Last night it was my pleasure to attend a book party at the swanky TAO New York for Maneet Ahuja, the CNBC tyro on whose wonderful new book, The Alpha Masters: Unlocking the Genius of the World’s Top Hedge Funds, I was delighted to contribute my editorial voodoo. What a party! Alan Greenspan! Gillian Tett! David McCormick! Some casually dressed top one percent of the top one percenters! Many financial journalists, all waiting in vain for somebody from the now $2 billion lighter JPMorgan to show up! It was swell. The justly famous Wall Street Maneet kindly mentioned me in her acknowledgements, saying “Your polish on prose is truly a thing of beauty.” Thanks, Maneet; I enjoyed it.

Here is an Iron Law of the modern era: When rich guys talk about freedom, hold on to your wallet. They are almost always talking about ways to make themselves more free to get more money.

Case in point: in an interview with The Guardian on Sunday, Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google, said that the principles of openness and universal access that underpinned the creation of the internet are under threat. “Very powerful forces have lined up against the open internet on all sides and around the world”. Brin says that the threats come from governments increasingly trying to control access and communication by their citizens; the entertainment industry’s attempts to crack down on piracy; and the rise of “restrictive” walled gardens such as Facebook and Apple, which tightly control what software can be released on their platforms.

Brin has accumulated a fortune that Forbes says is worth $18.7 billion, by creating a powerful research tool that has almost achieved monopoly status in its ability to help find information. And what he seems to be objecting to is the ability of others to infringe on his monopoly.

Brin seems most reasonable when he objects to government interference in the ability of its citizens to use the web. Everyone hopes that the efforts of China, Iran, Russia, North Korea and Saudi Arabia soon collapses in failure. But Brin objects not only to traditionally authoritarian states, but also to Great Britain, which plans to monitor social media and web use. The UK is doing this in response to concerns about terrorism and about criminal activity. Now, anyone with half a brain knows that whenever a government monitors its citizens, the government itself has to be watched with a close and skeptical eye. But fighting terrorism, child pornography and cyber-bullying are activities squarely within the legitimate police power of the state. Do we want to stop terrorists from conspiring in restaurants but allow them to plot away in cyberspace? Don’t be daft.

Now look what else Brin objects to: the attempts of entertainment companies to fight piracy. Where is freedom under threat here? I don’t think stopping people from stealing the work of other people is a threat against freedom. It’s a pollution of the language to think otherwise. Brin also objects to the tight control Facebook and Apple exert over their platforms. “There’s a lot to be lost,” he said. “For example, all the information in apps – that data is not crawlable by web crawlers. You can’t search it.” He says that under such rules, he and co-founder Larry Page would not have been able to create Google. “You have to play by their rules, which are really restrictive,” he said. “The kind of environment that we developed Google in, the reason that we were able to develop a search engine, is the web was so open. Once you get too many rules, that will stifle innovation.”

It seems to me that the main reason Brin is objecting to other people protecting their property is that it makes his property less valuable. He says that he’s concerned that having these kinds of regulations will stifle innovation. I’m sure he’s right. Look how locks and safes have stifled growth and innovation in the field of bank robbery.

It was interesting to place Brin’s spirited defense of freedom in light of Google’s announcement last week that it was going to split its stock. It seems that the freedom that Brin so staunchly champions in cyberspace is not something he values as much on such real world places as Wall Street. As Andrew Ross Sorkin reported in The New York Times on Monday (speaking of places that probably wished it could have preserved the value of its intellectual property on the internet), Brin, Page and company chairman Eric Schmidt “cleverly” created the stock split so that Google could issue a special new class of shares to current shareholders. The catch: the new class of shares has no voting rights. “In other words, the entire point of the stock split was to solidify the founders’ control of the company by diminishing the future voting power of the shareholders. So even as the founders continue a plan to sell some of their shares over the next three years through a program they enacted in 2009 and the company continues to issue new shares to employees, they have developed a plan to retain an iron grip over Google.” This decision will be put before shareholders at the company’s annual meeting, but since these three principles own two-thirds of the company, the result is a foregone conclusion: with every new non-voting share they sell, the voting shares they retain will be all the more powerful. “At a time when shareholders are increasingly seeking a bigger voice and more democracy,” says Sorkin, “Google is going the other way.”

