The Elephant Whisperer - very touching story

Subject: The Elephant Whisperer - amazing

 

The Elephant Whisperer

Lawrence Anthony, a legend in South Africa and author of 3 books including the bestseller 

The Elephant Whisperer, bravely rescued wildlife and rehabilitated elephants all over the globe from human atrocities,

including the courageous rescue of Baghdad Zoo animals during US invasion in 2003. 

On March

 7, 2012

 Lawrence Anthony died.  

He is remembered and missed by his wife, 2 sons, 2 grandsons & numerous elephants. 

Two days after his passing, the wild elephants showed up at his home led by two large matriarchs. 

Separate wild herds arrived in droves to say goodbye to their beloved man-friend.

 A total of 20 elephants had patiently walked over 12 miles to get to his South African house.

Witnessing this spectacle, humans were obviously in awe not only because of the supreme intelligence and precise 

timing that these elephants sensed about Lawrence 's  passing, but also because of the profound memory and 

emotion the beloved animals evoked in such an organized way: 

 Walking slowly - for days - making their way in a solemn one-by-one queue from their habitat to his house.

 

 

 

Lawrence's wife, Francoise,  was especially touched, knowing that the elephants had not been to his house prior to 

that day for well over a year! 

Yet they knew where they were going.

The elephants obviously wanted to pay their deep respects, honoring  their friend who'd saved their lives - so much respect that they stayed for 2 days 2 nights.

 

Then one morning, they left, making their long journey back home.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Without the middle class, our nation is Toast

Unfortunately, the right wing refuses to acknowledge this...and so we will go down the tubes...

Recovery depends on middle class spending power
by Robert Reich

Rarely in history has the cause of a major economic problem been so clear yet have so few been willing to see it.

The major reason this recovery has been so anemic is not Europe's debt crisis. It's not, as right-wing economists tell us, because taxes are too high on corporations and the rich, safety nets are too generous to the needy, and regulations on business are too onerous.

It's not even, as some liberals contend, because the Obama administration hasn't spent enough on a temporary Keynesian stimulus.

The answer is in front of our faces. It's because American consumers, whose spending is 70 percent of economic activity, don't have the dough to buy enough to boost the economy - and they can no longer borrow like they could before the crash of 2008.

If you have any doubt, just take a look at the Survey of Consumer Finances, released last week by the Federal Reserve. Median family income was $49,600 in 2007. By 2010 it was $45,800 - a drop of 7.7 percent.

All of the gains from economic growth have been going to the richest 1 percent - who, because they're so rich, spend no more than half what they take in. They send the rest around the world wherever it can get the highest return.

Can I say this any more simply? The earnings of the great American middle class fueled the great American expansion for three decades after World War II. Their relative lack of earnings in more recent years set us up for the great American bust.

Starting around 1980, globalization and automation began exerting downward pressure on median wages. Employers broke unions in order to make more profits. And increasingly deregulated financial markets began taking over the real economy.

The result was painfully slow wage growth for most households. Women surged into paid work in order to prop up family incomes. When that stopped working, families went deep into debt, using the rising values of their homes as collateral. Then the housing bubble popped.

The Fed's latest report shows how loud that pop was. Between 2007 and 2010 (the latest data available) American families' median net worth fell almost 40 percent - down to levels last seen in 1992. The typical family's wealth is their home, not their stock portfolio - and housing values have dropped by a third since 2006.

Bottom line: The American economy is still struggling because the vast American middle class can't spend more to get it out of first gear.

What to do? There's no simple answer in the short term except to hope we stay in first gear and don't slide backward. Over the longer term, the answer is to make sure the middle class gets far more of the gains from economic growth.

How? We might learn something from history. During the 1920s, income concentrated at the top. By 1928, the top 1 percent was raking in an astounding 23.94 percent of the total (close to the 23.5 percent the top 1 percent got in 2007). At that point the bubble popped and we fell into the Great Depression.

But then came the Wagner Act, requiring employers to bargain in good faith with organized labor. Social Security and unemployment insurance. The Works Projects Administration and Civilian Conservation Corps. A national minimum wage. And to contain Wall Street, the Securities Act and Glass-Steagall Act.

