Enough, we have two wonderful commentaires to republish. The first from our own Brad Schiller published today in the LA Times. We hope those Libs down in southland will take note. Following Brad’s is a piece by Michael Lewis published in Bloomberg, a bit more edgy than Brad’s, but those of you who have read his latest, Boomerang, would expect nothing less. Enjoy:

What’s so awful about the 1%?

Occupy Wall Street has said it’s the 99% of ‘us’ against the 1% of ‘them.’ But many of ‘them’ started out like ‘us’ and have brought us great innovations that we embrace

by Bradley Schiller

December 4, 2011

The class war is on. It’s the 99% of “us” versus the 1% of “them.”

In the rhetoric of this war, we are fighting the 1% because they possess most of the nation’s wealth, bankroll their handpicked political candidates, control the banks and get million-dollar paychecks and billion-dollar bailouts; yet they don’t pay enough taxes or invest their wealth in creating American jobs. They’re the “millionaires and billionaires” President Obama has called out as needing to pony up more for progressive reforms of our healthcare, banking, tax and political systems. They are the enemy of “us” — the 99% who toil at low-wage jobs, hold underwater mortgages, face foreclosures, suffer recurrent and protracted job layoffs and plant closings, and yet pay our fair share of taxes.

But there’s a flaw in this strategy. The Occupy Wall Street movement envisions the 1% as a monolithic cadre of entrenched billionaires who have a firm and self-serving grip on all the levers of the economy. But a closer look at that elite group reveals how untrue that perspective is.

Forbes magazine compiles a list of the richest 400 Americans every year. To get on that list, you must have at least $1 billion of wealth. They are the creme de la creme of the 1% — indeed, the top 0.0000013% (!) of Americans. So who are these dastardly people?

The late Steve Jobs was in that elite club this year. In his earlier days, Jobs would have been camped out with the OWS crowd, probably passing around a joint. Should we count him as one of “us” or one of “them”? (And you can’t use youriPhone or iPad to vote “them.”)

Then there’s 27-year old Mark Zuckerman (No. 14 on the Forbes list), whose Facebook innovation enables the OWS movement to communicate so easily. He and five other Facebook entrepreneurs just joined the Forbes 400 this year.

We’d also quickly recognize among “them” Sergey Brin, Larry Page and Eric Schmidt, who became billionaires developingGoogle. And, as they are sipping a latte to keep warm, the OWS campers should also reflect on whether Howard Schultz,Starbucks’ founder and No. 330 on the Forbes list, is with “us” or “them.”

Not every member of the Forbes 400 is a high-tech folk hero. There is a lot of inherited wealth on that list too (the Mars, Walton, Cargill and Ford dynasties). But 70% of the Forbes elite are self-made billionaires. Those entrepreneurial successes include not just the names behind Facebook, Google, Apple and Starbucks but also EBay (Meg Whitman, Pierre Omidyar), Yahoo (Jerry Yang), Nike (Phil Knight), AOL (Steve Case), Amazon (Jeff Bezos), Subway sandwiches (Peter Buck, Fred DeLuca), “Star Wars” (George Lucas) and even Beanie Babies (Ty Warner). Does anyone doubt that these members of the reviled 1% have enriched the country in significant ways?

Even more to the point is that all of these club-400 elites were once just like “us.” Jobs worked on the first Apple computer in a garage on a shoestring budget. He had vision, not wealth, to propel him to fame and fortune. Oprah Winfrey (No. 139) rose from poverty to TV queen through determination, hard work and a couple of lucky breaks. Even Warren Buffett, No. 2 on the Forbes list, started out looking very much like just another hardworking middle-class kid with good Midwestern values.

These storied rises from “rags to riches” are what make America the unique and prosperous nation it is. Some critics would have us believe that the American dream is dead. But that’s a view purveyed by those without the vision, the grit, the energy or the single-mined determination to build a better mousetrap. Starry-eyed inventors and entrepreneurs have no doubts about that dream. They know it exists and that they are going to achieve it. Maybe not on the first try, but eventually. That’s the entrepreneurial spirit that drives competitive markets, that not only makes the American dream come true for some (the 1%) but also improves life for the many (the 99%).

What really motivates the OWS movement is not resentment against the 1% but a sense of futility in grappling with a weak economy. With unemployment hovering around 9%, and with all the recurrent plant closings, foreclosures and cutbacks in public services, there is a lot of anger to vent. But class warfare isn’t the solution.

Our frustrations are more the product of Washington than Wall Street. We have been promised a lot and received little. Obama (who made millions in book royalties the last few years) sowed the seeds of disillusionment when he overpromised what his February 2009 stimulus package could deliver. A series of policy failures and political deadlocks has left people feeling disenfranchised and forgotten. Calling out millionaires and billionaires as the culprits in this economic saga is disingenuous and ultimately self-defeating. Those 1 percenters are not an avaricious “them” but in reality the most entrepreneurial of “us.” If we had more of them and fewer grandstanding politicians, we would all be better off.

Bradley Schiller is a professor of economics at the University of Nevada-Reno and the author of “The Economy Today.”

To: The Upper Ones From: Strategy Committee Re: The Counterrevolution

As usual, we have much to celebrate.

The rabble has been driven from the public parks. Our adversaries, now defined by the freaks and criminals among them, have demonstrated only that they have no idea what they are doing. They have failed to identify a single achievable goal.

