"The end of democracy & the defeat of the American Revolution will occur when government falls into the hands of lending institutions and moneyed incorporations." -Thomas Jefferson

In the period following World War II, full employment and high wages for working people, combined with high taxes for the rich, created the celebrated American middle class. For a historically brief period, debt slavery became a relatively rare condition, at least for whites. Then, as Wall Street fundamentalists gained control, they weakened unions, and outsourced jobs to create a downward pressure on wages while increasing the use of sophisticated advertising to promote ever more extravagant lifestyles and the use of credit card debt to finance them.



As wages continued to fall relative to the cost of living, Wall street promoted credit card and mortgage debt as the solution. Some people responded out of sheer desperation to put food on the table. Innocents simply bought into Wall Street's enticements to consume now, pay later. People were locked into ever-growing debt they could never repay, and Wall Street's take from whatever pittance they were able to earn increased, as did the total share of income going to those who lived off Wall Street profits relative to those who did honest work. Thanks to Wall street's control of the political system, this kind of indentured servitude is not only mostly legal but also is enforced by a legal system that favors the rights of property owners over the rights of people.



In a related move, Wall Street pressed for tax breaks for the rich and an expansion of military spending. The government began running up record deficits. To make up for the lost tax revenues, the government borrowed from the rich what it had formerly raised from them in taxes-- much as working people were borrowing from the rich to make up for inadequate wages. Government also became a debt slave to Wall Street.



When Wall Street got into trouble, Washington, suffering from what we might call battered-slave syndrome, responded with a bailout paid for with money borrowed from Wall Street courtesy of the Federal Reserve.

If you want to appreciate what Barack Obama is up against in 2012, forget about the front man who is his nominal opponent and look instead at the Republican billionaires buying the ammunition for the battles ahead. A representative example is Harold Simmons, an 80-year-old Texan who dumped some $15 million into the campaign before primary season had ended. Reminiscing about 2008, when he bankrolled an ad blitz to tar the Democrats with the former radical Bill Ayers, Simmons told the Wall Street Journal, “If we had run more ads, we could have killed Obama.” It is not a mistake he intends to make a second time. The $15 million Simmons had spent by late February dwarfs the $2.8 million he allotted to the Ayers takedown and the $3 million he contributed to the Swift Boat Veterans demolition of John Kerry four years before that. Imagine the cash that will flow now that the GOP sideshows are over and the president is firmly in Simmons’s crosshairs.



His use of the verb killed was meant in jest, of course, much as Foster Friess ($1.8 million in known contributions, and counting) was joking when he suggested that “gals” could practice birth control by putting Bayer aspirin between their knees. America’s billionaires are such cards! And we had better get used to their foibles and funny bones. Whatever else happens in 2012, it will go down as the Year of the Sugar Daddy. Inflamed by Obama-hatred, awash in self-pity, and empowered by myriad indulgent court and Federal Election Commission rulings, an outsize posse of superrich white men will spend whatever it takes to have its way with the body politic and, if victorious, with the country itself. Given the advanced age of most of this cohort, 2012 may be seen as the election in which the geezer empire struck back.



Sugar daddies-- whom I’ll define here as private donors or their privately held companies writing checks totaling $1 million or more (sometimes much more) in this election cycle-- are largely a Republican phenomenon, most of them one degree of separation from Karl Rove and his unofficial partners in erecting a moneyed shadow GOP, David and Charles Koch. At last look, there were 25 known sugar daddies on the right (or more, if you want to count separately the spouses and children who pitch in). You’ve likely heard of Sheldon Adelson, the Vegas tycoon who is Benjamin Netanyahu’s unofficial ambassador to the GOP. But you may be less familiar with Irving Moskowitz, the bingo entrepreneur who funnels his profits into East Jerusalem settlements. Or Robert Mercer, the hedge-fund master of “flash trading” who poured a clandestine $1 million into ads attacking the “ground-zero mosque” and nearly another $3 million into a scale-model railroad in his Long Island mansion. Or Steven Lund, the co-founder of Nu Skin, which became “direct selling” sponsor of the Romney-run 2002 Winter Olympics after having spent much of the nineties settling complaints over false advertising and other unscrupulous practices with the Federal Trade Commission and six different states’ attorneys general.



The list of 25 does not include donors whose names we may never know: those who are legally allowed to remain anonymous when giving to patently political “social welfare” nonprofits like Rove’s Crossroads GPS. That particular Rove money drop reported to the IRS last week that nearly 90 percent of its first $76.8 million haul (from June 2010 through December 2011) had come from two dozen donors giving $1 million or more, including two contributions of $10 million each. While Obama has his own super-PAC-- “social welfare” nonprofit combo, the proceeds totaled only a pathetic $6.7 million last year. A paltry $100,000 contribution is all it takes for a Democratic donor to get priority access to the White House, according to the New York Times. George Soros is on the sidelines, and Obama so far has claimed only two sugar daddies of his own: Bill Maher and DreamWorks co-founder Jeffrey Katzenberg. Their products may at times emit noxious fumes... but even the biggest show-business bombs can’t roil the environment like, say, Harold Simmons’s vast Texas site for dumping radioactive waste.



