October 2012 archive

This is your morning Open Thread. Pour your favorite beverage and review the past and comment on the future.

Find the past “On This Day in History” here.

October 17 is the 290th day of the year (291st in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 75 days remaining until the end of the year.

On this day in 1986, President Ronald Reagan signs into law an act of Congress approving $100 million of military and “humanitarian” aid for the Contras. Unfortunately for the President and his advisors, the Iran-Contra scandal is just about to break wide open, seriously compromising their goal of overthrowing the leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua.

Congress, and a majority of the American public, had not been supportive of the Reagan administration’s efforts to topple the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. Reagan began a “secret war” to bring down the Nicaraguan government soon after taking office in 1981. Millions of dollars, training, and arms were funneled to the Contras (an armed force of Nicaraguan exiles intent on removing the leftist Nicaraguan regime) through the CIA. American involvement in the Contra movement soon became public, however, as did disturbing reports about the behavior of the Contra force. Charges were leveled in newspapers and in Congress that the Contras were little more than murderers and drug runners; rumors of corruption and payoffs were common. Congress steadily reduced U.S. assistance to the Contras, and in 1984 passed the second Boland Amendment prohibiting U.S. agencies from giving any aid to the group.

The affair was composed of arms sales to Iran in violation of the official US policy of an arms embargo against Iran, and of using funds thus generated to arm and train the Contra militants based in Honduras as they waged a guerilla war to topple the government of Nicaragua. The Contras’ form of warfare was “one of consistent and bloody abuse of human rights, of murder, torture, mutilation, rape, arson, destruction and kidnapping.” The “Contras systematically engage in violent abuses… so prevalent that these may be said to be their principal means of waging war.” A Human Rights Watch report found that the Contras were guilty of targeting health care clinics and health care workers for assassination; kidnapping civilians; torturing and executing civilians, including children, who were captured in combat; raping women; indiscriminately attacking civilians and civilian homes; seizing civilian property; and burning civilian houses in captured towns.

Direct funding of the Contras insurgency had been made illegal through the Boland Amendment the name given to three U.S. legislative amendments between 1982 and 1984, all aimed at limiting US government assistance to the Contras militants. Senior officials of the Reagan administration decided to continue arming and training the Contras secretly and in violation of the law as enacted in the Boland Amendment. Senior Reagan administration officials started what they came to call “the Enterprise,” a project to raise money for their illegal funding of the Contras insurgency.

The Libertarian Party is the third largest and fastest growing political party in the United States. The party platform is favors minimizing regulation, less government, strong civil liberties (including support for same-sex marriage and other LGBT rights), the legalization of cannabis, separation of church and state, open immigration, non-interventionism and neutrality in diplomatic relations, freedom of trade and travel to all foreign countries, and a more responsive and direct democracy. They support the repeal of NAFTA, CAFTA and other trade agreements, as well as, withdrawal from the United Nations, the World Trade Organization and NATO. The party was founded in 1971 and has qualified for the ballot in 48 states and the District of Columbia.

Former two time Republican governor of New Mexico, Gary Johnson is the 2012 party nominee for president:

He entered politics for the first time by running for Governor of New Mexico in 1994 on a fiscally conservative, low-tax, anti-crime platform. Johnson won the Republican Party of New Mexico’s gubernatorial nomination, and defeated incumbent Democratic governor Bruce King by 50% to 40%. He cut the 10% annual growth in the budget: in part, due to his use of the gubernatorial veto 200 times during his first six months in office, which gained him the nickname “Governor Veto”. [..]

Johnson sought re-election in 1998, winning by 55% to 45%. In his second term, he concentrated on the issue of school voucher reforms, as well as campaigning for marijuana decriminalization and opposition to the War on Drugs. [..]

Johnson announced his candidacy for President on April 21, 2011, as a Republican, on a libertarian platform emphasizing the United States public debt and a balanced budget through a 43% reduction of all federal government spending, protection of civil liberties, an immediate end to the War in Afghanistan and his advocacy of the FairTax.

On December 28, 2011, after being excluded from the majority of the Republican Party’s presidential debates and failing to gain traction while campaigning for the New Hampshire primary, he withdrew his candidacy for the Republican nomination and announced that he would continue his presidential campaign as a candidate for the nomination of the Libertarian Party. He won the Libertarian Party nomination on May 5, 2012. His vice-presidential running mate is Judge James P. Gray of California.

