Random Observations Re: Last Night’s Debate

When I finally tuned out last night, the bobbleheads were calling the debate for Mitt Rombot because (i) the Rombot failed to completely short circuit on stage, and (ii) none of the other contenders really went after it.  From the bobbleheads’ perspective, calling the debate in the Rombot’s favor is undoubtedly the safe call as the Rombot is almost certain to win the New Hampshire primary two days from now and apparently is topping the polls in South Carolina (curse you, Newt Gingrich!  You have once again proven that I simply cannot predict what Republican voters are likely to do.)

In no particular order, below the fold are some random observations about last night’s GOP debate:

Americans Elect: Using “Bipartisanship” to Advance the 1%

If you’re not familiar with “Americans Elect,” this post by Dante Atkins at DKos yesterday will help bring you up to speed.  Essentially, AE is an online group that intends to field its own presidential candidate in this year’s election.  Supposedly, its nominee will be selected by successive online votes by everybody who joins AE, culminating with a final “election” in June.  That nominee would then select a running mate who must be from a political party other than the nominee’s own.

The more I find out about this organization, the more it sounds like nothing so much as a front group working to advance the interests of the 1%.

Making Hay at Plutocrat Romney's Expense

A good deal already has been written about Mitt Romney’s categorical refusal to release his tax statements.  The conventional wisdom is that Romney’s refusal arises out of his desire to avoid telling the American public that he makes millions every year – in part because he still collects a paycheck from Bain Capital, a company he left 12 years ago – but thanks to the “carried interest” loophole and the capital gains tax rate, he pays a lower federal income tax than do most working and middle class Americans.

If Romney does indeed turn out to be the Republican nominee, it’ll be interesting to see how much hay the Democrats can make of this.  I would hope that at a time more and more Americans are becoming concerned with the inherent unfairness of our economic system, the answer to that would be “a lot of hay.”  Personally, I think the Democrats should run political ad after political ad after political ad calling on Romney to do what every other presidential candidate has always done, each ad strongly suggesting that Romney doesn’t want to admit that – as a member of the 1% -- he is trying to hide from the American public just how skewed in his favor our current system is.

Of course, Obama himself shouldn’t run these ads.  The last thing Obama needs is to have Romney finally produce his tax returns and have them show something other than that Romney is taking advantage of a tax break.  It’d be like what Obama did to Donald Trump with his long-form birth certificate, except in reverse.

No, the ads should be run either by the Democratic Party or – even better – by an anonymous Super PAC.  So long as Obama himself cannot be tied to the charges, then it won’t make any difference whether the charges can be disproved.  And politically speaking, the damage would already have been done.  Accuse Romney over and over again of being a plutocrat who wants to enshrine the plutocracy, and low-information voters will come to internalize that message.  If it goes on long enough then no amount of information afterward will actually be able to correct that impression.

Clarification:  I don’t think that what I am suggesting here amounts to the same kind of outright falsehoods in which the Romney campaign itself already is engaged.  I certainly would not suggest that Obama lower himself to Romney’s own stygian depths in order to win an election.

And I do think there is a vast difference between asserting something that you believe to be true and that almost certainly is true (even if you don’t have absolutely conclusive evidence to back up that assertion), and flat-out making statement after statement that you know to be false – which is what Romney is doing.  

The 99%: We’re Not Even Livestock

So Rush Limbaugh is pulling another stupid human trick, this time assaulting the very idea that schools might want to feed poor children.  What I find revealing is his stated rationale for challenging the notion that it might be a good idea to give poor children food:  “If you feed them, if you feed the children, three square meals a day during the school year, how can you expect them to feed themselves in the summer?”  It’s as though he were describing baby black bears in Yosemite National Park who might not learn to forage properly if tourists keep giving away their pic-a-nic baskets.

The thing is . . . I have become more and more convinced that this attitude isn’t too far off from how the political and economic elite really do see the rest of us.  I used to think they view the millions of Americans who are the 99% as akin to crops or livestock, something to be harvested or culled for money when the need arose.  But I no longer believe that analogy holds.  After all, ranchers actually do have to spend money and tend to their cattle, farmers actually do have to water and care for their crops.  But the 1% and the public servants who toil on their behalf no longer bother to ensure we have minimal care.