In 1941, America went to war - a vast mobilization that employed every able-bodied adult American, and put money in their pockets. And after the war, the GI Bill, sending millions of returning veterans to college. A vast expansion of public higher education. And huge infrastructure investments, such as the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act. Taxes on the rich remained at least 70 percent until 1981.

The result: By 1957, the top 1 percent of Americans raked in only 10.1 percent of total income. Most of the rest went to a growing middle class - whose members fueled the greatest economic boom in the history of the world.

Get it? We won't get out of first gear until the middle class regains the bargaining power it had in the first three decades after World War II to claim a much larger share of the gains from productivity growth.

© 2012 Robert Reich Robert Reich, former U.S. secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at UC Berkeley and the author of "Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future." He blogs at www.robertreich.org.

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Mysterious Baltic Sea Object Disables ALL Electronic Equipment

Very strange object! 

The strange tale of the 200-diameter wide  circular object discovered last year on the  floor of the Baltic Sea gets curiouser and  curiouser, with guesses as to its purpose  ranging from a crashed UFO to a Cold War  submarine base.   Described as shaped like "a huge mushroom"  and rising 13 feet off the sea floor, recent dives  by the professional Swedish Ocean X Team have  revealed several other strange features - and "ALL"  of their electronic equipment was repeatedly  disabled as they swam directly over it.     Video: Mysterious Baltic Sea Object Disables ALL Electronic Equipment

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Obama/Dems need to come out swinging against the Supreme Court

I wholeheartedly agree with the author of this piece:  http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/06/24/michael-tomasky-democrats-should-come-out-swinging-against-the-court.html

The Democrats/Liberals have hung their heads long enough in the face of the brutal opposition of GOP wingnut bullies.  It's time to fight back, hard!

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GM grass produces cyanide--kills cows

God only knows what's happening with other genetically modified products that we humans ingest.  We're not protected against Monstrous Monsanto and our food is not even labeled to tell us if we are buying genetically modified food.  The giant corporations don't think we need to know that information.  This is what happens when corporations rule the world without regulation.

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-201_162-57459357/gm-grass-linked-to-texas-cattle-deaths/?tag=cbsContent;cbsCarousel

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To find out more about the Franklin Coverup

Check out the list of info. on google at:  https://www.google.com/search?q=Franklin+coverup&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a
Watch the video of Nebraska State Senator John DeCamp telling about the coverup at:

► 41:44► 41:44

www.youtube.com/watch?v=CcWrrBceuP4

and watch the British documentary Conspiracy of Silence that never made it to TV, even though it was scheduled to be aired on the Discovery channel May 3, 1994 (the TV Guide even listed it) -- but was pulled because of the insistence of high influential people in government.  

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Sandusky connected to sex ring -- another coverup

http://corporatemediaexposed.com/speedy-sandusky-trial-and-conviction-used-to-cover-up-large-scale-pedophile-ring/

Just like the Franklin coverup (see: educate-yourself.org/cn/franklincoverupexcerpt.shtml )-- who knows how far this goes?  The truth about all this will probably never be made known to the public -- at least not through the major media.

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Hands off my clam -- great song for women

I love this woman!   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=heXZTMHG88Y

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How Obama Is Following in Cheney's Footsteps

Excellent article -- I still can't understand why the right wing doesn't love Obama -- it's got to be his skin color they can't tolerate, and not his actions, because he is taking directions from Cheney's notebook.  Read: http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/tom-engelhardt/43893/tomgram-michael-klare-the-cheney-effect-in-the-obama-administration

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A sane Republican speaks to an insane one

Bryan Fischer, the bigoted fundamentalist "Christian" who hates gays was confronted today on his radio show by Fred Karger, a gay Republican.  It's about time someone in the Republican party spoke up against Fischer's terrible prejudice against anyone he perceives as different from himself.  Thank God most people are different from him!  To hear Karger's response to Fischer, go to:  http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/06/21/fred-karger-debates-bryan-fischer-on-same-sex-marriage/ 

An article about Fischer and his twisted thinking/hatred can be found in last week's New Yorker magazine.  Here's a short summary of it for those who may be interested:

Bryan Fischer in the New Yorker: Extreme, Rigid and the Product of a Broken Home

Submitted by Josh Glasstetter to RWW on Wed, 06/13/2012

The New Yorker is out with an excellent new piece by Jane Mayer that explores how Bryan Fischer came to be the bigoted firebrand known so well to readers of this blog. Over the years we’ve covered a seemingly endless stream of outrages by Fischer, who serves as American Family Association’s Director of Issue Analysis and host of “Focal Point” on AFA’s radio network. Yet Fischer only recently emerged on the national scene when he led the successful effort to oust an openly gay spokesman from the Romney campaign.

