When I was finally called for my initial presentation, I was warmly greeted by one of the many (at that time) plans examiners, most of whom I knew by name, and rattled off the address.  Entering it into the computer, her eyes widened, and she summoned a superior.  Evidently this dream home had a rap sheet with the city as long as your arm: holes in the roof, rodent infestations, broken windows, uncollected garbage, plugged sewage pipes…you name it. I had to assure them that these had been fixed, or at least were in the process of being, but they still scheduled a pre-inspection before final approval.  In other words, the place was such a dump the city had to make sure it was safe, not to live in, but just to work on.  Undoubtedly a demolition permit would have sailed right through.

The next time I met with the owners, I asked how they had ever managed to get financing; I still remembered that when my mother bought a house not nearly as bad in 1986, no bank would touch it, and she had to pay cash.

“Magic,” he said, somewhat conspiratorially, “and photoshop.”  As for due diligence, they did make them replace the roof, but the out-of-state lender never bothered with even a drive-by, much less a call to the city.  The owners did have a good income and credit, though, which was evidently more than many purchasers could claim back in those days.  It truly was the Wild West, and it was hardly driven by homeowners; it was driven by easy money for everyone else involved.

In desirable neighborhoods like that one, houses worth $250,000 in 2000 were going for $800,000 and more, often in a few hours.  Every house for sale was polished and staged to an impossible gloss; those that weren’t had been already snatched up by “flippers” hoping to make a killing in a few months.  People were “pre-qualified” by eager mortgage brokers and hungry banks, prodded by giddy realtors, for amounts that reached into the stratosphere.  Occasionally a wary buyer would do the math and set a realistic limit for themselves, which typically meant a busy street or a lesser school district, and an unknown “realtor” who’d been pumping gas six months ago.  (And probably is again…)

This is why every time I hear someone say that greedy homeowners, Fannie and Freddie, and a previously obscure 1978 (!) banking law caused the Wall Street crash, I want to punch them in the nose, if only as a last-ditch attempt to pump a little blood to their Fox-addled brains.  In my experience, the overwhelming majority of homeowners of that period were just trying to find a place to raise their families, and found themselves, quite unexpectedly, as pawns in someone else’s get-rich-quick scheme.  When the banks ran out of blue-chip buyers to fleece, they moved down the income ladder, but the reality was that whether you were trying to find a starter home or a thirty-foot living room for your grand piano, you were similarly forced to overpay and over-borrow just to stay in the game at all.  Not only did homeowners not benefit from the boom, but they were left holding the bag when it all came crashing down.  Blaming borrowers for buying overpriced houses back then is like blaming third world children for drinking tainted water; neither had any choice in the matter.

When solving a crime for which guilt isn’t obvious, quo bono is the ordinary approach, but that concept has now been turned on its head.  The realtors got their percentage, the mortgage brokers got their commissions, and the banks got their fees.  The homeowners, for their part, got houses that may never be worth what they paid until long after they’re dead, if they’re lucky enough to still have them.

Must be their fault.  After all, Rick Santelli said so.

No tendentious description of the phenomenon is required, nor is a detailed and boring historical context necessary, since they (like the poor) “have always been with us.”   But the sudden “surge” of poseurs, fakers, demagogues, deadbeats, and crooks stands out right now, as our vaunted world economy teeter-totters, and institutions – from colleges to banks to temples of journalism, and pinnacles of power – croak under the strain.

Here’s a partial list, culled from today’s headlines, of new and emerging Little Men.  Please feel free to add a name which may have been missed in this initial installment.  Step right up!  There’s room for everyone, and probably no end to it, once the battle has been joined.

Herewith:  The Little Men Of The Moment!

Silvio Berlusconi - the blessedly former prime minister of Italy.  The ultimate Mistero Buffo of Italian politics pledged to resign (and by God he did!) if a new, technocratic government now in formation can begin cobbling together a fiscal plan to prevent massive default by Italy, a member state in the Eurozone.  But like the magician/clown he is, some skeptical Burlesquecrony-watchers are wondering if this world-class fraudster and cockmaster will ever leave the stage (and, by God! – he hinted upon departing he might continue lurking behind the arras, in Milan).  What is not in dispute is Berlusconi has diddled and fiddled within his court of  whores and bunga bunga hangers-on, while failing, over twenty years, to do the job he was elected to do, so that Italy – more than Greece, Portugal, Spain, or Ireland – may truly sink the European “common market,” and possibly, the world economy itself.  Basta!