Instead, I think it is more accurate to say that the 1% now conceive of the hundreds of millions of Americans who together make up the largest economy in the world as a kind of natural wildlife that should be left free to forage on its own, but which they are at perfect liberty to trap, skin, slaughter and eat as they please, their exploitation restrained only by the dimmest of understandings that enough of us must be allowed to survive so that our next generation can be trapped, skinned, slaughtered and eaten in turn.

And, indeed, it’s fairly easy to understand why they’d see us that way.

Parsing the Order Evicting Occupy Boston

On Wednesday, Superior Court Judge Frances McIntyre issued an Order finding that Occupy Boston’s continual occupation of Dewey Square is not protected First Amendment activity.  This clears the way for the Boston Police Department to start evicting Occupy Boston from Dewey Square. 

I used to clerk for a federal judge, and so I have some hands-on experience in the crafting of Court Orders.  Having reviewed Judge McIntyre’s ruling, I’d describe it as clearly a “results oriented” decision.  That is, it is apparent that Judge McIntyre intended from the beginning to find that Occupy Boston could be evicted from Dewey Square, and was simply searching for a rationale to support that foregone conclusion.  The logical inconsistencies and the circular reasoning in her opinion give the game away.

Realizing the Aristocrat’s Dream: Universal Slavery

Following up on that last post regarding slavery and the Civil War, it’d be nice to think that now – as we deal with issues of vast inequality and as the 1% circle their wagons and start calling up their lobbyists, their political donors, and their congressmen – the idea of democracy will once again win out over America’s de facto aristocracy.  But perhaps it will go the other way.  After all, America’s aristocracy is doing great right now.  How long before they reinstate a de facto slavery too? 

Maybe not too long at all.  Marie Diamond at ThinkProgress  had a post on Tuesday catching up on what is happening in Alabama now that its “stop and show your papers, schnell!” anti-immigrant law has gone into effect and most of its farm labor has abandoned the state.  Turns out, Alabama’s got a two word solution to that little problem:  prison labor.    

 And as Diamond reports, Alabama isn’t alone:

Replacing skilled workers with virtually free (and sometimes actually free) prison laborers has become a trend in Republican-led states.  Under Gov. Scott Walker’s (R-WI) anti-collective bargaining law, at least one Wisconsin county replaced some union workers with prison labor.  And Georgia is considering replacing firefighters with prisoners to save money. (emphasis added)

So there you have it.  The Party of the 1% is destroying the unions (their political enemies) and replacing skilled workers with free prison labor.  They are driving out the immigrant work force that makes their agricultural industry so profitable and then – rather than allow free market forces to drive up labor costs and cut into that industry’s profits – they’re replacing that work force with free prison labor. 

And the next time you need to be rescued from a burning building, remember that the guy who’s supposed to run in and get you knows that he isn’t getting paid for risking his life; sure, it might impact his motivation a little, but rest assured that the money the state saves will more than make up for your subsequent death and/or severe disfigurement.

Of course, this is an old story in American history.  After slavery was legally abolished, the Confederate states created Black Codes that criminalized “vagrancy,” “loitering,” or simply being on the street without written proof of employment.  Convicted blacks were sentenced to prison, where their labor could be sold off to the same plantation owners for whom they originally had worked as slaves and for whom they now would continue to toil under slave-like conditions.

So I guess my only questions are:  (i) How long before the Republican-led states start handing down 360-day jail terms for jaywalking or for driving without a seatbelt? and (ii) Will 21^st-century America finally realize the 19^th-century South’s dream of the universal enslavement of poor people?

Progress!

Unsolicited Campaign Advice for Democrats – No. 2

You know, I was thinking about the Americans United for Change video in that last post, and why I think it fails badly at what it attempts to do; I think it doesn’t really work because it makes the life of the 1% -- who are impoverishing the rest of the nation – look too nice.

People respond to nice looking things, to nice looking people.  Hell, I’m about the most sympathetic audience possible for that video’s message, and even my first thoughts while I was watching it were ‘nice house,’ and ‘nice plane.’  I understand that the video is intended to be a parody of an actual campaign ad run by Romney and Gekko, but looking at the image of that handsome, trim, rich couple on their private jet – well, I can tell you that I certainly would not mind living that why.

Don’t get me wrong, I think ads focusing on America’s growing income and wealth disparity should be fundamental to the 2012 campaign.  (Although I think it’ll probably be more effective for outside groups like unions and labor PACs – as opposed to President Obama or the Democratic Party – to produce and broadcast such ads.)  But in order for them to truly work they can’t make the wealthy look attractive.

