Op-Ed Columnist - Fear and Favor - NYTimes.com. Paul Krugman’s column today

A note to Tea Party activists: This is not the movie you think it is. You probably imagine that you’re starring in “The Birth of a Nation,” but you’re actually just extras in a remake of “Citizen Kane.”

True, there have been some changes in the plot. In the original, Kane tried to buy high political office for himself. In the new version, he just puts politicians on his payroll.

I mean that literally. As Politico recently pointed out, every major contender for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination who isn’t currently holding office and isn’t named Mitt Romney is now a paid contributor to Fox News. Now, media moguls have often promoted the careers and campaigns of politicians they believe will serve their interests. But directly cutting checks to political favorites takes it to a whole new level of blatancy.

Arguably, this shouldn’t be surprising. Modern American conservatism is, in large part, a movement shaped by billionaires and their bank accounts, and assured paychecks for the ideologically loyal are an important part of the system.

  • Scientists willing to deny the existence of man-made climate change,
  • economists willing to declare that tax cuts for the rich are essential to growth,
  • strategic thinkers willing to provide rationales for wars of choice,
  • lawyers willing to provide defenses of torture,

all can count on support from a network of organizations that may seem independent on the surface but are largely financed by a handful of ultrawealthy families.

And these organizations have long provided havens for conservative political figures not currently in office. Thus when Senator Rick Santorum was defeated in 2006, he got a new job as head of the America’s Enemies program at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a think tank that has received funding from the usual sources: the Koch brothers, the Coors family, and so on.

Now Mr. Santorum is one of those paid Fox contributors contemplating a presidential run. What’s the difference?

David Cay Johnston spoke to some of this in his writings about the effort to re-brand the estate tax, which affects a tiny fraction of households, as the “death tax,” funded by those who would be beneficiaries. (Remember all that talk about saving the family farm? Think about that family-owned factory farm in Iowa which produces all those eggs. That’s the sort of entity we’d be protecting.)

Might I encourage you to go read “The Corruption of Economics” by Mason Gaffney and Fred Harrison. Here’s the product description:

Condemning the post-industrial economy to protracted periods of economic failure, this thought-provoking book documents how the integrity of economics as a discipline was deliberately compromised in the United States towards the end of the 19th century. Several chairs of economics were funded at leading universities to rebrand economics to justify unearned income. The tools for this strategy became neo-classical economics, and, unlike classical economists like Adam Smith who described wealth as the product of three factors — land, labor, and capital — the new theorists reduced these to two: labor and capital, thus treating land as capital. This concealed the benefits enjoyed by those in receipt of the rent from land. The effect, the authors reveal, was to deprive professional economists of the ability to diagnose problems, forecast important trends, and prescribe solutions.

The cover material reads,

Henry George championed social justice and economic efficiency so successfully he had to be stopped. He was. Here’s how: ‘With the development of democracy . . . Mind control became the urgent need: neo-classical economics was the tool.’ Economics was uprooted from reality and we are all paying the price today."

What comes to mind is that the vast majority of those who learned our/their economics from economists and instructors who only know neo-classical economists become highly useful idiots.

Schalkenbach.org may be your best source, at $16. And any purchase over $10 gets you a free copy of Henry George and the Reconstruction of Capitalism.

I hope you – and Dr. Krugman – will take a look at both.

What is it the plutocrats are protecting? The concentration of wealth in this country. If you don’t have the statistics top of mind, here’s a quick version, from the Federal Reserve Board’s 2007 Survey of Consumer Finances, which under-reports the concentration of wealth because it expressly omits the Fortune 400 families, who represent about 1% of aggregate net worth.

  1. EQUITY (stock in publicly held companies and equity mutual funds, whether held individually, in trusts, in retirement accounts):
  2. BUS (the value of privately held businesses)
  3. EQUITY and BUS combined

Distribution of Wealth: Stocks, Privately Held Business, and all other, by percentile of NETWORTH

Value (billions) Percent Aggregate NETWORTHPercentile of Wealth Distribution (NETWORTH) Bottom 95% Top 5%

0 to 50th50 to 90th 90 to 95th 95 to 99th 99 to 100th EQUITY $13,694 21.2% 1.5% 19.6% 12.4% 30.5% 36.0% 33.5% 66.5% BUS $14,894 23.1% 0.4% 6.0% 5.5% 25.5% 62.7% 11.9% 88.1% EQUITY+BUS $28,588 44.3% 0.9% 12.5% 8.8% 27.9% 49.9% 22.2% 77.8% everything else, including debt $36,010 55.7%3.7%36.7%12.9%25.6%21.1% 53.3%46.7%NETWORTH $64,598 100.0% 2.5% 26.0% 11.1% 26.6% 33.8% 39.6% 60.4% memo: HOUSES, net of mortgages $15,686 24.3% 5.8% 48.3% 12.8% 20.8% 12.2% 66.9% 33.1% Source: Ponds and Streams, reported at http://lvtfan.typepad.com/lvtfans_blog/ americas-wealth-distribution-2007-wealth-concentration-part-1-of-3.html