Joe Paterno – the disgraced former head football coach of Penn State.  Whereas Berlusconi was not a great man, Paterno might have been, to the extent he fashioned a winning, and honorable, sports tradition.  He did win a lot of football games; ya gotta give him that!  Brought truckloads of money to Beaver Stadium too!  His teams won, or contended for, quite a few national championships.  And he did, judging by the loyalty of the Penn State community, demand and get excellence from his players, on and off the field, for over two generations.  Some of them actually read books; most graduated.  He did not, sadly, measure up when faced with an unavoidable moral dilemma.  He has experienced a great fall.  His catharsis, and that of Penn State, awaits.

Jon Corzine – resigned CEO of MF Global, former Democratic governor and senator from New Jersey, former Goldman Sachs honcho.  Corzine took a mere year and a half or so to capsize MF Global, which traced its lineage to the sugar trade in late 18th century England.  Corzine bet on sovereign debt and lost.  Big.  MF Global under Corzine, a darling of Democratic big wigs, reported a nearly $192  million quarterly loss after betting on European government bonds.  At the end of October the company’s credit rating went to junk, and it filed for Chapter 11.  About a thousand Wall Street wizards went out on the dole.  Just like that.  MF Global’s demise has been logged in as the 8th largest bankruptcy in American history.  Corzine, a little man posting big losses, appears to have a few little Democratic Party leaders around him, saying:  “sssshhhh.”

Bill O’Reilly – reigning Fox News gasbag.  O’Reilly, a little twit with global reach, has been enjoying a two months-long perch on the New York Times bestseller list with a book he “wrote” on the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.  However, the “no spin” king’s tome has been banned from the shelves of the Ford’s Theater book store, operated by the National Park service.  Ford’s Theater was where Lincoln was shot by the mad thespian, John Wilkes Booth.  Among numerous errors cited in the book, O’Reilly asserts there was an Oval Office in Lincoln’s White House, when in fact the executive suite was not built until 1909, when, presumably, there was a federal budget surplus.  In another egregious error, O’Reilly for some reason had Honest Abe “furling” his brow sometime before he was shot (he might have been furling about the feckless Gen. McClellan).  Everyone knows a man would “furrow” his brow, not furl the damn thing, whatever the situation, right?  This flap from Ford’s Theater appears to be a collection of minor quibbles to the author.  O’Reilly’s publisher says the little man is working on another quickie about presidents, to be written in a “narrative, novelistic fashion.”  O’Reilly responded to the Ford’s Theater critique by saying, “Enemies are trying to hurt my book.”

Rick Perry - governor of Texas and Republican presidential candidate.  Perry doesn’t know which federal departments he wants to shut down, but he does know he wants American foreign aid under his administration to start with no money.  Way to go, little man!  Perry may seem drunk at debates he’s appeared in, but it’s just the best a little man from Texas can do.  What can you expect from a guy who used Whiteout on a rock at the entrance to his family’s vacation retreat, but can’t remember why exactly?  Also, such a little man should be cut some slack if he thinks real, light amber New England maple syrup might work as a companion to barbecue sauce!

Michael Bloomberg - mayor of New York.  Well now he’s done it!  There’s a lot of talk in the city about how bored Bloomberg is with his job; and a guy I know who was hanging around Zuccotti Park on Tuesday morning while the cops were mopping up says simply that Bloomie will run for prez as an indie and pull close to 20 percent, drawing the indie vote,  while cutting into Obama’s hide.  Result:  one crazy Republican president, unless it’s Willard the flip-flopper.  Maybe Bloomie will turn out to be a little big man.

Karl Rove – formerly Bush’s brain.  During an appearance at Johns Hopkins recently, Rove, evidently exasperated by taunts from OWS protestors and other unsavory characters, actually challenged one (or all) of them to a fight.  This does not compute.  It’s just hard to imagine this dweeby little man stepping up to his own challenge.  Bombast knows no bounds.