Johnson could become the spoiler in this election siphoning off votes from the Republican nominee, Mitt Romney, much as many believe the Green Party candidate, Ralph Nader, cost Al Gore the Florida vote in 2000 and Ross Perot candidacy lost George H. W. Bush his second term in 1992. This has the GOP running scared in swing states like Pennsylvania:

The fear of Mr. Johnson’s tipping the outcome in an important state may explain why an aide to Mr. Romney ran what was effectively a surveillance operation into Mr. Johnson’s efforts over the summer to qualify for the ballot at the Iowa State Fair, providing witnesses to testify in a lawsuit to block him that ultimately fizzled.

Libertarians suspect it is why Republican state officials in Michigan blocked Mr. Johnson from the ballot after he filed proper paperwork three minutes after his filing deadline.

And it is why Republicans in Pennsylvania hired a private detective to investigate his ballot drive in Philadelphia, appearing at the homes of paid canvassers and, in some cases, flashing an F.B.I. badge – he was a retired agent – while asking to review the petitions they gathered at $1 a signature, according to testimony in the case and interviews.

The challenge in Pennsylvania, brought by state Republican Party officials who suspected that Democrats were secretly helping the effort to get Mr. Johnson on the ballot, was shot down in court last week, bringing to 48 the number of states where Mr. Johnson will compete on Nov. 6.

On MSNBC’s Daily Rundown, political analyst Chuck Todd discusses the impact of third party candidates and interviewed Gov. Johnson:

You can read more about Gov. Johnson and his running mate, Judge James P. Gray at his campaign’s web site.

Today is the Colbert Report’s seventh anniversary.

This appears to be the full interview from which Stephen Colbert’s appearance on Meet the Press was drawn.  It still has waaay too much Dancing Dave for my taste.

Roundtable Responds to Colbert Exclusive

Moderator Role Under Scrutiny – Before the Debate

By Mark Halperin, Time

October 14, 2012

In a rare example of political unity, both the Romney and Obama campaigns have expressed concern to the Commission on Presidential Debates about how the moderator of this Tuesday’s town hall has publicly described her role, TIME has learned.

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In the view of the two campaigns and the commission, those and other recent comments by Crowley conflict with the language the campaigns agreed to, which delineates a more limited role for the debate moderator.

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According to the debate-format language in the agreement, after each audience question and two-minute responses from the candidates, Obama and Romney are expected to have an additional discussion facilitated by Crowley. Yet her participation is meant to be limited. As stated in the document, “In managing the two-minute comment periods, the moderator will not rephrase the question or open a new topic … The moderator will not ask follow-up questions or comment on either the questions asked by the audience or the answers of the candidates during the debate or otherwise intervene in the debate except to acknowledge the questioners from the audience or enforce the time limits, and invite candidate comments during the two-minute response period.” The memo, which has been obtained by TIME, was signed by lawyers for the two campaigns on Oct. 3, the day of the first presidential debate in Denver.

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Crowley seems unfazed by the behind-the-scenes maneuvering. Even after concerns were raised in the wake of the Malveaux interview, Crowley made additional comments that make clear she does not feel bound by any agreement between the commission and the Obama and Romney camps. On Oct. 11, the day of the vice-presidential debate, she told Wolf Blitzer, “I’m always interested in the questions because you don’t want to – in a debate, you don’t want to go over plowed ground. Now, this is the vice-presidential candidates as opposed to the presidential candidates. So is there room there to come back to a presidential candidate and say, Well, your vice-presidential candidate said this? I’m always kind of looking for the next question … So there’s opportunity for follow-up to kind of get them to drill down on the subjects that these folks want to learn about in the town hall.”

Sources say both campaigns are preparing their candidates for the debate under the assumption that Crowley might play a bigger role than either they or the commission want. At the same time, some officials familiar with the deliberations of the campaigns say they hope that by publicizing the expectations for the moderator’s role in the town hall and making public the language in the memo, Crowley will be less likely to overstep their interpretation of her role. One key source expressed confidence on Sunday afternoon that, despite Crowley’s remarks on CNN, the moderator would perform on Tuesday night according to the rules agreed to by the two campaigns.

