David Frum

The Radical Rich: Moving From Romney to Re-Occupy

Richard Eskow — Wed, 19 Sep 2012 00:00:19 -0400

Two recent movements have transformed the political landscape. The Occupy movement literally operates in the light of day. The other movement operates in secrecy, with money as its "speech" rather than ... well, you know, speech.

The Romney video offers us a rare glimpse of the other movement. This movement of the extremely rich is ruthless, radical, and full of rage. And it's on the rise.

If you're not scared, you're not paying attention.

The Revolutionary

Sure, it was stupid for Mitt Romney to insult the non-Federal-tax paying "47 percent" on that video, especially since so many of them are Republican voters. But it was only "stupid" in traditional political terms. For a radical – and make no mistake, Romney is a radical – those rules don't apply.

The bile flows out of this unscripted Romney. He says of his father, the governor, presidential candidate and car company CEO: "Had he been born of Mexican parents, I'd have a better shot of winning this." This kind of resentment, as absurd as it is, is a very real emotion for the Radical Rich.

The words seem to sting his lips when he says "they believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, that they are entitled – to health care, to food, to housing, you name it. That's an entitlement."

Feast your eyes on the articulated rage of the Radical Rich. Romney and his audience are genuinely angry at people who "don't pay taxes" – although almost all of the "47 percent" do, counting payroll and sales taxes. That doesn't matter. The Radical Rich consider all of them – the disabled, the elderly, poor people, veterans – the Other.

From Savanarola to Sarah Palin, from Robespierre to Romney, the psychology never changes: You're either one of us or one of them.

Private Equity Party People

In his attempt to defend Romney, David Brooks suggested he was a "fundamentally decent" person who only expresses contempt for so many of this country's citizens because it appeals to his audience.

The only thing that may be less "decent" than hating entire groups of people is pretending to hate them for your own purposes. But this incident reveals something even more important than Romney's weakness of character, which is:

That's what appeals to Romney' audience.

The guests had gathered at the home of Mark Leder, a private equity manager whose business practices are as exploitative and job-killing as Bain Capital's. Leder's post-divorce antics earned him the nickname "private equity party boy" and headlines like "Nude frolic in tycoon's pool."

Romney and the others keep their clothes on, in case you were wondering, so the video's work-safe.

But that doesn't mean they're not enjoying life. They've acquired a level of wealth, power and luxury which ancient pharaohs and kings could never imagine: Their private jets will take them anywhere on the planet at a few minutes' notice. Rulers of nations flatter and court them. They even seem to be above the law. None of them will ever know hunger, or financial fear, or be denied medical care because they can't pay for it.

And yet they're filled with resentment.

Their voices are heard over the the constant clinking of silver forks on fine china. As the night wore on a man at that table undoubtedly loosened his expensive belt – lizard-skin, perhaps, or calfskin – because he'd eaten too much. A slightly tipsy woman left lipstick prints – a Shiseido lacquered rouge perhaps, in a shade like "Savage," "Nymph," or "Nocturne" (Mark would like that) – on a half-empty glass of very fine wine.

And yet, beneath the warmth of the meal and the glow of the wine, they were burning with rage.

Meet The Radicals

They're probably just a small subset of high-earning Americans. But these resentment-fueled party people are a new force in politics, made even more powerful by growing wealth inequity and Citizens United. They are the Radical Rich.

How radical are they?

Romney and his party are already pursuing their radical policies: A dismantling of most government programs, including a self-funded program like Social Security and vitally needed ones like Medicaid, Federal disaster relief, education ... even law enforcement and storm warning systems to reduce deaths and property damage.

The country they seek is radically different from the one we all grew up in, or even the troubled one we live in today. It's a nation without a social safety net, with hungry and ill people in the streets, without free and fair elections, without basic legal protections for consumers or the environment – a United States unlike anything we've seen in our lifetime.

How angry are they?

Their resentment is as great as their wealth. It seemed like an unfortunate slip from an unpleasant individual when another hedge funder, Steve Schwarzman, compared the loss of his tax breaks to Hitler's invasion of Poland. But we now know that this sense of outrage is shared by many, if not most, of his peers: Hedge funder Daniel S. Loeb. The unnamed CEOs of Fareed Zakaria's acquaintance. Scandal-ridden bank CEO Jamie Dimon.

You'd think they'd be kissing the ground Barack Obama walks on, given their embarrassment – or what should be an "embarrassment" – of riches.

But they're enraged. Why?

Insatiable

Because it isn't enough.

At no time in modern history has the top 1 percent – or the top 0.1 percent, or the top 0.01 percent – owned more of our wealth or paid less in taxes.

