Of course the corporate media moguls are going to keep the spotlight on the Tea Party movement; the more they reinforce the meme that government is the one taking liberty, not protecting it, then that much less attention can be paid to the real issue - the consolidated corporate giants that control the mass market of consumer goods directed at the middle class that so many of these ‘activists’ are freaked out about losing. Don Monkerud writes for Counterpunch, Tea Partiers Should Be Picketing the Corporations That Dominate Our Lives:

Tom Tomorrow

“Those who control our corporations managed an Orwellian achievement to redefine the use of brute corporate force as ‘market forces,’” says Lynn. “We still believe in a consumer utopia, but we have an illusion of choice. Corporate powers manipulate our decision-making and direct us to buy certain goods at certain prices.”

Institutional power shifted to Wall Street and large financial institutions. Today a small elite runs corporations to serve themselves as they concentrate their power. Some Americans are waking up to the reality of their situation, but Congress lacks the will to regulate corporate power.

…Although some Americans worry about the growing power of the government, few understand the real power that controls their everyday lives.

Private monopolies determine the brand of breakfast cereal we eat, the type of car we drive, where we bank, the medical treatment we receive, the fashion of our clothes, and the kind of toothbrush we use, in addition to the beer we drink, the health insurance we buy, and what we feed our pets.

…”People say we have an uncontrolled free market but we have the opposite,” says Barry C. Lynn, senior fellow at the New American Foundation. “What we have today is a laissez faire American version of feudalism; a private government in the form of private corporations run by private individuals who consolidated power to govern entire activities within our political economy.”

…

Denise Dorrance comic

In America we tend to hold on tightly to this myth of a ‘classless society.’ Talk of status and reaching for it is taboo; rarely will an individual list ’signaling status to others’ as motivation for purchasing a luxury good (yeah sure, it’s allll about the quality…). British epidemiologist Richard Wilkinson isn’t afraid to broach the class issue, and explains the fashion/status connection pretty clearly in his interview with Brooke Jarvis:

Louis Vuitton, classic status symbol

Status competition causes problems all the way up; we’re all very sensitive to how we’re judged. Think about Robert Frank’s books Luxury Fever or Falling Behind, or the great French sociologist Bourdieu—they show how much of consumption is about status competition. People spend thousands of pounds on a handbag with the right labels to make statements about themselves. In more unequal countries, people are more likely to get into debt. They save less of their income and spend more. They work much longer hours—the most unequal countries work perhaps nine weeks longer in a year.

If you grow up in an unequal society, your actual experience of human relationships is different. Your idea of human nature changes. If you grow up in a consumerist society, you think of human beings as self-interested. In fact, consumerism is so powerful because we’re so highly social. It’s not that we actually have an overwhelming desire to accumulate property, it’s that we’re concerned with how we’re seen all the time. So actually, we’re misunderstanding consumerism. It’s not material self-interest, it’s that we’re so sensitive. We experience ourselves through each other’s eyes—and that’s the reason for the labels and the clothes and the cars.

“We experience ourselves through each other’s eyes.” We are conscious about how others perceive us, especially strangers who have no other point of reference other than our outward appearance.

This is about the psychosocial effects of inequality—the impact of living with anxiety about our feelings of superiority or inferiority. It’s not the inferior housing that gives you heart disease, it’s the stress, the hopelessness, the anxiety, the depression you feel around that. The psychosocial effects of inequality affect the quality of human relationships. Because we are social beings, it’s the social environment and social relationships that are the most important stressors.

Daniela Perdomo neatly sidesteps engaging in the content of the theories themselves, but rather takes a step back and asks what their growing popularity means:

promo ad for Jesse Ventura's tv show

“We have got to get to a point where we have leaders who are there for us instead of representing their manipulative, greedy ways,” he told me.

This insight is one most progressives can identify with, and it drives home the fact that people like Jones and Noory are driven to do what they do because they are distrustful of the powers that be. The fear of a government that ignores your constitutional rights or of too-powerful interests controlling the economy is a perfectly legitimate concern. This manifests itself across the political spectrum in the United States.

