Month: January 2014

A low point in human history, Davos edition

by digby

I don’t even know what to say about this:

At this year’s World Economic Forum, there have been numerous soul-searching sessions about how to achieve a worthy life and true happiness. There was a dinner dedicated to “mindfulness,” another to “the importance of being happy,” and a daily meditation run by a Buddhist monk.

For those wanting to experience real hardship (for an hour or so) there were multiple sessions each day that attempted to simulate what it is like to be a refugee in a camp. During these sessions actors dressed up as soldiers stormed in, pretending to beat up another actor dressed up as a refugee and firing fake gunshots. Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook and Peter Brabeck-Letmathe of Nestle were among the executives who participated.

Sadly, even pretending to be refugees for an hour and meditation with a monk couldn’t provide any relief from the knowledge that they are victims of terrible persecution:

“It used to be just bankers that were bashed,” the chief executive of a large European consumer goods company said with a sigh after coming out of his morning trance. He spoke on condition of anonymity, perhaps not wanting to seem as if he was complaining. “Now it’s all of us.”

Is there anything more embarrassing to the human species than Davos?

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Sanity returns to Texas (for a day anyway)

by digby

It would appear that barring some last minute intervention by the anti-abortion zealots the tragic saga of Marlise Muñoz is finally over:

A federal judge ordered Friday night that Marlise Muñoz, the Texas woman who has been kept on life support against her and her family’s will, be removed from her ventilator and respirator.

Muñoz has been legally dead since she collapsed on her kitchen floor in November, but the state has kept her on a ventilator because she was pregnant. Lawyers for the John Peter Smith Hospital, where Muñoz is being kept, cited an obscure state law that stipulates that hospitals are required not to remove “life-sustaining treatment” from pregnant women to argue that such life support was necessary.

However, lawyers both for Muñoz’s family and for John Peter Smith Hospital acknowledged Friday that the fetus was “non-viable.” Earlier, attorneys simply had indicated that the fetus suffered “abnormalities,” but did not say whether it could viably live outside of the womb.

I’ve been writing about this for a while and I’ve been struck by how little air time the Fox News claque has been giving it. Can it be that it was too ghoulish even for them?

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Look who’s holed up in Hong Kong cozying up to the Chi-coms now

by digby

No, not Edward Snowden the commie/dupe, the scion of a very powerful right wing family and former high level private contractor and CIA agent:

Erik Prince —ex-Navy SEAL, ex-CIA spy, ex-CEO of private-security firm Blackwater —calls himself an “accidental tourist” whose modest business boomed after 9/11, expanded into Iraq and Afghanistan, and then was “blowtorched by politics.” To critics and conspiracy theorists, he is a mercenary war-profiteer. To admirers, he’s a patriot who has repeatedly answered America’s call with bravery and creativity.

Now, sitting in a boardroom above Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbour, he explains his newest title, acquired this month: chairman of Frontier Services Group, an Africa-focused security and logistics company with intimate ties to China’s largest state-owned conglomerate, Citic Group. Beijing has titanic ambitions to tap Africa’s resources—including $1 trillion in planned spending on roads, railways and airports by 2025—and Mr. Prince wants in.

With a public listing in Hong Kong, and with Citic as its second-largest shareholder (a 15% stake) and Citic executives sitting on its board, Frontier Services Group is a long way from Blackwater’s CIA ties and $2 billion in U.S. government contracts. For that, Mr. Prince is relieved.

“I would rather deal with the vagaries of investing in Africa than in figuring out what the hell else Washington is going to do to the entrepreneur next,” says the crew-cut 44-year-old.

In case you’re rusty on the more colorful details of Erik Prince’s legacy, this recap from 2007 by Jeremy Scahill, (who literally wrote the book on Blackwater) should refresh your memory:

Gunning down seventeen Iraqi civilians in an incident the military has labeled “criminal.” Multiple Congressional investigations. A federal grand jury. Allegations of illegal arms smuggling. Wrongful death lawsuits brought by families of dead employees and US soldiers. A federal lawsuit alleging war crimes. Charges of steroid use by trigger-happy mercenaries. Allegations of “significant tax evasion.” The US-installed government in Iraq labeling its forces “murderers.” With a new scandal breaking practically every day, one would think Blackwater security would be on the ropes, facing a corporate meltdown or even a total wipeout. But it seems that business for the company has never been better, as it continues to pull in major federal contracts. And its public demeanor grows bolder and cockier by the day.

