Tina Dupuy

One of the richest men in the country, ranking in the 0.006 percent of Americans, likes to accuse the President of creating an “entitlement society.” Mitt Romney, the heir apparent, next in line GOP nominee … is against entitlement.

When I hear “entitlement society” I think, “country club.” But When Mitt uses that phrase he doesn’t mean rich guys like him, given all the advantages of wealth, who are now enjoying its comforts – he means the rest of us. Yes, Mitt is against an “entitlement society” because that involves too many people and not just him and his ilk. It’s not the “entitlement” he contests – it’s the entire “society” part.

At the Monday Florida debate last week Mitt noted that under Gingrich’s tax plan Mitt would pay no taxes at all. Gingrich responded with, “Well, if that — and if you created enough jobs doing that — it was Alan Greenspan who first said the best rate, if you want to create jobs for capital gains, is zero.”

So rich people whose money makes their money (it’s literally capital gaining) are so fortunate they get to hire other people to pay taxes for them? Rich people with their alleged mythical power to create jobs even get to outsource their tax obligations to poor saps working for a living?

This is the prosperity gospel as a Super PAC-funded marketing blitz. Money is next to godliness and poverty is the fault of the poor for not being better people.

It’s as if Jesus were a CEO and the Romans job-killing communists.

“Contrary to the President’s constant disparagement of people in business,” former George W. Bush budget director Gov. Mitch Daniels said in his State of the Union response last week, “It’s one of the noblest of human pursuits.” This is one of those phrases you (usually) will only hear in business school (funnier if it was one of those rip-off for-profit colleges). Business is one of the noblest of human pursuits? Noble as in aristocratic? That phrase, “noble pursuits,” is usually applied to an avocation not paying much but rewarding in other ways: teachers; firefighters; nurses; foster parents; soldiers; community leaders; social workers; mentors; rescue workers; care givers; farmers. Or to anyone who’s honest, shows up every day and works hard. That’s a noble pursuit.

Are the wealthy really so sensitive they need Mitch Daniels to make them feel better about themselves in a spiritual sense? What they’re doing not only pays off with privilege and cash – it also has to be venerable from a moral perspective? How much reward does one group need? They own everything and they also need to be thanked?!

The rich are not just over-paid – they’re over valued. And generous welfare recipients.

As Senator Tom Coburn points out in his damning Nov. 2011 report, “Subsidies of the Rich and Famous,” we are a wealthfare state. It reads, “This reverse Robin Hood style of wealth redistribution is an intentional effort to get all Americans bought into a system where everyone appears to benefit.” In other words: We subsidize the rich by telling the poor to pay their fair share.

It’s been a strange three years under the Obama administration. First the GOP was against empathy. Yes, the party had to vehemently opposed seeing the plight of your fellow human beings because Obama was for it. Now their new hot button word? Fairness. Obama used the word fairness in his third State of the Union. And now the GOP has decided to be against fairness and celebrate inequality as being the thing that makes America great.

It’s as if Jesus were a CEO and the three wise men were shareholders.

The prosperity gospel is not America. It’s not democratic. It’s not even Christian. It’s greed warped into being a virtue by the greedy.

The rich aren’t better, they’re just richer.

Mitt Romney’s hurdle in winning the love/respect/admiration/fear of his party can be summed up in one photo: It was taken by his son, Tagg (doesn’t Sarah Palin have a kid with that name?) and put on Twitter this week. It’s of Romney and his wife Ann, presumably in a hotel basement, side-by-side pouring detergent into washing machines. Mitt is, of course, wearing a starched button up shirt and jeans, which is what people who never do laundry think people would wear when they do laundry. (Personally, if I have a clean starched shirt and jeans that’s an indication I don’t need to do laundry yet.) “Nothing like the glamorous life on the road,” the intermittent front-runner’s son tweeted with the pic.

This photo comes in the same week as Romney’s tax return where we learned Romney doesn’t actually work. He is in fact, as he’s claimed, unemployed. His money…makes his money. Millions and millions. He pays a tax rate of 13.9 percent – far lower than your average laundromat owner.

Which leads me to ask: Why is Mitt being photographed doing his laundry? Were there no Dukakis tanks available?

Apparently pleased with his Average Joe “real street” cred, Romney happily explained the image to NBC News, “We do our laundry at least once a week, because we’ll be on the road for 30 straight days. Who else do you think is going to do our laundry?”

When you are a multi-multi-millionaire, I can think of millions of people who could do your laundry. Isn’t Romney taking away jobs by washing his own clothes? First he outsourced American jobs, destroyed companies while the CEO at Bain Capital – now his quirky down-homeness is denying a gig to a professional fluff and folder.

When you don’t actually think about the plight of working people, you can assume you’re connecting to their “kitchen table” concerns by saying you have to do laundry at least once a week. We all do our laundry that much. Mainly because if you’re middle-class (or the former middle-class), you don’t have weeks worth of clothes; therefore you wash clothes all the time. It’s like saying you pay your bills at least once a month. Or you fill up your car with gas at least once a week. Or you worry about money at least once every other day. For normal people, this goes without saying, but for a candidate trying to appear normal, well, let’s just say it doesn’t wash.

Speaking of which, does one really, as the GOP-dubbed “vulture capitalist” with holdings in the Cayman Islands and some Swiss bank accounts want to have oneself associated with the word “laundry”? If you’re admittedly doing accounting tricks to pay as little U.S. taxes as possible, don’t you want to avoid a word synonymous with rich guy malfeasance? “I pay all the taxes that are legally required, not a dollar more,” said Romney at the NBC debate on Monday night in Florida.