But it isn't enough.

The Wall Street executives who broke laws weren't indicted, and those who ruined their own businesses were saved – their wealth and incomes protected – by the very people who are being financially destroyed by their actions.

It isn't enough.

Our government relaxed the regulations, razed the rules, and leveled the laws so they could ruin both the economy and the Gulf of Mexico, and has left us vulnerable to their ongoing predations.

It isn't enough.

What do they want?

They want more – more tax breaks, more protection from the law.

And they want adoration. From the looks of it, nothing short of an Roman Imperial cult – complete with their apotheosis as state deities upon their death – would satisfy them. Obama's corporate-friendly policies, which have protected their wealth and protected them from judgement, aren't enough. They want him to pledge his fealty on the White House steps – or they'll destroy him.

Not every wealthy person is radical, of course. It seems as if a rich person's level of bitterness and rage is directly proportional to the undeservedness of their riches: Hedge fund managers who exploited the rules are the angriest, while authentically talented business people, artists or genuinely "job-creating" entrepreneurs seem to be the least angry.

Could it be guilt, and a not entirely unreasonable feeling of low self-worth, turned outward? Whatever's behind it, a Molotov cocktail of wealthy rage has exploded.

Asymmetrical Warfare

David Frum, a conservative and former George W. Bush speechwriter, gets it. Frum writes that "what makes it all both so heart-rending and so outrageous is that all this is occurring at a time when economically disadvantaged Americans have never been so demoralized and passive, never exerted less political clout. No Coxey's army is marching on Washington, no sit-down strikes are paralyzing factories, no squatters are moving onto farmer's fields."

Beautifully said. Frum's batting average dips slightly as he continues: "Occupy Wall Street immediately fizzled, there is no protest party of the political left."

Occupy didn't "fizzle." It attracted massive support almost overnight. Within weeks it had dramatically transformed the national conversation. Democrats from the president on down were forced to address issues of economic injustice, at least rhetorically, instead of negotiating destructive (and pro-wealthy) austerity deals with the Republican counterparts.

But the powers arrayed against Occupy – in the media, in politics, and elsewhere – combined with the winter winds to force it into hibernation.

Frum's absolutely right, however, when he says there's "no protest party of the political left" – although I'd drop the word "protest" and make it simply a party, one that can win rather than just siphon off votes. That won't happen without a mass movement.

That's why it's time to re-Occupy our country. In fact, maybe it should've been called "Re-Occupy" all along. It was, and it remains, a re-occupation – of our privatized public spaces and our privatized political discourse. Occupy, or something like it, is the only force that has a chance against the power of the Radical Rich.

Closing the Deal

Mitt can't close the deal. He's tanking like Facebook's IPO. Why? Because he's one of the Radical Rich, and he can't control his rage any more than Steve Scharzman can.

The executives I used to know would have laughed off Obama's populist rhetoric as long as the cash kept pouring in. But the new crowd doesn't just want an unfair and ill-gotten share of the nation's wealth. They want it paid as tribute.

This didn't happen by accident. The Radical Rich have, in David Frum's words, been "scammed" by political operators playing off their emotions. In the old days demagogues would work a mob into a frenzy until it was ready to burn down Parliament. Nowadays you can work a billionaire or two into a frenzy and buy Parliament instead. That's much more efficient – and a lot less messy.

And yet, even with all their resources at his disposal, Mitt can't close the deal. He can't hide his radicalism long enough.

Next time it'll be uglier. They may not even try to close the deal. They might just take it. That's why we need a new movement.

What would a revived Occupy movement – a "Re-Occupy movement" – look like? That topic should dominate the conversation on the American left. This election and the events that follow it should be viewed through the lens of long-term independent activism, with political office only one tool among many.

Romney articulated both his own emotions and those of his crowd when he said of the American majority, "The things that animate us aren't the things that animate them." Well, right back at ya, pal.

That's why it's time to Re-Occupy the country – now, before it's too late.

The Phony "Generational War": It's Like the Hunger Games, But With Old People

Richard Eskow — Mon, 02 Jul 2012 12:42:55 -0400

Millions of people have read the Hunger Games stories, about a depraved future society where young people are forcing to fight each other for scarce resources while elites in the Capital plunder the nation's wealth.

Now take a look at our world, where Washington's elites are laboring to pit the young against the old in in a similarly ritualized battle: Generational War. Like the Hunger Games, this spectacle only distracts us from the real economic injustices in our society.