Rather than hiding out and hoping for the scandals to fade, the Bush Administration’s preferred mercenary company has launched a major rebranding campaign, changing its name to Blackwater Worldwide and softening its logo: once a bear paw in the site of a sniper scope, it’s now a bear claw wrapped in two half ovals–sort of like the outline of a globe with a United Nations feel. Its website boasts of a corporate vision “guided by integrity, innovation, and a desire for a safer world.” Blackwater mercenaries are now referred to as “global stabilization professionals.” Blackwater’s 38-year-old owner, Erik Prince, was No. 11 in Details magazine’s “Power 50,” the men “who control your viewing patterns, your buying habits, your anxieties, your lust…. the people who have taken over the space in your head.”

In one of the company’s most bizarre recent actions, on December 1 Blackwater paratroopers staged a dramatic aerial landing, complete with Blackwater flags and parachutes–not in Baghdad or Kabul but in San Diego at Qualcomm Stadium during the halftime show at the San Diego State/BYU football game. The location was interesting, given that Blackwater is fighting fierce local opposition to its attempt to open a new camp–Blackwater West–on 824 acres in the small rural community of Potrero, just outside San Diego. Blackwater’s parachute squad plans to land at the Armed Forces Bowl in Texas this month and the Virginia Gold Cup in May. The company recently sponsored a NASCAR racer, and it has teamed up with gun manufacturer Sig Sauer to create a Blackwater Special Edition full-sized 9-millimeter pistol with the company logo on the grip. It comes with a Limited Lifetime Warranty. For $18, parents can purchase infant onesies with the company logo.

In recent weeks, Blackwater has indicated it might quit Iraq. “We see the security market diminishing,” Prince told the Wall Street Journal in October. Yet on December 3 Blackwater posted job listings for “security specialists” and snipers as a result of its State Department diplomatic security “contract expansion.” While its name may be mud in the human rights world, Blackwater has not only made big money in Iraq (about $1 billion in State Department contracts); it has secured a reputation as a company that keeps US officials alive by any means necessary. The dirty open secret in Washington is that Blackwater has done its job in Iraq, even if it has done so by valuing the lives of Iraqis much lower than those of US VIPs. That badass image will serve it well as it expands globally.

Prince promises that Blackwater “is going to be more of a full spectrum” operation. Amid the cornucopia of scandals, Blackwater is bidding for a share of a five-year, $15 billion contract with the Pentagon to “fight terrorists with drug-trade ties.” Perhaps the firm will join the mercenary giant DynCorp in Colombia or Bolivia or be sent into Mexico on a “training” mission. This “war on drugs” contract would put Blackwater in the arena with the godfathers of the war business, including Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Raytheon.

In addition to its robust business in law enforcement, military and homeland security training, Blackwater is branching out. Here are some of its current projects and initiatives:

§ Blackwater affiliate Greystone Ltd., registered offshore in Barbados, is an old-fashioned mercenary operation offering “personnel from the best militaries throughout the world” for hire by governments and private organizations. It also boasts of a “multi-national peacekeeping program,” with forces “specializing in crowd control and less than lethal techniques and military personnel for the less stable areas of operation.”

§ Prince’s Total Intelligence Solutions, headed by three CIA veterans (among them Blackwater’s number two, Cofer Black), puts CIA-type services on the open market for hire by corporations or governments.

§ Blackwater is launching an armored vehicle called the Grizzly, which the company characterizes as the most versatile in history. Blackwater intends to modify it to be legal for use on US highways.

§ Blackwater’s aviation division has some forty aircraft, including turboprop planes that can be used for unorthodox landings. It has ordered a Super Tucano paramilitary plane from Brazil, which can be used in counterinsurgency operations. In August the aviation division won a $92 million contract with the Pentagon to operate flights in Central Asia.

§ It recently flight-tested the unmanned Polar 400 airship, which may be marketed to the Department of Homeland Security for use in monitoring the US-Mexico border and to “military, law enforcement, and non-government customers.”

§ A fast-growing maritime division has a new, 184-foot vessel that has been fitted for potential paramilitary use.