It’s not threats to freedom that Brin wants to stop. It’s threats to his power.

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

Like Neptune and Jupiter, there is gaseousness in the atmosphere of the planet Thomas L. Friedman, but we are nonetheless confident that intelligent life resides there. Quite intelligent, in fact; most days we are confident that we’ve learned something from reading Friedman’s columns, which usually deliver a much-needed macro view of America’s position.

Still, there are days when Friedman writes a column that makes you think that instead of making another trip to talk to small businessmen in Bangalore or economic planners in China, he should spend a political season at the knee of the county chairman of a political party or with the chief of staff of some US Senator, and learn something about votes, and how they’re cast and how they’re counted.

In today’s column in The New York Times, Friedman–perhaps seeking inspiration and finding himself sitting on it?–rides in a taxi that hits some potholes outside Union Station, and from there quickly moves to expressing the fond wish that New York City’s mayor Michael Bloomberg commit a selfless act of patriotism and spend tens of millions of dollars running as a third party candidate for president. “This election has to be about those hard choices, smart investments and shared sacrifices — how we set our economy on a clear-cut path of near-term, job-growing improvements in infrastructure and education and on a long-term pathway to serious fiscal, tax and entitlement reform. The next president has to have a mandate to do all of this. But, today, neither party is generating that mandate . . . .That’s why I still believe that the national debate would benefit from the entrance of a substantial independent candidate — like the straight-talking, socially moderate and fiscally conservative Bloomberg — who could challenge, and maybe even improve, both major-party presidential candidates by speaking honestly about what is needed to restore the foundations of America’s global leadership before we implode.”

Bloomberg doesn’t have to win in order to pull off this miracle, says Friedman, “or even stay in the race to the very end. Simply by running, participating in the debates and doing respectably in the polls — 15 to 20 percent — he could change the dynamic of the election.” The other candidates and Congress would gravitate towards him. “And, by taking part in the televised debates, he could impose a dose of reality on the election that would otherwise be missing.”

Here’s a dose of reality: the most likely beneficiary of a Bloomberg Third Party candidacy would be the far right. This is the most retrograde part of the electorate, the group most opposed to tax hikes, but also to the very idea of government with an activist agenda. Bloomberg would take votes away from Obama, and deny him the a portion of the moderate suburban vote that is uncomfortable of not outright alarmed by the right wing having such a big influence over the GOP. Romney’s dilemma right now is that he has to run to the middle to win, and his party isn’t keen to follow. But because Bloomberg is likely to absorb those votes, Romney could win a lot of swing states with around 40% of the vote, which means he wouldn’t have to move much at all. Romney would win, but he wouldn’t have a mandate to enact Bloomberg’s proposals. He wouldn’t have a mandate at all. The right wing would.

Here’s another dose of reality. Thanks to a third party candidate named Ralph Nader, America got the presidency of George W. Bush, ten years of war, mismanagement of the economy, and Supreme Court justices named John Roberts and Samuel Alito.

If Friedman is serious about this new sidelight of being Mike Bloomberg’s career counselor, may I suggest that he urge Bloomie not to spend his money in pyrrhic run for the presidency, and encourage Mike to become an investor. He should invest in the depleted stock of the Republican party in the northeast and Middle Atlantic and midwest and the Pacific coast states, and rebuild it into a going concern. Build a forward-thinking party in those places that will provide an alternative to the far right of the GOP and to the excesses of the Democrats. Create a party that is pro-business (not pro-billionare), pro-growth (not anti-tax), pro-Main Street (not pro-Wall Street), and pro-education and pro-opportunity, but skeptical about big government. It would be a large, inclusive party, with the kind of values Bloomberg at his best articulated during the Islamic Center controversy.

Bloomberg shouldn’t run a campaign in which not only he and his ideas would certainly lose. He should build a party that could actually elect him.