Fortunately, they don’t need to.  Sure, I suppose you can present an ad that shows the 1% happy and attractive and laughing it up while the rest of us suffer, but for a lot of viewers that’s just going to make them resent their situation and wish they were playing for the other team.  Another, better way to get the point across is to present the 1% as unhappy, greedy, grasping little people consumed by their addiction to grabbing more, More, MORE for themselves, and never able to get enough . . . while everybody else suffers because of them.

Ultimately, the same point is being made, but now the wealthy don’t look happy, or glamorous, or enviable.  They only look sad, and stupid, and venal – and people don’t easily sympathize with the sad, the stupid and the venal.

At least, that’s how I would do it.

Banksters: Same As It Ever Was

I've mentioned before how much I enjoy learning about the sordid details of history, the pettiness and evils they usually try to sweep under the rug but that anyone who knows anything about the human species has to suspect occurred.

From Colin Woodard's new book American Nations:  A History of the Eleven Regional Cultures of North America, comes this charming little tale of banksters, creditors and their government enablers absolutely screwing over the 99% Americans immediately only a few years after the Revolutionary War was over:

In the dark hours of the wars of liberation, the Continental Congress had no money to pay salaries to their soldiers or to compensate farmers for requisitioned food and livestock.  Instead Congress gave all these people government IOUs.  This practice continued for years until, under the financial administration of the notoriously unethical banker Robert Morris, the state of Pennsylvania announce it would no longer accept the congressional IOUs as payment for taxes.  With no other form of money in circulation in much of the countryside, many poor families had no choice but to sell the notes for whatever they could get, and wealthy speculators purchased them for one-sixth to one-fortieth of their face value.  Soon  just over 400 individuals held over 96 percent of Pennsylvania's war debt, and nearly half was controlled by just twenty-eight men, most of whom were Robert Morris's friends and business partners.  Shortly thereafter, Morris and his protege Alexander Hamilton took control of federal financial policy, rigging it so as to literally turn their friends' worthless paper into silver and gold.  Under Morris and Hamilton, the federal government would buy back the bonds for face value, plus 6 percent interest, paid in precious metals raised by assessing new federal excise taxes designed to fall most heavily on the poor people who'd been forced to take the worthless congressional scrip in the first place.

But, wait -- there's more.  Most people in Appalachia hadn't seen hard cash in years.  The closest thing to cash that Borderlander farmers could create was whiskey, which was nonperishable, marketable, and easy to transport.  Knowing this, Morris and Hamilton cynically imposed a sharp tax on this all-important Appalachian product, even as they discouraged their underlings from collecting taxes owed by merchants on the coast.  Meanwhile, they used their influence to give themselves and their private banker friends effective control over the new nation's currency supply -- much of it printed by Morris's private Bank of North America -- but with federal taxpayers on the hook to clean up their mess if things went wrong. . . .

But unlike in 1929 or 2008, the victims of this scheme were well aware of what was going on, and it was the people of Appalachia who resisted the federal elite's machinations most strongly.  The greatest uprising that followed would come to be known, derisively, as the Whiskey Rebellion.  But what it was really about was the fact that enlisted war veterans had gone unpaid and had been forced to sell the government's IOUs to pay government taxes, only to then be taxed again to allow vultures to make a 5,000 percent profit on their misery.  Those taxes had to be paid in gold and silver, which nobody in the countryside had seen in years.  When they couldn't pay, their farms and possessions would be seized and liquidated to further enrich Morris, Hamilton, and their speculator friends from the coastal nations.

(emphasis added).

That is just awesomely stunning.  How charming to know that the United States of America's 1% demonstrates such continuity of history when it comes to manipulating debt in order to effectively steal from the remaining 99%.  You might even say it's in our national DNA.

Refusing to Reinvest in the Country

I really have come to believe that The Powers That Be have lost sight of the fact wealth is the lifeblood of any the economic system and that if it stops circulating the economy itself will die. 

Here in the US the latest mantra has to repeat the wholly unsupported claim that the rich are “job creators” and that if the rich have their taxes raised then they will stop creating jobs.  The belief seems to be that the richer we make the top 1%, the more wealth magically will be transferred to the rest of the economy.  Of course, this doesn’t work and it hasn’t worked, despite 30 years of increasing income inequality.