The lame rules for presidential debates: a perfect microcosm of US democracy

Glenn Greenwald

Tuesday 16 October 2012 16.03 EDT

The way the two major parties control the presidential debates is a perfect microcosm of how political debates are restricted in general. Though typically shrouded in secrecy, several facts about this process have recently come to light and they are quite instructive.

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Under this elaborate regime, the candidates “aren’t permitted to ask each other questions, propose pledges to each other, or walk outside a ‘predesignated area.'” Worse, “the audience members posing questions aren’t allowed to ask follow-ups (their mics will be cut off as soon as they get their questions out). Nor will moderator Candy Crowley.” The rules even “forbid television coverage from showing reaction shots of the candidates”.

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Here then, within this one process of structuring the presidential debates, we have every active ingredient that typically defines, and degrades, US democracy. The two parties collude in secret. The have the same interests and goals. Everything is done to ensure that the political process is completely scripted and devoid of any spontaneity or reality.

All views that reside outside the narrow confines of the two parties are rigidly excluded. Anyone who might challenge or subvert the two-party duopoly is rendered invisible.

Lobbyists who enrich themselves by peddling their influence run everything behind the scenes. Corporations pay for the process, which they exploit and is then run to bolster rather than threaten their interests. The media’s role is to keep the discourse as restrictive and unthreatening as possible while peddling the delusion that it’s all vibrant and free and independent and unrestrained. And it all ends up distorting political realities far more than illuminating them while wildly exaggerating the choices available to citizens and concealing the similarities between the two parties.

To understand the US political process, one can just look to how these sham debates are organized and how they function. This is the same process that repeats itself endlessly in virtually every other political realm.

The 2012 Debates – Memorandum of Understanding Between the Obama and Romney Campaigns

Leaked 2012 Presidential Debates Contract: Few Critical Points Worth Raising

By: Kevin Gosztola, Firedog Lake

Monday October 15, 2012 8:25 pm

It is what should be expected from candidates from the two most prominent political parties in America, which wrested control of the debates from the League of Women Voters back in the 1980s. The two parties launched the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD), which has conducted itself like the corrupt organization it was destined to become by working to exclude third party candidates, debate moderators and key issues/topics for decades now.

The contract shows no one is to “issue any challenges for additional debates” or “appear at any other debate or adversarial forums except as agreed to by the parties.” They are also not to “accept any television or radio air time offers that involve a debate format or otherwise involve the simultaneous appearance of more than one candidate.” What this means is that when news programs like “Democracy Now!” or HuffPost Live hold debates or CNN host Don Lemon hosts does a segment where third party candidates are invited, neither Obama nor Romney can participate because of this agreement. They also cannot accept invitations from the NAACP to participate in forums or groups like Free and Equal, which is committed to openness and fairness in elections. The two campaigns agree to close off debate and limit democracy in the election.

If candidates outside of Obama or Romney are “invited to participate,” they must sign the secret contract and agree to these terms. Should they refuse, they cannot be part of the debate. Someone like Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson or Green Party candidate Jill Stein might get a bump and have enough support in a poll to be in a debate but, if they refuse to cooperate with a organization with such a shady history, they will not get to go before an audience and share their platform.

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For the town hall debate, the contract instructs the moderator to go through a cumbersome process of approving audience questions prior to the debate for the benefit of the candidates, who would not want to be caught off guard by a question the carefully selected media personality had not finessed and sanitized for public consumption.

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There are also to be no cut-aways to candidates not answering a question or not giving a closing statement. This is why candidates are shown in a split-screen on television. That is not prohibited in the agreement and is also not a cut-away. In any case, the campaigns mean to limit viewers’ ability to react to body language.

There is nothing in the “leaked” secret contract on third party candidates, beyond the note that additional qualified candidates must sign the CPD agreement. The selection criteria, however, is posted on the CPD website. It makes clear a candidate must be “constitutionally eligible, “appear on enough state ballots to have at least a mathematical chance of securing an Electoral College majority in the 2012 general election” and  have a level of support of at least 15% “of the national electorate as determined by five selected national public opinion polling organizations, using the average of those organizations’ most recent publicly-reported results at the time of the determination.”

