AMERICAblog News: ‘Who will stand up to the superrich?’

Great blog about Frank Rich’s Sunday New York Times Column.  It really help that Rich gets this….

Americablog does this summation better than I, so I encourage you to click the link to the full post:

That’s the title of Frank Rich’s latest column, and it’s the key question, not just of this election cycle, but perhaps of the first half of the new century.

Who will stand up to the superrich? From the columnist who coined the phrase “billionaires’ coup” (my emphasis throughout):

The wealthy Americans we should worry about … are the ones who implicitly won the election — those who take far more from America than they give back. They were not on the ballot, and most of them are not household names. Unlike Whitman and the other defeated self-financing candidates, they are all but certain to cash in on the Nov. 2 results. There’s no one in Washington in either party with the fortitude to try to stop them from grabbing anything that’s not nailed down.

Just a note on that last line, “grabbing anything that’s not nailed down.” What do you call it when absolutely everything on the planet is for sale to the only people left with money? Mission accomplished. Frank Rich again:

The Americans I’m talking about are not just those shadowy anonymous corporate campaign contributors who flooded this campaign. No less triumphant were those individuals at the apex of the economic pyramid — the superrich who have gotten spectacularly richer over the last four decades while their fellow citizens either treaded water or lost ground. The top 1 percent of American earners took in 23.5 percent of the nation’s pretax income in 2007 — up from less than 9 percent in 1976. During the boom years of 2002 to 2007, that top 1 percent’s pretax income increased an extraordinary 10 percent every year. But the boom proved an exclusive affair: in that same period, the median income for non-elderly American households went down and the poverty rate rose.

Good numbers to remember when your “Reagan Democrat” hate-the-hippies uncle mouths off at Thanksgiving. The top-1% folks went from 9% of all pretax income to 23% — your “Reagan revolution,” and his tax dollars, at work.

via AMERICAblog News: ‘Who will stand up to the superrich?’.