In an economy where most people's lives have been harmed by bank recklessness and massive wealth inequality - that is to say, by the diversion of an ever-increasing lion's share of our national income to the richest of the rich - these instigators and those who follow them want everybody to worry about a different predator instead:

Grandma.

Introducing the Effie Awards

Every ritual battle needs someone to act as its cheerleader, promoter, propagandist, and recruiter. In the Hunger Games it's the relentlessly cheerful Effie Trinket, who recruits young people for brutal combat and near-certain death while chirping upbeat sayings like "Welcome to the Games!" and "May the odds ever be in your favor!"

Rather than pitting kids against each other like the Hunger Games, this false "Generational War" pits the young against the old. Call 'em the Younger Games, and there are plenty of Effies out there hunting for recruits.

Some Effies, especially those funded by billionaire Pete Peterson's anti-Social Security and Medicare campaign, are engaging in classic big-lie tactics: Repeat your falsehoods over and over and people will begin to believe them. Others may just be parroting the latest cocktail-party chatter.

We therefore announce the "Effies," a periodic review of generational-war literature in which we rate our contestants for the effectiveness of their "greedy geezer" propaganda. The weakest efforts get one "Effie," while as many as five of them can be awarded to those pieces of Gen-War Lit which prove worthy of any sci-fi dystopia.

Let's meet this week's contestants.

David Frum

Frum's attack on seniors starts with a truly cheap shot: They don't drive very well. Frum lingers on old people's driving for several paragraphs, long enough to have some readers thinking as they drive to work: That old jerk's going fifteen miles an hour in the left lane and I'm paying for his Medicare!

(Hey, when I was growing up in upstate New York we thought people from New Jersey drove badly. It was a major theme of the Friday night brawls between Jersey and New York teens at the Rainbow Bar and Grill in Suffern. But even the worst hooligans among us never considered starving the entire state.)

Driving is only a setup, however, for the main point embedded in Frum's title: "... we need to say no to the elderly." He writes:

Whether we can ever learn to say no to the elderly is the great political question hanging over all modern societies, in Europe as much as in the U.S., as we face a 21st century of diminished economic opportunity and staggering government debt.

Got it? Saying no to all people is the great political question hanging over all modern societies. Not a great political question, the great political question. And not some modern societies. All of them.

Truth time: We had more than enough money to pay for Social Security when the payroll tax cap (currently $106,000) ensured that 90 percent of our national income was being taxed. That's how it was designed by the Greenspan Commission in the 1980s. Since then the ultra-wealthy have captured so much more of our national income that this number has dropped substantially, leading to a relatively mild (25 percent) shortfall in a couple of decades. That's easily fixed by lifting the cap, along with one or two other adjustments (a financial transactions tax, gradual small increases in the payroll tax rate, etc.)

But these solutions, which polls show are politically popular, aren't being discussed much in Washington these days - or in the opinion pages, for that matter. That's because the truly great political question for all modern societies is saying no to the wealthy.

Frum, of course, doesn't tell you that.

Frum goes on to discuss the supposed "disdain" older Americans feel for the young, when there's no evidence to suggest anything of the kind. The real disdain comes from those like Frum who would sell young people on "generational war" as a way to cut benefits, because those cuts would harm young people far more than they would hurt anyone who is retired or approaching retirement today.

Rag on their bad driving to get you steamed up, then take away their benefits. Propagandists manqué, take note: That's how you turn the public against a whole class of people.

David Frum's score: Four Effies.

David Leonhardt

The award-winning Washington bureau chief for the New York Times begins with the jaw-dropping statement that "one dividing line (among Americans) has actually received too little attention ... the line between young and old." Too little attention? It's been the topic of endless commentary.

It doesn't get any better. Leonhardt meanders through a few paragraphs about the shifting opinions among generations before making the same statement we've seen so many times before: "If there is a theme unifying these economic and political trends, in fact, it is that the young are generally losing out to the old."

Unfortunately, Leonhardt never gets around to proving his case. He acknowledges that seniors who receive Social Security have paid for it throughout their working lives, and this intellectual honesty undercuts his thesis. And while it's true that Medicare costs more than its normal funding sources provide, Leonhardt makes a fatal omission: He doesn't explain why it costs more. For-profit healthcare has driven our medical costs, and our rate of cost increase, far above those of any other developed nation.

That means the solution isn't to restrict benefits. That would impoverish oldsters who can't afford care, or force them to go without needed medical treatment. The real solution is to restrain the profit motive that's making healthcare unaffordable for everyone in this country.