Yesterday on Morning Joe, Joe Scarborough trotted out one his preferred observations. “Americans don’t resent the rich,” he said. “We want to be rich.” He noted that voters had a high regard for the Kennedys and the Roosevelts, who managed to convey a sense of concern for the general good.

I suppose Scarborough is right; we do not resent the rich per se. But we resent a lot of qualities that are associated with the rich. We don’t like snobbery, for example. We don’t like a sense of superiority. Or a sense of entitlement. We don’t like people bucking the line, or favoritism. We don’t like shallowness, and we don’t like self-absorption. In general, we believe that anyone who inherits wealth doesn’t know what life is really like, and that most people who have accumulated vast wealth forgot mostly all of whatever they once knew as fast as they could. We do resent people who can spend money without a second thought; and more, we envy those who can pamper themselves; and most of all, we have contempt for those who waste it. We acknowledge that money can’t buy happiness, but we do believe that having more money would buy us more happiness, and that the rich don’t know what real unhappiness is, because at the bottom, no matter how bad things are, having money gives them options that a lack of money forecloses. We don’t mind being taken advantage of by the rich on any particular deal, for we expect that everyone has his thumb on the scale, and believe that capitalism is a system where goods and services are exchanged in a way that mostly keeps a lid on the gouging; what we resent is lying, dishonesty, theft, and being forced to swallow a bad deal and told we ought to like it. We don’t really like that the exploit workers or rape the planet, but not many of us are willing to do much about it, as long as prices remain cheap on our end.

Some rich we like quite a bit–lotto winners, entertainers, criminals of a certain style, and the unlikely rich, like whoever owns Shamwow. We feel we could be these people. We have a certain tolerance for the discreet rich–the ones who live behind drawn shades in the big house on the hill, or behind the granite facades of the austere apartment buildings on Sutton Place, and who just go about their business without throwing their wealth in our faces. We actually like a very few of these discrete rich, people whom you hear about from time to time who work as librarians or janitors and who save and invest every penny they ever made, and whom you never hear of until they die and bequeath millions to some worthy charity. We like those rich a lot.

I do not think Scarborough is right when he says that we all want to be rich. All of us have a fantasy in which we are rich, and it is not unpleasant. Richness is a condition that we would accept, preferring it to most other conditions. In reality, what most of us want is more. According to a survey I saw a few months ago, most Americans believe they would have their dreams fulfilled with an income of about $150,000 a year.

That is the American Dream, isn’t it? It’s not to be as rich as Mitt Romney. It’s to have a house, a car or two, food on the table, some money for vacations, enough savings for the kids, health care as needed, and enough money for a decent retirement. For what it’s worth, the distance we are from that dream on any given day is equivalent to the amount we resent the rich.

With the premiere of Iron Lady approaching at the end of December, we are certain to be treated to a heavy dose of Margaret Thatcher‘s greatest hits. None will be more pertinent to the issues of this moment that the point she made in her final Question session as prime minister in 1990, shown in the clip above. In the merry, feisty exchange, a Labor MP respectfully asks her if she regrets that disparity between rich and poor widened during her tenure. Thatcher denied the relevance of such statistics, and instead argued that people of all classes had benefited during under her administration. And that, she said, was the difference between her and her opponents in a nutshell: “He would rather the poor were poorer as long as the rich were less rich.”

Well of course this is a false choice: the poor could certainly be less poor without the rich becoming richer, but that is neither here nor there. Thatcher came up with a phrase that has served as the underpinning for at least fifty years of American policy. Ever since that old sailor John F. Kennedy pointed out that a rising tide floats all boats, it has been widely accepted by nearly all Americans that as long as everyone is improving, we can accept wide discrepancies in wealth. As even the great American mafioso Barzini acknowledged in The Godfather, “After all, we are not communists.” Our social contract accepts the reality of the rich, as long as things overall are improving for everyone.