Rush Limbaugh – radio bombasterbasta! – par excellence.  This week the little man of the airwaves used every slur in the book to denigrate the OWS protesters, particularly those evicted from Zuccotti Park, since Tuesday was not a slow news day, and therefore an opportunity for el Rushbo to spike his sagging rating a tad.  Limbaugh spent minute after minute on one of his shows this week obsessing about the OWSers’ tendencies to spew precious bodily fluids all over public spaces across America’s fruited plain, just to call attention to their sad state, which to dittoheads means they’ll have to move back home with Mom & Dad when it’s all over – as a spent force.  Only a man with a little whatnot could stoop to that.

Well, there you have it!  But there are many other candidates to be nominated, to say nothing of the untold millions of Honorable Mentions, past and present.  Step right up.  Tell the nation who you’d like to see on the Pedestal of Heroes in this category.

Well, it seems that Goldman Sachs, whose stock has lost 43% of its value since 2010 and has reported its first-ever quarterly loss, still has its priorities; mainly, stealing from everybody so a few guys can stuff their pockets with millions.  Granted, they did pay a $500 million fine for defrauding investors, lost money in a game so fixed a goldfish could have won it, all the while alternately whining incessantly about being “demonized” or bragging about doing “God’s work,” but they did manage to step up to the plate for currently faddish “austerity” by courageously deciding to fire a thousand or so people lower on the food chain, and thus destroyed jobs, so their executives, who would have been fired for incompetence by any normal business, could continue to wipe their asses with $100 bills.

Not to be outdone, Bank of America is attempting to unload its toxic assets onto the taxpayer-backed arm of its corporate octopus, a shameless scam supported, naturally, by Ben Bernanke’s Fed but bitterly opposed by the FDIC, which smells the inevitable Brooks Brothers train robbery in the offing. Naturally, the overconfident children that pass for its management are grabbing huge bonuses as well, based at least in part on the “savings” it will realize by dumping 30,000 employees into the red-hot American job market.  That, and adding a new $5 fee to its already fleeced and long-suffering customers in the middle of Occupy Wall Street, even having some of them arrested for the crime of trying to close their accounts.  Citibank did the same thing. Smart.

Are these demonstrably worthless nincompoops really what their goddess Ayn Rand called “producers?”  If so, I’d hate to see the parasites.  All I see in these examples, which are just the most recent of dozens, is poor judgement, short-sightedness, and mind-boggling avarice.  But there’s a method to the madness; a ruined economy does offer a lot of opportunities to its architects (and beneficiaries, who are generally the same).  Job insecurity, a specific goal of lifelong Rand devotee Alan Greenspan, does allow corporate looters to squeeze out “profits” over the short term, but lingering job insecurity is even better, as it enables deeply unpopular and upwardly redistributing economic schemes to gain undeserved currency, thus enabling long term goals of plutocrats the world over to be implemented, at great detriment to all concerned, except them.  They ruined the economy for a reason.

That reason, of course, is the unacceptable “affluence” of those below them.  They lament the injustice that the poor have refrigerators, that firefighters have pensions, that poorer children receive “free” education, and that the elderly have Social Security and Medicare.   In a perfect world, nobody but they would have a thin dime, much less a voice, to complain when they are being shafted.  Not satisfied after having thoroughly looted the private sector,  they’re going after what little money there is left lying around: public pension funds and “entitlements.”  What a waste it is for any money, anywhere, not to be solely devoted to trophy wives, jets, and fancy cars and thus be squandered on such enfeebling “welfare” as, say, public schools and decent retirements for the elderly.

#OWS couldn’t have come at a better moment; when America’s increasingly unaffordable overclass is acting like a bunch of drunks at last call, hippies, of all people, have stepped in, like sober bouncers, to ask them to leave.  They don’t have to go home but they can’t stay here.  Most Americans agree.

The trouble is that the wealthy don’t fit the stereotypes: They aren’t all pampered CEOs, hotshot investment bankers, pop stars and athletes. Many own small and medium-sized companies. Half the wealth of the richest 1 percent consists of stakes in these firms. That’s double their holdings of stocks, bonds and mutual funds, according to figures compiled by economist Edward Wolff of New York University. Reid would pay for Obama’s jobs plan by taxing the people who are supposed to create jobs. Does that make sense?