Right: Millionaire plus laundry equals accidental editorial cartoon.

What’s next for this guy? Dressing up as a pirate and walking through foreclosed neighborhoods?

Also do you really want, as a Mormon candidate, to open up a conversation about separating whites from colors?! Gah!

The photo op was like answering a question no one asks: Who does your laundry? No one cares. A millionaire former-CEO insisting on doing his own cleaning is either lying or not a very good CEO.

A great politician can be all things to all people: an Elite, an Everyman; a Soldier, a General; a Fighter, a Thinker. A bad one can just pander and grovel for everyone’s approval. “You like that? Me too.”

Hey look guys, I’m doing my super-normal-every-week laundry. As the 3,000^th richest man in the country, who else is going to do my laundry, am I right?

I mean, there’s being clean cut and then there’s just…oh never mind.

Who would have guessed we’d have a national conversation about urinating on corpses? And worse yet to have people with a media megaphone attempting to defend it. The video of four marines desecrating the remains of a Taliban fighter in Afghanistan surfaced on YouTube last week.

The first thing worth noting is this treatment of war dead is absolutely against the Geneva Convention. The second thing is we threw out the Geneva Convention when we invaded Afghanistan.

Which leads me to the following conclusion: It’s time to end this war. It’s time to leave.

President Dwight Eisenhower, in his 1963 memoir, noted that in Vietnam “the mass of the population supported the enemy.” This was an insurmountable obstacle (at the time) for the French and an ominous foreshadowing for a full-scale American conflict to come. A war the U.S. would engage in for 20 years through five presidents and an estimated 200,000 dead or wounded American soldiers.

Yet that is where we are with Afghanistan: The population is not on our side. I was recently on a television program with Michael Hastings, a reporter at Rolling Stone on Afghanistan. He said some of the Afghans still think they are fighting the Soviets (a nine year war which ended in 1989).

That is the best indication this war, for us, is unwinnable: We don’t really know who we’re fighting there and they don’t really know who they’re fighting there.

We’d actually have to educate people as to who it is they are trying to kill first…in order to “win their hearts and minds.”

We’ve been in a country called the graveyard of empires for a decade. Last year General David Petraeus announced his COIN or counterinsurgency strategy, integral in Iraq, would be implemented in Afghanistan too. The pillars of a COIN strategy are “security, political and economic.” Or as Petraeus wrote in the field manual “Success in COIN operations requires establishing a legitimate government supported by the people.” Basically, nation building. We have to build a nation that will be stable, legitimate AND support the U.S. How does that happen? More time; more soldiers; more money.

Just one decade is not enough to make little progress in a country whose last successful conqueror was the Mongols…roughly 800 years ago. And whose type of government historically can be best described as tribal.

Front-runner for the Republican nomination Mitt Romney said in his New Hampshire primary victory speech, “He [Obama] doesn’t see the need for overwhelming American military superiority.  I will insist on a military so powerful no one would think of challenging it.”

We have the largest navy in the world (twice as big as the second largest) and we’re in a ten-year-long struggle in a landlocked country.

This is a Romney “let them eat cake moment.” Oh we’re not winning with the biggest military in the history of the planet? The solution is to make it bigger!

Enough. Eisenhower, the last five-star general to be President of the United States, warned Americans upon his leaving office of the “military industrial complex.” Part of this complex is the insistence of “listening to the commanders on the ground.”

The commanders still insist we can win if we just try harder, stay long and commit more troops. But this is in their nature. Asking commanders on the ground if we should continue with a war is like asking a football coach if we should continue to have football games. Of course they say yes, they’re professionals and this is their livelihood. Their opinion should be treated as such.

In 2008, Obama was the recipient of more donations (6:1) from soldiers serving overseas than his opponent, former POW, John McCain. It was specifically because then-Senator Obama spoke of ending the Iraq War.

Iraq is over. Let’s end our involvement in Afghanistan too.

Republicans have a wide variety of conservative white males now vying to be their nominee. No really. Bear with me:

They have former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich summing up the worst of the ‘90s GOP. Not only did he shut down the government during his tenure, he attempted to oust a president for doing what Gingrich was doing at that very moment. The Speaker investigated Bill Clinton for hanky panky with an intern (a paid one – FYI – oh the ‘90s were a golden age) while Gingrich was messing around with a Capitol staffer; soon to be his third and current wife, Callista.

I’ve stopped using the word “hypocrite” for people like Gingrich. It’s a 75-cent word no one cares about. A better term is “fraud.”

Gingrich enjoys going after people for the things he’s guilty of; like when he said we should lock up Congressman Barney Frank and Senator Chris Dodd. Gingrich described them as “the politicians who profited from the environment and the politicians who put this country in trouble.” This was before it was disclosed Gingrich was paid $1.6 million by Freddie Mac for what any reasonable person would call lobbying. (He maintains it was anything from being a celebrity to being a historian that “earned” such a paycheck.)

He’s now attacking Mitt Romney for “making people unemployed” at the leverage buyout firm Bain Capital, while not mentioning Gingrich was on the advisory board at a competing leverage buyout firm Forstmann Little after his stint as Speaker.

Fraud.

But don’t worry, Republicans also have a sample of the worst of their party from ‘00s: Rick Santorum. Now Santorum believes your uterus doesn’t have a right to privacy. If Santorum has his way, women’s private parts are up for public scrutiny and federal regulation. He’s also bravely stood up for states being able to ban birth control and not wanting to make black/blah people’s lives better by giving them someone else’s money.