…That doubt stems from not knowing what happens behind closed doors in government and in the board rooms of the largest, most powerful companies in the country. What we have little doubt about is that power in the United States — and everywhere, for that matter — is monopolized by small, associated groups that do not represent the interests of the great majority. That’s why there is at least a grain of truth in every bit of conspiracy theory, even the most delusional ones.

The fear of concentrated power is valid and brings up important questions that mainstream culture is often unwilling to ask. Conspiracy theorists ask those questions, though their answers may lead some astray.

This is sort of where I’m at with all of this - can’t say too much about the specifics, aware that anyone who thinks they’ve got it all figured out is still seeing through their own filters, and since I’m still awaiting my invitation to the next Bilderberger event know that I’m so far outside elite power circles of any kind I’ll never have a chance to draw first hand conclusions.

But what I do see is a growing populist discontent with whomever is in power, and as the Supreme Court’s baffling decision to grant giant corporations with multi billion dollar arsenals the same rights of the individual ‘persons’ that have nothing near the means to compete on that playing field shows us, whomever that is sure isn’t governing ‘for the people.’

So the question becomes not ‘is there a shadow elite intricately tangled up in corporate and government trying to manipulate the masses for their own ends using mainstream media bombardment to frame the reality they want everyone to believe?’ (see the film Orwell Rolls in his Grave for an excellent expose on the specifics of that). The question is ‘what are people going to do when the system of consumer supply that keeps us comfortable and compliant begins to falter?’ It’ll be then - and only then - that we’ll start to see any widespread challenges to said structure that go beyond watching tv shows.

As our government continues to enable ‘too big to fail’ rather than address the banking/financial oligarchy, will a grassroots movement gain enough momentum and participation to force the big bank to address the concerns of their ‘little people’ customers? From an editorial that appeared in The Nation:

The cynics either do not understand banking or misunderstand the widespread public anger. Dennis Santiago, IRA’s CEO and managing director, explained that banks compete fiercely for the “core deposits” provided by individual and small business accounts–this stable money is their preferred base for profitable lending. Take away core deposits, and bankers feel immediate balance-sheet stress. Expand the account base for community banks, and they gain greater stability and greater lending power. “Will moving your money have an effect?” Santiago asked. “And by effect, I don’t mean making a momentary political statement. I mean making a structural difference to the country’s financial system. The answer is yes.”

Time will tell…

...

Alt press influential Arianna Huffington shines the spotlight on her first book pic of the year:

My first HuffPost Book Club selection of 2010 is Janine Wedel’s Shadow Elite: How the World’s New Power Brokers Undermine Democracy, Government, and the Free Market. It’s a gripping, disquieting book that exposes and explains why it’s been so hard to bring about any real change in our country — why Washington no longer seems capable of addressing the problems our nation faces.

It’s not an altogether new idea, but what’s notable is the divergence from the usual focus on corporate power and towards individual players. It will be interesting to read it and see how much overlap there is with conspiracy theories that target organizations like the Illuminati.

But the mere fact that books like these can still be published and then promoted on a alternative-mainstream site with a large audience gives me a glimmer of hope.

“The shadow elite clearly knew that the months and months of so-called debate over the issue was nothing more than a charade — the ultimate outcome never in doubt. The bill was created in the shadows. The public process since then has essentially been like a Hollywood adaptation — complete with the requisite third act happy ending (or, in the words of our elected officials, a “historic” ending).

“The new breed of players,” writes Wedel, “who operate at the nexus of official and private power, cannot only co-opt public policy agendas, crafting policy with their own purposes in mind. They test the time-honored principles of both the canons of accountability of the modern state and the codes of competition of the free market. In so doing, they reorganize relations between bureaucracy and business to their advantage, and challenge the walls erected to separate them. As these walls erode, players are better able to use official power and resources without public oversight.”

