Fraud, theft, and extortion. The new norms.

[Skidmore]

Dylan Ratigan's "wealth extraction" (such a techno jargonistic jingoey construction) together with Scarborough's litany on how that $2,3,4trillion the banks are sitting on because they are "uncertain about the future" and won't invest is utter RW claptrap. This "wealth extraction" has been going on for decades and much of it was perpetrated by scamming the citizenry in a manner that would have landed your garden variety pickpocket a prison term. Ratigan informs us that it is still going on and is somehow an impediment to the economy but uses language that implies that it is a necessary evil. Don't get this man, who talks out of both sides of his mouth. Perhaps he doesn't get that "liberatarianism" cannot truely exist in a facist society or in the presence of rabid capitalism.

Second, the panel on Morning Joe is generally made up of well-heeled media types who make excessive amounts to blather "woe is poor little me, the average citizen" crap from their current life experience of being well-heeled bloviaters with images to maintain on the cocktail circuits of DC & NYC. Generally, lawyers to begin with, mostly Ivy League educated, contemptously sneering downward at the schmucks who snake out the drains and slam drywall at their estates. Grand spokes people for helping their drinking buddies continue to extract wealth and use it to extort the public by withholding investment in the economy while demanding that they be absolved in perpetuity of ANY civic responsibility through permanent tax cuts. The last time I checked extortion is also a crime for which your garden variety extortionist does time.

The take away is that the media is selling these antisocial behaviors as the norm and letting our legal and government institutions off the hook for not doing their jobs. That it is okay to commit fraud and to extort people if you don't mess around in piddly amounts of a few hundred or thousand dollars but run the table and shoot for the whole pot.

We've fallen through the looking glass into a world where croquet is played with flamingos and hatters are mad and the walrus has invited us oysters over for bit of dinner.