But Santorum ranks among the worst of the Bush Era because of a blah spot on the Grand Old Party called: The Terri Schiavo case. In 2005, Schiavo was in a decades-long vegetative state; her husband wanted to abide by her wishes and not keep her alive by artificial means. Her parents disagreed. They went to court. Then Congress got involved. Then the President of the United States at his home in Crawford boarded Air Force One on Easter to fly to Washington to sign legislation to “save Terri.”

Santorum was at the bedside of Terri Schiavo (uninvited) to make a national spectacle of himself. How’d he get there? Walmart corporate jet. Why was this Pennsylvania senator in Florida? Outback Steakhouse fundraiser. So an industry toady uses his corporate favors to publically moralize our most intimate issues? He’s pro-life, with the caveat of being pro-er-big-big-business.

A few months later in that same year, nearly 2,000 Americans died in Hurricane Katrina without a special session from Congress or a visit from Santorum. It’s hard to embrace the sanctity of life while corpses float along the streets of an American city. Santorum lost his seat by 17 points the next fall.

So worst of the ‘90s, worst of the ‘00s and just to add diversity – the cartoon of an absurd GOP future: Rick Perry.

All that really needs to be said about Perry is he was finally able to list all three agencies he’d cut while president and got a nearly standing ovation from an otherwise subdued New Hampshire crowd last Saturday at ABC’s debate. As they say in Texas, Perry is all hat and no…

“Uh … I can’t … sorry … oops.”

Which leads us back to the 1 percent (tipper) representing, Mitt Romney. Because all the other candidates remind us of bygone ethics violations, shameful hysterias, China or Ron Paul, the GOP looks like they’re stuck with Romney. But they do not love him.

His campaign has been like the rehearsal dinner for an arranged marriage: kind of sad, kind of inevitable – fun to watch from another party.

Feign shock while you read this: the latest Rasmussen Reports survey finds just 5 percent of “Likely Voters rate the job Congress is doing as good or excellent.”

Yes, 5 percent of Americans think Congress is doing a good job. Which means 5 percent of those polled didn’t understand the question.

Right after taking his comically oversized gavel, Speaker of the House John Boehner stated, “Hard work and tough decisions will be required of the 112th Congress. No longer can we fall short. No longer can we kick the can down the road. The people voted to end business as usual and today we begin to carry out their instructions.”

Translation: All the other Congresses have fallen short. We are going to be better than all of them. Hilarious foreshadowing ensues.

Boehner’s first act was to have (parts of) the U.S. Constitution read out loud on the floor and the entire (non-amended parts) of the document put into the public record for the first time. Why hasn’t it been done before? Maybe because it took 90 minutes of precious session time to not accomplish anything. Sense a theme?

On that same day incumbent Congressman Pete Sessions (R-TX) and freshman Congressman Mike Fitzpatrick (R-PA) took their oaths while watching C-SPAN at a fundraiser. They had to be sworn in later since it violated the Constitution to just raise your hand at the TV.

So this devotion to the founding document was all for show – a way to waste time giving lip service to patriotism while giving real fidelity to money. That’s the theme.

A theme consistent with pizza being a vegetable because Congress is an over-boiled, over-processed, unappealing lump.

The 112^th Congress is at its halfway point. And even if you don’t care about opinion polls and refuse to believe more people approve of scabies in principle – look at their track record: This Congress is only responsible for passing 80 laws so far. That’s it. Eighty. And 13 of those “laws” were naming courthouses and post offices. Other Congresses have passed five times the amount of legislation in their tenures. The 108^th Congress with Republican majorities in both houses wrote 498 laws in their two years. The 111^th with Democratic majorities made 383 public laws.

We’ve had to endure the threat of a government shutdown every three months. Think about it: April the government was going to shut down over defunding Planned Parenthood. Again in August over the debt-ceiling. In September it was to hold up disaster relief. And another shutdown was barely averted in December with a spending bill attached to the payroll tax cuts. As a direct result of this Congress’ squabbling our credit rating was downgraded by Standard and Poors. That is, in fact, “ending business as usual.”

If we take out all the partisanship – all the pontificating of what Congress should or should not do – the facts are they’re doing NOTHING but filling space, waiting out the clock and still threatening a work stoppage. Basically the worst of public salaried workers is the 112^th Congress on a productive day.

And this “nothing” is not appealing to Republican voters. It’s not making Democratic voters happy. It’s not making Independents overjoyed. In fact it’s uniting us all to a solid voting bloc – 95 percent of the country – who thinks this Congress has failed to do its job.

It’s failed America.

How do you get a Congress that is unanimously reviled? It’s simple: get voted in by the American people only to adhere to the needs of lobbyists and moneyed interests justified with cockeyed ideology passed off as “principles.” Oh and do it during the worst economy in several generations.

How’s that working out?

We like risk and reward. The gold rush was as much a motivation to be a pioneer as was the more noted religious freedom. Poker is actually considered a sport. Yes, poker players are athletes according to the U.S. government. It’s the one sport you can train for while chain smoking in a tracksuit.

But like every wine connoisseur will think they have nothing in common with a wino; we celebrate gamblers but not degenerates.

We don’t like people who lose and continue to place bets only to lose again. But here is the Republican Party wrapping up their year as unapologetic gamblers with America’s fate in their greasy hands.

And they’re on a losing streak.

“Ten thousand bucks?” proposed Mitt Romney to Rick Perry on a debate stage earlier this month. Yes, Romney couldn’t have said: “You are lying, Rick.” Couldn’t have said: “There you go again.” Couldn’t have countered with the fact Perry seems to get basic civics wrong and can’t list more than two things at a time – Mitt Romney had to make a wager; a wager for nearly a year’s pay for a minimum wage worker.

