So Many Plutocrats, So Few Guillotines …

I don’t wonder how these folks get their money or their positions.  However, I do wonder if any one even listens to them.  Oh, wait.  One of them is running for president and the other is taken seriously in the media.

Where’s a guillotine when you need one?

Here’s the Romney example from my old home town of Council Bluffs, Iowa where my Dad owned a Ford Dealership for 30 years from KPTM TV.

Dianne Bauer opened up her cafe to Mitt Romney and his campaign for a small round table discussion Friday morning before his speech at Bayliss Park.

This isn’t the first politician that has asked Bauer to use the Main Street Cafe in downtown Council Bluffs.

“With Rick Perry he made a point of stopping in the kitchen before he ever went to the other side to address the public and the media to thank us and introduce himself to us,” said Bauer. “That’s what I thought we would get here, just normal. This was all out, like you’d think Obama was here.”

Bauer’s issues with the campaigns staffers started the night before when they started staging the cafe for the event.

She described many of their demeanors as “arrogant”.

She says her cafe was not treated with the respect it deserved.

“Stuff got broke. My table cloths they just got ripped off, wadded up and thrown in the back room,”

She says the boom truck she allowed the campaign to borrow to gain access to the roof now has an 8-inch gauge in it that she’ll have to take the time to repair.

The campaign told her to send them an itemized list of anything that was broken, and they would pay for it, but Bauer says that won’t fix everything.

“My dad’s picture, an emblem my dad gave me, it got broke. Those aren’t things you can replace,”

Bauer says she never even got to meet the candidate she closed half of her restaurant down for.

“Every time we tried to go out or look, secret service was right there,” she said.

She was complaining about the event to a friend when reporters overheard her and posted about it online.

That’s when Romney called Bauer himself. She says he explained that it was just a misunderstanding that she did not get to meet him, but the phone call didn’t smooth things over for her.

“He responded ‘well, I’m sorry your table cloths got ripped off, wadded up and thrown in the back room’ and I took it as mocking,” she said. “We’re the ones he’s wanting to get the votes from, you’d think we would have been treated better.”

She says the whole experience left her wondering.

“With how he treated me, is that how he’s going to treat others? You know, if he gets in office is he going to be that way to us little people?”

The always guillotine-worthy David Brooks proves to his again exactly why he is a public menace.  He whines that there just aren’t any good ‘followers’ out there any more.  I guess he’s in search of a new generation of true believers.  I’m going to let you read  Dean Baker who rips him a new one.

Nope, I’m not kidding. His column today is devoted to “the follower problem.” He is upset that people are cynical and don’t seem to trust the elites. Brooks tells us:

“I don’t know if America has a leadership problem; it certainly has a followership problem. Vast majorities of Americans don’t trust their institutions. That’s not mostly because our institutions perform much worse than they did in 1925 and 1955, when they were widely trusted.”

Let’s leave aside 1925 since it was a very different world. In 1955 the economy was growing at a healthy pace with workers up and down the income ladder sharing in the prosperity. They were seeing rapidly rising living standards and it was a virtual certainty that children would enjoy much better standards of living than their parents.

Brooks may have missed it, but the economy collapsed in 2008. This was not due to any external event like a massive drought or asteroid strike, it was due to fact that the people who design economic policy were too brain-dead to see the largest financial bubble in the history of the world.

The result of this failure is that tens of millions of people are unemployed, underemployed, or out of the workforce altogether. Millions more are facing the loss of their homes. And a huge cohort of baby boomers, many of whom spent their lives working at decent paying jobs, are approaching retirement with nothing to support them but their Social Security.

It’s enough to make me take up knitting.

OOPS wrong musical …