Privatizing Development; Transnational Legal Processes; and The Silicon Empire. 

Likosky is an Expert to the Clinton Global Initiative, the OECD, and the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development. He co-chaired California Governor Edmund Brown Jr's Task Force to Modernize the CA Infrastructure and Economic Development Bank, the country's oldest infrastructure bank with over thirty-two billion dollars lent out to-date. Likosky is a regular contributor to the World Investment Reports, Oxford Amnesty Lectures, and Trade and Development Report. 

Likosky's work has been supported by Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, Arts and Humanities Research Board, Surdna Foundation, Markle Foundation, Chatham House, and others. 

He advises public officials, private investors, pension plans, and inter-governmental organizations. Likosky has advised US Treasury; US Senators John Kerry (then), Charles Schumer, Kirsten Gillibrand, Cory Booker and Bill Nelson; US Representative Rosa De Lauro; California Governor Edmund Brown Jr.; New York State Empire State Development Corporation; CA Business Transportation and Housing Agency; CA State Infrastructure and Economic Development Bank; the cities of Chicago and Newark; D. E. Shaw; Deutsche Bank; Credit Suisse, McKinsey; Goldman Sachs; Standard and Poor's; broadcasters (ABC, CBS, NBC, ESPN), International Development Law Organization; the capital stewardship programs of SEIU, AFT, UFCW, and LiUNA, and others. 

He has published opinion pieces and appeared in outlets such as New York Times, New York Times Deal Book, Wall Street Journal, CNN Money, Bloomberg, Associated Press, Reuters, Bond Buyer, American Banker, Institutional Investing in Infrastructure, Infrastructure Journal, PPP Bulletin, Engineering News-Record, Africa Investor, and elsewhere. 

Likosky has delivered keynote and featured talks to Project Finance International (Master Class), Bond Buyer's Annual Transportation P3 event, American Society of Civil Engineers, the US Chamber of Commerce; State Chief Financial Officers Roundtable, Oxford Law, Harvard Law School, Columbia Law School, Max Planck-Halle, and elsewhere. 

He founded and directed NYU's Center on Law and Public Finance and was a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Public Knowledge, was Professor of International Economic Law at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, and has held fellowships and visiting posts at Oxford Law, NYU Law, Fordham Law, Wisconsin Law, and the University of Bonn. 

Since 2008, Likosky has convened the Reinvesting in America Series often in partnership with OECD, Partnership for NYC, Clinton Global Initiative, Citizens Budget Commission, Debevoise & Plimpton, Shearman Sterling, British Telecom, and Hogan Lovells. It features members of Congress; public officials from US Treasury, Defense, Transportation and Commerce; as well as state officials. The series includes small off-the-record discussions and large public events. It alternates between New York and Washington DC.

Damn! That's a very long-winded way of saying he's sold out to the best of the best of the worst ... if you follow my semantics. How many keynotes did Judas (or Quisling) make, before, during & after getting their 30 pieces of silver?

ps: He's also saying that China's Asian Development Bank is not competing with the remnants of England's East India Corp, or the G7's World Bank and IMF. No, he's saying that the 1% everywhere have teamed up, to own & hoard The Commons worldwide.

What's not to like?

What we've got here is failure to communicate .... honestly. (Blam!) You do have to admit that they have a relentless, killer-drone instinct.

For anyone who's ever taken biology-101, this is a mundane and boring replication of an age-old pattern, since the dawn of life on planet Earth. It goes like this. In any and all growing aggregates - even gas clouds pre biology - observers will notice that those components that CAN scavenge & hoard new surplus resources ... will. It's the straightforward statistics of of any recombination process, in any aggregate. Biology is just organized to find shortcuts, faster than thermodynamics alone. Either way, you eventually get some of every possible permutation of characteristics which support further recombination, in succeeding populations of components. That's what recombination produces ... whether molecular, sexual, behavioral or cultural recombination.

Yet hoarders never know what to do with said resources, any more than any other components. None of us is ever as smart as all of us working together, with all components adequately PROVISIONED! So the inevitable next step - among survivors, that is - after the inevitable blind hoarding reflex, is to re-distribute provisions in a way that enables the aggregate to invade new niches beyond the imagination of any of it's components. Hoarding is just a useless bit of noise in the ongoing recombination statistics. Discerning signal from noise always shows the path to progress. If we don't need hoarding, and can dispense with it, or repurpose it, then all the better.