Oops.  Turned out to be a gutter ball, and worse, one that looks suspiciously like John Boehner’s orange head.  Of course, the statistics reek of bogusness, but guys like Samuelson aren’t really trying all that hard anymore.  They write columns straight off the wingnut ticker tape, where “job creators” are the answer, whatever the question. Less than 3% of actual “small businesses” are taxed at the top rate, and Samuelson knows this, but what the hell?  It’s worked so far….

The backlash against the rich is the start of debate, not the end. Are the rich to be punished for succeeding or merely asked to pay their “fair” share? Who is wealthy or who’s just well-off? Is $250,000 a reasonable cutoff for couples, as Obama once indicated, or has that been repudiated? If taxes do rise, what approach would best preserve incentives for hard work, investment and risk-taking? Are Obama’s assaults on wealthy business leaders just deserts (sic) or political cheap shots? However measured, the rich are besieged; the attacks almost certainly will intensify.

Ah, before there were “job creators,” there were the “successful” being “punished.” And my, how this punishment seems to have taken its toll on the poor dears. Ensconced in one or the other of their several gated compounds, these shrinking violets feel “besieged,” as Samuelson so sympathetically puts it, and worse, they’re threatening, for the umpteenth time, to go Galt on us if we don’t leave them alone.  These are the things that keep Samuelson awake at night. They should.

I’m the national training director at Obama for America. My job is to develop the programs and resources our staff and volunteers use to teach others how to grow this campaign in their communities.

That sounds like nice work, if you can get it.

I’m writing because you or someone you know might want to be among a group of people who will play the leading role in our grassroots strategy this fall. They’re called our fall fellows.

Hmmm.  If you changed it to “senior” Fall Fellow it might get me a chance to blabber on TV…..   Meanwhile, it sounds like nobody gets paid.  Why am I not surprised by this?

By now you’ve probably heard of our summer organizers program, through which more than 1,500 full-time volunteer organizers have stepped up as the next generation of leaders in this movement. These folks have been the focus and the heart of our movement all summer, and though each and every one of them will remain a part of this organization, their time as Summer Organizers ends next month.

Fifteen hundred?  In a nation of 300 million?  In Obama’s math, such as we’ve seen, that would equal about .000000021 of one hedge fund manager in terms of political influence.  Note the unintentionally hilarious use of the term “movement” to describe supporting the continuation of a Presidency that has abandoned virtually all of the ideals on which it based its campaign, and repeatedly concedes to its political enemies with defiant exuberance.  Whatever “movement” might have animated his campaign has been so repeatedly kicked to the curb that it only exists now as a movement against it, but in the land of those hardy 1500 Obamabots, a “movement” can be conjured out of thin air supporting, say, Predator Drones, Wall Street lawlessness,  deep cuts to the social safety net, and continuing historically unusual and destructively low tax rates on the wealthy, and, to top it off, more wars than you can count on one hand.   That “movement” has enough supporters already, a fact which need hardly be belabored here.

The job of fall fellows is to pick their work up and carry it forward into the months to come.

The Summer Fellows having all moved back into their parents’ basements.

Our fall fellows are going to engage new volunteers on front porches and over the phones. They’ll register new voters and develop relationships with other organizers and supporters on campuses and in communities. The people selected will be on the front lines of the most important work we do as a campaign: bringing people together at the local level.

Really?  Well, oughtn’t your boss have thought ahead and done a better job, so people on the “local level” would, well, not have already decided that he’s the lamest President since Warren G. Harding?  Who, pray tell, would want to talk to even one voter, especially a Democratic one, about how fabulous Obama’s supposedly been? Presumably, applicants will  be trained to handle a lot of slammed doors and hangups.

Apply to be a fall fellow right now — or pass this message along to someone else you think would be great:

http://my.barackobama.com/Fall-Fellows

Organizing is tough work. I started out as an organizing intern in Iowa in 2007, and I can tell you firsthand that the hours can be long, often extending late into the evening and over the weekend. But this will be one of the most rewarding and inspiring things you’ll ever do. It’s through organizing that I’ve met some of my closest friends and learned the skills I use in my job every day.

Ahhh, they’ve finally gotten to the real hook.  Basically, she’s saying that if it weren’t for becoming an unpaid Obamabot way back when, she would be unemployed too, just like the rest of y’all.  The way out of Obama’s Hoovervilles for the young, educated, and unemployed is to, guess what, support their continuation for others!  You see, once you’ve nailed a job in the political-media-industrial complex, massive unemployment is only for the little people.  Where do I sign up?