The New Yorker profile, appropriately titled “Bully Pulpit,” is Fischer’s first national media close-up, and the results are none too pretty. Mayer spoke with former and current friends and co-workers of Fischer, and the portrait that consistently emerges is of an extreme and rigid man who consistently drives friends away and is compensating, to this day, for childhood traumas.

 

                 (Photo by Alec Soth for the New Yorker)         

 

As you would expect, the article includes a number of outrageous and offensive remarks and claims made by Fischer, both to Mayer and previously (many of which were first reported on this blog). Here are some notable examples from the profile:

• “Fischer declared that ‘homosexuality gave us Adolf Hitler, and homosexuals in the military gave us the Brown Shirts, the Nazi war machine, and six million dead Jews.’
• “Like the saying goes, ‘I’ve never met an ex- black, but I’ve met a lot of ex-gays.’ If one person can do it, two people can do it.”
• “He then denied, as he does routinely, that H.I.V. causes AIDS, calling it a ‘harmless passenger virus.’”
• “Fischer thinks that Islam is a violent religion, and argues that Muslims should be stopped from immigrating and barred from serving in the U.S. military. He believes that the country was a Christian nation when the Bill of Rights was written, and therefore non-Christians ‘have no First Amendment right to the free exercise of religion.’ He has said that Native Americans are ‘morally disqualified’ from ruling America, and that African-American welfare recipients ‘rut like rabbits.’”
• “Obama, he has said, ‘despises the Constitution” and “nurtures a hatred for the white man.’”
• “Fischer advised a caller that, in some instances, a child as young as six months could be spanked.”

Readers who are already familiar with Fischer’s extremism will likely be much more interested in the details about how he came to be what he is today, starting with his upbringing and relationship with his parents:

Fischer’s political activism, however, began years before the advent of same-sex-marriage laws. In fact, his preoccupation with family dysfunction seems to have started with his own. Though Fischer loves to talk, he does not like to talk about his childhood, and spoke about it only grudgingly. He was born in Oklahoma City, in 1951, and his father, John, a descendant of German Mennonites, was a Conservative Baptist minister whose pacifism was so strict that he became a conscientious objector during the Second World War—a choice that makes Fischer uncomfortable. […]

 

Fischer didn’t volunteer anything about his mother, but, when pressed, said, “My parents divorced when I was about twenty. It just rocked my world.” His mother, who worked as an interior decorator at a furniture store, was “chronically late,” and the bus driver on her route to work would always hold the bus for her. Eventually, he said, “my mom fell for the bus driver,” deserting him, his father, and his younger sister. “I don’t want to go into it,” Fischer said. “But I saw the devastating impact it had on other people in my immediate family.” Asked how his father fared, Fischer turned away, then said, “He looked like an Auschwitz survivor. It was akin to that ordeal.”

 

Dennis Mansfield, a Christian conservative who was friends with Fischer for twenty years, said that Fischer also “had a deep-rooted disappointment in his father, for not being strong enough.”

Later, as a student at Stanford, Fischer gravitated to David Roper, a chaplain at the school, and began attending his evangelical church in Palo Alto. Fischer told Mayer that he was attracted by the “manliness” of the church: “It was the first time I’d been around a real muscular Christianity,” he told me. “It had a kind of strength and virility to it that would appeal to men.” Roper told Mayer he found this characterization “odd” and is no longer close to Fischer.

 

Manliness and strength continued to be major forces – and sources of strife – in Fischer’s life. Roper left Palo Alto in 1978 and recruited Fischer and Terry Papé, a fellow student, to join him in Boise after they graduated. In 1993, Roper retired and chose Papé to lead the congregation, passing over Fischer, who was crushed. Manliness was to blame:

“Bryan was very popular when he came to Cole,” Papé recalled. “But, over time, those relationships were strained, because of his very strong personality. When it comes to his perspective, it’s very difficult to get him to budge. He loves a good argument, but he doesn’t like being persuaded he might be wrong.” In 1993, Fischer was crushed when Roper retired and endorsed a different successor. […]

 

But friction had grown between the two men—and between Fischer and the congregation— over various doctrinal issues. “The central issue was gender,” Fischer told me. The church, he said, had “adopted policies that would have allowed women to exercise authority over men.” He opposed this, citing the Apostle Paul.

