It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine.
“Magic Kingdom For Sale: Sold!” – Zandar (Balloon Juice)
Sheldon Adelson is worth $24.9 billion. Let’s assume, for a second, that he decides that he wants to more or less conquer America. Not militarily, but by buying the Presidency. The cost of the Presidential campaign this year is expected to top $1 billion per candidate. Let’s assume this is the theoretical maximum.
Sheldon Adelson can buy the Presidency for the next 96 years, and still have $900 million leftover.
And that’s just the Presidency. Adelson could decide he just wants to secure the next fifty years of American politics, and just dump mountains of cash into Senate, House, Governor, Mayor, State Legislature, and Judicial races. Sheldon Adelson can literally buy, through unlimited campaign donations enabled by Citizens United, the entire political structure of multiple states for as long as he has left on this planet. What makes it worse is that there isn’t just one Sheldon Adelson. There’s about a dozen guys out there that are real-life honest-to-God supervillains that are in the 1% of the 1%, hellbent on buying the U.S. Government, and transforming America into some kind of libertarian/conservative Mad Max-esque wasteland.
Either the Supreme Court needs to step in and say “You know what? We fucked up. Citizens United was a HUGE mistake.” or Congress needs to get off their asses and find some way of passing meaningful campaign finance reform (Ha! Fat fucking chance of that happening.), because after those, We The People are out of legitimate options.
Sheldon Adelson is giving Mitt Romney $10 million dollars even though he doesn’t really like him.
How are we going to compete with that?
“The Fuck You Society” – J.B.S. Riley (Doghouse Riley)
I’m just gonna leave this here:
“This is the program which has failed, publicly and demonstrably, time and again, since. Incontinent tax cutting and irresponsible regulation are precisely what got us here. And they are promoted by the likes of Mitch Daniels, public liars, political cowards, and “principled” men who won’t actually do anything except accompanied by a new moon, and the sort of massive PR campaign which convinces Americans to eat pig anus stuffed with bacon and cheese.”
“New York to repeat Chicago’s parking meter catastrophe” – Matt Taibbi (Rolling Stone)
I’ve lived through this particular situation twice: once when Mitch “I never met a public asset I didn’t want to sell for pennies on the dollar and a ham sandwich” Daniels sold the Indiana Toll Road, and again when Richard Daley sold out Chicago’s parking meters (which, incidentally, was my first experience with public disobedience).
Taibbi is dead on when he compares this to companies like J.G. Wentworth, who prey on the poor and stupid, hoping to separate them from their money now in exchange for pennies on the dollar. The only difference is that we’re talking about scamming on a municipal scale, where foreign entities are stealing billions from American cities and owning assets paid for by the taxpayers, while sticking the taxpayer with the bill for maintenance and repair.
“How Republicans cheat Democrats – and Democrats cheat themselves” – Rick Perlstein (Rolling Stone)
Rick Perlstein gets it right. I don’t consider myself a Democrat, because pretty much every national Democrat of some importance has a spine made of rubber and is willing to twist themselves into a pretzel to avoid offending some small segment of the population that is too brain dead to make up their mind who they’re going to vote for before they show up at the polls.
Here’s the deal: the Democratic constituency is HUGE, and MASSIVELY underrepresented on Election Day. Old White people vote at a 60% clip and get Republicans elected in Democratic districts. Young people, Blacks, and Latinos are having a good day if they break 25-50%. There are countries out there where turnout is north of 90%. California has already booted the GOP, and the rest of the country could be next.
But dammit, the Democrats have to earn the votes of me and my friends. Clinton-era centrism makes for weak politicians. Show some fucking backbone.
“No Home-Field Advantage for Mitt Romney” – John Avlon (The Daily Beast)
So here’s Mitt Romney, scion of a beloved Michigan Governor, former Governor himself of the state of Massachusetts, and Resident of the state of California, and he’s not going to win a single one of them in November.
We may as well start calling him Mitt “Nowhere Man” Romney (R-Money).
“Words Conservatives Hate” – Garance Franke-Ruta (The Atlantic)
You might as well call this the Rush Limbaugh Effect.
“Issa blasted investigation of Bush Attorney General as a ‘Political witch hunt'” – Josh Israel (ThinkProgress)
So basically, Eric Holder is being roasted for a low-level screw up, whereas Alberto Gonzales committed a major breach of ethics and abdicated his responsibility as AG.
Someday, we will have a full accounting of how much the Bush Administration screwed up America, but it won’t be for a long, long time.
“The Cult of Smartness: How Meritocracy is Failing America” – Conor Friedersdorf (The Atlantic)
Once upon a time, the wealthiest members of society paid a 90% top tax rate, and didn’t say shit about it. Why? Because they were still making more money than anyone else. That money got plowed back into the country and build roads and schools and hospitals, which people used to create more wealth.
And then someone decided that they didn’t have enough, and knocked that down. And they kept knocking it down, and building in loopholes, and stashing money offshore, until what’s left is the wealthiest Americans paying less in taxes than the people that work for them.
Breaking the elites in this country means breaking their ability to transition wealth across multiple generations. It means fortunes like Sheldon Adelson’s cannot be allowed to continue to exist in perpetuity.
And if the government is unwilling to act, then the people will.
“The End of the World as We Know It” – Dani Rodrik (Project Syndicate)
This is the way the world ends. The dominoes are in place. All it takes is someone to knock them over.