But this is what you do when you have a problem with gambling. This is what happens when you pass that invisible line from “risk taker” to “intervention subject.” When you lose – instead of contrition or reassessing your philosophy or re-thinking your lifestyle – you double down and hope to win. When your policies fail you prescribe those same policies as the solution.

It’s like a homeopathic remedy; put a hot compress on a burn. Sell your ideas as a remedy for the turmoil your ideas cause.

For example:

The housing bubble burst the entire world’s economy because there were too few regulations. The GOP double down? Fewer regulations!

There are Americans who live with dirty air and water. It’s been widely documented that fracking has caused earthquakes and taint well water. GOP double down? Kill the Environmental Protection Agency.

The rich have never been richer. Wealth inequality is worse in the U.S. today than that of the slave-owning Roman Empire. GOP double down? Protect all tax cuts for the wealthy and propose new ones.

Unemployment plagues America. Long-term unemployment is becoming acutely painful. GOP double down? Cut the federal workforce!

America is losing faith in their government. Republicans say government can’t do anything right. GOP double down? Be the most ineffective Congress you can be. Currently Congress’ approval rating is just above the margin of error.

When you double down – you lose twice as much – twice as quickly. And that sums up Speaker John Boehner’s tenure just perfectly. If Congress were an actual casino they’d be required by law to at least have Gamblers Anonymous pamphlets available. “Did you ever gamble until the deficit was $15 trillion and still vow to keep the Bush Tax Cuts? Call us.”

“The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president,” famously said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell at the beginning of the lowest rated Congress in the history of the institution. Which to me is the biggest gamble of them all. It’s the notion that politics is a Zero Sum game. That if Obama loses – the GOP therefore wins. It’s just not true. Who loses are the people who always lose when it comes to Republican policies: the poor and the middle class.

That’s who’s bearing the brunt of the first gambling losses – and now the double down.

It’s us.

My first job was cleaning the group home I lived in. True story. I participated in the Summer Youth Employment Program part of the Job Training Partnership Act passed during Reagan’s first term. It was a War on Poverty federal program considered to be an economic stimulus and a way to keep teenagers off the streets. I was in foster care and had just barely turned 14; I went to a few seminars on job skills and was given a job “super cleaning” for minimum wage ($4.25). I pulled in about $75 a week…before taxes.

I learned two things at that job: one, horizontal blinds are a malevolent plague on society; and two, Republicans don’t care about people who work.

No, Republicans, in general, and disgraced former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, specifically, concern themselves with their fickle “job creators” not the staple of the American economy: job workers.

The overpaid, overfed, and over-hyped Gingrich said to an audience at a Nationwide Insurance luncheon earlier this month, “Really poor children in really poor neighborhoods have no habits of working and have nobody around them who works, so they literally have no habit of showing up on Monday.”

Gingrich is willfully ignorant of the fact you can work and still be “really poor” in this country. You can show up every Monday and do your job faithfully and STILL not make a living. If you work full-time at the federal minimum wage you’ll pull in $15,000 a year before taxes (and yes, they do take social security, state and federal taxes out of those paychecks). Add children to the equation and it’s worse than the working poor – it’s the working impoverished.

Now 49 million Americans live in poverty – with 2.6 million falling into the category last year. That’s 16 percent of Americans. There are more Americans living in poverty than there are Canadians on the planet.

Gingrich is trying to equate poverty with a moral shortcoming. It’s a warped offshoot of the prosperity gospel – riches are a sign of god’s love – poverty is a sign of his indifference.

But also in this richer-and-therefore-holier-than-thou diatribe of Gingrich’s is an attempt to bust unions. He suggested firing union janitors to hire children to clean their own schools. Yes, a janitor with a job that pays him enough to live on is, in Gingrich’s eyes, a problem. In the call for hiring children and ending child labor laws is the call to end working for a living.

All the anchors of a middle-class living (pensions, benefits, decent salaries) are being dubbed “luxuries” by Republicans, to be sacrificed so magical “job creators” can be cajoled into saving us all.

Because, really, the greatest threat to America is that janitors are paid too much. Please. Wealthy janitors are, to borrow Gingrich’s phrase, “an invented people.”

Gingrich has a dark vision for a Shining City Upon a Hill: where poor children work in place of union labor. It’s basically the 20^th century played in reverse.

Working (even scrubbing toilets) should mean making a living. If someone who works is still eligible for food stamps and government assistance – it’s really the employer who is federally subsidized. These “job creators” are taking advantage of government programs so they won’t have to cut into their profit margins to pay living wages.

The best example of this is also the biggest private employer in the country: Walmart.

If Newt and his Republican same-thinks want to go after Welfare Queens and those who don’t value work – go after the Walmart heirs. According to economist Sylvia Allegretto in 2007 the six Walmart heirs own more than the bottom 30 percent of Americans. And that was four years ago when their wealth was estimated at $69.7 billion, now it’s thought to be around $93 billion.

Will Newt take them on? No, Gingrich is showing his courage as a K Street custodian by kicking the little guys. Because really, it’s not that poor children need jobs to make them better workers – it’s that jobs need to be better to adult workers.

Is this kind of bravery to take on the least powerful (and some imaginary) among us resonating with Republicans?

Well, he is the new front-runner.

A perfect summary of the Grand Old Party’s relationship with the U.S. Constitution comes from Texas Governor Rick Perry at Mike Huckabee’s candidate forum on Fox News last Saturday. Governor Perry claimed as president he could overturn a law passed by Congress by executive order (he can’t), and then to show his bona fides on the subject he pulled out a copy of the Constitution from his breast pocket – displaying it proudly to the national audience.

