Incredibly illuminating piece by Thomas Frank: "And as we serve money, we find that money wants the same thing from us: to push everyone it beguiles in the same direction. Money never seems to be interested in strengthening regulatory agencies, for example, but always in subverting them, in making them miss the danger signs in coal mines and in derivatives trading and in deep-sea oil wells. You can have a shot at being part of the 1 percent, money tells us, only if you are first committed to making the 1 percent stronger, to defending their piles in some new and imaginative way, to rationalizing and burnishing their glory, to exempting them from regulation or taxation, to bowing down as they pass, and to believing in your heart that their touch will heal scrofula."
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Good review of Thomas Frank's book, Pity the Billionaire: "The reason Obama does not explain things – and Frank captures this vividly – is the cult of expertise. He assumes everything has already been explained and the answers are known to the people at the heart of business, insurance, banking, and the flourishing industries, people he has come to know personally. As he said once when a reporter brought up the names of Jamie Dimon (CEO of JPMorgan Chase) and Lloyd Blankfein (CEO of Goldman Sachs): "I know both those guys, they are very savvy businessmen." An artless moment, but not without a message. The cult of expertise is a form of elite pride, and the populace have sniffed it out in the president."