Okay, even these ‘let them eat cake’ fat cats at the tippy top of the pyramid are worried that we’re in for civil unrest. In her commentary for Bloomberg Alice Schroeder explores the underlying meaning behind the spike in handgun sales to Goldman Sachs execs.

Has it really come to this? Imagine what emotions must be billowing through the halls of Goldman Sachs to provoke the firm into an apology. Talk that Goldman bankers might have armed themselves in self-defense would sound ludicrous, were it not so apt a metaphor for the way that the most successful people on Wall Street have become a target for public rage.

She points out that it appears to be a slightly irrational symbolic gesture. After all, a non-concealed handgun in the home only goes so far to protect against a true pitchfork wielding mob, and won’t help at all in the commute to the office. Again, the point here is that it’s an indicator not just of the growing gap between the rich and poor (that’s been going on since the 90s), nor even that the public is not only finally feeling the pain, but that they expect it to get worse.

So maybe other senior people at Goldman Sachs have gone out and bought guns, and they know something. But what?

Henry Paulson, U.S. Treasury secretary during the bailout and a former Goldman Sachs CEO, let it slip during testimony to Congress last summer when he explained why it was so critical to bail out Goldman Sachs, and — oh yes — the other banks. People “were unhappy with the big discrepancies in wealth, but they at least believed in the system and in some form of market-driven capitalism. But if we had a complete meltdown, it could lead to people questioning the basis of the system.”

There you have it. The bailout was meant to keep the curtain drawn on the way the rich make money, not from the free market, but from the lack of one. Goldman Sachs blew its cover when the firm’s revenue from trading reached a record $27 billion in the first nine months of this year, and a public that was writhing in financial agony caught on that the profits earned on taxpayer capital were going to pay employee bonuses.

Years ago I made the claim that there was an undercurrent of anti-corporate sentiment that was destined to gain momentum and break into the mainstream. At that pre-economic meltdown time it would have been unthinkable to also see attacks on capitalism itself recognized by mainstream media, but with Michael Moore’s documentary, Capitalism, a Love Story, poised to explode into theaters near you, I see this entering the discourse as well. But these two themes together can all too easily provide fuel for right wing hysteria about a communist state just around the corner, it is fortunate and timely to have authors like Cenk Uygur provide an eloquent defense of capitalism and what it really is, and explain how the corporatocracy we’re currently living under is anything but that.

My favorite quote in Corporatists v. Capitalists: comes near the end:

I believe in the capitalist system. I think it makes sense and it is attuned to human nature. People do not work to the best of their ability and take only as much as they need. They work as little as humanly possible and take as much as humanly possible. Capitalism helps to funnel these natural impulses in a positive, hopefully productive manner.

But in order to have capitalism we must have choice. If consumers do not have different companies to choose from, if the markets aren’t truly free and there is no real competition, then you kill capitalism. Corporations are a natural byproduct of capitalism, but as soon as they are born they want to destroy their parent. Corporations are the Oedipus of the capitalist system.

The ultimate dialectic.

He elaborates on the term ‘corporatist:’ (more…)

As I started digging around a little bit into what actual indie designers think about the Design Piracy Prohibition Act (DPPA), I found the situation far more frightening than I ever thought it could be. Whereas before I could just chalk it up to one more example of corporate lobbying I couldn’t control and be ever so grateful I wasn’t trying to make a living as a fashion designer, now I’m starting to grasp how this could have a major impact on consumers of fashion as well, and our access to innovation, good design and quality clothing. You can sign a petition here, (you really should, it’s super easy and the least we all can do) and there are links to contact senators in the quote from Kathleen Fasenella’s Fashion Incubator below.

Picking up where I left off in the previous post…

Marc Jacobs may have risen to fame and fortune based on his genius ability to co-opt, tweak and disribute an indie aesthetic to hipster celebutantes around the globe, but anyone who designs for Louis Vuitton can hardly be labeled and indie designer. What do the real indie designers  - the one this law is supposed to champion and protect - think about the DPPA?