Of course, he held his prop upside down.

And said, “It’s all right here.”

Indeed.

Republicans love to worship the Constitution as scripture. Perry keeps his next to his heart. They also love to talk about adding some Even Newer Testaments to this sacred document. They’re strict constructionists believing in the original intent but they’d prefer to see it improved drastically. Translation: It’s so perfect they’d like to see it changed.

Saturday, candidates talked about amending the Constitution to outlaw abortion, keep marriage heterosexual, term limit the Supreme Court and take away citizenship from children born to illegal immigrants.

English author Samuel Johnson famously said patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel. For Republicans, talking about amending the Constitution is the first defense against having actual policy discussions. The 112^th Congress has grinded to an all out halt by GOP obstructionism and instead of having an authentic plan to help the country that elected them, they opted to vote in (among other symbolic bills) a Balance Budget Amendment. This of course, like the majority of the bills the House will pass this year, will never become law.

This is bureaucratic busy work. A great display of government waste Republicans love to spend their time on the federal payroll talking about.

In order to amend the Constitution you have to get two-thirds majority in both Houses and then it has to be approved by three-fourths of state legislatures. Meaning: You have to build a broad consensus to change the founding document of our nation.

Republicans are not consensus builders – they’re talking point pounders. They’re re-branders. They’re more likely to ram through laws on the fly like Ohio Governor John Kasich’s union busting law which was months later overturned by voters – than super majority-sized popular things like taxing the rich. The middle-class will see a tax hike this year due to the payroll tax expiring. It appears Republicans are going to allow this to happen in order to protect the wealthiest Americans from paying more of their easier-earned cash to the federal government. Those who are being squeezed? Tax hike! Those who are squeezing? Lowest tax rate in two generations. Not a popular stance – but Republicans are taking it.

A Constitutional amendment demands wide support, something Republicans don’t bother themselves with.

Face it: they will never amend the Constitution even though it’s their favorite go-to non-starter.

However, a group that’s all about consensus building – at least at their meetings I’ve sat in on across the nation – is the Occupy movement. And their list of grievances includes money in politics and corporate personhood.

To Occupiers, corporations are like robots in every sci-fi movie ever made: they’re created by man, having taken on human traits (or in this case legal rights) and are turning on their makers … to eventually destroy the world. The Occupiers don’t see one party or another as an answer. They’re not like the tea party who are just a voting bloc for conservatives. They see both parties as being hostages to corporate money and complicit in the extreme economic inequality in the country.

How do they plan to tackle this? By calling for an amendment to end corporate personhood – to in effect overturn Citizens United. You’ll hear whispers of this among activists as a way to solve the problems that have prompted nearly 5,000 Americans to be arrested for nonviolent civil disobedience all across the country. Some polls show that over two-thirds of Americans would like to see the Constitution amended to overturn that decision.

The problem is we’re very used to this empty go-no-where non-solution of a Constitutional amendment from Republicans who know theirs will never happen; in that way Republicans have already preempted any earnest campaigns for an amendment.

I’ve brought this up to Occupiers and they are undeterred. They tell me they are, after all, the 99 percent, and there’s power in those numbers. They replied with what I’ve heard them say before: “We’re not going fast. We’re going far.”

“The media,” as it’s referred to, is not a monolith. We don’t just have one channel, one paper or one site with one nefarious dude pulling levers. “The media” consists of books, newspapers, magazines, television, billboards, radio, blogs, vlogs, ebooks, webcasts, podcasts and movies etc. The media is a vast and (kind of) diverse way of communicating information.

Let’s talk news. And where the majority of Americans – as in over 50 percent (by most estimates) – still get their news – from their local nightly news show. Any discussion about how unaware Americans are when it comes to news needs to have its finger pointed at the proper culprit: Your local broadcast.

Yes, everyone hates Congress but loves their Congressman. Everyone thinks “the media” is biased, wrong and awful – but tunes in to their local anchor with admiration and trust. A pox on them all, except our guy…

Last week a PublicMind FDU poll went viral with the line, “Fox News [viewers] are five-points more likely than those who watch no news at all, to incorrectly say it’s the U.S. that is bailing out European countries.” The under-reported story (buried lede as we call it in “the media”) was of those polled 67 percent said they watched their local news. And that could explain why 36 percent said they didn’t know who was bailing out Europe and only 30 percent gave the correct answer (Germany).

Did you know that Iceland is having a revolution as a direct result of the economic meltdown centered in the U.S. housing market? How about Syria being sanctioned by the Arab League? Vladamir Putin has gotten himself back on the ballot in Russia?

And it’s not just the “reading off BBC headlines” news the local news misses – it’s the actual local news: Investigative news in the public interest. News about the economy, politics and local issues.

Your local news opts to put a camera in the face of a crime victim and be a staple of “fear porn” rather than ever tackle difficult segments holding the school board/city council/mayor/state legislature/governor accountable for anything.

Why can I assume without sitting down and watching a week of your local newscast that they’re more than likely gleefully doing a recap of what happened on Dancing With the Stars/American Idol/Survivor tonight? Because your local broadcast news is more than likely ratings driven. And because of the last couple of decades of ratings driven local news our Edward R. Murrows have all become Harvey Levins.

Why are Americans not even rising to the level of ill informed and topping out at totally clueless? Because as Homo sapiens, we are effectively distracted by shiny objects and Kardashians. Plus our monkey brains got a chance to evolve this long by being on hyper-alert for danger, so we eat up any story telling us about “the hidden dangers lurking in our homes!” So of course we tune-in as told and in that way reward our local yokels for their reportage. And local yokels as Homo sapiens … also like rewards. It’s a vicious circle.