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The selection criteria is why Johnson took the step of filing an antitrust lawsuit against the CPD. According to the Los Angeles Times, the suit argues the Republican and Democratic national committees engaged in a conspiracy by meeting and creating rules for the debates in secret, which exclude third-party candidates. It also alleges they participated in a “restraint of trade” that violated the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. (The challenge is different from a challenge brought by Ralph Nader that argued the CPD was violating the Federal Election Campaign Act by endorsing, supporting or opposing political candidates or political parties.)

Tomorrow, during the second presidential debate, Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein and Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson will not be on stage. A functioning democratic society would not tolerate a political process where these individuals were not treated fairly. At minimum, each general election cycle would begin with a debate with all candidates that were on enough state ballots to assume the presidency and were registering a percentage of support in national polls. That would typically be four to six people and not unreasonable.

Regardless of whether the rigged system makes it possible for them to win or not, they should not be excluded. Secret contracts have no place in any society claiming to have fair elections. And, the CPD-which is a symptom of the bipartisan racket that is US elections-should be dissolved. It does not encourage open, free and fair politics but rather exists to protect the status quo or current order that benefits the richest one percent and the guardians of the national security state.

*Tune into “Democracy Now!” as they expand the debate Wednesday morning after the second presidential debate with Jill Stein, Rocky Anderson and Virgil Goode, who will answer questions they should have been asked personally the previous night.

Me?  I’m going to be watching Professional Wrestling because I know that’s not fixed.

This is an Open Thread.

Green Party candidate for president, Jill Stein and her running mate, Cheri Honkala, were arrested outside of Hofstra University, the site of tonight’s restricted debate between President Barack Obama and Republican nominee Governor Mitt Romney. It was reported that they was denied access to the university by Hofstra representatives because they didn’t have “credentials.” After about 20 minutes of trying to gain access, Dr. Stein and Ms. Honkala sat down on the sidewalk draping an American flag across their laps. Police advised them if they did not move they would be arrested. They refused and were led away by Nassau County and campus police.

The Green Party will be on 85% of the ballots in November but because of the tight control of the debates organized by the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD), a supposed “non-partisan” entity, the voices of other candidates are being silenced.

You can however stay informed. Dr. Stein will be participating in at least four other debates according to a statement at her web site:

   Thursday, October 18 — The Independent Voter Network debate between Jill Stein and Gary Johnson can be viewed live on October 18, 2012 beginning at 7:00 PM EST on http://ivn.us/, or on IVN.us’ Google+ and YouTube page. More information at: http://ivn.us/ca-election-cent…

  Monday, October 22 — Time TBA: Democracy Now continues its “Expanding the Debate” series with a live broadcast during the third presidential debate with real-time responses from Green Party presidential nominee Jill Stein and Justice Party nominee Rocky Anderson. For full details: http://www.democracynow.org/bl…

   Thursday, October 23 & Tuesday October 30 — Free and Equal Election’s Alternative Debate will be available live online, streaming from http://freeandequal.org/live on Oct. 23 and Oct 30 at 9:00 PM EST.  The first of thses two debates will include Jill Stein from the Green Party; Gary Johnson from the Libertarian Party; Virgil Goode from the Constitution Party; and Rocky Anderson from the Justice Party.  More information at: http://action.freeandequal.org…

As all my readers know I’m just a warm fuzzy teddy bear of nurturant positivity, so as I promised last night I’m going to attempt to alleviate the anxieties of the Yankee fans in my audience.

First of all I can’t help but feel that Derek Jeter’s unexpected injury has opened Yankee management’s eyes to the vulnerability of their current line up.  Win or lose the team of destiny has all the resources they need to make dramatic changes (I understand the Cardinals are lousy with minor league pitching prospects) and as I think I’ve made clear I have no quarrel at all with their goals (173 victories) or strategy (whatever it costs), but merely with some tactical decisions ($27.5 Million a year until 2017?!  What were you thinking?).

Other positive signs include the fact that the Tigers are terrible at Comerica.  Didn’t they just lose 2 straight to the As there?  Also in playoff games without Alex Rodriguez the Yankees are an undefeated 1 – 0, you can’t beat that.