Over at Digby’s on Monday, David Atkins had a piece up asking “Why Are Young People So Upset and Disenchanted?" and breaking down the federal budget to determine how much money our government is reinvesting back in the nation’s economy.  Of a $3.5 trillion budget for fiscal year 2010, government spending breaks down as follows:

            --$1,120 billion consisted of by military expenditures and veterans’ benefits;

            --   $707 billion consisted of Social Security payments;

            --   $732 billion consisted of Medicare, Medicaid, and the Childrens’ Health 

                           Insurance Program;

            --   $496 billion consisted of other safety net programs;

            --   $210 billion consisted of interest payments on our existing debt.

That totals $3.265 trillion dollars, the vast majority of which is devoted either to military expenditures – which have the least economic stimulative effect – or to maintaining the elderly and the less fortunate, which (don’t get me wrong) is a laudable goal and the only decent thing a civilized people can do but also does not reflect an investment in the nation’s future.

That leaves a grand total of $235 billion to be spent on every other federal expenditure:  law enforcement, NASA, the Center for Disease Control, education, technology, medicine . . . everything.

But it gets even worse.  A federal budget of $3.5 trillion is about 24% of our GDP for FY2010, which means our GDP was about $14.853 trillion.  But as Atkins points out, we only collected tax revenues for the year of $2.2 trillion, and borrowed the remaining $1.3 trillion.  That means the US had an effective tax collection rate of only 15.08% of its GDP in FY2010.

This is astonishingly low.  Here is a chart comparing tax collection rates for various countries as compiled by the OECD, which indicates that in 2006 America’s effective tax collection rate was 28% -- still generally low compared to the rich European countries but nearly twice the figure for 2010.

The bottom line is that the US collects low taxes as a percentage of its GDP in comparison to other industrialized countries.  If the nation’s GDP were being shared equally with the population, i.e., if increases on productivity were being realized as increased wages and benefits by the population as a whole, this might not be so bad.  If we all were sharing equally in the economy’s growth, then there might not be any need to tax the wealthy and in order to reinvest that money back into the economy and keep its lifeblood flowing.

But, of course, that’s not the case:

(Click to enbiggen.)

Instead, we see that from these charts that almost all the increase in income for 30 years has gone to the top 1% (the top 20% also have realized an increase, but that quintile includes, of course, the top 1% . . . which largely counts for what is presented as a gain by the top 20%). 

So in 30 years we have been stuck with an economic system that concentrates its wealth in the hands of a very few where – because we have largely reduced the progressivity of our income tax schedule by slashing taxes for the wealthy – all that wealth tends to remain. 

This is not only inequitable, but by allowing this money to pool in the hands of the very few The Powers That Be effectively are gutting and hollowing out the nation’s economic system by preventing its lifeblood from flowing.  

What are seeing -- what we have been seeing for 30 years -- is not the growing of an economy but the plundering of an economy.  Life the farmer who doesn't practice crop rotation, what to pass on to his children may long have been depleted by the time it is their turn to run the family farm.  No wonder Atkins was able to identify why young people are so disenchanted with the system:  “Even if they don’t know the details, young adults understand that they’re getting screwed.”

Update: The 1%’s European Coup

As a follow up to my earlier post about the 1%’s European Coup, my attention was called to Noah Millman’s “In the Long Run, We’re All German” over at The American Scene.  (h/t Kevin Drum)

Millman approvingly cites Ryan Avent for the proposition that the European Central Bank actually engineered the crisis now unfolding in the Eurozone by raising benchmark interest rates to collapse demand, thereby driving economies on the threshold – like Italy’s – into insolvency.   He then adds:

Some might well argue that responsibility sits with the debtors – more specifically, creditors might argue that.  In other words:  Germany might argue that.  Central banks are generally biased in favor of creditors; the ECB was specifically organized to be biased in favor of Germany.  (That was the price for getting Germany to agree to give up the Deutschemark in the first place.)  One way of looking at the sequence of events is to say that the ECB was willing to permit contagion in order to wring out inflation.  I think a better way of looking at it is to say that the ECB was willing to threaten Italy with insolvency in order to give Germany more formal control over Italy’s finances.

That’s incredibly hard-ball politics, but if you are not accountable to anybody (which the ECB, basically, is not) then you can play really, really hard-ball politics.