But as Paul Krugman once again points out today in the Times, things really aren’t improving for anyone. He cites a Congressional Budget Office report that showed that between 1979 and 2005, “the inflation-adjusted, after-tax income of Americans in the middle of the income distribution rose 21 percent. The equivalent number for the richest 0.1 percent rose 400 percent. For the most part, these huge gains reflected a dramatic rise in the super-elite’s share of pretax income. But there were also large tax cuts favoring the wealthy. In particular, taxes on capital gains are much lower than they were in 1979 — and the richest one-thousandth of Americans account for half of all income from capital gains.”

In other words, the rising tide has been channeled into the Yacht Club’s marina. The super rich have been getting richer, while almost no one else has enjoyed very much of a gain at all. And much of what the super rich have gained has come through government tax-cutting, which has exacerbated the deficit, which hurts everyone. Far from Thatcher’s trade-off, the rich have grown richer precisely at the expense of the poor and middle classes.

I wonder what the Iron Lady would say about that?

Following Saturday’s “Take a bath and get a job” slam on Occupy Wall Street, Grumpy Old Man Newt Gingrich continued his “Hey You Kids, Get Off My Lawn!” campaign for the presidency yesterday by advocating an end of Child Labor laws. Proving that there is truly nothing sacred in the right’s efforts to roll back the accomplishments of decades of progressive government, Gingrich said to an audience at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government “It is tragic what we do in the poorest neighborhoods, entrapping children in, first of all, child laws, which are truly stupid. Most of these schools ought to get rid of the unionized janitors, have one master janitor and pay local students to take care of the school. The kids would actually do work, they would have cash, they would have pride in the schools, they’d begin the process of rising.”

First question: Has Gingrich ever seen how kids clean?

Second question: Do we really want 14 year old kids cleaning toilets?

Third question: When Gingrich talks about the tragic things we do in the poorest neighborhoods, do “truly stupid” Child Labor laws really top the list of the policies and programs we have promulgated? Are they really ahead of negligence, indifference, hostility and racism?

Fourth question: What’s next–restoration of the work houses?

“You’re going to see from me extraordinarily radical proposals to fundamentally change the culture of poverty in America,” Gingrich added. How much more extraordinary radicalism can we stand? Poor school districts across the country are cutting teachers, cutting labs, cutting books, cutting after-school study sessions, and cutting extra-curricular activities. I guess this radical rollback isn’t enough; this radical disinvestment in the future isn’t enough. Let’s pass out the Lysol. I’m all in favor of young people having jobs, and learning discipline and responsibility, but this proposal is squarely in mold of those middle-class destroying policies that lay off older workers in favor of cheaper youngsters, and lay off American workers in favor of cheaper workers abroad. It’s hard to send janitor jobs off-shore, so let’s end Child Labor regulations, and get minimum-wage teens to haul garbage instead of unionized workers.

Gingrich’s brainstorm is just a new rendition of the same GOP theme: the maximization of profit and its retention by the ownership class, at all costs, is the only thing it stands for.

Today in New Hampshire, presidential candidate, corporate consultant, and Tiffany’s Customer of the Year Newt Gingrich told a group of college students that he would change the social security system to allow them to opt out of the current system, in favor of putting the money into private retirement accounts. Seven years ago, in what may have been the most prescient three minutes of his life, the peerless George Carlin warned us this was coming.

This is a picture of Ray Lewis, a retired Philadelphia Police Department captain, being arrested with other Occupy Wall Street protesters in Zuccotti Park last week. Lewis was carrying signs a pair of signs urging New York City cops to join the protests. “NYPD Don’t Be Wall Street Mercenaries,” one read. Lewis was highly critical of the NYPD’s tactics in the park: “This bullrush–-what happened last night is totally uncalled for,” said Mr. Lewis, who argued that the removal should have been accomplished through negotiation instead of force. “You should, by law, only use force to protect someone’s life or to protect them from being bodily injured, okay? If you’re not protecting somebody’s life or protecting them from bodily injury, there’s no need to use force. And the number one thing that they always have in their favor that they seldom use is negotiation–continue to talk, and talk and talk to people. You have nothing to lose by that.” Lewis dismissed the claims of Mayor Bloomberg that the raid was necessary because the protest encampment carried with it a risk of crime, fire and health hazards. “That’s a farce. They complained about the park being dirty. Here they are worrying about dirty parks when people are starving to death, where people are freezing, where people are sleeping in subways and they’re concerned about a dirty park. That’s obnoxious, it’s arrogant, it’s ignorant, it’s disgusting.” Lewis says that the police should be careful not to get on the wrong side of the protests. “All the cops are, they’re just workers for the one percent and they don’t even realize they’re being exploited,” Mr. Lewis said.