Leonhardt also says this: "Over all, more than 50 percent of federal benefits flow to the 13 percent of the population over 65. Some of these benefits come from Social Security, which many people pay for over the course of their working lives. But a large chunk comes through Medicare ..." (Leonhardt doesn't tell us what the percentage of Federal benefits is without Social Security.)

Medicare is insurance which pays for medical care, and it's designed for older people who need more medical care than younger people. To suggest that's unjust is like saying my auto insurance plan is unjust because all the payouts go to the privileged few who have had accidents.

Leonhardt tries manfully to push the generation-war theme, but it's as if his heart isn't in it. Maybe an editor assigned this piece, or he felt compelled to write it for another reason. But tit doesn't cohere, either logically or as generational-war lit. Maybe it was that intermittent, yet troublesome, intellectual honesty. We don't know. But it seems as if he wasn't feeling it, and we sure weren't.

David Leonhardt's score: Two Effies.

Ezekiel Emanuel, M.D.

Dr. Emanuel has come up with a Rube Goldberg-like policy contraption. Remember Rube Goldberg? His inventions executed a lot of complicated, rickety, and diverting processes - lifting little mechanical hands, compelling a toy monkey to clash his cymbals together - in order to do something trivial, like drop a ping-pong ball into a cup. They were creative, labor-intensive - and pointlessly made an easy task into something complicated.

Dr. Emanuel's latest construction is worse than pointless. It's destructive. His latest contribution to the Younger Games comes in the form of a New York Times editorial called "Share the Wealth," in which he notes that poverty for children is on the rise while poverty for elderly Americans has declined.

There are many things terribly, terribly wrong with this argument, not the least of which is the dishonesty with which Emanuel cherry-picks the facts to create the illusion that the elderly are getting rich at the expense of the young. But Emanuel's real Hunger Games flourish is in the unstated premise behind his use of these statistics: that the right way to address poverty isn't by eliminating it, but by distributing it more effectively among competing groups.

"Growing up in poverty is bad," Dr. Emanuel helpfully informs his readers.Then come statements like this: "The rising standard of living among older Americans is largely a result of the tens of thousands of dollars each collects from Social Security and Medicare." (Actually, the standard of living for most older Americans is most likely declining, not rising.) "... This huge transfer of wealth," Emanuel continues, "is harming our children."

Except, of course, that there is no "transfer of wealth" between young and old. Social Security is entirely self-funded, by law. And every proposal to "save" the program from future actuarial imbalances involves taking much more from today's children than they would lose even if the program weren't changed at all.

Like his fellow Effie winners, Dr. Emanuel never discusses the real transfer of wealth that's endangering our fiscal security and leading to that long-term shortfall - the transfer of national income to the wealthiest among us. High unemployment is another contributor to the program's long-term shortfall, but Effies aren't permitted to mention that either.

Medicare will be in serious financial trouble in coming decades, but the problem isn't that older Americans are demanding too much medical care. The problem is runaway greed in our healthcare economy - greed which encompasses for-profit hospitals, physician practice management companies, pharmaceutical manufacturers, and diagnostic imaging providers, to name but a few.

Emanuel proposes creating a "Children's Opportunity Bequest and Fund," where "old Americans could agree to forego Social Security and Medicare for one to three years." The money could be directed to "their very own grandchildren" or "any specific child identified by their Social Security number." He never mentions the many ways grandparents can already give cash and gifts to their grandchildren, so we'll help him out: They have names like "trust fund," "savings account, "Hanukah gelt, "Communion gift ...."

Why should government resources be used to create yet another vehicle for this purpose?

Ezekiel then meanders into some convoluted "we could also" ideas, including a "Children's Opportunity Fund" that a "would support the early childhood education of a randomly chosen newborn from a family below the poverty line."

Hunger Games fans will immediately see the parallels between this proposal and the system which allowed young people to collect credit points by increasing their likelihood of being chosen as a sacrifice. Why does Ezekiel propose such a redundant and foolhardy contraption? Either he's not thinking very clearly or he's deliberately befuddling the public. (We do know he's a serial misleader on the subject of retirement benefits - see Dean Baker for an example).

Phony arguments? A government system which encourages oldsters to sacrifice themselves for youngsters - and even uses their Social Security numbers? All presumably accompanied by propaganda campaigns encouraging seniors to give up their benefits and stigmatizing those who don't? Congratulations, Doc! That's real Hunger Games material.

Ezekiel Emanuel's score: A winning Five Effies.

What are we to conclude from this relentless wave of false generation-war propaganda? If you're not a senior yet, it means you still have the chance to become the star of somebody's dystopian science-fiction novel. In the meantime, here's a final word to you from all of our contestants:

May the odds ever be in your favor!