(emphasis in the original)

Millman later states in the comments that accompany his post that he views all of this as more of a “north-south European conflict” rather than a “class conflict within Germany,” i.e., not as a matter of the German 1% grabbing power at the expense of the German 99%.  But while I agree with Millman’s analysis, I think that ultimate conclusion is incorrect. 

As Millman says, central banks work for creditors, the ECB works for Germany, and the German banking system is the Eurozone’s largest creditor.  In other words, the ECB is fairly well working for the German banking system.  And the German banking system – like all modern financial systems – basically works for the 1% even if (as Millman seems to want to indicate in his comments) not all German bankers are themselves members of the 1%.

Giving control over Italy’s internal policies to the German banking system only means that the German banking system will have greater power to engineer Italy’s policies for the benefit of the 1% for whom it works.  If Millman is correct that the ECB actually “engineered” the Eurozone crisis to accomplish this, then what we are looking at is a de facto coup of a representative democracy by the global monied elite not by the exercise of physical force, but by the control of financial power.

The Driving Dream of MORE

Too often we assume that Homo Economicus is truly just motivated by the money, or more ridiculously the financial interests of the shareholders of the companies they run.  The truth is Our Galtian Overlords are frequently just assholes because they are assholes, not because being assholes will actually make them any richer.

                                                --Atrios

                                    

That right there.  What Atrios said.  

Digby wrote something the other day quoting Joseph Stiglitz’s assertion that the ultimate fate of the 1% “is bound up with how the other 99% live.”  Digby then added that “a stable society with a thriving middle class is more necessary to [the 1%’s] survival than a quick buck to add to their already depraved level of wealth . . . .”

With which Steve M. quibbled:

Maybe [these statements] are true in the very, very long run, but I can’t live on a planet in which North Korea’s regime has endured for decades, thriving as its population starves, and believe that the overdogs in our society can’t keep bleeding us relatively slowly for as long as we’re willing to put up with it.  They don’t need for us to thrive – they’ll sell to a Chinese or Indian or Brazilian middle class if ours isn’t thriving.  Or they’ll sell to one another.  They don’t need for us to thrive any more than they’ve ever needed a thriving middle class in any of the third world countries where they’ve long put their factories.

But I think Steve M. gets it wrong here, because I think Steve misapprehends the issue.

Digby and Stiglitz might have been discussing the division between the 99% and the 1% that obtains here in the United States, but that division is being replicated around the world and so their argument applies on a global scale.

It is fine to blithely suggest that Our Galtian Overlords will sell to a Chinese or an Indian middle class if the US middle class isn’t flourishing, but neither the Chinese nor the Indian middle class are flourishing either.  Sure, you can point to the high growth rate of the middle class in either country, but that is only because when one’s starting point is essentially zero any uptick at all implies, mathematically speaking, a growth rate of infinity.  (I exaggerate, obviously, but I think you take my point.)

The reason we have a “global savings glut” (Bernanke, Krugman, Roubini), or - stated another way - a “dearth of economic investment opportunity” (Stiglitz), or - stated another way - an “overaccumulation of capital” (Marx) is because Our Galtian Overlords in pretty much every country are appropriating for themselves alone almost all the profit from their growing economies and not recycling that profit back into the system in the form of higher wages for everybody else.

By doing so, they are at once accumulating capital for themselves and destroying any market in which they might later deploy that capital.  It’s not that they are eating their seed corn so much as they are storing that seed corn away until it rots from disuse.

This is also why Steve M.’s point about the 1% never having needed a thriving middle class in “any of the third world countries where they’ve long put their factories” is misplaced.  The cruel genius behind the idea of employing third-world workers at slave wages to manufacture goods for export is that those goods, by definition, are intended to be sold elsewhere; by keeping their labor markets and their consumer markets absolutely separate, manufacturers could impoverish the former without shrinking the latter.  But the genius of this little stratagem evaporates once one attempts to replicate it on a global scale.  When the entire world’s labor supply is impoverished, the entire world’s consumer market is as well.

And as for the idea that the world’s 1% might simply sell to one another if they can no longer sell to the 99%?  Well, they certainly intend to try doing that; in fact, that seems to be the fundamental idea underlying CitiGroup’s infamous “plutonomy memo” from 2005.   But to again quote Kunkel: “this substitution was never likely, for as Keynes observed, ‘when our income increases our consumption increases also, but not by so much.’”  Simply stated, not even the greedy gobs of the Galtian Overlords can swallow an entire world’s production, over and over and over again.

