Morning Must-Read: “Mitt”, Tom Perkins, The 1%, The 47%, and How Inequality Is Destroying Our Leadership

Here is an interesting post from "The Equitablog".  Please follow link to original.  Read some more of the stuff there. 
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http://equitablegrowth.org/2014/02/04/1881/morning-must-read-mitt-tom-perkins-the-1-the-47-and-how-inequality-is-destroying-our-leadership

Elias Asquith: The 1 percent’s most ruinous sin: How they sap our politicians of all decency:

‘Mitt’, Netflix’s recently released documentary… has, on the whole, been rather well-received…. Not everyone believes that the film succeeds in giving viewers a behind-the-scenes look… but most seem to have found it… a humanizing depiction of a seemingly decent man…. Even if the man in “Mitt” is not so charming and sympathetic a figure as to counterbalance the woeful policies on which he ran, there is the lingering question of why there is such a great distance between Candidate Romney and Mitt Romney. How could the same guy who at one point in the film acknowledges the immense privilege he was born into repeatedly insist, on the campaign trail, that he was a self-made man, a testament to the American meritocracy? How could the guy who infamously sneered that roughly half of the country were irresponsible, entitled, greedy moochers seem, in another context, to be kind, thoughtful, polite and fundamentally well-meaning?

Sure, people are complicated; and yes, the intensity of the politico-media complex often renders us incapable of seeing the men and women on the other side as fully formed human beings until well after the final ballot is counted. That’s all true. But I think there’s another explanation…. While [Tom] Perkins’ ahistorical and narcissistic ramblings were roundly mocked, they also inspired greater interest in discovering whether or not his fellow members of the 1 percent felt the same way he did. As it turns out, many, if not most, of them do. Bloomberg Businessweek’s Joshua Green explained how in the Obama years, ‘a class of financiers whose wealth shields them from the effects of practically any government policy has come to develop… a powerful persecution complex’….
Now, if Perkins and his ilk were as isolated from American society and politics as they feel they are, this kind of ‘frothing paranoia’ would still be annoying and ridiculous, but also fundamentally harmless…. [But] more than a quarter of all the disclosed political donations in the 2012 election (nearly $6 billion) came from a mere 31,385 people. And… these are Tom Perkins’ people…. Imagine spending five hours of every day talking to Tom Perkins and not only having to listen to his nonsense, but do so in such a way that he’ll feel inclined to give you huge amounts of money afterward….
So, getting back to Mitt Romney, keep in mind that during the roughly six years he was running for president — from 2006 to 2012 — Romney was spending an unfathomable amount of his time engaging in the soul-destroying process of pretending to listen, pretending to agree, pretending to care, all in the hopes of securing a big, fat paycheck… and then doing it again, and again, and again.
Think back to the infamous 47 percent video, which was taken during a high-priced Romney fundraiser. Romney’s a Republican, so I don’t doubt that on some fundamental level he believes that what separates Democrats and GOPers is an ethic of responsibility and self-reliance. But at the same time, you can easily imagine that Romney, long numb to the entire process of humoring the wealthy, was acting like any modern politician: telling his audience what it wanted to hear. And his audience wants to hear that they’re true Masters of the Universe, real champions of the meritocracy.
One of the most remarked upon moments in “Mitt” features Josh Romney explaining why “good people” don’t run for office. Referring to the nonstop criticism, scrutiny and abuse a candidate for president must endure, Josh says:

This is why you don’t get good people running for president. What better guy is there than my dad? Is he perfect? Absolutely not. He’s made mistakes. He’s done all sorts of things wrong. But for goodness sakes, here’s a brilliant guy who’s had experience turning things around, which is what we need in this country. I mean, it’s like, this is the guy for the moment. And we’re in this, and you just get beat up constantly.

It’s a common complaint, and people of all stripes tend to enjoy bashing ‘the media’, so it has quite a few adherents. But it’s got the dynamic all wrong. It’s not what happens on the big stage, in front of all the flashing lights and snapping cameras and hovering microphones and outstretched tape recorders, that keeps ‘good people’ from wanting to run. It’s what happens behind the curtain, during those thousands upon thousands of moments spent greasing the Tom Perkinses of this world, that turns a seemingly decent guy like Mitt Romney into that most vacuous and disturbing figure: the presidential nominee…