The rich no longer need the rest of us

i find it somewhat encouraging that a thoughtful, articulate, non-conspiracy-theory-prone, liberal, progressive blogger like digby seems to be leaning more toward what i consider to be a fairly obvious reality...

So the new business of America is looting the coffers of the US treasury. Sounds about right.

she's responding to two items... first, an article in the wsj that offered this interesting perspective...

[Michael Lind] says the wealthy increasingly earn their fortunes with overseas labor, selling to overseas consumers and managing financial transactions that have little to do with the rest of the U.S. “A member of the elite can make money from factories in China that sell to consumers in India, while relying entirely or almost entirely on immigrant servants at one of several homes around the country.”

and second, a post from yves smith at naked capitalism...

The financial crisis resulted in the greatest looting of the public purse in history. While the banksters were the obvious beneficiaries, most of the rest of the rich were carried along with them. The sudden recovery in the fortunes of the wealthy was no accident, but the result of a host of policies to prop up asset values.

while i rarely post excerpts from digby and almost never visit her blog, i've always respected her as one of the less ideological, more open-minded and intellectually honest individuals of the liberal-progressive persuasion... maybe it's time to add her blog to my newsreader...

p.s. nah... digby's gonna hafta wait... i just dropped by her blog and, without going past the first page, i noted posts devoted to glenn beck, howard kurtz, sarah palin, tasers, tea party, andrew breitbart, the catfood commission, newt gingrich, lindsey graham, and michele bachmann... while none of those are without significance in and of themselves, they comprise the essential laundry list of tired liberal-progressive talking points, the same things to be found in blogs from think progress to daily kos, the manufactured diversions so strongly decried by glenn that serve in place of us talking about what really matters... in fact, so strongly do i feel about this, i'm re-posting glenn's perspective...

If you read and write about politics full-time and are thus forced to subject yourself to the political media -- as I am -- what's most striking aren't the outrages and corruptions, but the overwhelming, suffocating, numbing stream of stupidity and triviality that floods the brain. One has to battle the temptation to just turn away and ignore it all. Every day, day after day, is consumed by some totally irrelevant though distracting melodrama: what Sarah Palin wrote on her Facebook page, some "outrageous" snippet of a comment made by John Boehner or Harry Reid, some "crazy," attention-attracting statement from some fringe idiot-figure or TV blowhard that is exploited for superficial partisan gain or distraction value (hey, look over there: I think Michelle Bachmann just said something outrageous!!!!).

nothing against ya, digby, i just think you need to seriously contemplate the larger implications of the statement you made included at the top of this post cuz, trust me, it ain't about sarah, glenn, michele or the tea party... those are just the squashed bugs on the windshield obstructing the view of the 16-wheeler that swerved out of the oncoming traffic lane and is headed right for us...

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