Which leaves us, finally, with the suggestion that perhaps Our Galtian Overlords will learn to be content with living the way Kim Jung-il does in North Korea:  luxuriously, wanting for nothing, content to pile up riches while the rest of the world beggars itself for their comfort.  To which I respond . . . maybe.  Maybe they could learn to live this way, but I doubt it.

It is one thing to beggar a nation, it is quite another to beggar the world.  Kim Jung-il might not be vexed by the idle wealth he is amassing at the expense of North Korea but remember . . . at the end of the day it’s still only North Korea.  How much wealth can he possibly be amassing over there?  After Kim shoots a few new action-adventure Godzilla blockbuster movies and springs for another giant waterslide, how much can he really have left over with which to play the role of Scrooge McDuck?

 (h/t Anderson Cooper)

But The World is . . . The World. 

Grab up all of The World’s resources and you can’t just let that stuff sit around doing nothing.  You’ve got to find some use for it . . . exactly the same way campus police at UC-Davis or the cops in New York just needed to find a use for all that cool new military equipment that until recently had been just lying around.  “Money – excess capital – needs to be put to work; it needs to earn profit, or else it is just useless.”  As useless as an unopened can of military grade pepper spray.

Besides, at the end of the day anyone who has climbed to or spent their life in the coveted position of a Galtian Overlord, anyone as sociopathic as the Koch Brothers who – not content to possess a combined wealth of $50 Billion -- still feel the need to purchase governors, destroy workers’ rights, eliminate all business regulation, and disenfranchise voters merely to suck up even more money. . . anyone like that is never going to be content just to kick back and enjoy their unimaginable wealth.

Because the truth is that people so batshit, Koch brothers-level insane are just a little more imaginative than you or I could ever even think of being.  And what they tend to imagine is what it would be like to have more.  And not even more money, not necessarily.  Just . . . more.  More power, more control, more authority, more stuff, more, more, more and always, always, More Than Anybody Else.

More is what drives them.  Because, in the end, it really isn’t the money.  In the end it simply is that such people are – to borrow Atrios’s term – assholes.

* * *

So, yeah . . . Stiglitz gets it right when he says that the well-being of the 1% depends on them not destroying the very markets they need in order to keep realizing their ever-present dream of More.  

Nevertheless, the 1% persists in destroying those markets anyway because these people are perfect singularities of covetousness, reflexively grubbing up anything that crosses their greed field's event horizon.  It remains true that their very well-being depends to a large extent on the well-being of all the rest of us but, as Digby says, “they are too thick” to realize that simple fact.

Digby wins the round on points.

Following Up on Greece

I cross-posted yesterday's The 1%'s European Coup over at DailyKos, where it generated quite a bit of commentary.  In reading some of those comments this morning, I came across a number that took issue with my characterization of exactly what happened to Greece.  I addressed these points in a lengthy comment of my own, but it occurred to me to cross-post that additional argument/data here as well.


I originally had left out this information because I thought yesterday's post was getting long enough as it is, but I do think that this additional data supports my contention that Greece's debt problems arose because its wealthiest citizens simply refused to pay their taxes.  The comment I posted up over at DailyKos and the additional supporting information are both below the fold.

The 1%’s European Coup

The last thing the world needs at a time like this is democracy.  That is what got us into this mess in the first place.  People wanting stuff, and voting for people who said they’d give ‘em that stuff, without showing they’re working. 

            --Comedian Andy Zaltzman to John Oliver

            The Bugle, Ep. 173a

           

In yesterday’s Washington Post, Harold Meyerson wrote about “The Growing Tension Between Capitalism and Democracy.”  Meyerson pointed out that

Over the past year . . . capitalism has fairly rolled over democracy. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Europe, where financial institutions and large investors have gone to war under the banner of austerity, and governments of nations with not-very-productive or overextended economies have found that they could not satisfy those demands and still cling to power. The elected governments of Greece and Italy have been deposed; financial technocrats are now at the helm of both nations. . . .  It’s as though the markets throughout Europe have had enough with this democratic sovereignty nonsense.  (emphasis added)

Essentially, Meyerson is arguing that the entwined financial system of the Eurozone now gives “financial technocrats” more power to dictate any particular Eurozone country’s fiscal policies than that country’s own citizens have. 

But as much as Meyerson’s description should be enough already to give one pause, I think framing the situation in this way actually understates the significance of what we are witnessing:  a European political and economic coup by the global 1%.