Confessions of a three dollar donor.

While waiting to get my mind around Vladimir Putin, Bitcoin and High Frequency Trading, I thought I should pass along this contribution from my friend Jay Duret.

Among the categories of wasted cyber ink that I am getting too frequently – really, one would be one too many – are the posts I get from the political people looking for money. I made the mistake – I made the same mistake many times – of donating money to one candidate or another. I am a lawyer; I worked in Government; some friends have run for office; there really was no avoiding it, but in this world no mitzvah goes unpunished.

In fact this punishment is endless, a daily dose of emails that implore and entreat me to fight back and join in and stand firm and show what I stand for (presumably as I am standing firm). I am urged to help take back the House or hold on to the Senate. I am begged to have the back of the President. Barack needs me. And while I might find that hard to accept – I am a helpful person, yes, but he has done pretty well on his own steam - it is harder to discount completely when the message is reinforced by an email from Barack himself! And not one! Many! He sends them all the time. Barack loves to email me, it seems.

There is something frankly weird about getting emails from Barack. I like the man. I voted for him two times. Enthusiastically. I have defended his administration endless times at cocktail parties and dinner table talk-a-thons. But I don’t actually know him. And he couldn’t pick me out from a carload of circus clowns. He certainly has not sought my advice in some of the areas where he could have profited from it. I don’t even have one of those grip and grin photos with him that you can get for the maximum individual donation.

I am not angry about any of that; I don’t see any reason why Barack should be reading my blog (though really, it would be good for him). But then why is he emailing me all the time? It is unsettling. Disconcerting. To see that an email from Barack has arrived. I have no friends named Barack and so I don’t dismiss it on the thought that it is about carpool logistics or a squash match; no, when I get a message from Barack I feel as if I should drop everything: the President is reaching out to me! I am being called on.

But it’s a let down. Every time. He is only asking me to stand firm or take a stand or double down. He asks me to give whatever I can. He asks me to chip in $3, $2 whatever.

I mean, really? The President is asking me to give him three bucks?

I am from the generation, and I have the mindset, that if the President were to ask me to quit my job, move to DC and sleep on a bare mattress for a year to work on a matter of import and do it all for no pay, do it as a volunteer! do it pro bono! – I would be on a flight the next day. What choice would I have? My President has asked me to serve! But an email asking me to “chip in” three bucks? Hmmn, I don’t think so.

Thinking about Barack, I decide to look back and see how frequently he has actually reached out to me. Google of course makes these types of explorations easy and in no time at all I have discovered that Barack has emailed me 22 times since June of 2012. (That isn’t the day that he started to correspond with me; it is roughly when I last had the hard drive on my laptop wiped by some genius at the Apple Store.) If I were to go back further, I am sure that I would have a lot more email from the most powerful man in the world. I can remember specifically that I got an email from Barack the night before his speech in Chicago after he was elected. That was electric. Such a shame that electricity has come to begging for bucks at $3 a pop.

As I look at my Obama emails I discover that Barack appears to have shared my email address with a few of his friends and colleagues. I have emails from Abby Witt, Greg Berlin, Grant Campbell, Brandon English, Devin Driscoll, Michael Bennet, Erin Hannigan, Emmy Ruiz. Jeremy Bird, Ivan Frishberg (really? there is a guy actually called Ivan Frishberg?), Kathy Gasperine, Kaili Lambe, Julianna Smoot, Jordan Kaplan, Jon Carson, Jim Messing, Nico Probst, Neeti Kaur, Mu’Min Najah, Liz Lowery, Lindsay Siler, Sara El-Amine, Sami Rahanim, Rufus Gifford, and Robby Mook. All 25 of those folks sending me the same type of message that Barack has been sending me; all of them asking me to “stand firm” and “chip in” and “do my part”.

I suspect that these are fictitious names, but when I start Googling, they are all out there – all linked in to Linked In, all wikipedia’d up, all on Facebook and Twitter, all apparently actual people, and indeed all pretty damn impressively resumed. Ivan Frishberg is a climate change guy, Sara El-Amine is the National Organizing Director for Organizing for America. The list goes on and on.