But, now as there are Americans Occupying public spaces demanding economic justice and other Americans being baffled as to why that is: it’s become clear some of the problem is our local news broadcasts.

It is completely unacceptable for a 30-minute telecast with 10 minutes of commercials and two minutes of teasers to have any minutes for a Bieber. Nothing ever involving a Real Housewife is really news. Curb the fear porn. Plus it’s absolutely journalistic malfeasance to give airtime to any alleged psychic … even when they’re an octopus.

We have to change this. We have to demand that our local news isn’t just meteorologists in skimpy (think: shiny) cocktail dresses. We have to demand real news – the less sexy kind – the kind where the white-collar criminals break into our homes with the swipe of a pen. We have to ban celebrity gossip from the 18-minutes of need-to-know information we consume each night.

And the only way to change it is from the consumer up.

Tell your local station if you want to find out about Brangelina you’ll go anywhere other than your local news broadcast. Tell them you want to know about authentic issues involving our complex global community – or just NOT “a report” what’s airing on television next week. Either way will be an improvement.

You know what’s never been said? “We should have MORE Republican primary debates.” Why? Because there are (by my count) 734,589 debates this election cycle and not enough hours in the day (spent working harder for less money) to watch eight Republican candidates stand around agreeing with each other for two hours every night.

And that’s really the thing – they all agree with each other. They want to kill regulations by dubbing them “job killers.” They want to kill jobs by calling job killers “job creators.” They want poor people to feel good about giving the wealthy their stuff and the wealthy to feel at ease about poor people NOT taking their stuff. And they want to cut government jobs to create other alleged jobs (wink, wink). And they want to stand up for the sanctity of life and the virtue of executions. They want government out of your life unless your womb is functioning. Then government is the only way to regulate it!

Oh and they all just hate Obamacare. They hate their party’s previous idea for health care reform because it’s tainted by anti-Republican Obama cooties. Yes, socialist, only-maybe-born-here cooties! And cootie vaccinations have been linked to mental retardation, which is both an explanation AND a warning.

The housing crisis? They blame Fannie and Freddie…but not the “banks.” They believe marriage is between and man and a corporation. They love business and their favorite size is small to go with their small towns. They have Nixon’s Environmental Protection Agency in their crosshairs. Yes, they have an affinity for pollution because it smells like New New Neo-Con. Smog is just the Lord’s way of telling us our engines are running!

And they hate the bailouts and pretend George W. Bush didn’t do it (or anything else).

At a recent Republican event I attended in DC there was a booth set up where you could put on a Reagan mask and have your picture taken. If that’s not a metaphor for the record number of Republican candidates in the record number of primary debates – I don’t know what is.

Reagan? Totally awesome in every way. Mention that he raised taxes WHILE still tripling the debt and gave millions of illegal immigrants amnesty and there is a Rick Perry-sized blank stare coming your way.

Tax cuts! Oh are they ever for tax cuts. Taxes should always go down unless they’re flat. And flat taxes, those are on the way up!

They don’t believe in climate change or evolution – just punitive hurricanes and social Darwinism.

And they love guns. Everyone should be armed because everyone who loves guns (they assume) loves them because they LOVE guns.

The Second is the best when it comes to Amendments. They like the First okay unless it’s protesters who don’t pay them a speaking fee…or the press. Oh that media…they only have 564,345 chances to get their message across to the voters without the filter of the mainstream media. The injustice of it all!

And, yes, they want to waterboard prisoners – as if it’s not evident by the sheer NUMBER of debates – they are all very pro-torture.

“Oh but Tina, you don’t have to watch them all. You have a choice.”

No, no I don’t. I cover politics. I have to watch 383 hours a week of Republican debates for the next year because I never developed any usable skills. This is my penance for failing to make it as a paleontologist (first problem is I never tried). So now, I don’t have a choice. I’m stuck with my fate.

The point is: It’s too late for me. Save yourself.

I asked an Occupier in DC named Rob Wohl, why the movement he’s a part of is resonating with people – why as over 3,000 Americans have been arrested in demonstrations and even journalists and vets have endured tear gas and rubber bullets, the movement is still growing.

His answer? “Because we are analytically correct.”

What does that mean? Apparently, they believe they have the facts on their side.  History certainly is. And as author Michael Lewis said when asked about the Occupy Wall Street movement, they also have justice on their side.

New census data released shows we have record high poverty in this country. It’s up to 16 percent or 49.1 million Americans (that’s over five New York Cities). We have the worst wealth inequality in the industrialized world (meaning we’re on par with some third world countries). We have the highest health care costs in the world. And a recent study by the Economic Policy Institute notes, “U.S. productivity grew by 62.5 percent from 1989 to 2010, far more than real hourly wages for both private-sector and state/local government workers, which grew 12 percent in the same period.” Basically Americans are working much (much) harder for much (much) less. Pair that with the fact U.S. businesses are making record profits and that’s why Americans have taken to the pothole-laden streets to protest.

It’s not just about the bank bailout. It’s not just about Wall Street. It’s about the goal of the wealthy to milk their fellow citizens until they’re completely dry. And while regular Americans are condescended to about their proverbial bootstraps, the U.S. government has helped the wealthy at every turn. So it’s no surprise they’ve won. And now that people are brittle and dusty – there are encampments all over the country.

The question isn’t, “Why are there so many people sleeping in parks?” The question is, “Why aren’t there more?