From Blogger Erika Jurney’s site, Try Handmade, “Beware the Design Piracy Prohibition Act (HR 2196)”

If you care about being able to buy indie fashions, then you will be horrified to learn about the Design Piracy Prohibition Act (HR 2196). On the face, it seems reasonable. The purported goal is to prevent designers from ripping off styles from others, but their methods are insane.

Under this legislation, however, designers will need to consult with a lawyer throughout the design process to ensure that every new design created could not subjectively be found at a later date to be “closely and substantially similar” to one protected in the Copyright registry…

Further, young, up-and-coming designers would be susceptible to legal intimidation from designing anything new at all, as they would likely not have the resources to fight a legal challenge in court…

While the bill purports to keep all fashion designs that have existed in the past free and open for all to use, the legislation would allow the ability to copyright non-original design elements in the public domain if arranged in an original way.

Moreover, since there is no test for originality, the registry will begin to be populated with designs that from the public domain. Thus, a designer who draws upon inspiration from the public domain, can easily find himself/herself stuck in costly litigation. - Fashion Incubator via Boing Boing

Anyone out there know any fashion designers? Big, little, rich, poor, amateur or pro, have you ever known a fashion designer who has time to sleep, much less keep up with this kind of research and paperwork? Again, I repeat, the only designers who will benefit from this act will be the ones with enough corporate backing to retain copyright lawyers, the ones who will really benefit the most from this law.

This point is debated by two well known designers via a Reuters article is making its way around the web, which I was able to access on Canada.com:

Toledo also fears the law could hurt the independent designers it was written to protect, by making them risk expensive copyright lawsuits. “Half these young designers can hardly pay their sewers. So you’re going to take that money and go to court?” she asked.

The article highlights the arguments between the CFDA (Council of Fashion Designers of America) - an elite, invitation-only organization representing the only the hottest names in high-end fashion; the three-four figure garments featured in aspirational editorials of the fashion media - and the American Apparel and Footwear Association, which represents the major retailers from which the vast majority of Americans procure their clothes.

Cornejo said the law would encourage collaboration between the two sides of the clothing market. Under the DPPA, mass-market retailers would have to hire designers to consult, instead of copying, she said.

But Toledo disagrees.

“They said that manufacturers would be forced to hire us, the designers. Many of the interns I’ve had happen to work now for JC Penney, or the Gap - they are designers!” she said. “What are you saying, it’s a hierarchy? We’re better?”

Toledo worries the DPPA will give high fashion a monopoly on trends, making good design more expensive and reducing consumer choice. “You’re now saying that the top (designers) can own the top and the bottom levels of the market,” she said.

The corporate sponsors of the top designers, that is.

But if you really want to know how scary this is for independent designers, take a look at what else Kathleen Fasenella (who has tirelessly championed up and coming designers by being one of the only sources for rock solid soup to nuts how to instructions on turning one’s dreams into a solid line of manufactured clothing distributed in stores) has to say about what life would be like for aspiring designers under this new law. The quote is from Proposed Law to Destroy 90% of Design Businesses lengthy, but is worth reading and sharing:

It seems so surreal; between CPSIA, Proposition 65 and now the Design Piracy Prohibition Act, there seems to be nothing less than a full scale war against the apparel industry. Have you forgotten about the Design Piracy Prohibition Act? Well, it’s been resurrected and presented to Congress (HR 2196). It’s nothing short of a bold power grab to protect wealthy socialite designers at the expense of independent designers, putting over 90% of them out of business. Consider this scenario of what will happen if this bill is passed:

Your name is getting out there, picking up more doors everyday and your accounts love you. Now that your fabric samples have arrived, you’re inspired and happily sketching your new styles. This is sure to be your best collection ever! So then you reach for the phone to schedule a slot to have your patterns and samples made. But on the other end, the pattern maker or sewing contractor refuses to work with you. Your heart sinks through the floor, why? You’ve got an established relationship, you’re a great customer with regular work and steady pay but still, no one will take your contracts. In fact, they’re shutting down themselves.