So even if you’re not in a position to join us part- or full-time in the months to come, I really hope you’ll forward this message to someone you know who might be.

Give me some time.  I might think of somebody.

This kind of organizing isn’t just how we plan to win this election. I’ll say.  That job has been turned over to Wall Street et al.  It’s a reflection of the kind of politics that we believe in — the kind the President himself practiced as a young organizer working with communities devastated by factory closings in Chicago.

And also the kind that he stopped practicing in about 2007, as most people have now noticed.

No experience is required — you might be a veteran organizer or a first-time volunteer. And if you happen to be a college student, you can work with your school to earn credit through this program.

Wow.  Who knew working for free was so much easier to get into, especially now, than a real paying job?  Heck, with more than twenty million unemployed, you’d think….  Oh yeah, they got the fifteen hundred last time.  Coincidence?

Bottom line: No matter how old you are or where you come from, it’s not too often you get a chance to do something like this.

Every four years, last time I checked; it’s not like it’s Halley’s Comet or something.  Hard times like this, though; only the geezers remember.

Apply now to be one of our fall fellows — or share this message with someone you think might be interested:

http://my.barackobama.com/Fall-Fellows

Thanks, and good luck,

Sara

I’m sure Sara is a lovely person, and means well.  But the only campaign slogan that will possibly reelect Obama, and the one they’re clearly relying on, is, “Don’t let (insert crazy Republican nominee here) make things worse than they already are.”  Given the likelihood of a genuine crazy person as his 2012 opponent, this craven and amoral strategy just might work.  But please, don’t call that a “movement.” Sheesh.

Really.  Is it news anymore when President Obama morphs into a smarter and more polished Bush, and the media eat it up?  Admittedly, he chooses his sets and costumes more understatedly, and avoids the sort of mangled and often unwittingly inflammatory scripts that eventually made Bush the most hated President in decades, at home and abroad, but the message, and certainly the outcomes, haven’t changed a bit.  As Glenn Greenwald and many others have tirelessly pointed out, in many ways on matters that are always called “National Security,” but are really merely covers for the militarization of America, Obama is every bit as bad as Bush, and often worse when it comes to toleration of dissent (from anyone who doesn’t happen to be a Joint Chief, that is…).  Obama’s acquiescence to these policies, given that he ran against not a few of them, was bad enough, but his later gleeful embrace of them as he headed into what he obviously thought would be a cakewalk reelection, has put him off his game.

On matters large and small, Obama has cast aside the concerns of “The Professional Left” for so long that even a purely theatrical gesture like this one comes as something of a gift at this point, and a tacit admission that the most rabid chickenhawks can be crossed for once is certainly welcome, but is it enough?  The plain fact is that Obama’s worst failures that endanger his reelection all have to do with his constantly surrendering to and thereby legitimizing the worst and stupidest of Republican policies from the Bush years.  Bad policies do, in the end, make bad politics, and Obama is reaping the whirlwind, deservedly, for failing to repudiate them each day.

Had he chosen to look both backward and forward involving the myriad crimes of his predecessors, many of today’s loudest and most strident critics would be in jail.  Had he chosen to prosecute the banksters, same thing, with the added benefit that all Americans, even teabaggers, would have benefitted substantially.  Had he forthrightly and openly backed Medicare for all, he might not have gotten shellacked in 2010.  But worst of all, out of either foolishness or cynicism, he inexplicably adopted the ridiculous rhetoric about the Federal Budget being just like the Family Budget, and therefore couldn’t buy just any old thing in tough times, and the public bought it.   Sadly, for him and the Military Industrial Complex he so ably leads, what the long-suffering public decided it didn’t want to buy anymore was more wars.

Since he can’t run on the economy, healthcare, civil rights, choice, or what have you, he has decided, rather oddly, to run on Peace, and fear of the Republicans.  I suppose it’s better than nothing, but is it really any different, with 70,000 troops still there for at least two years, than Dick Cheney saying, “So what,” albeit  a bit more delicately?  I don’t think so.

