Insightful comments from Robert Reich

....Clinton's labor secretary:  Financial capitalism has taken over from real capitalism. Financial capitalism is taking over from product and services, from people that actually produce goods and services. And that has distorted our entire system. When so much money and so much income are at the top—and by the way, the 400 richest Americans right now have more wealth than the bottom 150 million Americans put together. When you get that much income and wealth at the top, inevitably some people at the top—not all people at the top, but some of them—are going to abuse their income and wealth and corrupt the political system. I don’t want to mention names, like Charles and David Koch; that would not be nice of me; that would not be fair. But they, each of them worth $25 billion—each of them worth $25 billion, what they are doing is using a chunk of their fortune to pollute and corrupt American democracy. And why are they doing that? Because they want to entrench themselves. They make petrochemicals, they want to stop the environmental movement; they want to create doubts about whether there is, in fact, climate change. They want to cut the budget; they don’t want taxes to be raised; they and other people at the top are using their political muscle to entrench their power and privilege, and we cannot allow that in America. [applause] _________________________________________________ Just in case you skeptics resist the point, Reich isn't seeking that awful-sounding "redistribution of wealth" that some politicians   these days like to throw around to frighten us into a renewal of anti-communist hysteria; he's talking about quite the opposite--the vast accumulation of wealth by a handful of financial privateers and corrupt businessmen at our expense. I have difficulty accepting how some of us still don't get it, how some of us will continue to vote  against our own best interests.  It has more to do with the suspension of common sense than with common sense.  Blindness to reality, the result of  the unwillingness to shake off  entrenched loyalties, has never been more a danger to this country than it is today. thanks to David A. Tree