Tonight we’ll have Phil Hughes (16 – 13, 4.23 ERA) on the mound who is their 3rd best pitcher after Sabbathia and Kuroda.  Girardi has changed his mind and will pitch Sabbathia on full rest in Game 4 tomorrow.

On the other hand the Tigers will be starting Verlander (17 – 8, 2.64 ERA) and he’s an unstoppable winning machine.  Leyland probably won’t even have to call on the questionable Valverde though he says he’s willing to if necessary.

Still it’s not hyperbole to call this a ‘must win’ game.  In a playoff you have to do everything you can to avoid being placed in a elimination situation.  If the Yankees lose tonight they’ll have to win every single one of the remaining 4 games to advance or it will be a whole 3 years since their last World Championship in 2009 (their average is 4).

Unacceptable!

• ESPN Radio
• The New York Times Live Scoreboard

Junior League Games will be carried on TBS.

The Obama/ Biden campaign sued the state of Ohio  over changes in Ohio law that took away the three days of voting for most people, but made exceptions for military personnel and Ohioans living overseas. The 9th Circuit Cout of Appeals ruled that Ohio must make early voting available (pdf) to all Ohio voters and Ohio’s Republican Secretary of State, John Husted, made an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court weighed in this afternoon declining to block early voting.

The Supreme Court is siding with Democrats in refusing to block early voting in the battleground state of Ohio.

The court on Tuesday refused a Republican request to get involved in a dispute over early voting in the state on the three days before Election Day.

This is not just a win for Democrats, it is a victory for democracy.

The Romney/Ryan tax plan is not serious. As Matt Taibbi, contributing editor of Rolling Stone, points out, we should all be rolling our eyes and laughing at this farcical plan. He also takes the mainstream media to task for not being offended by the dishonest tactics and lies that the Republican candidates are using to bamboozle the electorate into handing these two frat boys the White House.

I’ve never thought much of Joe Biden. But man, did he get it right in last night’s debate, and not just because he walloped sniveling little Paul Ryan on the facts. What he got absolutely right, despite what you might read this morning (many outlets are criticizing Biden’s dramatic excesses), was his tone. Biden did absolutely roll his eyes, snort, laugh derisively and throw his hands up in the air whenever Ryan trotted out his little beady-eyed BS-isms. [..]

The load of balls that both Romney and Ryan have been pushing out there for this whole election season is simply not intellectually serious. Most of their platform isn’t even a real platform, it’s a fourth-rate parlor trick designed to paper over the real agenda – cutting taxes even more for super-rich dickheads like Mitt Romney, and getting everyone else to pay the bill. [..]

Think about what that means. Mitt Romney is running for president – for president! – promising an across-the-board 20 percent tax cut without offering any details about how that’s going to be paid for. Forget being battered by the press, he and his little sidekick Ryan should both be tossed off the playing field for even trying something like that. This race for the White House, this isn’t some frat prank. This is serious. This is for grownups, for God’s sake. [..]

Sometimes in journalism I think we take the objectivity thing too far. We think being fair means giving equal weight to both sides of every argument. But sometimes in the zeal to be objective, reporters get confused. You can’t report the Obama tax plan and the Romney tax plan in the same way, because only one of them is really a plan, while the other is actually not a plan at all, but an electoral gambit. [..]

The proper way to report such a tactic is to bring to your coverage exactly the feeling that Biden brought to the debate last night: contempt and amazement. We in the press should be offended by what Romney and Ryan are doing – we should take professional offense that any politician would try to whisk such a gigantic lie past us to our audiences, and we should take patriotic offense that anyone is trying to seize the White House using such transparently childish and dishonest tactics.

Like Taibbi, I am no fan of the Obama/Biden administration, but this campaign by the Republican candidates is a bad joke being played out with the blessings of the traditional MSM. It’s time to get answers. This is serious business.

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.

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New York Times Editorial: If Roe v. Wade Goes

A Romney-Ryan victory could result in re-criminalizing abortion in much of America

It is no secret that Mitt Romney and his running-mate, Representative Paul Ryan, are opponents of abortion rights. When Mr. Ryan was asked at last week’s debate whether voters who support abortion rights should be worried if the Romney-Ryan ticket were elected, he essentially said yes.