Fischer then started his own church in Boise, the Community Church of the Valley, and pursued a hard line on gender and family issues:

In church, Fischer preached that it might be preferable if Americans married upon becoming sexually mature. “I’m not saying go out and get your fifteen-year-old engaged,” he said. But he argued that “we have artificially delayed the age at which people are expected to marry,” and observed, “Mary, the mother of Christ, was probably a teen-ager when she was betrothed to Joseph.” In another sermon, he preached that women were equal to men in worth but “not equal in authority.”

 

“Somebody’s got to have the tie-breaking vote,” he explained to me. “According to God, that’s the husband and father.”

Fischer was appointed in 2001 as the chaplain of the Idaho Senate and began developing a statewide reputation for hard-right political activism. He also alienated many people, including Dennis Mansfield, an elder at his church and a longtime friend, who told Mayer about a pattern he noticed over the years: Fischer would “develop a closeness to a friend and then, as soon as they had a disagreement, they’d be cut adrift.”

 

Four years later, Fischer was kicked out on the street by his own congregation – again manliness was to blame:

“It was the gender issue again,” Fischer told me. “Because of my Scriptural convictions, I wasn’t able to budge. A female friend of the wife of an elder wanted a leadership role. I felt those roles should be reserved for men… . When I objected, they said, ‘You’re fired.’ It was very abrupt. I didn’t know what I was going to do next. It was very painful.” 

Fischer then fell into full-time political activism, founding the Idaho Values Alliance, which in 2007 became the state chapter of the American Family Association. Two years later he moved to Tupelo, MS to take on his current roles at AFA’s headquarters, which features a “statue of a fetus enshrined in a heart and a shoulder-high stone tablet inscribed with the Ten Commandments” out front.

 

Mayer’s profile provides an interesting look inside AFA, the tax-exempt and supposedly nonpartisan organization behind American Family Radio, which “comprises two hundred stations in thirty-five states.” At one point, Fischer’s producer began laughing after saying that “we have to be careful, because we’re not allowed to endorse.”

 

Mayer also relays a story about how AFA president Tim Wildmon texted Fischer during an on-air tirade about Newt Gingrich’s infidelities to warn him that “he might be alienating listeners.” This anecdote caught my attention because we’ve noted instances in the past where AFA has censored and edited Fischer’s articles on their website. Could it be that Fischer is on course to alienate yet another friend and benefactor? Only time will tell.

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Tribal culture ignorance in Uganda re. homosexuality

Interesting to note that the same kind of ignorance prevails in America's right wing tribal culture.  Interesting, too, that much of the racist right wing here also hates blacks.  But in this case the white supremacists and Ugandan blacks are on the same page in their mutual detestation/fear of gays.   Rabid "Christian" right wingers from the U.S. have actually urged on the Ugandans in their prejudice against gays--with some of them agreeing that gays should be killed.  These people vote, too -- and guess who they will be voting for in November?   What a world we live in....

http://www.cnn.com/2012/06/20/world/africa/uganda-agencies-ban/index.html?hpt=hp_bn2

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Scary things taking place in our world -- increased govt. censorship

http://www.cnn.com/2012/06/18/tech/web/google-transparency-report/index.html?hpt=hp_t1

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Now it's "switchblade drones" -- when will all this craziness end?

http://www.bendbulletin.com/article/20120615/NEWS0107/206150345/
Talk about escalating the insanity!  What about when our enemies get these? (and they will).  Testosterone-driven men have ruled this planet long enough.  It's definitely time for sane women to take over and raise the overall consciousness beyond a Neanderthal level. 