In the wake of this massive protest – right in the middle of the tenure of the lowest rated House in our nation’s history – a group of men and women whose approval rating of 9 percent is hovering just above the margin of error – what do they do? They pass another symbolic (think: busy work) nonbinding resolution to reaffirm “in God we trust” as the national motto.

I could have made that up as satire and I’d get a letter saying I was being too harsh.

Time spent on a bill (of which there are FOUR versions) reaffirming a phrase already on every denomination of money, every courthouse and most public buildings is about as contemptuous as this body of seat-warmers can get.

It’s “let them eat cake” with a little of King George III’s “the colonies will submit” thrown in for flavor.

Yes, the do-less-than-nothing House has passed a whopping 54 bills originating in their chamber in their nearly full year in office. Their counterparts in previous congresses usually author and pass three times that. And if you subtract passing go-no-where bills to defund NPR, Planned Parenthood and other specters like Obama Czars and take into account their days off (next year they’re only set to work 109 days out of the ENTIRE year) – they’ve put in a lot of effort to be ineffective.

Which is what you’d expect from self-hating government workers like the House leadership. They’re illustrating how lazy, stupid and useless government can be – by example.

To sum up: the American people are paying more for less, working more for less and asking more…and Congress is doing (wait for it) LESS.

The Occupiers are right. They are “analytically correct” in their assessment. Their government is failing them. As another Occupier put it, maybe it’s “time to replace Congress with people.”

You may have heard the Occupy Wall Street protesters are being paid to camp out. I heard it; they’re being funded by a shifty billionaire and that’s why they’re demanding billionaires be taxed more. Seems likely. Also they’re all Communists and ACORN. And whatever you’ve been scared of before – probably that. Sharia Law, maybe? Anti-Semites? Anarchists?

The weirdest dismissal of the encampments that has sprung up across the country is it’s just a bunch of homeless people – who’d be sleeping on the streets anyway. As if homeless people should have no voice in a discussion about economic justice. As if huge groups of homeless people shouldn’t warrant media attention.

I asked a protester in New York, Ashley Anderson, about this very thing: where is their rapid response to deal with all the rumors and accusations? Where is their team of media people? “This here,” he pointed to the crowded GA or General Assembly at Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan a few feet from where we were standing. Every night hundreds participate in a slow all-inclusive assembly to figure out a consensus on what to do next. “This is like a healthy immune system. It can handle it.” He then said if anyone didn’t like what they’re doing, all are welcome to come down and tell them.

I’ve now been to four Occupations in two countries (I had a trip to Canada planned months ago) and the lamest rumor I’ve heard by carefully coifed talking heads is that the protesters are all something: are all Ron Paul fans; or all union; or all liberals; or all white; or all illegals; or all students who don’t want to pay their loans back; or all “the people who always show up to a protest.” Occupy Wall Street and its solidarity encampments are more a lot of everything as opposed to all of anything. That’s why the rumors keep going – those who wish to discredit the movement pick out one person to identify with the movement and then they’re all Neo-New Redux Black Panthers.

At the (very crowded) Zuccotti Park I saw people with children in strollers but no one has accused all Occupiers of being overly fertile. Yet.

The under-reported story to me is how many veterans are at these Occupations. I spoke at length with a Canadian vet who served in Somalia in the ‘90s and is now “pitching in” at Occupy Toronto. In the U.S. I met several vets from Iraq and Afghanistan. They volunteered to fight for a country they now feel has fewer opportunities for them and their families. Vets are the middle-class. It was the vets who created the suburbs and the Baby Boomers after WWII. They are as big of stakeholders in the country as anyone and they’ve been given a rotten deal just like the rest of the 99 percent. Vets have the distinction of being deified by the right-wing on occasion. That’s until it comes to having their benefits cut … then they should blame themselves for not being rich.

Meet the new face of Occupy Wall Street: Scott Olsen, a 24-year-old Marine and Iraq War vet who was shot in the head with a “non-lethal round” during a raid on Occupy Oakland last week. His skull was fractured and it put him in a coma. He has since woken up to being a rallying cry for the movement. I followed a march in Toronto to the U.S. consulate to denounce police brutality in Oakland. I counted two national news trucks and a local reporter there to cover the demonstration. There was even a solidarity march to the U.S. Embassy from Tahrir Square in Egypt.

Olsen’s story is compelling. Not just because he fought in a foreign war and while in his home country, utilizing his first amendment right to peaceful assembly he was fired on by police. His may be the name you know from Occupy Oakland, but like Rosa Parks, he’s part of a bigger story. He’s a symbol for something we’ve managed to not talk about. Which is we’ve had two (sometimes three) wars in this country in the last 10 years and those who’ve fought overseas are coming home to an America with a shockingly high poverty rate. An America with the worst economic inequality in four generations. An America with less for those who work and fight and die.

Which is why they’re camped out and asking the question: “What have we been fighting for?”

I spoke with a thirty-something mother of two residing in suburban New Jersey about the Occupy Wall Street movement. She was disgusted by their antics. “Our business failed, our house was foreclosed on, we lost everything and you don’t see us blaming someone else for it!” she exclaimed. “It’s about personal responsibility!”

She lost everything as a result of the economic meltdown and yet still puts it on herself for not having anticipated or planned properly beforehand. I tried to explain that protesting a rigged system isn’t the opposite of personal responsibility. Doing what you can about the cards being stacked against you and 99 percent of your fellow Americans is, personally, responsive. And that is what Occupy Wall Street and their international – viral solidarity demonstrations say they are there to do.

