An Apropos Election Year Observation:

"Neither is it any answer to this view of the case to say that the men holding this absolute, irresponsible power, must be men chosen by the people (or portions of them) to hold it. A man is none the less a slave because he is allowed to choose a new master once in a term of years. Neither are a people any the less slaves because permitted periodically to choose new masters. What makes them slaves is the fact that they now are, and are always hereafter to be, in the hands of men whose power over them is, and always is to be, absolute and irresponsible."

- Lysander Spooner, "No Treason No. VI. The Constitution Of No Authority" (NT.6.6.7 in the link)

From the International Herald Tribune:

"…But there is also a certain violated moral sense at the spectacle of all that wealth being concentrated in so few hands, the sense that making the acquisition of great wealth the highest achievement is bad for social cohesion and private morality.

Or, to put this another way, the money culture has arranged it so that a starting associate at a big-time law firm in New York makes more money a year than the chief justice of the United States.

And then, of course, there is the spectacle of the captains of finance getting severance packages in the tens of millions of dollars after screwing up so badly that they had to leave their posts.

The statistics on this do not tend to dissipate the irritation of the ordinary well-off in New York who spend hours of their time trying to park their cars on the street, because a spot in a parking garage costs $6,000 or $7,000 a year.

If you are in the 90th percentile in family wage and salary income in the United States, your revenues increased by only 34 percent in the 29 years from 1972 to 2001, according to economists Ian Dew-Becker and Robert Gordon.

But if you're in the 99.9th percentile of family income in the United States, which is pretty high up there, your wage and salary income increased on average 181 percent in those years, Becker and Gordon found. If you are in the 99.99th percentile, it went up 497 percent.

Similarly, two leading researchers on the topic of American income distribution, Thomas Picketty and Emmanuel Saez, found that the total share of national income received by the top 1 percent of the population doubled from 8 percent in 1980 to 16 percent in 2004."

Notice that these trends have continued under both democratic and republican administrations. Don't fool yourself. They are two factions of the same Whig Party which, by mere analytic definition, became two parties. Ideologically and in practice both are about as close as two parties can be -- so much so that against the broad political spectrum, they blend back into the one whence they came.

The Middle East is on the continent of Asia, the Byzantine Rite of Catholicism is considered "The Eastern Church", I get held up at airports more than the average person I know, and the people of my ancestry are continually made out to look like religious fanatics and savages in news media. Yet whenever I get a form where I have to declare my race/ethnicity, I am forced into the box "White". Really? Perhaps it can be said that I am Caucasian, but if we really want to talk about "races" (which are an absurdity in my opinion, especially considering the most the human genome diverges is 0.1%) descended from the Caucasus, then people from the Asian sub-continent of India are also Caucasian. But that doesn't make them White, now, does it? "Hispanics" are Caucasian, but they're not White. Really? Caucasian? Are we still using racial categories based on craniometry? Why don't we all subscribe to Nazism while we're at it. I must admit, though that I have seen Middle East on forms, yet they always lump it in with Europe. Let me ask: if Middle Easterners were really the same people as White Europeans, they couldn't be so easily racially profiled at airports, now could they? And let me tell you: I have been detained, searched, or pulled aside for a second ID check 100% of the time in Ireland, England, and Germany; yet among the brown people countries of Mexico, Greece, and India, I was checked only once in Mexico out of innumerable crossing when I lived on the border. Yet I keep being force to check the box "White." When I walk around New York or Chicago, no one looks twice; but in rural White-ville, USA I get stared at. Do you know what it feels like to continually receive the communication that you are less-than, suspicious, strange, and yet then be forced by the people who take that stance that you must formally identify with them? I think it's one of the worst forms of insult.