Why no one will take your work:
Let’s say we help you produce this line, you sell it and make your pile crumbs. Then -thanks to the influence of the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA, membership by invitation only) and Congress- somebody can come out of the woodwork and claim it is their design, they own it and now you owe them. If they registered the design and you didn’t know it, this could be perfectly legal. Of course you didn’t copy them but it won’t matter. The fact that society designers have been copying nameless unknown independent designers for years doesn’t even register. Even Diane Von Furstenberg, the leading champion of this bill recently got caught doing it. Because you don’t have any money, this party will sue everyone in your production and retail chain. That means pattern makers, contractors and the stores who bought your stuff. So in the interests of avoiding law suits, any service provider is going to require you prove you own it. It’s even worse for retail buyers who face potential criminal prosecution for dealing in pirated goods. Everybody who helps you or buys from you is going to require you to prove ownership of your concept before they’ll have anything to do with it. If wealthy society designers like Diane Von Furstenberg have their way, this could become an unfortunate reality. Paradoxically, CFDA is telling Congress they’re protecting you.

You think you (or we) won’t be sued in today’s era of lawsuit happy plaintiffs? Have you ever heard of a patent troll? A patent troll is someone who enforces patents they have no intention of manufacturing, against alleged infringers. It’s somebody who makes a living filing legal papers, they don’t actually make anything. In this climate, you think there won’t be fashion copyright design trolls? Right, and the fashion industry is one big family working happily together amid resounding choruses of Kumbaya. Good grief, there are churches tattletaling on other churches to state health departments over competing bake sales! If the morally superior are ratting each out over cup cakes, you think they won’t over caftans? Folks, this is going to get ugly. The CFDA, living in happy-land as they are, deny this will happen saying similar laws haven’t encouraged law suits in France or Japan yet neither of those two nations have culture as law suit happy as the United States.

It’s been two years since I last wrote of this and I couldn’t imagine it’d go anywhere considering how it so obviously favors the wealthy and famous at the expense of designers barely eking out a living but this thing has grown legs; if H.R. 2196 becomes law, it is certain to kill what’s left of the industry except for wealthy socialite fashion designers with in-house legal departments. In one fell swoop, this law will put over 90% of us out of business. Even me. Fashion-Incubator will become an artifact, who will need it? You all will have to speak out. Congress has been misled, they think they are helping you!

The cost of doing business has just gone up astronomically. You’ll have to hire a lawyer, pay for searches through a design database of all existing design registrations. You thought a trademark or logo search was bad? I have no doubt there’s over 10,000 clothing designs out there for every logo. This will cost a fortune. But, you’ll have to do it if you want to stay in business. And those of us left standing will have to have our own lawyers to check up on you and draw up contracts and buy more insurance, our prices will double if not triple. Somehow I don’t think consumers will be happy. Assuming we could afford to shop at Neiman’s and Nordstrom’s, few society designers cut anything larger than a size 12 and I for one am not thrilled at the prospect of mini-skirts, navel grazing tops, tepid/garish colors of whatever constitutes the fashion trends dictated by elite designers.

Even with proof of registration in hand, you will have to produce your registered design exactly as sketched. No design changes or iterations in process are allowed, otherwise you’ll have to start over and re-register a new design. Forget shortening that sleeve, changing the shape of that neckline or tapering the pant leg of that prototype. So what if it ends up looking lame and you have to start all over? That will be the new cost of doing business. Gee, how long will it take to get a line to market?

You know what the worst part is? A law professor specializing in Intellectual property told me that the standard for determining the innovation of a given design is not based on expert opinion. No no, the legal definition is based on the opinion of a non-expert, what the average Joe thinks looks similar. In other words, someone like your significant other who doesn’t even notice you’ve cut or colored your hair or are wearing a new outfit and yet they’re supposed to be the judge of a sleeve design detail? WHAT?! The average person just doesn’t notice that much* and no contractor will stake the viability of their business of what constitutes a copy if the litmus test is determined by John Q Public. So, every designer would need paper. Good luck finding a contractor otherwise.