Meanwhile, Blackwater is deep in the camp of GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney. Cofer Black is Romney’s senior adviser on counterterrorism. At the recent CNN/YouTube debate, when Romney refused to call waterboarding torture, he said, “I’m not going to specify the specific means of what is and what is not torture so that the people that we capture will know what things we’re able to do and what things we’re not able to do. And I get that advice from Cofer Black, who is a person who was responsible for counterterrorism in the CIA for some thirty-five years.” That was an exaggeration of Black’s career at the CIA (he was there twenty-eight years and head of counterterrorism for only three), but a Romney presidency could make Blackwater’s business under Bush look like a church bake sale.

That didn’t work out.  Thank goodness. Here, we pick up the story today:

At that point, charges Mr. Prince, Blackwater was “completely thrown under the bus by a fickle customer”—the U.S. government, and especially the State Department. He says Washington opted to “churn up the entire federal bureaucracy” and sic it on Blackwater “like a bunch of rabid dogs.” According to Mr. Prince, IRS auditors told his colleagues that they had “never been under so much pressure to get someone as to get Erik Prince,” and congressional staffers promised, “We’re going to ride you till you’re out of business.”

Amid several federal prosecutions involving Blackwater employees, most of which fizzled, Mr. Prince resigned as CEO in 2009 and now feels “absolutely total regret in every way, shape and form for ever saying ‘yes’ ” to a State Department contract.

Which brings him to Hong Kong and his new firm. “This is not a patriotic endeavor of ours—we’re here to build a great business and make some money doing it,” he says. Asia, and especially China, “has the appetite to take frontier risk, that expeditionary risk of going to those less-certain, less-normal markets and figuring out how to make it happen.” Mr. Prince says “critics can throw stones all they want” but he is quick to point out that he has “a lot of experience in dealing in uncertainties in difficult places,” and says “this is a very rational decision—made, I guess, emotionless.”

Now think about all this for a minute. Here we have a former military contractor with a top security clearance who has been in business with some of the most highly knowledgeable covert and clandestine agents in the national security agencies. He is politically connected at the highest levels, and feels persecuted by the US government which he believes is hounding him for financial misdeeds. He is now partnering with the Chinese Ministry of State Security.

And he has a very serious personal ax to grind against the US Government:

At this point in the interview, Mr. Prince begins speaking more sharply, even bitterly, not simply as a critic of Washington policy but as a man betrayed. Which he was, in 2009, when he was outed publicly as a CIA asset.

For years while running Blackwater, it turns out, Mr. Prince was also using his personal wealth and expertise to recruit and deploy a world-wide network of spies tracking al Qaeda operatives in “hard target” locations where even the CIA couldn’t reliably operate. This work remained secret until June 2009, when then-CIA Director Leon Panetta mentioned it in classified testimony to Congress. Within weeks, leaks hit the front pages.

“The one job I loved more than any other was ripped away from me thanks to gross acts of professional negligence at the CIA,” Mr. Prince wrote in his memoir, “Civilian Warriors,” published in November.

This background comes to mind as Mr. Prince makes the surprising claim that “there’s very little advantage to being an American citizen anymore. They tax you anywhere in the world you are, they regulate you, and they certainly don’t help you, at all.”

His advice for Washington: “Stop committing suicide.” Lawmakers should “get out of their heads this idea that they can recklessly spend money that they don’t have,” he says. “The United States government is too big in all areas. . . . It’s time to make the entire thing a lot smaller.” That would include doing everything from allowing Americans to buy incandescent light bulbs to reining in domestic surveillance by the National Security Agency.

At no point does Mr. Prince address the irony of making these arguments days after going into business with a state-owned firm founded as part of Communist China’s Ministry of State Security.

Erik Prince is a disillusioned and extremely angry former military contractor entrusted at one time with some of our most clandestine activities and he is living in Hong Kong and partnering with the Chinese government.

Anybody have a problem with that? Rogers? Feinstein? Bueller??

