(Zombie Country? At Least the Consensus) Bombshell Study: America's Wealthy Even More Obscenely Rich Than Anybody Thought

Happy Midsummer's Nightmare!

Or at least a Zombie Jamboree?

In approaching this subject, let us first address the historical situation of the Obama administration. The task of museums, like that of history generally, is to document periods of great change. The task facing the makers of the Obama museum, however, will be pretty much exactly the opposite:  How to document a time when America should have changed but didn’t.

Its project will be to explain an age when every aspect of societal breakdown was out in the open and the old platitudes could no longer paper it over — when the meritocracy was clearly corrupt, when the financial system had devolved into organized thievery, when everyone knew that the politicians were bought and the worst criminals went unprosecuted and the middle class was in a state of collapse and the newspaper pundits were like street performers miming “seriousness” for an audience that had lost its taste for mime and seriousness both. It was a time when every thinking person could see that the reigning ideology had failed, that an epoch had ended, that the shitty consensus ideas of the 1980s had finally caved in — and when an unlikely champion arose from the mean streets of Chicago to keep the whole thing propped up nevertheless.

As we read that the full-court press is on for the funding of the coming Barack Obama Memorial Hall (or some such impressive title), just like the Nixon Institute of Justice (or the Bush Baby House of Pabulum), even a half-assed-educated citizen (most of us, obviously) has to wonder exactly what will be remembered and celebrated for the further glory of the "greatest democracy ever founded" (or something).

Not to mention even more millions from the wealthy wasted.

Thomas Frank (the Voltaire of our times) gives it a pretty good go in the essay below. Its implications, unfortunately (for the country and its taxpayers), reveal the lack of any vision or action taken on their behalf by the Obama administration, whose talents actually were found to lie elsewhere. And a very good explanation of why Dem (not that many so Dim any longer) candidates are moving away rapidly from the Obama embrace.

Sunday, Jul 20, 2014

Right-Wing Obstruction Could Have Been Fought:   An Ineffective and Gutless Presidency’s Legacy Is Failure

Yes, we know, the crazy House. But we were promised hope and change on big issues. We got no vision and less action.

Thomas Frank

Predicting the future course of American politics is a lively and flourishing vocation. Guessing how future generations will commemorate present-day political events, however, is not nearly as remunerative. In the interest of restoring some balance to this tragic situation, allow me to kick off the speculation about the Obama legacy. How will we assess it? How will the Barack Obama Presidential Library, a much-anticipated museum of the future, cast the great events of our time?

In approaching this subject, let us first address the historical situation of the Obama administration. The task of museums, like that of history generally, is to document periods of great change. The task facing the makers of the Obama museum, however, will be pretty much exactly the opposite:  How to document a time when America should have changed but didn’t.

Its project will be to explain an age when every aspect of societal breakdown was out in the open and the old platitudes could no longer paper it over — when the meritocracy was clearly corrupt, when the financial system had devolved into organized thievery, when everyone knew that the politicians were bought and the worst criminals went unprosecuted and the middle class was in a state of collapse and the newspaper pundits were like street performers miming “seriousness” for an audience that had lost its taste for mime and seriousness both.

It was a time when every thinking person could see that the reigning ideology had failed, that an epoch had ended, that the shitty consensus ideas of the 1980s had finally caved in — and when an unlikely champion arose from the mean streets of Chicago to keep the whole thing propped up nevertheless.

The Obama team, as the president once announced to a delegation of investment bankers, was “the only thing between you and the pitchforks,” and in retrospect these words seem not only to have been a correct assessment of the situation at the moment but a credo for his entire term in office. For my money, they should be carved in stone over the entrance to his monument:  Barack Obama as the one-man rescue squad for an economic order that had aroused the fury of the world. Better:   Obama as the awesomely talented doctor who kept the corpse of a dead philosophy lumbering along despite it all.

The Age of the Zombie Consensus, however poetic it sounds, will probably not recommend itself as a catchphrase to the shapers of the Obama legacy. They will probably be looking for a label that is slightly more heroic:   the Triumph of Faith over Cynicism, or something like that. Maybe they will borrow a phrase from one of the 2012 campaign books, “The Center Holds,” and describe the Obama presidency as a time when cool, corporate reason prevailed over inflamed public opinion. Barack Obama will be presented as a kind of second FDR:   the man who saved the system from itself. That perhaps the system didn’t deserve saving will be left to some less-well-funded museum.

Another prediction that I can make safely is that the Obama Presidential Library will violate one of the cardinal rules of presidential museums: It will have to be pretty massively partisan. As I noted last week, presidential libraries usually play down partisan conflict in order to make the past seem like a place of national togetherness and the president himself like a man of broadly recognized leadership, but in order for Obama’s presidential library to deliver the usual reassuring message about himself, it will have to stand convention on its head. As president, Obama has been reluctant to take the reinvigorated right too seriously. But as legacy-maker, I predict that he will work to make them seem even crazier and more unstoppable than they actually are.

Why? Because all presidential museums are exercises in getting their subject off the hook, and for Obama loyalists looking back at his years in office, the need for blame evasion will be acute. Why, the visitors to his library will wonder, did the president do so little about rising inequality, the subject on which he gave so many rousing speeches?

Why did he do nothing, or next to nothing, about the crazy high price of a college education, the Great Good Thing that he has said, time and again, determines our personal as well as national success? Why didn’t he propose a proper healthcare program instead of the confusing jumble we got? Why not a proper stimulus package? Why didn’t he break up the banks? Or the agribusiness giants, for that matter?