I was pleasantly surprised with President Obama’s speech today, and although by now I find myself reluctant to believe much of it will happen, for once he firmly laid the blame for the deficits and debt where it belongs, with the Republican Party.  Of course, the fact that he hasn’t been making this point in a thousand ways for a thousand days partially explains both his current weak political position and the loss of congress that created it, but better late than never, Mr Ivy League.  While I rejoiced at his admittedly belated willingness to talk about tax cuts for the wealthy in a more factual way, i.e. that money given to so few people who don’t need it blights the lives of millions who do, he still didn’t take a crack at the bonkers philosophy behind it; that such short-sighted and dumb-ass cruelty is supposedly good for us all.

Saddled with his bankster-sodden administration and, sadly, policies, Obama has put himself in a place where he always has to leave behind the biggest rhetorical tool in the shed, one that would bedazzle everyone from teabaggers to firebaggers*: Simply and plainly stating that rich people, when allowed to, will use their excess money to buy the government, and widespread poverty and suffering is the inevitable result.  Every Republican policy, every last one, shows this, and basically hands him a daily narrative of oligarchic plunder to exploit, were he so inclined.  We have thirty years of data to prove that, far from benefitting the economy, handouts to the rich invariably cause debt and repeated crises, and always result in a declining standard of living for everyone else.

Of course, that inconvenient truth would have gone over like a fart in church amongst the millionaire Villagers, who still say a prayer to St. Ronnie whenever their contracts come up, so in his typically wienie way, Obama wouldn’t go after either the idiocy of the Laffer Curve (in which evidently 100% or Republicans still believe) nor the resulting pernicious uses to which absurdly rich people put their newfound large excesses of cash, like buying elections, for instance.  Naw, he couldn’t say that, not when he’s got an election to buy for himself; too chancy to try and get it for free (which he would) by puncturing some of the right’s most successfully embedded Big Lies, so he is left to fight a squirmish** here and there, but against a narrative so stupid and discredited that he shouldn’t have to fight it at all.

Today Glenn Greenwald argued pretty persuasively what I’ve been thinking for a long time, that Obama isn’t really trying to reverse the rightist lurch because he never really wanted to; it’s disappointing but probably true.  After all, as we saw today, he is smart, and has gifts to which he could put to any goal he wanted.  And so far, those goals appear to differ only in style and presentation from his predecessor, the worst president America ever had, who seems an odd model for success for someone supposedly in the nominal opposition.

It’s infuriating enough to anyone to the left of say, Blanche Lincoln, to continually find that nearly all politicians of both parties, once they reach Washington, end up on the same self-serving team.   It’s doubly infuriating if you’re a Democrat, and naively thought that was exactly what you were ostensibly voting against. Obama made some welcome if predictably tentative steps back toward his repeatedly scorned “base” today, and went further than I expected in “educating,” as righty might put it, those listening.  But he again failed to aim his slingshot squarely at the Chicago School Goliath, that is, Voodoo Economics itself.  It was either a missed opportunity, or a simple and understandable desire to spend his twilight years at Burning Tree, resting assured that generations of his heirs won’t have to work.  Just like Bill Clinton, who compellingly showed all future Democrats that doing good for others should never get too much in the way of doing well for oneself.  Ideological purity is quite evidently a luxury only available to Republicans these days.

President Kennedy is reported to have once wondered aloud how much money it took to turn a Democrat into a Republican, but being rich himself, he was only talking about voters, not Presidents.  Those were the days, huh?

*When Firedoglake criticized, appropriately, some of Obama’s early caves, other lefty bloggers dropped them from their blog rolls and called them “firebaggers.”

**Thank heaven for Sarah Palin’s many Shakespearian contributions to the language….

“That’s one of the nice things. I mean, part of the beauty of me is that I’m very rich. So if I need $600 million, I can put $600 million myself,” he said.
–Donald Trump, in an interview with Ashleigh Banfield, wherein he also announced that something about President’ Obama’s birth and past is a tad fishy.

At the risk of sounding like some kind of commie yet again, can I point out that the psychological pathology of the above statement (and video) makes it clear that far from being placated further, America’s rich need to be kicked to the curb, pronto, because they are as certifiably crazy as any inbred potentate throughout history, and likely, unchecked, to cause at least as much damage?  I suppose the string of increasingly younger and more costly women in his life may make Donald Trump think he sees “beauty” in the doughy, fright-wigged horror in the mirror, but then again, other corrupt (and physically revolting) nincompoops have thought the same, improbable, thing; it’s a story as old as time.