It's called evolution. Get over it. It's happened. Countless times. And rest assured that it will happen again. One tombstone at a time. It's only a question of whether the next arrays of tombstones have to mark the graves of countless wasted human lives, or just mark the timely, graceful passing of their naive ideas about obsolete hoarding. As Wallace & Darwin implied, it's far more valuable to hoard and lust for Aggregate Adaptive Rate, rather than to be a dumb, King Midas member of the 1% - and be  merely statistical noise slowing down evolution.

In the history of planet Earth, subsequent aggregates always appear, slightly more able to hoard coordination methods on a new level, not just crude resources. That's how army ants evolved past snails, and how homo fiaticus will evolve past homo neoconinsis. It'll happen again, when we quit conning ourselves in neo ways.

Do we HAVE to subject another 7 generations of humans to yet another cycle of producing/hoarding/dying/evolving? Or can we just do it all virtually, right now, and just SAY we did it the hard way? Are we really fascinated with Grand Theft Culture, or can we just make an app for the 1%, and let them pretend to uselessly hoard real resources?

ps: Let's not hate Michael Likosky too much. Like Smedley Butler, he may yet realize that he's been a "high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers," and then seek more meaning in his life. If he's intelligent enough. It takes a culture to train a citizen. Likely, he's just had too little feedback to fully grasp the implications of what he's doing.

David Ruccio — In the US since 1949 inequality has increased with each expansion, with most gains going to the 1%

We have to face the fact that capitalism’s crises have become increasingly severe, and the solutions to those crises have increasingly involved redirecting the income gains to a tiny minority at the top. Everyone else is being left behind. Is it any wonder that the current economic system is facing a legitimation crisis?

The ruling elite make both during the boom and in the busts. Such a deal. That's the beauty of capitalism, which by definition prioritizes money and machines over people and the environment. 'Cause its all about growth, which requires capital formation and preservation, right?

Real-World Economics Review Blog
In the US since 1949 inequality has increased with each expansion, with most gains going to the 1%
David Ruccio

James Surowiecki — Moaning Moguls

Schwarzman isn’t alone. In the past year, the venture capitalist Tom Perkins and Kenneth Langone, the co-founder of Home Depot, both compared populist attacks on the wealthy to the Nazis’ attacks on the Jews. All three eventually apologized, but the basic sentiment is surprisingly common. Although the Obama years have been boom times for America’s super-rich—recent work by the economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty showed that ninety-five per cent of income gains in the first three years of the recovery went to the top one per cent—a lot of them believe that they’re a persecuted minority. As Mark Mizruchi, a sociologist at the University of Michigan and the author of a book called “The Fracturing of the American Corporate Elite,” told me, “These guys think, We’re the job creators, we keep the markets running, and yet the public doesn’t like us. How can that be?” Business leaders were upset at the criticism that followed the financial crisis and, for many of them, it’s an article of faith that people succeed or fail because that’s what they deserve. Schwarzman recently said that Americans “always like to blame somebody other than themselves for a failure.” If you believe that net worth is a reflection of merit, then any attempt to curb inequality looks unfair.…

If today’s corporate kvetchers are more concerned with the state of their egos than with the state of the nation, it’s in part because their own fortunes aren’t tied to those of the nation the way they once were. In the postwar years, American companies depended largely on American consumers. Globalization has changed that—foreign sales account for almost half the revenue of the S&P 500—as has the rise of financial services (where the most important clients are the wealthy and other corporations). The well-being of the American middle class just doesn’t matter as much to companies’ bottom lines. And there’s another change. Early in the past century, there was a true socialist movement in the United States, and in the postwar years the Soviet Union seemed to offer the possibility of a meaningful alternative to capitalism. Small wonder that the tycoons of those days were so eager to channel populist agitation into reform. Today, by contrast, corporate chieftains have little to fear, other than mildly higher taxes and the complaints of people who have read Thomas Piketty. Moguls complain about their feelings because that’s all anyone can really threaten.