There’s a bastardized quote attributed to John Steinbeck that says socialism never took root in America because we all think we’re just temporarily embarrassed millionaires. The actual quote, which Steinbeck wrote in America and Americans, is more pointed, “I guess the trouble was that we didn’t have any self-admitted proletarians. Everyone was a temporarily embarrassed capitalist.”

We’re not really a culture of delusional dreamers who all believe someday we will be wealthy. There are some, sure. Their escapist fantasy involves a windfall and a secluded island. There are also those who (still) actually become rich. But for the vast majority of Americans – the myth is less we are going to be rich – the myth which led us to the extreme wealth distribution debacle we’re now in – is that we’re all homesteaders.

You don’t have to grow your own food, build your own house or “paint your own wagon” to believe you could if you really wanted to. And really, did in some indirect way.

We’re a society full of pioneers, pilgrims and immigrants. We were a religious freedom sanctuary from England and then penal colony for England – insulted, neglected and over-taxed by the empire. This led us to tell the King of England off then engage the most powerful army in the world at the time for our independence. And we succeeded at it. Then people from all over the world flocked here to find refuge and opportunity. It’s led Americans to have a bit of bravado about who we are as a people. We think of ourselves as rugged individualists. Because it takes courage and determination to leave your country and forge a new life in this one – and most of us are descended from those people.

It’s not so much that we think our destiny is to be rich – it’s that we believe our destiny is ours. We make our fortunes or we don’t make our fortunes. We block out of our minds that roads aren’t a naturally occurring phenomena; that buildings take legions of workers to erect or that energy comes from somewhere. We think we do it all and when we fail – it’s our fault.

So when things don’t go our way, we don’t blame outside factors. When we fail we don’t see that the game is fixed. We tug at our bootstraps and feel anguish at our own deficiencies.

The reason why Occupy Wall Street is resonating still with Americans is because there are those who’ve been living with shame for what they see as not being self-sufficient…enough. They’re not “embarrassed capitalists” they’re mortified homesteaders. They’ve been laid off, they’ve lost their homes, their retirement is gone – they feel personally humiliated that (according to their personal creed) they didn’t do the right thing and maybe could have avoided this defeat.
Occupy Wall Street is letting people who’ve been in the shadows know that they’re not alone and they didn’t cause this. It’s something Americans at their core don’t usually believe. It’s actually a tough sell. But the movement is growing so apparently there are some converts.

Americans in general, and the downtrodden specifically, are figuring out they’re not alone. They’re, in fact, The 99 Percent.

Pirates, at least the traditional image we have in our minds  (the ones with the parrots on their shoulders and wooden legs from the 1700s), were in reality rapists, thieves and murderers. They were violent outlaws; terrorists of the Caribbean colonies. Some of them were hired as mercenaries called privateers, but they were still pirates even with a note from the King. They pillaged, slaughtered and plundered for a couple hundred years.

And a couple hundred years after that? Well, now pirates are a multi-billion dollar Disney franchise.

The point is: there’s hope for Wall Street. Yes, Bankaneers – as I’ve decided all profiteers from the economic collapse should be called – should stop lamenting that they’re misunderstood. They are not. They’re greedy, shortsighted and smitten with their own power. We get it. Instead, they should just embrace the villain role full on. And maybe they too can inspire a theme park ride someday. (Perhaps a roller coaster where only one out of every hundred gets a lap bar. Just an idea.)

Follow Bank of America’s lead: Bank of America has been criticized (fairly) for not paying any (not one cent) of federal income tax in 2010. This was after they took federal bailout money, during a year where they reported a $10 billion profit and WHILE they were foreclosing on American’s homes. But BofA didn’t just stop there. They just recently announced an additional fee for their customers to access their own money: a $5 a month charge to use a debit card. Which still isn’t “CGI level villainy” just yet. So, in September this year, the giant – too big to fail – mega-bank announced it was cutting 30,000 mid-level jobs to save $5 billion in costs.

Funny how all corporations are now the euphemistic “job creators,” even after they proved to be (over and over again) job-cutters. Yes, the swashbuckling job-cutters! Arrr!

The lesson here is go all out. Don’t try to make anyone like you. Don’t try to deflect scorn – raise fees AND kill jobs. Go ahead – you think Black Beard held back?

Also, the whining is just atrocious. David Moore, CEO of Moore Holdings wrote an opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal last week where he reported a homeless man heckled him after the author had just given him a dollar. This anecdotal evidence is all the proof this cheap guy in an expensive suit needed to conclude: Obama has done this to him.

“I do not recall another president in my lifetime whose negative drumbeat about large segments of the population has been so relentless,” he wrote.

Apparently Moore can’t recall anything before the Obama administration, when dissent was equated with treason. “With us or against us.” Also it’s quaint (in a boy-in-a-bubble way) that he thinks CEOs and his Wall Street pals are a “large segment.” Muslims and gays are both larger groups than the top 1 percent and unless Moore is three years old, there’s been a negative drumbeat against them in his lifetime…even by a president.

The sniveling is not going to get the Bankaneers romanticized. There’s nothing sexy about being a privileged creep and trying to make yourself out as a victim. Dignity is much sexier. This is no way to get a theme restaurant modeled after you!

So buck up, Bankaneers! What you’ve done to your country is immoral, egregious and unethical – regardless of whether or not it’s legal. There are privateers in pirate movies too. They’re doing the same stuff as the criminals. “Just doing my job” is not a good excuse when you’re responsible for millions of others losing theirs.

There’s no such thing as gilded rage. Embrace the disdain. If money is good for anything – you can at least shove it in your ears to drown out all the jeering.

It’ll be a sub-plot to the sequel: “Bankaneers of the Wall Street: The Curse of the Volcker Rule.”