This rant takes a few weak swings but there are also many damning blows.

The bigger issue is whether the country can afford the systemic damage being done by the ever-growing income inequality between the wealthiest Americans and everyone else, whether poor, middle class or even rich...

Inequality is instead the result of specific policies, including tax policies, championed by Washington Democrats and Republicans alike as they conducted a bidding war for high-rolling donors in election after election....

Those in the higher reaches aren’t investing in creating new jobs even now, when the full Bush tax cuts remain in effect, so why would extending them change that equation?

Read the whole thing...

Barack Obama:

The question is -- can we afford to borrow $700 billion?

Frank Rich:

That's a good question, all right, but it's not the question. The bigger issue is whether the country can afford the systemic damage being done by the ever-growing income inequality between the wealthiest Americans and everyone else, whether poor, middle class or even rich.

You know things are grim when you start wishing that the president might summon his inner Linda McMahon.

Noteworthy:

If you think "Russia" when you hear "oligarchy", think again.

A banker:

Revolutionize your heart out. We'll still have this country by the balls.

Jules Dupuit:

Having refused the poor what is necessary, they give the rich what is superfluous.

Nouriel Roubini:

Things are going to be awful for everyday people.

Etay Zwick:

During the last economic "expansion" (between 2002 and 2007), fully two-thirds of all income gains flowed to the wealthiest one percent of the population. In 2007, the top 50 hedge and private equity managers averaged $588 million in annual compensation. On the other hand, the median income of ordinary Americans has dropped an average of $2,197 per year since 2000.

Tony Judt:

Why is it that here in the United States we have such difficulty even imagining a different sort of society from the one whose dysfunctions and inequalities trouble us so?

We appear to have lost the capacity to question the present, much less offer alternatives to it.

The question is, What do we do now, in a world where, in the absence of liberal aristocracies, in the absence of social democratic elites whose authority people accept, you have people who genuinely believe, in the majority, that their interest consists of maximizing self-interest at someone else's expense? The answer is, Either you re-educate them in some form of public conversation or we will move toward what the ancient Greeks understood very well, which is that the closest system to democracy is popular authoritarianism. And that's the risk we run. Not a risk of a sort of ultra-individualism in a disaggregated society but of a kind of de facto authoritarianism.

What we need is a return to a belief not in liberty, because that is easily converted into something else, as we saw, but in equality. Equality, which is not the same as sameness. Equality of access to information, equality of access to knowledge, equality of access to education, equality of access to power and to politics.

Decius:

I said I'd do something about this, and I am.