Well, duh, his museum will answer: he couldn’t do any of those things because of the crazy right-wingers running wild in the land. He couldn’t reason with them — their brains don’t work like ours! He couldn’t defeat them at the polls — they’d gerrymandered so many states that they couldn’t be dislodged! What can a high-minded man of principle do when confronted with such a vast span of bigotry and close-mindedness? The answer toward which the Obama museum will steer the visitor is:   Nothing.

In point of fact, there were plenty of things Obama’s Democrats could have done that might have put the right out of business once and for all — for example, by responding more aggressively to the Great Recession or by pounding relentlessly on the theme of middle-class economic distress.

Acknowledging this possibility, however, has always been difficult for consensus-minded Democrats, and I suspect that in the official recounting of the Obama era, this troublesome possibility will disappear entirely. Instead, the terrifying Right-Wing Other will be cast in bronze at twice life-size, and made the excuse for the Administration’s every last failure of nerve, imagination and foresight. Demonizing the right will also allow the Obama legacy team to present his two electoral victories as ends in themselves, since they kept the White House out of the monster’s grasp — heroic triumphs that were truly worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize. (Which will be dusted off and prominently displayed.)

But bipartisanship as an ideal must also be kept sacred, of course. And so, after visitors to the Obama Library have passed through the Gallery of Drones and the Big Data Command Center, they will be ushered into a maze-like exhibit designed to represent the president’s long, lonely, and ultimately fruitless search for consensus.

The Labyrinth of the Grand Bargain, it might be called, and it will teach how the president bravely put the fundamental achievements of his party — Social Security and Medicare — on the bargaining table in exchange for higher taxes and a smaller deficit.

This will be described not as a sellout of liberal principle but as a sacred quest for the Holy Grail of Washington:   a bipartisan coming-together on “entitlement reform,” which every responsible D.C. professional knows to be the correct way forward.

How will all the legacy-shapers of the future regard the Obama movement, the political prairie fire of six years ago that transformed the Senator from Illinois into a folk hero even before he was elected?

What will the Obama library have to say about the people who recognized correctly that it was time for “Change” and who showed up at his routine campaign appearances in 2008 by the hundreds of thousands?

It will be a tricky problem. On the up side, those days before his first term began were undoubtedly Obama’s best ones. Mentioning them, however, will remind the visitor of the next stage in his true believers’ political evolution:   Disillusionment.

Not because their hero failed to win the Grand Bargain, but because he wanted to get it in the first place — because he seemed to believe that shoring up the D.C. consensus was the rightful object of all political idealism. The movement, in other words, won’t fit easily into the standard legacy narrative. Yet it can’t simply be deleted from the snapshot.

Perhaps there will be an architectural solution for this problem. For example, the Obama museum’s designers could make the exhibit on the movement into a kind of blind alley that physically reminds visitors of the basic doctrine of the Democratic Party’s leadership faction:   that liberals have nowhere else to go.

My own preference would be to let that disillusionment run, to let it guide the entire design of the Obama museum. Disillusionment is, after all, a far more representative emotion of our times than Beltway satisfaction over the stability of some imaginary “center.” So why not memorialize it? My suggestion to the designers of the complex:   That the Obama Presidential Library be designed as a kind of cenotaph, a mausoleum of hope.

Thomas Frank is a Salon politics and culture columnist. His many books include What's The Matter With Kansas, Pity the Billionaire, and One Market Under God. He is the founding editor of The Baffler magazine.

More Thomas Frank. 

Our buddy CoyotePrime goes this analysis one better as we learn the real financial nightmare figures of the present, which have been lovingly kept secret from us.

Better to lull us to sleep that way.

July 17, 2014

“Bombshell Study: America's Wealthy Even More Obscenely Rich Than Anybody Thought”

By Lynn Stuart Parramore

“Just when you think you've got a handle on how bad wealth inequality is in America's Second Gilded Age, researchers find it's even worse than you imagined. The European Central Bank has crunched the numbers and it looks like wealth inequality in the U.S. is even more astounding than previous statistics have shown.

Of the 10 rich countries the researchers analyzed, America's wealthy have grabbed the largest portion of the country's wealth. The most affluent 1 percent is sitting on between 35 percent and 37 percent of the nation’s wealth, according to  a working paper by ECB senior economist Philip Vermeulen.

The Federal Reserve figure that has been previously cited had the 1 percent's share at 34 percent. But actually it looks like that's a lowball figure.

Economists studying wealth have been dealing with the fact that when you reach the stratosphere, wealth becomes a sort of dark matter. It's got a huge gravitational pull, but it's very hard to trace. It likes to hide, and slip over borders and between bank accounts in the blink of an eye. Vermeulen calls the billionaires whose wealth manages to evade researchers the "missing rich."

Unfortunately for researchers, rich people don't tend to respond to surveys that aim to study their wealth; some don't have the time, but undoubtedly many just don't want anyone getting their mitts (sic) on that sensitive information.

So researchers have to figure out other ways to track wealth, including the popular Forbes' billionaires list, which, while not entirely accurate (it misses a lot of people, like dictators whose money derives from the state), at least makes an attempt to shine a light on the wealth amassed by global tycoons.

Vermeulen warns that even what's been revealed so far doesn't give the whole picture. “The results clearly indicate that survey wealth estimates are very likely to underestimate wealth at the top." You heard that right. Even 37 percent is probably not high enough.

In other countries Vermeulen's report studied, the 1 percent have also been getting a bigger share of the pie, like the Netherlands, whose rich now hold 17 percent of wealth, up from 9 percent. The French and Spanish wealthy have also increased their share by a couple of points. But the U.S. wins the prize for the fattest fatcats — Austria and Germany are close but no cigar. These ravenous beasts are just now gobbling up the American pie at such a rate that soon there will be only crumbs for you and me. That's how we roll in the land of opportunity.”