They would depart slightly from the extremist Republican Party platform by allowing narrow exceptions for rape, incest or the life of the woman. Beyond that, they would move to take away a fundamental right that American women have had for nearly 40 years.

Dean Baker: The National Debt and Our Children: How Dumb Does Washington Think We Are?

While much of the country is focused on the presidential race, the Wall Street gang is waging a different battle; they are preparing an assault on Social Security and Medicare. This attack is not exactly secret. There have been a number of pieces on this corporate-backed campaign in the media over the last few months, but the drive is nonetheless taking place behind closed doors.

The corporate honchos are not expecting to convince the public that we should support cuts to Social Security and Medicare. They know this is a hopeless task. Huge majorities of people across the political spectrum strongly support these programs.

Instead they hope that they can use their power of persuasion, coupled with the power of campaign contributions and the power of high-paying jobs for defeated members of Congress, to get Congress to approve large cuts in Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and other key programs. This is the plan for a grand bargain that the corporate chieftains hope can be struck in the lame duck Congress.

Crossposted from DocuDharma

The Self-Destruction of the 1 Percent

By CHRYSTIA FREELAND, The New York Times

Published: October 13, 2012

Even as the winner-take-all economy has enriched those at the very top, their tax burden has lightened. Tolerance for high executive compensation has increased, even as the legal powers of unions have been weakened and an intellectual case against them has been relentlessly advanced by plutocrat-financed think tanks. In the 1950s, the marginal income tax rate for those at the top of the distribution soared above 90 percent, a figure that today makes even Democrats flinch. Meanwhile, of the 400 richest taxpayers in 2009, 6 paid no federal income tax at all, and 27 paid 10 percent or less. None paid more than 35 percent.

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Educational attainment, which created the American middle class, is no longer rising. The super-elite lavishes unlimited resources on its children, while public schools are starved of funding. This is the new Serrata. An elite education is increasingly available only to those already at the top. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama enrolled their daughters in an exclusive private school; I’ve done the same with mine.

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America’s Serrata also takes a more explicit form: the tilting of the economic rules in favor of those at the top. The crony capitalism of today’s oligarchs is far subtler than Venice’s. It works in two main ways.

The first is to channel the state’s scarce resources in their own direction. This is the absurdity of Mitt Romney’s comment about the “47 percent” who are “dependent upon government.” The reality is that it is those at the top, particularly the tippy-top, of the economic pyramid who have been most effective at capturing government support – and at getting others to pay for it.

Exhibit A is the bipartisan, $700 billion rescue of Wall Street in 2008. Exhibit B is the crony recovery. The economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty found that 93 percent of the income gains from the 2009-10 recovery went to the top 1 percent of taxpayers. The top 0.01 percent captured 37 percent of these additional earnings, gaining an average of $4.2 million per household.

The second manifestation of crony capitalism is more direct: the tax perks, trade protections and government subsidies that companies and sectors secure for themselves. Corporate pork is a truly bipartisan dish: green energy companies and the health insurers have been winners in this administration, as oil and steel companies were under George W. Bush’s.

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Businessmen like to style themselves as the defenders of the free market economy, but as Luigi Zingales, an economist at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, argued, “Most lobbying is pro-business, in the sense that it promotes the interests of existing businesses, not pro-market in the sense of fostering truly free and open competition.”

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That all changed with industrialization. As Franklin D. Roosevelt argued in a 1932 address to the Commonwealth Club, the industrial revolution was accomplished thanks to “a group of financial titans, whose methods were not scrutinized with too much care, and who were honored in proportion as they produced the results, irrespective of the means they used.” America may have needed its robber barons; Roosevelt said the United States was right to accept “the bitter with the sweet.”

But as these titans amassed wealth and power, and as America ran out of free land on its frontier, the country faced the threat of a Serrata. As Roosevelt put it, “equality of opportunity as we have known it no longer exists.” Instead, “we are steering a steady course toward economic oligarchy, if we are not there already.”

It is no accident that in America today the gap between the very rich and everyone else is wider than at any time since the Gilded Age. Now, as then, the titans are seeking an even greater political voice to match their economic power. Now, as then, the inevitable danger is that they will confuse their own self-interest with the common good. The irony of the political rise of the plutocrats is that, like Venice’s oligarchs, they threaten the system that created them.