Update: I should make it clear that I don’t actually have any idea what Erik Prince is telling the “Chi-coms.” I’m just using this as an example of the “is it irresponsible to speculate? It’s irresponsible not to” smearing we’ve been seeing from certain members of our government toward Edward Snowden. I know this is shocking, but they seem to have a bit of a double standard …

I gotcher reform for yah, rightchea



by digby

New boss same as the old boss:

President Obama has signed off on the nomination of Vice Adm. Michael S. Rogers to lead the embattled National Security Agency and the Pentagon’s cyberwarfare organization, according to sources familiar with the decision.
[…]
Rogers, a Navy cryptologist, had long been seen as the frontrunner to succeed Gen. Keith Alexander, who has been NSA director since 2005. Alexander, who will retire March 14, is the longest-serving NSA head. He is also the first commander of U.S. Cyber Command, which launched in 2009.

Rogers, whose Navy career spans more than 30 years, is “uniquely qualified” to take on the job, said Terry Roberts, a former Naval intelligence official who worked with Rogers when he served as a special assistant to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) and JCS director of intelligence. She cited his background in intelligence and his experience heading Fleet Cyber Command, the Navy’s cyber unit that also works for U.S. Cyber Command.

Rogers understands signals intelligence and cyberattack operations, as well as the intelligence needs for the military and civilian agencies, she said. He “is the kind of leader who will embrace the challenge of defining the optimal balance for the NSA between security, privacy and freedom in the digital age,” Roberts said.

The Senate Armed Services Committee is expected to question him on issues related to both cyber operations and the NSA.

Rogers has regularly briefed top military and civilian leaders at the Pentagon. He has been involved in cyberdefense and offense policy issues as head of Fleet Cyber Command. But he has not had to defend the nation’s largest intelligence agency against charges of violating surveillance and privacy laws, and the Constitution.

Last month, Obama decided not to split the leadership of the NSA and Cyber Command, which a number of administration officials advocated, including Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. Obama also opted not to end the 62-year tradition at the NSA of having a uniformed officer as the director.

Alexander, who supported Rogers as his successor, has long argued that Cyber Command and the NSA need to be under one leader and closely linked because the military cyber mission depends heavily on the NSA’s networks and capabilities.

In other words, everything should continue smoothly with no disruption. Nothing to see here. Carry on citizens.

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How I learned to stop worrying and love income inequality

by digby

“The American Dream is alive in Denmark and Finland and Sweden. And in San Jose and Salt Lake City and Pittsburgh. But it’s dead in Atlanta and Raleigh and Charlotte. And in Indianapolis and Detroit and Jacksonville.”

The rich are getting richer, but according to a blockbuster new study that hasn’t made it harder for the poor to become rich. The good news is that people at the bottom are just as likely to move up the income ladder today as they were 50 years ago. But the bad news is that people at the bottom are just as likely to move up the income ladder today as they were 50 years ago.

We like to tell ourselves that America is the land of opportunity, but the reality doesn’t match the rhetoric—and hasn’t for awhile. We actually have less social mobility than countries like Denmark. And that’s more of a problem the more inequality there is. Think about it like this: Moving up matters more when there’s a bigger gap between the rich and poor. So even though mobility hasn’t gotten worse lately, it has worse consequences today because inequality is worse.

But it’s a little deceiving to talk about “our” mobility rate. There isn’t one or two or even three Americas. There are hundreds. The research team of Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Herndon, Patrick Kline, and Emmanuel Saez looked at each “commuting zone” (CZ) within the U.S., and found that the American Dream is still alive in some parts of the country. Kids born into the bottom 20 percent of households, for example, have a 12.9 percent chance of reaching the top 20 percent if they live in San Jose. That’s about as high as it is in the highest mobility countries. But kids born in Charlotte only have a 4.4 percent chance of moving from the bottom to the top 20 percent. That’s worse than any developed country we have numbers for.

Here’s the map. The lighter colors have more mobility than darker colors:

The article goes on to discuss why this is the case, but there is no one factor that explains it.

The thing to keep in mind about this study is the fact that it’s being used by alleged liberals as a way to stop worrying and learn to love income inequality. We’re supposed to be very happy that things haven’t gotten worse. America! Fuck yeah!

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Infuriating ad of the year

by David Atkins

There’s one ad that’s been on my TV quite a bit lately, and it makes me want to throw something through the television every time. No, it’s not a political ad. It’s an ad for a Honda Civic Coupe, targeted at Millennials.