During the primaries, the Republican sugar daddies fanned out to support various contenders, gladly bestowing tens of millions in mad money on the vainglorious crusades of Newt, the Herminator, and the two Ricks. But today these donors are starting to coalesce around Mitt. In retrospect, Romney, a one-percenter incarnate, is their natural candidate. And, for all intents and political purposes, they will own him if he makes it to the White House. The Center for Responsive Politics has calculated that just 10 percent of Romney’s donors for 2012 have been from among the hoi polloi (those contributing $200 or less)—compared with 52 percent for Santorum, 48 percent for Gingrich, and 45 percent for Obama. The only Americans fired up and ready to go for Mitt are those who can and will give to the max, all keenly mindful of the dividends certain to accrue to them in a Romney administration.



Mitt’s own coterie of Wall Street vulture capitalists is second to none in rapaciousness-- starting with the hedge-fund gambler John Paulson, who collaborated with Goldman Sachs on his megabet against the entire American housing industry before the crash. Another Romney hedge-fund patron, Paul Singer, is notorious for slick trafficking in Third World debt, with results that leave the destitute masses of countries like the Congo in a far sadder state than the hapless Goldman clients (those “muppets” we’ve been hearing about) on the losing end of Paulson’s big score. Romney also has an affinity for fellow Mormons who’ve made sugar-­daddy fortunes by peddling dubious “health products” sold by “multilevel marketing” schemes (a.k.a. pyramid selling) in which retail sales are secondary to the commissions tied to roping more suckers into the sales force. In addition to Lund of Nu Skin, there’s Frank VanderSloot, the Professor Marvel behind Melaleuca, an ­Idaho-based company that promises to help “moms be moms” and “earn a corporate income from home,” even if they don’t have the financial cushion of, say, Ann Romney. Though a promotional video on its website features women who claim to have earned as much as $500,000 selling goods like dietary supplements (which purport to remedy clogged arteries and arthritis), the average Melaleuca peddler makes just $87 per year. An industry critic, Robert L. FitzPatrick, elucidated for Mother Jones how companies like Melaleuca and Nu Skin are perfect examples of the vulture-capitalist business model: They set “the average person upon his neighbor to get at his assets, savings, and investments.” Romney, meanwhile, has applauded VanderSloot for having “vision and sense of social responsibility” that are “second to none.”



What these sugar daddies specifically want from Mitt and his party, besides the usual conservative bullet points (codified in Paul Ryan’s tax-cutting, government-shredding budget), is clear enough: the widest possible regulation-free berth for any vulture businesses they have a hand in, from nuclear waste to “health” nostrums, from new houses to financial products created from those homes’ subprime mortgages. A particularly large wish list is likely to emanate from the Koch brothers, whose privately held business interests are many. Such has been their zeal to protect their gas and oil holdings that they shoveled nearly $25 million into organizations fueling climate-change denial from 2005 to 2008-- nearly three times what Exxon­Mobil spent on such spin during that period, in Greenpeace’s accounting. To preserve another profit center, a Koch subsidiary has also backed the recently disbanded Formaldehyde Council, which argued that formaldehyde is “a natural part of our world” rather than “a complete carcinogen,” which is how it is classified by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. osha, of course, is exactly the kind of federal agency that would lose funding and gain Koch apparatchiks as staff members in a Romney administration.

We're in the midst-- and have been for several decades-- of a full-blown counterrevolution. The Revolution that is being countered is the American Revolution of the late 1770s. And the war against our democracy is being waged by the same conservative elements who fought alongside the British, many of whom fled to England, Canada and the West Indies after they lost. Except now they're winning.No, really. They're winning... we're not even aware there's a war, let alone fighting back... with the exception of scattered OWS bands and one or two local tea party groups who aren't part of the "movement "bought out and directed by the counterrevolution itself. I was just a kid when the counterrevolution started. It's the Democratic Party's fault. For a wide variety of reasons, they just gave up on the role of protecting the interests of working families soon after FDR died. By the '50s they were complicit in allowing the tax structure to begin a radical change in such a way as to create immense wealth and power concentrated in the hands of a few families. By the '90s, financial predators were starting to call the shots in Washington. Today they outright own the Supreme Court and Republican Party and, more or less, have effective control over the DC Democrats as well.In his essential book, Agenda For A New Economy , David Korten explains how Americans are being herded into the Ancien Régime debt slavery that the American Revolution was fought to defeat from taking root here.So just who are these enemies of American working families and enemies of the American democratic experiment who are working so hard to undermine both from their own obsessive, sociopathic greed? Last week Frank Rich introduced us to them in acolumn, Sugar Daddies , the old rich white men who are buying this election. They're rolling the dice that their time has come and the big take-over they've been working for is here. And they're going up against one of the weakest, most conflicted presidents in American history, someone none of them fears in the slightest.And Americans have no taste for guillotines... at least those on the left don't.

Labels: 2012 presidential race, class war, David Korten, Frank Rich