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Bill Maher: Conservative Disrespect for Obama rooted in racism

By their fruits you shall know them -- those who send out racist type e-mails against Obama reveal themselves to be racist.  Bill Maher said it correctly on his show last night:
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/06/16/maher-conservative-disrespect-for-president-obama-is-rooted-in-racism/

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Being prepared for middle school

Hard to believe, but sexual activity is happening at such a young age these days.  In contrast, I didn't learn where babies came from until I was in the 6th grade and that was by looking at birth photos in Life Magazine with a girlfriend at her house -- while her parents weren't home.  Seems we are going from one extreme to the other in our world...

Parents in Washington state -- and a few conservative websites -- are outraged after an elementary school principal described sex acts during a sexual education class last week.

According to KCPQ, the principal of Onalaska Elementary School was talking to 11- and 12-year-old students about HIV and sexually transmitted diseases when she asked was about oral and anal sex.

The principal's answer allegedly included verbal descriptions of those sex acts.

Parent Jean Pannkuk recalled to Fox News Radio what her daughter said she was taught: "You take a man’s penis and you put it in your mouth – that’s what the girls do to the boys. ... The boys spread the girls legs apart and put their mouths down on the vaginas."

"Basically, how I feel and others that I've talked to, it’s just the same as raping somebody, but you’re raping their innocence instead of their physical being," parent James Gilliand explained to KCPQ. "When you hit those levels and the sexual acts, you might as well hand them a Kama Sutra book or something, you know?"

Superintendent Scott Fentor defended the lesson by saying that the principal was just following the state's sexual education requirements that were adopted in 1988.

“In reality, she stuck to the curriculum, it's pretty difficult to talk about STDs, sexually transmitted diseases, without explaining what that is," Fentor said. "Kids leaving 5th grade and moving into middle school start getting exposed to a lot more information, and we know that`s the age where many children start to become sexually active, unfortunately. And that`s a scary thought, [but] that's the truth."

A notice was sent to parents on March 26 giving the chance to review the program and opt out. Fentor said only three parents showed up to examine the curriculum, and only one or two parents asked for their kids to be excused from the class.

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Super PACS -- another way for the wealthy to buy influence

Average folks like us who are trying hard to make ends meet can only watch from the sidelines as the rich buy a candidate who knows he will have to pay them back with programs to make them even richer.  This is how corporate deregulation continues, how tax cuts for the rich keep happening, and how the middle class is being killed off.  Many right wingers in the middle class don't understand that they are voting against their own interest when they vote for a candidate like Romney, who is being backed by multiple billionaires--with payback chits attached to their donations.  Ah, but what can be done? As the old song goes, "The rich get richer and the poor get poorer."  How sadly true. No one in today's world sees this more clearly than Bill Moyers. Thank God he is still around and still speaking truth.

CAMPAIGN CASH IS THE GIFT THAT KEEPS ON GIVING

by Bill Moyers and Michael Winship

If you’re visiting a candidate this summer and looking for a thoughtful house gift, might we suggest a nice Super PAC? Thanks to the Supreme Court and Citizens United, they’re all the rage among the mega-wealthy. All it takes is a little paperwork and a wad of cash and presto, you can have, as The Washington Post describes it, a “highly customized, highly personalized” political action committee.

It’s easy -- Super PACs come in all amounts and party affiliations. You don’t have to spend millions, although a gift that size certainly won’t be turned aside. Cable TV tycoon Marc Nathanson got a Super PAC for his friend, longtime Democratic Congressman Howard Berman from California, and all it cost was $100,000. Down in North Carolina, Republican congressional candidate George Holding received a handsome Super PAC that includes $100,000 each from an aunt and uncle and a quarter of a million from a bunch of his cousins. Yes, nothing says family like a great big, homemade batch of campaign contributions.

You can start a Super PAC on your own or contribute to one that already exists. Super PACs are available for every kind of race – presidential, congressional or statewide. But there are other ways you can help buy an election. Look at the Wisconsin recall campaign of Republican Governor Scott Walker. At least fourteen billionaires rushed to the support of the corporate right’s favorite union basher. He outraised his Democratic opponent, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, by nearly eight to one. Most of his money came from out of state. More than sixty million dollars were spent, $45 million of it for Walker alone.

