You know things are bad when Paul Craig Roberts, one of the founders of Reaganomics, says about deregulation and the current state of the economy:

It’s gone too far.

With Heist: Who Stole the American Dream, directors Frances Causey and Donald Goldmacher trace the roots of today’s current economic crisis back to a 1971 memorandum written by Lewis F. Powell Jr.– a Virginia lawyer and representative of the tobacco industry who later became an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court. The Powell Memo, written for the Chamber of Commerce, lays out a very solid, point by point plan for corporations to loosen regulations and gain greater and greater control of the economy for their own benefit at the expense of of the American people.

This could well have been the want ad Esquire used to attract a writer for its story titled, “War Against Youth.” This lengthy piece is the best compendium of warped logic and misplaced facts on this topic since the Peter Peterson financed film, IOUSA.

Austin Lounge Lizards — Too Big To Fail.

Apparently racism is starting to lose its luster as an electoral tool for the servants of the 1%, so now they have to broaden their focus from picking on nonwhites and nonconservatives to attacking the very white working-class voters on whose backs they’ve rode time and again to victory.

Wall Street wants to rip your face off. House Republicans make it easier and safer to cheat you. Stop saving and let your friends on Wall Street help you!

Self-awareness won’t make money for hedge fund operator Ken Griffin, which is just as well.

The inconclusive results of Super Tuesday, and the flat unwillingness of any of the lesser Republican candidates to vacate the field, have left us in a situation that would have been unthinkable even six months ago: Republican gasbags have grudgingly begun admitting that they don’t expect to achieve Mitch McConnell’s only goal, winning “back” the Presidency in 2012.

I look upon Tom Frank as a political behaviorist with a healthy sense of the humor and an even healthier sense of the absurd, the latter of which works with the former the way an afterburner works on a fighter jet. His great gift is to look at us first, before getting around to looking at how we come to order ourselves in our society and govern ourselves in our politics, if it can even be said that we govern ourselves in our politics any more, which I would contend is a matter of some debate.

Anyway, to me, Tom’s great gift always has been to look at the influences behind millions of individual decisions that add up to the collective experience of at least the appearance of political self-government. Reading Tom’s work, and reading his assessment of the political malpractice we sometimes inflict on ourselves, I am reminded of an entry in the voluminous diary of Ignatius Donnelly, great American crank, former Minnesota congressman, virtual inventor of modern pseudo-science, creator of everything we think we know about Atlantis, and intellectual amanuensis of my own book, Idiot America. Once, while defending his own work, he wrote in his journal — “I believe I am right. Or, if not right, at least plausible.”

To the surprise of virtually no one, Courtier to the Elitists (the elitist class lets him pretend he’s one of them because of that purty way he uses his tongue) David Brooks is quite taken with Charles Murray’s “Oh Great. Now The Fucking White Trash Is Acting Like The Coloreds.”

Hot on the heels of Charles Murray’s upcoming The Rich Man’s Burden: Civilizing The Savages fellow AEI’er [coughwingnutwelfarerecipientcough] James Q Wilson takes to the pages of Fred Hiatt’s Rich Folk’s Etch-a-Sketch page to wave his hands around and deflect deflect deflect people’s attention away from the American Romney Class by pointing out that you’re just upset and acting irrationally (you’re probably having your period, aren’t you?) if you’re pointing at the Romney Rich as 99% percent of the problem on economic inequality in America.