It’s not law yet, there’s still time to speak out!

I’ve also been seeing the phrase ‘tone deaf’ used a lot, too. From ABC News, JPMorgan Chase To Spend Millions on New Jets and Luxury Airport Hangar

After pressure from his administration, Citigroup abandoned plans for a new $50 million corporate jet from France. And in February, Obama said the days of bank executives flying corporate jets “were over.”

But on March 11, the chairman of JPMorgan Chase, Jamie Dimon, said he could not understand why corporate America has such a bad image.

“When I hear the constant vilification of corporate America I personally don’t understand it,” Dimon said.

Dimon, whose 2008 compensation package, according to SEC documents, was worth more than $19 million in salary, stock and options, declined to speak with ABC News about the proposed plans.

Can we say deeply engrained sense of entitlement totally divorced from performance or contribution not just to the greater good, but even to their own benefit? Because as I understand it, the whole Ayn Rand kick is all about leaving these superior, brilliant beings to pursue their own self interest because since it wouldn’t be in their self interest to, let’s say…have their companies blow up in a super nova that becomes a black hole sucking away global capital… that they wouldn’t - couldn’t - let that happen. And how’s that theory working out for us right about now?

Tony Schwartz writes How Self-Interest Destroyed the Economy and explains the ‘tragedy of the commons.’ Expect that phrase to be popping up more and more:

Do you find yourself asking this question: How is it that so many ostensibly smart people in the financial world made such terrible choices for so long?

Thirty years ago, an ecologist and professor named Garrett Hardin wrote a classic article in the journal titled “The Tragedy of the Commons.” His thesis was that individuals, acting in their rational self-interest, may ultimately destroy a limited resource over the long term.

To illustrate, Hardin used the metaphor of an open pasture - “the commons” - to which herdsmen bring their cattle to feed. The herdsmen understandably want to feed as many of their cattle as possible - or as Hardin put it: “As a rational being, each herdsman seeks to maximize his gain.” This works fine for everyone so long as there’s enough grass to feed all the cattle. As demand rises, however, the effects of overgrazing take a progressive toll on the commons, until ultimately they’re destroyed for everyone.

“Therein is the tragedy,” Hardin writes. “Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit - in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons.”

But we’re not herdsman (well, at least not literally. Although the case could be made for anyone in marketing…) How does this relate to our financial system?

Far too many of us conspired to get as much as we could while the getting was good, never stopping to consider that if everyone keeps trying to get more - leveraging their bets and running up debt to do so — there will eventually be a day of reckoning.

And the antidote?

We live now in a world of palpably limited resources. Every choice we make has an increasingly visible impact on the commons. The leader who suggests that his company’s only obligation is to maximize profit for his shareholders is dangerously delusional.

We’re all in this together, and we literally can’t afford to act any longer as if we’re each free to pursue our self-interest with blinders on. The antidote is a higher level of awareness - the capacity to see the consequences of our actions over the long term and to make choices from that perspective rather than succumbing to our most primitive impulses.

A perspective which, of course, is the opposite of current advertising methods which are all about stimulating those primitive impulses in order that they may be sated by the product on offer. What we’ll have to see then, is a layer of sophistication integrated in - since thinking about others or the common good might now have perceived rewards (feeling good about oneself and the like) then the brand will need to associate itself with those actions. This will become a feedback loop of sorts - as consumers get more activist and whistleblowing becomes accessible to everyone with a cell phone camera, corporations will have to watch their p’s and q’s. How many investment bankers can become PR people? Hype alone isn’t going to cut it.