Here are just a few of the satisfied buyers:

Wisconsin billionaire Diane Hendricks contributed more than half a million dollars on Scott Walker’s behalf. Her late husband built ABC Supply, America’s largest wholesale distributor of roofing, windows and siding. Fearful the United States might become “a socialistic ideological nation,” she’s an ardent foe of unions and, in her words, “taxing job creators.” True to her aversion to taxes, she paid none in 2010, despite being worth, according to Forbes magazine, about $2.8 billion dollars.

Before he launched his crusade against the collective bargaining rights of working people, Governor Walker had a conversation with Diane Hendricks, in which she asked, “Any chance we’ll ever get to be a completely red state and work on these unions… and become a right to work [state]? What can we do to help you?”

Walker replied, “We`re going to start in a couple weeks with our budget adjustment bill. The first step is, we`re going to deal with collective bargaining for all public employee unions, because you use divide and conquer.”

And so he did.

Walker also hauled in checks for nearly half a million from the Texas oligarch Bob Perry. He made his fortune in the home building business and is best known nationally for contributing four and a half million to the Swift Boat campaign that smeared the Vietnam War record of Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry back in 2004.

In Texas, Bob Perry is known for his cozy relationship with the state’s Supreme Court. He once gave money to every one of its nine elected judges. And guess what? Those same nine judges later overturned an $800,000 judgment against his building company for faulty construction. Bob the Builder, who’s naturally eager for help in the cause of tort reform -- that is, making it hard for everyday people to sue corporations like his for malfeasance -- has so far given four million to the pro-Romney Super PAC, Restore Our Future, and millions to Karl Rove’s American Crossroads Super PAC.

Then there’s casino king Sheldon Adelson, who gave Scott Walker’s cause $250,000. That’s a drop in the old champagne bucket compared to the $21 million Adelson’s family gave to the Super PAC that kept Newt Gingrich in the race long after the formaldehyde had been ordered. According to The Wall Street Journal, Adelson did not long mourn Gingrich’s passing, and has now given at least $10 million to the Restore Our Future Super PAC supporting Romney. By all accounts, what he expects in return is that his candidate hold unions at bay and swear that Israel can do no wrong.

Next up on Scott Walker’s list of beneficent plutocrats: Rich DeVos, owner of the Orlando Magic basketball team and co-founder of the home products giant Amway, which, thanks to Republican leaders in Congress, once shared in a $19 million tax break after a million-dollar DeVos contribution to the Republican Party. He’s a long-time member of the secretive Council for National Policy, a who’s who of right-wing luminaries.

Let’s not forget cowboy billionaire and born again Christian, Foster Friess, Rick Santorum’s moneyman, who told us about the good ol’ days when women would “use Bayer aspirin for contraceptives. The gals put it between their knees and it wasn't that costly.” And Louis Moore Bacon, the billionaire founder of the hedge fund Moore Capital – which in 2010 was fined $25 million for attempted commodities manipulation. A big backer of Romney, he, too came to Walker’s aid in Wisconsin.

So did Dallas oil and gas wildcatter Trevor Rees-Jones, who’s given millions to Karl Rove’s American Crossroads, in anticipation of another administration as friendly to taxpayer subsidies for big oil as the Rove-Bush White House. Last year, Rees-Jones’ company, Chief Oil, and a partner sold to Chevron nearly a quarter million acres in northeast America’s Marcellus Shale – the epicenter of the raging controversy over fracking. Estimated price: one billion dollars.

We could go on and name more, but you get the picture. These are the people who are helping to fund what the journalist Joe Hagan describes as a “tsunami of slime.” Even as they and their chosen candidates are afforded respectability in the value-free world of plutocracy, they can hide the fingerprints they leave on the bleeding corpse of democracy in part because each Super PAC comes with that extra special something every politician craves: plausible deniability. When one of their ads says something nasty and deceitful about an opponent – when it slanders and lies – the pol can shrug and say: “Not my doing. It’s the Super Pac that’s slinging the mud, not me.”

And that’s how the wealthy one percent does its dirty business. They are, by the way, as we were reminded by CNN’s Charles Riley in his report, “Can 46 Rich Dudes Buy an Election?” almost all men, mostly white, “and so far, the vast majority of their contributions have been made to conservative groups.” They want to own this election. So if there are any of you left out there with millions to burn, better buy your candidate now, while supplies last.

Bill Moyers is managing editor and Michael Winship is senior writer of the weekly public affairs program, Moyers & Company, airing on public television. Check local airtimes or comment at www.BillMoyers.com.