Money in copious quantities, especially in a culture as money-worshipping as ours, does more than just work to derail democracy and impoverish everyone but the moneyed; it turns its grabby, narcissistic recipients into, alternately depending on the day, whining, put-upon victims, or superhuman, divinely-inspired conquering overlords.  Both notions are, not to put too fine a point on it, a little divorced from reality, and ought to be treated as such.  When bailed-out banksters justify their serial thefts from customers, taxpayers, and even shareholders, they proudly declare that they are doing “God’s Work.”  When clueless environmental scofflaws are confronted with criticism for killing people in large numbers and wiping out ecosystems, they peevishly lament not having their yacht-racing “lives” back.   Then, take the Koch brothers.  Please.  Ripping people off and ruining the planet is their selfless “life’s work,” to their addled minds, and as such their combined $40 billion or so can never be enough.  We, as a country, owe them, precisely because they do have so much money.  They’re every bit as beautiful as The Donald, with the trophy wives to prove it.

The evidence clearly shows that while we’ve been endlessly told that money is good for the rich, but bad for the poor, as Lewis Lapham memorably put it, the opposite is closer to the truth when one considers the glaringly obvious effects on the comparative mental health of the two groups, not to mention the effects of this puzzling theory on society as a whole.  After a certain point, money does make a person too crazy to be listened to, much less hold high office, but yet we are forced to listen to them day after shocking day, and yet nearly all of them think they should either be President, or at the very least get to pick who is.

Whether it be Jan Schakowsky’s plan for a millionaire’s surtax (supported by an astonishing 81% of those polled), the rollback of the Bush (and Reagan, for that matter…) tax cuts, the removal of the Social Security cap, or all three, something must be done, at once, to free rich people from their crazy-making money.  They’re all drunk, and somebody’s got to take away the punch bowl.

Out here in the Northwest, nuclear power has a long history of being dismissed as the kooky, plutocratic boondoggle it is, even while we have been spared the worst of the fears it understandably creates.  Back in the 70′s, when our local utility, Portland General Electric, built the Trojan nuclear power plant, its remote location in Rainier, Oregon, about 40 miles from Portland, perhaps contributed to the lack of significant opposition to its initial construction, so much so that by the time it went online, a consortium of public power utilities and the State of Washington decided to build five of their own, presciently dubbed WPPSS. Just as Trojan was soon discovered to have myriad design flaws large and small that caused constant shutdowns, and regional opposition to nuclear power began to flower, WPPSS had already spent billions, primarily benefitting Trojan’s contractor, Bechtel, and other corporate welfare queens building the plants when it was discovered that both revenue projections and costs estimates used to justify the plants had been startlingly manipulated, and I’m sure you can guess in which direction, respectively.

The Keystone Kops quality that plagued nuclear power in the Northwest was so much a part of the culture that it was mockingly parodied on the local rock FM station, KGON, which had a daily “Nukes in the News” segment (to which CHNN owes its “Nudes in the News” category..), and in it, from around the world and right here at home, tales of the perfidy, stupidity, and indifference to its inherent dangers fell like rain from the nuclear industry.  After WPPSS collapsed in an embarrassing heap, with only one of its five plants completed and the rest scaled back or mothballed, Three Mile Island put an end, one would have thought for good, to the ridiculous idea that it would be smart to mine and unleash the earth’s deadliest substances to, well, boil water.

For a time, anyway.  Like any professional freeloaders, the nuclear industry found that getting real jobs, that is, finding something to do that wouldn’t require permanent government subsidy, incur uninsurable and incalculable risks, and create waste that no one on earth knows what to do with, was just too taxing.  After expensively and deceptively fighting voter initiatives to close its unseemly white elephant at its own expense rather than ratepayers, PGE finally got tired of the whole thing and closed Trojan anyway, and not only charged ratepayers for its losses, but even for the expense of dynamiting the thing, like a cat charging its owner to bury its own poop.  That sort of coup was impressive enough that Enron came calling, and soon PGE was part of that fine example of Randian Producerism.