Mark you calendars: April 11 might turn out to be a newsworthy flashpoint day. I just read an alternet article about A New Way Forward, a group that’s formed to synchronize protests against Wall Street and the ‘too big to fail’ financial institutions:

Somehow, we’ve created a system that protects some of America’s wealthiest individuals by letting them build institutions that are “too big to fail.” Large scale banking has left our economy unstable, and overly dependent upon too few institutions. Greed for short-term profit, and competitive exuberance, has led to incomprehensible financing schemes and rewards for companies that sold people things they couldn’t afford.

But, increasingly, people are realizing that anger at the banks ought also be directed at Congress, and at ourselves. We have created corporations that have left us exposed, unstable, and made it easy for concentrated wealth to exploit the political process.

A new grassroots, bottom-up, organization, has sprung up demanding structural change, and grown from 4 to over 1,000 people in the last week. Their clear and important demand is this: any bank that is too big to fail is too big to exist.

Writer Matt Taibbi thinks the same thing. Keeping with the ‘too big to fail is too big to exist’ theme, Rachel Maddow interviews Taibbi and calls his piece for the Rolling Stone a must read:

Here is the introduction from The Big Takeover, which is well worth reading in its entirety. He follows with a blow by blow historical account framed in his take-no-prisoners style.

So it’s time to admit it: We’re fools, protagonists in a kind of gruesome comedy about the marriage of greed and stupidity. And the worst part about it is that we’re still in denial — we still think this is some kind of unfortunate accident, not something that was created by the group of psychopaths on Wall Street whom we allowed to gang-rape the American Dream. When Geithner announced the new $30 billion bailout, the party line was that poor AIG was just a victim of a lot of shitty luck — bad year for business, you know, what with the financial crisis and all.

… He conveniently forgot to mention that AIG had spent more than a decade systematically scheming to evade U.S. and international regulators, or that one of the causes of its “pneumonia” was making colossal, world-sinking $500 billion bets with money it didn’t have, in a toxic and completely unregulated derivatives market.

Nor did anyone mention that when AIG finally got up from its seat at the Wall Street casino, broke and busted in the afterdawn light, it owed money all over town — and that a huge chunk of your taxpayer dollars in this particular bailout scam will be going to pay off the other high rollers at its table. Or that this was a casino unique among all casinos, one where middle-class taxpayers cover the bets of billionaires.

People are pissed off about this financial crisis, and about this bailout, but they’re not pissed off enough. The reality is that the worldwide economic meltdown and the bailout that followed were together a kind of revolution, a coup d’état. They cemented and formalized a political trend that has been snowballing for decades: the gradual takeover of the government by a small class of connected insiders, who used money to control elections, buy influence and systematically weaken financial regulations.

The crisis was the coup de grâce: Given virtually free rein over the economy, these same insiders first wrecked the financial world, then cunningly granted themselves nearly unlimited emergency powers to clean up their own mess. And so the gambling-addict leaders of companies like AIG end up not penniless and in jail, but with an Alien-style death grip on the Treasury and the Federal Reserve — “our partners in the government,” as Liddy put it with a shockingly casual matter-of-factness after the most recent bailout.

The mistake most people make in looking at the financial crisis is thinking of it in terms of money, a habit that might lead you to look at the unfolding mess as a huge bonus-killing downer for the Wall Street class. But if you look at it in purely Machiavellian terms, what you see is a colossal power grab that threatens to turn the federal government into a kind of giant Enron — a huge, impenetrable black box filled with self-dealing insiders whose scheme is the securing of individual profits at the expense of an ocean of unwitting involuntary shareholders, previously known as taxpayers.

And then for some fun with time machines and crystal balls, Rachel Maddow interviews Senator Byron Dorgan of North Dakota. Why is that fun? She pulls quotes from 1999 where Dorgan - one of the only 8 senators who voted against the bill that allowed for the consolidation of insurance companies/banks/investment firms heretofore prohibited because that’s what helped lead up to the great depression - expresses concern that 10 years forward we’d find ourselves bailing out these institutions.

Who’s looking like the smart guy now?