Just weeks ago, in our first memo, we expressed concern that the big Wall Street banks were vulnerable to a mass financial boycott — more vulnerable even than tobacco companies or apartheid-era South African multinationals. A boycott might raise fears of a bank run; and the fears might create the fact.

Now, we’ll never know: The Lower 99’s notion of an attack on Wall Street is to stand around hollering at the New York Stock Exchange. The stock exchange!

We have won a battle, but this war is far from over.

As our chief quant notes, “No matter how well we do for ourselves, there will always be 99 of them for every one of us.” Disturbingly, his recent polling data reveal that many of us don’t even know who we are: Fully half of all Upper Ones believe themselves to belong to the Lower 99. That any human being can earn more than 344 grand a year without having the sense to identify which side in a class war he is on suggests that we should limit membership to actual rich people. But we wish to address this issue in a later memo. For now we remain focused on the problem at hand: How to keep their hands off our money.

Looming Threats

We have identified two looming threats:

The first is the shifting relationship between ambitious young people and money. There’s a reason the Lower 99 currently lack leadership: Anyone with the ability to organize large numbers of unsuccessful people has been diverted into Wall Street jobs, mainly in the analyst programs at Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs. Those jobs no longer exist, at least not in the quantities sufficient to distract an entire generation from examining the meaning of their lives.

Our Wall Street friends, wounded and weakened, can no longer pick up the tab for sucking the idealism out of America’s youth. But if not them, who? We on the committee are resigned to all elite universities becoming breeding grounds for insurrection, with the possible exception of Princeton.

The second threat is in the unstable mental pictures used by Lower 99ers to understand their economic lives. (We have found that they think in pictures.)

For many years the less viable among us have soothed themselves with metaphors of growth and abundance: rising tides, expanding pies, trickling down. A dollar in our pocket they viewed hopefully, as, perhaps, a few pennies in theirs. They appear to have switched this out of their minds for a new picture, of a life raft with shrinking provisions. A dollar in our pockets they now view as a dollar from theirs. Fearing for their lives, the Lower 99 will surely become ever more desperate and troublesome. Complaints from our membership about their personal behavior are already running at post-French Revolutionary highs.

We on the strategy committee see these developments as inexorable historical forces. The Lower 99 is a ticking bomb that can’t be defused. They may be occasionally distracted by, say, a winning lottery ticket. (And we have sent out the word to the hedge fund community to cease their purchases of such tickets.) They may turn their anger on others — immigrants for instance, or the federal government — and we can encourage them to do so. They may even be frightened into momentary submission. (We’re long pepper spray.)

In the End

But in the end we believe that any action we take to prevent them from growing better organized, and more aware of our financial status, will only delay the inevitable: the day when they turn, with far greater effect, on us.

Hence our committee’s conclusion: We must be able to quit American society altogether, and they must know it. For too long we have simply accepted the idea that we and they are all in something together, subject to the same laws and rituals and cares and concerns. This state of social relations between rich and poor isn’t merely unnatural and unsustainable, but, in its way, shameful. (Who among us could hold his head high in the presence of Louis XIV or those Russian czars or, for that matter, Croesus?)

The modern Greeks offer the example in the world today that is, the committee has determined, best in class. Ordinary Greeks seldom harass their rich, for the simple reason that they have no idea where to find them. To a member of the Greek Lower 99 a Greek Upper One is as good as invisible.

He pays no taxes, lives no place and bears no relationship to his fellow citizens. As the public expects nothing of him, he always meets, and sometimes even exceeds, their expectations. As a result, the chief concern of the ordinary Greek about the rich Greek is that he will cease to pay the occasional visit.

That is the sort of relationship with the Lower 99 we must cultivate if we are to survive. We must inculcate, in ourselves as much as in them, the understanding that our relationship to each other is provisional, almost accidental and their claims on us nonexistent.

As a first, small step we propose to bestow, annually, an award to the Upper One who has best exhibited to the wider population his willingness and ability to have nothing at all to do with them. As the recipient of the first Incline Award — so named for the residents of Incline Village, Nevada, many of whom have bravely fled California state taxes — we propose Jeff Bezos.

His private rocket ship may have exploded before it reached outer space. But before it did, it sent back to Earth the message we hope to convey:

We’re outta here!

(Michael Lewis, most recently author of “Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World,” is a columnist for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)

To contact the writer of this article: Michael Lewis at mlewis1@bloomberg.net.

Sorry but I couldn’t resist!

For example, “In Seattle, prosecutors and supervisors at the city’s electric utility both have formed collective bargaining units in the past year, while in central Minnesota, managers at a regional library system have created its first union of any kind. In Sacramento County, Calif., a group that includes management engineers and lawyers nine months ago voted to become a collective bargaining unit for the first time.”

Let’s see if we can imagine how the bargaining will take place with union member negotiating with union member. Monty Python’s “Life of Brian” comes to mind:

The only redeeming news is that union membership has dropped both in the private and public sectors. As you would expect, though, while the private sector membership in the last decade has dropped by 2% the public sector has dropped by only 1/2%. “The 7.6 million government workers in unions made up more than half of the 14.7 million workers in the U.S. who belonged to a union last year, with the state and local government sectors among the most heavily unionized in the economy.”

Do you think it’s time for the taxpayers to form a union and call a strike!