The video below is two minutes and a half long, but the 30-second spots that are derived from it still capture the gist pretty well:

Get the message? The economy may be terrible and politics may be ugly, but that’s OK! Because you can take selfies, watch Nyan cat, grow out a beard, dress up like a comic book character, maybe get fifteen minutes of fame on Youtube, put on a virtual reality mask and volunteer for causes. Also, lots of great new technology that isn’t quite here yet but will almost certainly kill what few jobs are left, so…rejoice!

Let’s be clear: this is a perfect distillation of the message that corporate executives and the politicians who feed out of their hands are peddling to Millennials everywhere. And it’s bullshit.

No. Today is not great. Today is terrible. All the petty personal freedoms to dress up funny, grow funny facial hair, watch funny videos online and do silly things doesn’t make up for the fact that jobs are less available than ever, wealth is more concentrated than ever in fewer hands than ever, wages are lower than ever, and the climate is spinning out of control.

The right answer isn’t to shrug one’s shoulders and retreat into silliness and the hope for technologies that may or may not do more than increase productivity while killing jobs.

The answer is to fight like hell until the people in the top 1% strangling the economy and stealing all the money get their grubby, rapacious hands out of the community cookie jar. All that gloriously commodified self-expression doesn’t amount to a hill of beans if your kids can’t eat, your Social Security is stolen, and your planet is burning.

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The turtle wearing a hat backward, baggy jeans and purple sunglasses looks just like other cartoon characters that marketers use to make products like cereal and toys appealing to children.
But the reptile, known as T. Top, who says creating and breaking codes is really “kewl,” is pushing something far weightier: the benefits of the National Security Agency. 

“In the world of diplomacy, knowing what your enemy is planning helps you to prepare,” the turtle says. “But it is also important that your enemies do not know what you have planned. It is the mission of the National Security Agency and the Central Security Service to learn what it can about its potential enemies to protect America’s government communications.” 

Such an enthusiastic endorsement of the N.S.A.’s mission might seem particularly timely given the criticism directed at the agency since one of its former contractors, Edward J. Snowden, began leaking documents he had stolen from it. But T. Top and a troupe of eight other smiley-faced cartoon characters have been busy promoting the N.S.A.’s mission for the past nine years as part of a government wide attempt to make agencies more understandable to the public. With cartoon characters, interactive games and puzzles, the N.S.A.’s CryptoKids website for “future codemakers and codebreakers” tries to educate children about spying duties and recruit them to work for the agency. 

As the website says: “It is never too early to start thinking about what you want to do when you grow up.” >To enter the “How Can I Work for N.S.A.?” section of the site, children click on a picture of a bucktoothed rabbit, who says in his biography that he likes listening to hip-hop and rock. In his free time, the bunny says, he participates in cryptography competitions with other cartoon characters named Decipher Dog and CryptoCat.

“As a signals analyst, you will work with cutting edge technology to recover, understand and derive intelligence from a variety of foreign signals found around the world,” children are told in the future employment section. “You will also attempt to identify the purpose, content, and user of these signals to provide critical intelligence to our nation’s leaders.”

They can’t actually be trying to recruit little children with this thing, can they? because I hate to tell them that unless they’re aiming this a pre-schoolers, it’s unlikely to get anywhere with the budding geeks they obviously want to bring into the fold. It’s really silly. WTH?

Maybe it explains this comment recounted by Dan Drezner when he went on the NSA field trip a couple of months ago:

One official described the difficulties he had while speaking to school groups about the NSA, and his inability to convince students that Snowden was a “bad guy” who had done serious harm to U.S. national security. He asked us how he could more compellingly and convincingly make that case to young people. Bewildered, we asked why the merits of the surveillance programs turn in any way on whether Snowden’s a patriot or a traitor. Even President Obama has conceded that the public debate we’re now having is “welcome,” regardless of where we end up as a result. 

But the NSA official’s reply seemed to suggest that these two perspectives are mutually exclusive—that we must choose between Snowden and the NSA. If we believe Snowden is a bad guy, then the NSA must be right. And if we believe he acted in what he thought were the best interests of the country, the NSA must be wrong.

Frankly, this whole “good guy bad guy” discussion is simply puerile. As is the idea of recruiting kindergartners to be spies.