The New Yorker
Moaning Moguls

James Surowiecki

(h/t Mark Thoma at Economist's View)

Auburn Parks — The Poll Progressives Need To See....

About what one would expect, but here the figures that show it.

Daily Kos — Money and Public Purpose
The Poll Progressives Need To See....
Auburn Parks

Derek Thompson — How You, Me and Everyone Got the Top 1 Percent All Wrong

The media frenzy over inequality continues.

Atlantic Business
How You, Me and Everyone Got the Top 1 Percent All Wrong — Unveiling the real story behind the richest of the rich

Derek Thompson

On the study by Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman

House of Debt
Measuring Wealth Inequality
Atif Mian and Amir Sufi

Ryan Cooper — Why everyone is talking about Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century

The French economist's magnum opus explains the history of income inequality — and represents a real threat to the reign of the 1 percent

The Week
Why everyone is talking about Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century
Ryan Cooper

Watershed moment for neoliberalism?

The English translation of French economist Thomas Piketty's magnum opus Capital in the Twenty-First Century is finally out, and it's made an enormous splash (see reviews here, here, and here). It's a brilliant, surprisingly readable work that synthesizes a staggering amount of careful research to make the case that income inequality is no accident. Indeed, Piketty argues that it is a feature of capitalism itself — unless governments take action to rein in capitalism's excesses.

That may sound like an obvious point to you. But the value of Piketty's work is that it shows that capitalism's postwar heyday — in which incomes at the bottom and the top actually converged — was a historical anomaly. Piketty's analysis of the last two centuries makes the case that capital in its natural state does not tend to spread out or trickle down, but to concentrate in the hands of a few.

This is news to those on the right who have long championed capitalism's egalitarian benefits. Conservatives have been far too complacent in believing that capitalism is the only possible economic system, and far too aggressive in attempting to demolish the structures that mitigate capitalism's worst side effects. If Piketty is correct, he has laid the intellectual groundwork for a resurgence of American socialism — and conservatives are starting to feel distinctly uneasy about it.

International Coordination To Do ..... WHAT? Loot the MiddleClass ... everywhere?

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

South Africa pleads for global coordination amid Fed [QE?]

The 1% of every OTHER country, not just ours, wants to feed off of the US MiddleClass too? Just WHO is coordinating WHAT here? The 1% coordinating international Control Fraud?

??  I thought it was our $US, and their problem. No?

Instead of the 1% everywhere "coordinating," what if the MiddleClass of all countries coordinated? Or heck, even the MiddleClass of the USA alone!

What would "we" tell the Free-Trade = Free-Labor looters, and their little banksters too?

That we're not ALL in Kansas anymore?

And, maybe also tell 'em to stick their 1%-size heads where the sun don't shine? 

"1, 2, 3 ... all together now .... co-ordinate!"

Michael Lind — The 1 percent wins again: The system’s so fixed that a global class war is only a dream

No, there won’t be a global campaign against global inequality. The wealthy have written the rules to guarantee it

Salon
The 1 percent wins again: The system’s so fixed that a global class war is only a dream
Michael Lind

Yves Smith — Yes Virginia, Obama and the Democrats Are Mussolini-Style Corporatists, Just Like the Republicans

Doh. Anyone didn't get that? Oh, right, the Obama bots and the Third Way/Clinton fans.

Oh, well, at least it is bipartisan.

Naked Capitalism
Yes Virginia, Obama and the Democrats Are Mussolini-Style Corporatists, Just Like the Republicans
Yves Smith

Aunt Samantha Needs YOU! To Help Our Country Use Our Group Brain - Not Just Sit On It.

(commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

Wal-Mart Steps Up Security as Fights Break Out Over TVs

How Many Dogs and How Many Bones?

And the "solution" is to hire outside dogs to keep the starving dogs from fighting ... TOO aggressively?

I'm weeping for my country, my Middle Class, and my people.

Someone has my people right where they want 'em. 

Yet why do they want 'em there? Purely out of boredom? Now progressed to OCMD? (AKA, obsessive-compulsive merchant disorder; AKA 1% disease?)

