Long article. Read it anyway. Of particular note to my fellow liberals is this: When criminal Wall Street fraud became so rampant that it literally COLLAPSED THE ECONOMY OF AN ENTIRE PLANET, not only did "political connections" allow those responsible to escape justice, the connections were not to usual suspects. They weren't protected by links to Republicans like Mitt Romney or Dick Cheney, but "liberal" Democratic icons Hillary Clinton and Chuck Schumer. In other words the perception Republicans are the corporate party and Democrats the party of the working class is a rather tattered conceit: BOTH parties are bought and paid for lackeys protecting corporate Americas right to prey on everyone else, with complete impunity, often with large subsidies from the very taxpaying "consumers" multi-nationals consume.

Vote Democrat, vote Republican, vote for Zippy the Pinhead; it really doesn't matter. So long as Democrats OR Republicans win we can count on more corporate crony capitalism, whether it's Obama handing a few trillion taxpayer dollars to insurance companies, car makers and investment banks or Cheney handing no bid contracts to his own companies. Henceforth I'm backing the Greens until/unless presented a better option, as much because of their pledge to refuse all corporate donations as the generally liberal platform that produced that pledge. Like a perhaps surprising number of American liberals, my motive is more self preservation than any higher ideal.

Economists as well as sociologists have warned of the dangers of alienation for decades but, as a wholly corporate owned American government has become the norm, an increasingly alienated, disenfranchised and desperate public has also become normal. The consequences of that are sometimes tragically violent. Desperate people do desperate things and, absent non-violent options, won't simply crawl off to unobtrusively die in a corner somewhere out of sight. It's therefore vital to preserve (or in Americas case, recreate) such a viable non-violent option before the growing number of unemployed homeless Americans still waiting for the universal healthcare promised three years ago take the unenforced law into their own hands. Moral considerations aside, people enraged until irrational over victimization their government not only permits but assists tend to react indiscriminately, as we're seeing demonstrated more and more often.

Starving homeless rioters won't recognize any more shared humanity in, feel any more compassion or consideration for, the "shrinking middle class" than do families who've been independently wealthy for generations. Eighty years ago Joseph Kennedy embraced the New Deals "creeping socialism" for no nobler reason than his stated willingness to give up half his fortune to keep the other half in security. He was no starry eyed idealist; he'd made a fortune off the very kinds of fraud and insider trading discussed in the article--and knew exactly what to look for as the first SEC Chairman. His logic seems largely forgotten in modern America, so let me be clear: I'm not interested in starting some violent Bolshevik revolution, but VERY interested in preventing one. As Joes presidential son once put it, those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable, so I consider it urgent to give the unwashed masses a legitimate peaceful exit from the corner into which we're sneeringly backing ever more of them. Raising taxes above their 1950 level might be unthinkable, but I feel it preferable to more people flying planes into buildings in Austin (or NYC, for that matter; people American corporations exploit overseas are as apt to hold the wrong party responsible as people within Americas borders, and at least as likely to respond with reprehensible violence).

I'm out of the dog (or elephant) and pony show of Democrats vs. Republicans. It's bread and circuses--without the bread.