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Consider this: WHAT IF THE RICH LOST 40% OF THEIR WEALTH?

There is a lot of Truth in this article!

WHAT IF THE RICH LOST 40% OF THEIR WEALTH?
By James Carville

Let's imagine that yesterday there was a front page story in The New York Times that read the following:

"The recent economic crisis left the top 1% of Americans in 2010 with no more wealth than in the early 1990s, erasing almost two decades of accumulated prosperity, the Federal Reserve Monday.

"A hypothetical family richer than the median net worth of the top 1% of the nation's families had a net worth of $77.3 million in 2010, compared with $126.4 million in 2007, the Fed said. The crash of the stock market, in addition to the collapse of housing prices in Greenwich, Connecticut, the Upper East Side of New York City, Beverly Hills, Highland Park in Dallas and the North Shore of Chicago, directly accounted for three-quarters of the loss."

What do you think the reaction would be to that?

The elite would call for the suspension of habeas corpus, the government would call out the National Guard, invade Honduras and the Supreme Court would announce that it is in session 24/7 to take any action deemed necessary to help their friends.

The Wall Street Journal would have a black border on the newspaper. The Financial Times would go from pink to gray. CNBC would play funeral music for nine months. Steve Schwarzman would compare it to the H-word. Cable networks would roadblock all coverage.

Minimum wage laws would be suspended, the 40-hour work week would be thrown out, perhaps they would even do away with child labor laws to get productivity up so profits could increase to make up for lost revenue.

OK, we know that story did not appear in Wednesday's New York Times, and we would certainly agree that a massive loss of wealth in the top 1% would wreak economic havoc on the country. But there was, if anything, a worse story on that front page with only minor variations from our hypothetical scenario.

The story said that the recent economic crisis left the average American family in 2010 with no more wealth than in the early 1990s, erasing almost two decades of accumulated prosperity, reducing their net worth by almost 40%.

And the response of the national elite, the people Paul Krugman refers to as "very smart people" or I like to call the "chin-scratchers," was a barely audible whimper.

To put it bluntly, the middle class in this country has been screwed, blued and tattooed.

Rising health care costs, job insecurity, declining real estate values, massive cuts to public education and public safety (no Mitt, we don't need fewer police officers, we actually need more of them and yes, the federal government has a large hand in this.)

It is a depressing state of affairs when about two-thirds of our fellow citizens are caught in an economic trap that is wrecking their lives financially and emotionally.

And the reaction to all of this has been limp at best.

The Republicans say that if we just give the rich more tax cuts, it will make everyone's life better -- seems as though we've tried this before, doesn't it?

The Democrats have done some things that have been helpful, such as payroll tax cuts and the Affordable Care Act, but there is much more work to be done. As far as other institutions around the country, the response has been pathetic.

Opinion: Why the middle class has taken a big hit

There is an entire industry devoted to denying that this is even a problem.

I read a piece written by Andy Kessler in The Wall Street Journal, stating that thanks to "consumption equality," the wealthy work their 60- to 80-hour weeks inventing things for the masses, but there's not much they can buy with their money that the middle class can't afford.

You can only afford a product, because some rich person invented it for the masses, just like they did with smartphones, hard drives and affordable air travel.

Who cares if you can't afford to send your children to college or pay for your health insurance premium or what you owe on your house is more than what it's worth? Hey, you can buy them a cell phone, now that they don't cost $4,000, and talk to them as they stand in line for a job interview at McDonald's.

Where are our nation's institutions that should be raising holy hell about this? Lets start with my own Catholic Church: They are spending all of their time hunting down masturbators and birth-control takers.

Academics: Have you ever heard of the Princeton Center for Middle Class Studies? Not hardly.

The press: There is much more coverage on George Zimmerman's wife than on the destruction of the middle class in this country.

The lobbyists: Give me a break. When was the last time you heard of a lobbyist for the middle class? The point here is that we are reading the most significant economic story of our time and its effect on the psyche of the people who should know better is minimal.

In the words of Warren Buffett, "There's class warfare, all right, but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning."

The big scandal in America is that our middle class is shrinking, and no one seems to care. Maybe someone somewhere somehow should consider doing something else. (Ya' think?!!!)

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