Among the few embarrassing experiences left to a person in his fifties is to be exposed as a naif. Over the years I’ve grown quite complacent, in my aging bourgeois post-9/11 whiteness, to snuggle myself under the warm comforter of a visible police presence. It’s been dismaying and alarming and frightening to see what I had come to be believe were law-enforcement professionals suddenly act like goons in the service of the Banking State. Now is the time to remind ourselves of the terrifying brilliance behind Mayor Richard Daley‘s timeless malapropism: “The police are not here to create disorder, they’re here to preserve disorder.” (Photo, by Randy L. Rasmussen of The Oregonian, showing an Occupy Portland protester the same age as my daughters being pepper-sprayed in the face by a policeman.)

What’s worse–the heavy-handed regimes like Russia, where the president rules like the former head of the KGB that he is, or the apparently democratic regimes where real power stands behind a curtain and whispers its dictates into the ears of the elected government? In an article in the Guardian, George Monbot reports on the Corporation of the City of London, the powerful and unaccountable body over which Parliament has no control. Monbot calls it the “dark heart of Britain, the place where democracy goes to die.”

Monbot tells us that the Corporation is the equivalent of a local council, one of the small units through which local government is administered in the UK. The Corporation is responsible for the area of London known as the Square Mile in which the large banks and financial services companies are based. There are 25 electoral wards in this tiny area, but only in four of them are the 9000 residents of the area allowed to vote; in all the rest, the officials who are elected are chosen by the corporations located there. The Top Man of this Old Boys’ network is the Lord Mayor, invariably a well-heeled insider, who oversees “a vast pool of cash, which it can spend as it wishes.”
As it happens, the Corporation usually wishes to spend that money to lobby on behalf of banks. According to its website, the Corporation “handle[s] issues in Parliament of specific interest to the City”; the job of the Lord Mayor is to “open doors at the highest levels” for business and to “expound the values of liberalisation”–that is, deregulation.

If all this smells fishy, here comes the whale: “The City of London is the only part of Britain over which parliament has no authority,” writes Monbot. “In one respect at least the Corporation acts as the superior body: it imposes on the House of Commons a figure called the remembrancer: an official lobbyist who sits behind the Speaker’s chair and ensures that, whatever our elected representatives might think, the City’s rights and privileges are protected” The result is “a kind of offshore state, a secrecy jurisdiction which controls the network of tax havens housed in the UK’s crown dependencies and overseas territories.” Those within this district then use their position “to launder the ill-gotten cash of oligarchs, kleptocrats, gangsters and drug barons,” depriving “the United Kingdom and other nations of their rightful tax receipts.” This Corporation also allows American banks a way to avoid regulation. “AIG’s wild trading might have taken place in the US, but the unit responsible was regulated in the City. Lehman Brothers couldn’t get legal approval for its off-balance sheet transactions in Wall Street, so it used a London law firm instead.”

Over the years, several governments have tried to reign in the City of London, but none succeeded. As former Labor Prime Minister Clement Attlee said, “Over and over again we have seen that there is in this country another power than that which has its seat at Westminster.”

Right now, Occupy Wall Street-like protestors are camping outside St. Paul’s Cathedral.The Corporation, working with the Church of England, is trying to evict them. The protesters, in turn, have demanded that the Corporation submit to national oversight and control. Look for a showdown on or before November 12th, the date of the Lord Mayor’s Show, which, as the website says, “brings together all the pomp and pageantry the City can muster.” The Show dates to 1215, when King John gave the City a charter which stipulated that the Lord Mayor must swear allegiance to the Sovereign and ‘show’ himself to the people. “If ever there were a pageant that cries out for peaceful protest and dissent,” writes Monbot, “here it is. Expect fireworks.”