WalMart has become the modern gladiatorial games, staged purely for the bloodfinance-thirsty lust of the OCDM 1%.

Listen up, dawgs. If you want your own idiot-savant "master" merchants to "provide" you with ACCESS TO MORE OF YOUR OWN FIAT, then simply lead the idiot-savant OCMDs to direct a policy of seeking national goals WORTHY of your country's full mobilization.

You want an example?

1% Idiot Savant Gentry: [What do they do for fun? Oh, try to own and run the country.]

CODDLED 1% Kiddies: "We're BORED. There's NOTHING to DO outside with the country! We want more toys. Waah."

Middle Class Mommy-to-1% (Aunt Samantha): "Nonsense! You have a group brain. So USE it, and FIND something worth having the country do! Now get OUT of my way.

   I've got work to do just feeding this growing country. 

   Now, out, out. Get out of the kitchen.

   And don't come back 'til suppertime!

   And QUIT whining - or I'll give you something worth whining about!"
(Under her breath: "1% kids today! They were running the country into the ground anyway. 'Bout time they start learning how to use their country's group brain, not just sit on it.")

That's what YOU get when YOU let your mega-merchants try to run the country all by themselves. If war is too important to leave to the generals, then surely EVERY process and policy is too important to be left to the PRESUMED process owners?

Aunt Samantha and Uncle Sam need YOU, to help us all use OUR group brain - not just sit on it!

The only cure for obsessive-compulsive merchant disorder; AKA 1% disease, is to create, and then hoard Dynamic Assets (coordination capabilities), not Static Assets.

David Cay Johnston — We Shall Overwhelm

Four years ago, the modern Tea Party seemed to emerge from nowhere, leaving journalists bewildered and the public with few reference points to understand seemingly spontaneous rallies by middle-class people seeking lower tax rates. A search for the phrase “tea party” in connection with “politics” in major newspapers yielded fewer than 100 mentions in 2008—and when the words did appear linked together, they suggested studied formality and decorum. The next year, they appeared more than 1,500 times, often connected to “protest demonstration.”

But little was spontaneous about the new party. “Social movements that explicitly defend the interests of the rich and the almost-rich have been a recurring feature of American politics,” Isaac William Martin, a sociologist at the University of California, San Diego, reminds us in his new book, Rich People’s Movements: Grassroots Campaigns to Untax the One Percent. “Such movements shook the American polity before the Obama era, before the Reagan era, and before Barry Goldwater ran for president—before, even, the New Deal.”

With meticulous research, Martin shows how the modern Tea Party grew from decades of efforts by American oligarchs to de-tax themselves. They relied on cranks, rogues, and a few scholars to polish the most effective ideological marketing pitches. Their goal was selling the notion that if the rich bear less of the burden of government, all of us will somehow end up better off. These pitches have worked best when some newly proposed government initiative—like President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act—arrives to pose the threat of major policy change. They have depended on diverting attention from obvious questions, such as just how does a smaller tax bill for the Koch brothers benefit us?

The American Prospect
We Shall Overwhelm
David Cay Johnston

Harry Binswanger — Give Back? Yes, It's Time For The 99% To Give Back To The 1%

Never say we don't present both sides. And no, this is not the Onion. It's Forbes.

It is “the community” that should give back to the wealth-creators. It turns out that the 99% get far more benefit from the 1% than vice-versa.

Then he quotes from John Galt in Any Rand's Atlas Shrugged to prove it.

Forbes
Give Back? Yes, It's Time For The 99% To Give Back To The 1%

Harry Binswanger, Contributor

"I defend laissez-faire capitalism, using Ayn Rand's Objectivism"

(h/t dan Lynch)

Another narcissist that never grew up.

Peter Radford — Business schools and inequality [HBS smackdown]

Peter Radford smacks down his alma mater, Harvard Business School, as perverted. Harsh. Managerial capitalism at its worst. The good new is that now the public is waking up to the fact that the managerial class is engaged in class warfare against them.

Real-World Economics Review Blog
Business schools and inequality
Peter Radford

See also:

Truthout | Opinion
Debating Capitalism - Redefining Outdated Terms
Richard D Wolff | Professor ofEconomics Emeritus, University of Massachusetts, Amherst