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This seems to be The President's modus operandi - 1) Lay out clear markers that are supported by a majority of Avericans - i.e. balanced approach with cuts and revenues; 2) Watch the republicans take a hard line to satisfy the tea party; 3) Give the republicans 99% of what they want; 4) Blame the left for not compromising. It looks like the framework for the deal is beginning to take shape, and it's not at all surprising. Tilted heavily toward cuts that will affect the middle and working classes disproportionately, and almost tailor-made to spare the rich any sacrifice whatsoever. While this is not surprising given the terms of the debate, it still boggles the mind to witness our republic complete its transformation into the very definition of a plutocracy. We have a political system designed specifically to protect the interest of the monied elite (I suppose one could argue that this had been the case for a long time, but it only really became nakedly, brazenly obvious during the 2008 financial crisis). Stories like these don't end well. Including for the elite. The history books are replete with warnings. Our country is going into a dark time.

The litany of war crimes in the name of "liberation", "ridding the country of tyrants", spreading "democracy", has become the language of blackest satire.

Bruce E. Levine is a clinical psychologist and author of Get Up, Stand Up: Uniting Populists, Energizing the Defeated, and Battling the Corporate Elite (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2011). www.brucelevine.net.

A new aristocracy is reaping huge unearned gains from our collective intellectual wealth. Our celebrated entrepreneurs and money men are hoisting a cherry to the top of an already existing sundae-and then laying claim to the entire ice cream parlor. Knowledge is the primary source of our national wealth, with or without the elites at the top who claim the lion's share.

Stark raving mad, this website trembles in fear at evil communists like Senator Bernie Sanders, I-VT, who wants to balance excesses of asset-owning, elite investors with needs of wage-earning peasants!

Critics of capitalism often argue that any form of capitalism would eventually devolve into corporatism, due to the concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands. A permutation of this term is corporate globalism. John Ralston Saul argues that most Western societies are best described as corporatist states, run by a small elite of professional and interest groups, that exclude political participation from the citizenry. Corporatism has been supported from various proponents, including: absolutists, conservatives, fascists, progressives, reactionaries, socialists and theologians. In the United States, economic corporatism involving capital-labour cooperation was influential in the New Deal economic program of the United States in the 1930s as well as in Fordism and Keynesianism.[36] In the post-World War II reconstruction period in Europe, corporatism was favoured by Christian democrats, national conservatives, and social democrats in opposition to liberal capitalism.[37] This type of corporatism faded but revived again in the 1960s and 1970s as "neo-corporatism" in response to the new economic threat of stagflation.[38] Neo-corporatism favoured economic tripartism which involved strong and centralized labour unions, employers' unions, and governments that cooperated as "social partners" to negotiate and manage a national economy.[39]

The Pentagon power elite is waging a global war of secret scope...although the public knows more after Osama bin Laden's killing...read on.

Today, Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations is considered a Bible for capitalism, but when published in 1776, it was a blasphemous challenge to the big business, big government mercantilism in Europe. Smith's free market theories expanded economic opportunity, promoted competition and encouraged innovation, in large part, by attacking the "concentrated wealth and power" of Britain's commercial elite.