In spite of this pretty clear-cut history, the political establishment from the Obama Administration to the New York Times all decided recently that it was time to join the kleptocratic Republicans in supporting the one thing on which the Village can all agree, taxpayer handouts to the wealthy and unscrupulous, and nuclear power obviously fit the bill.  Where would the modern day John Galts go for their welfare checks if the war machine ran a little slow for a term or two?   A plutocrat’s gotta eat, you know, and their bar tabs can be astronomical, especially if John Boehner’s there, which he no doubt usually is.

The only fly in the ointment, of course, is as ever those liberally-biased facts.  The “Green Economy” that nuclear power advocates envision is only green because that’s what happens when you have to evacuate a couple hundred thousand people, perhaps for a week, perhaps for decades, from large areas of formerly habitable planet.  Plants flourish, especially in the streets.

I feel guilty, really; I live just a few dozen miles from Hanford, where the Manhattan Project devised the fiendish nuclear devices that vaporized thousands of Japanese were concocted, and the only impact on my life from that questionable endeavor was that a large stretch of the over-engineered Columbia River  was miraculously spared the salmon-destroying overdevelopment of its safer, non-quarantined parts.  Nuclear Power, I can safely say, is dead again here.   The Japanese, on the other hand, have once again been pressed into grisly service to remind the world of the idiocy of it all.

I hope someone’s listening this time.

The CHNN eastern desk reported recently that Harlan Harrington, the network’s go-to international correspondent and expert on Mediterranean scandals of all sorts, was skiing in Switzerland, accompanied by Lois Farnsworth, a former Miss North Dakota, and largely unavailable.

Until this week.

Harlan said he’s been overwhelmed, not to mention overdone, by the tempest in Italian politics, and has not been able to mount a massive,  Guernica-size report on Berlusconi’s titanic struggle to hold onto power.  Occasional thousand word pieces fail to do this story justice, Harlan said, and since the CHNN flying boat is in winter storage in Bismarck, he’s also had some difficulty just hopping down to Milan, as he is wont to do, to examine court briefs against the PM.

Still, Harlan does have a snippet of news, small beer though it may be to those ravenous readers of all things bunga bunga in Rome.

The prime minister, according to Harlan, met this week with a select group of Vatican leaders, ostensibly to celebrate the 82nd anniversary of the signing of the Lateran Pact of 1929.  The Roman Catholic church struck a deal at that time with then Italian leader Benito Mussolini, providing for official state recognition of Vatican City and it’s core structures.  The church built a village and people came, long before the idea occurred to Hillary Rodham Clinton.

The meeting between the clerics and the prime minister was described by observers as “correct,” as the church, itself embroiled in a worldwide institutional sexual abuse scandal, appeared to be sensitive to the need to reach out to the prime minister, somehow or other, without appearing to ignore or condone the colorful contours of the premier’s personal life.

Back to the small beer.

Italian reporters helped Harlan out a bit with some details of the meeting, pointing out that church leaders still see Berlusconi as an ally on right to life issues, and as a possible source of money – direct, or, if need be, indirect.

A bill now before the Italian parliament,  and favored by the church, would include a one euro ($1.36) tax hike on commercial movie tickets.  Church-owned “family friendly” theaters would be exempt.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7uGkuyc2OmY

As picayune as such a negotiating point might appear to the uninformed, non-Italian political observer, Harlan emphasized the Machiavellian quality to the church-state dance now underway between Vatican leaders and Berlusconi.

Observers said Berlusconi, sitting in a large, blood-red upholstered, gold-leaf wing chair, appeared to wince slightly as the ticket issue was raised in whispered tones by a cleric assigned to the task.  The Leader then nodded as if in assent, conveying a confessional demeanor.

Harlan ended his report to the CHNN eastern desk with this quote from an Italian legislator:  “The church has an enormous influence on politics still,” says Italo Bocchino, a lawmaker who defected from Mr. Berlusconi’s party  last year (the political party, not the one at his Sicilian retreat with Vladimir Putin).  “If the church had said Berlusconi was incompatible with governing, he would have fallen.  But they didn’t.”

Catholic reporter Andrea Gagliarducci observed:  “It is diplomacy.  You take everything you can.  You make agreements even with people you don’t trust.”

Harlan told the eastern desk  he’s thinking of bringing that message personally – along with a large shipment of The Prince in paperback – to activists and leaders in Madison, Wisconsin, and maybe Ohio, as soon as he packs his skis and can get himself and Lois on a plane back to Bismarck.