Does any of this enhance your “confidence” in the NSA?

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Look at Mike Huckabee dance

by digby

… No, not literally. Thank God.

Here he is with Megyn Kelly trying to explain his ridiculous comments. Kelly actually pushed him a little bit. She is, after all, a woman:

I’ve always thought Huckabee was a lugubrious phony of the highest order and this smarmy “explanation” is pretty typical. He has a mean bitchy streak a mile wide that he just can’t quite control. These comments came from within the real him.

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It looks like somebody got the word: Income inequality is out, “ladders of opportunity” is in

by digby

Perhaps you were unaware that discussions of income inequality is just like Hitler, but it is. At least according to this man who is worth at least 8 billion dollars. From the Wall Street Journal letters section under the headline: “Progressive Kristallnacht Coming?”

Regarding your editorial “Censors on Campus” (Jan. 18): Writing from the epicenter of progressive thought, San Francisco, I would call attention to the parallels of fascist Nazi Germany to its war on its “one percent,” namely its Jews, to the progressive war on the American one percent, namely the “rich.”

From the Occupy movement to the demonization of the rich embedded in virtually every word of our local newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle, I perceive a rising tide of hatred of the successful one percent. There is outraged public reaction to the Google buses carrying technology workers from the city to the peninsula high-tech companies which employ them. We have outrage over the rising real-estate prices which these “techno geeks” can pay. We have, for example, libelous and cruel attacks in the Chronicle on our number-one celebrity, the author Danielle Steel, alleging that she is a “snob” despite the millions she has spent on our city’s homeless and mentally ill over the past decades.

This is a very dangerous drift in our American thinking. Kristallnacht was unthinkable in 1930; is its descendent “progressive” radicalism unthinkable now?

Tom Perkins

San Francisco

Mr. Perkins is a founder of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers

Because there’s very little difference between raising taxes and sending someone to Auchwitz. It might even be worse. You know how much harder it is for rich people to be forced to give up even the tiniest bit of money than any kind of tragedy is for the rest of us. They’re sensitive.

(Quite honestly, I think the most shocking part of that letter is the assertion that Danielle Steele is San Francisco’s number one celebrity. The place really has gone downhill since I lived there. Sheesh, you’d think he’d at least claim Clint Eastwood. He hates taxes too.)

But it looks as though Mr Perkins can relax. The big shot Democrats have this well in hand:

Income inequality is out, “ladders of opportunity” is in.

Eager to dispel claims that President Barack Obama is engaging in “class warfare” as he heads into his State of the Union address next week, the White House is de-emphasizing phrases focusing on economic disparity and turning instead to messages about creating paths of opportunity for the poor and middle class.

The adjustment reflects an awareness that Obama’s earlier language put him at risk of being perceived as divisive and exposed him to criticism that his rhetoric was exploiting the gap between haves and have-nots.

On Dec. 4 Obama delivered a sweeping economic address where he declared that “increasing inequality is most pronounced in our country, and it challenges the very essence of who we are as a people.” He used the word “inequality” 26 times in his speech that day.

A month later the word has all but disappeared at the White House. In his most recent remarks about his economic agenda, the president made no mention of chasms between rich and poor. Rather, he stressed policies that help move low income people into the middle class.

Golly, I wonder what made them change? Whatever it was, it seems to be a bipartisan shift:

“What you want to do is focus on the aspirational side of this, lifting people up, not on just complaining about a lack of fairness or inequality,” said Paul Begala, a former top adviser to President Bill Clinton who consults with White House officials. “Watch the State of the Union, I’d be surprised if he uses phrases like inequality, which suggests a leveling down. If you talk about the middle class, it suggests a lifting up.”

Obama’s December speech was well received by Democrats and liberals, but conservatives jumped on it, arguing that Obama was laying a foundation for economic redistribution.

“I think the administration is playing with dynamite,” Karl Rove, the former adviser to President George W. Bush, said earlier this month on Fox News. “The more this becomes a question of taking from those who have to those that don’t have, the more they engage the American people in a very negative way for the administration.”

And the last thing you want to do is have the president lose his credibility with conservatives. Why, they might stop meeting him half way.

A new poll by the Pew Research Center and USA Today illustrates Obama’s message challenge. The poll found that nearly two out of three surveyed believe that the gap between the rich and everyone else has grown in the last 10 years, a view held by majorities across political party lines. But the poll found that Democrats and Republicans disagreed sharply on whether the government should intervene to close the gap. Among Democrats 90 percent said government should act whereas only 45 percent of Republicans said the same thing.

There you go. Democrats and Republicans disagree. So the the only logical for this administration to do is to back away sharply from the position favored by its supporters. How embarrassing that result must have been for them.

“Anytime a Democrat mentions inequality, suddenly they’re a raging populist,” said Jon Favreau, Obama’s top speech writer until he left the White House a year ago. “What’s he’s talking about he’s been talking about since 2004, 2005.”

“Any capitalist country has inequality and that in itself is not necessarily a bad thing,” Favreau said. “What most concerned him is mobility.”

It’s actually getting quite boring tracking the administration feints and retreats on these issues. The president clearly would like to be able to say some populist stuff that his supporters want to hear. But the Big Money Boyz are very sensitive about this and he’s not going to cross them. Make no mistake, there are no policy proposals coming from anyone of either party that would seriously erode this wealth inequality. That’s simply out of the question. What has everyone so agitated is populist rhetoric, which these narcissists see as akin to being a powerless minority attacked by the state. And that means the president and his men have to fall back on “meritocracy” and mobility tropes that ensure these narcissists will remain on top. That’s where the money is.

As Chris Hayes explained in his book, “Twilight of the Elites”:

The Iron Law of Meritocracy states that eventually the inequality produced by a meritocratic system will grow large enough to subvert the mechanisms of mobility. Unequal outcomes make equal opportunity impossible. The Principle of Difference will come to overwhelm the Principle of Mobility. Those who are able to climb up the ladder will find ways to pull it up after them, or to selectively lower it down to allow their friends, allies and kin to scramble up. In other words: “Who says meritocracy says oligarchy.”

Meanwhile, in other oligarch news, I’m sure you’ve all heard by now that Jamie Dimon got a great big pay raise after a year in which his company agreed to pay out a 13 billion dollar settlement for its illegal mortgage schemes.

I think Senator Elizabeth Warren asks the right question:

If JPMorgan is so happy with their settlements that they are rewarding their CEO with a big raise, do you really think the federal bank regulators were tough enough?

No. But it’s far more important that we don’t make Jamie Dimon feel bad about anything. That’s just as wrong as Pol Pot killing all the doctors and teachers. You can look it up.

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Evolution revolution Part II

by digby

Dr. Francis Collins, the head of the National Institute of health, believes in God. He also believes in science, obviously. And what he says here is what I assumed for most of my life was the way the vast majority of religious people thought about this:

It is certainly true in the United States that there is an uneasiness about certain aspects of science, particularly evolution, because it conflicts, in some people’s minds, with their sense of how we all came to be,” Collins said. “But you know, if you are a believer in God, it’s hard to imagine that God would somehow put this incontrovertible evidence in front of us about our relationship to other living organisms and expect us to disbelieve it. I mean, that doesn’t make sense at all. So as soon as you kind of get over the anxiety about the whole thing, it actually adds to your sense of awe about this amazing universe that we live in, it doesn’t subtract from it at all.”

I remember watching Inherit the Wind when I was a kid and thinking that it was almost funny how old fashioned that whole argument was. I truly thought that we had passed way beyond the point at which evolution could be challenged. But we have been going backwards.

Actually “we” haven’t been. As I noted a couple of weeks ago, it’s one particular sub-group:

A new Pew Research Center poll shows a widening political gap over theories about how humans came to be, with Republicans growing increasingly skeptical about the idea that humans evolved over time.

Over the last four years, the percentage of Democrats who said they believe in evolution has risen by three points, from 64 percent to 67 percent. But the percentage of Republicans who believe in the theory has dropped 11 points, from 54 percent to 43 percent.

So while there was a 10-point gap in 2009, there is now a 24-point gap.

Apparently, the conservative party can no longer comfortably accommodate the opinion expressed by Dr. Collins — that God and evolution are not mutually exclusive.

The Republican Party is rapidly becoming exclusively a party of religious fundamentalists. (Just don’t compare them to the Taliban, because that would very rude …)

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