I go back to my treasure trove of Obama emails and find it isn’t just Barack and his entourage, There are even more from Barack’s organizations. Organizing for America. Obama for America. Something called the Obama Store. I also find, somewhat to my surprise – that Joe Biden, Michelle Obama and Nancy Pelosi are also counting on me. I know them even less than I know Barack, but like Barack, they are also on a first name basis with me, though each of them refer to me by my formal first name rather than the name (Jay) that people who actually know me tend to use.

If you count all the emails – from Barack, the entourage, the OFA, the other organizations, and the political celebrities – I have gotten an awful lot of emails in the last two years asking me to chip in.  Rather overwhelming that my small dollar contributions to the President have generated this much attention.  Maybe I ought to feel guilty. Maybe I should be chipping in more. But the truth is I don’t feel guilty at all. I feel annoyed. I feel as if there is some fundamental lack of grace in these solicitations. A donation, modest as it may be, ought to buy one some zone of immunity. Maybe not forever. But at least for a while.

I wonder if it is possible to unsubscribe from these emails. At first I didn’t think it was but then I learned the trick. You have to scroll WAY DOWN to the bottom of the email – the key lines are spaced below the bottom of the screen on an iPhone. But if you persist and then look down to the smallest possible typeface, you indeed will find a button that says “click here to unsubscribe”. But this is not like Amazon one-click. Rather clicking unsubscribe takes you to a new page where a video of Michelle Obama starts playing right away, reminding you of the great work done last year, a narrative that doesn’t exactly try to talk you out of unsubscribing, but certainly makes you feel that unsubscribing would be churlish.

The text on the side of the unsubscribe page is more direct. The words read:

"I support the President — I just get too many emails."

That’s what a lot of folks who end up on this page say. 

Having acknowledged your pain, the page goes on and urges you to suck it up – there is an agenda to pursue and if you want the good folks on the Obama team to keep fighting you should stay looped in, but failing that, you should select an option to receive fewer emails, about one a week.  Wow, that puts it into perspective. I think I would be fine with one email a year; limiting it to one a week doesn’t seem like much of a limitation.

I go back to my email history and find that yesterday, March 31, 2014, I received four emails – two from OFA and one each from Obama entourage members Kathy Gasperine and Jon Carson. The day before I had three and the day before two. Wow. That’s a lot of love for three days. I read the eight love letters and found that seven of them asked me to “chip in”. God, they love that line. The only thing new in this batch was that the emails were now asking me for $5, a $2 dollar upsell from the $3 I remembered.

I hovered there on the unsubscribe button. Should I do it? I love Barack. He is my guy. I feel as if my whole identity as a good government, reform, citizen-activist will be somehow destroyed if I click the button. But I did. I unsubscribed. Sorry Barack. I am happy to help, but I just can’t stand this begging.

As soon as I click the button, a new page comes up that confirms that I have been unsubscribed and will be removed from all future mailings. I am about to move on to other business when I notice that there is a big bright red box on the Unsubscribe Confirmation page. And within that box there is a word in all caps:

DONATE. 

I puzzle over it for a minute.

I should have been puzzling over the question of why the web designers thought that one who has been driven to such distraction by the emails that they would navigate themselves to the unsubscribe button would at the same time care to make a parting donation. I mean, seriously, what are they thinking?

But frankly, that thought hardly crossed my mind. What really baffled me was why it said DONATE. Didn’t the designers realize what they wanted to say:

CHIP IN 

How could they be so tone deaf?

                                                    -- Jay Duret

What would Dick Cheney do?

Why, exactly, are we surprised? Up until Russian President Vladimir Putin seized the Crimean peninsula, a large swath of the commentariat seemed to think that such an action in this day and age was unthinkable. Then, when President Obama warned Putin against military intervention, it seemed all but inevitable.

This was not cynicism or defeatism or a reflection on other red lines. Rather, it was the simple realization that there was little to be done to deter a Russian invasion of Ukraine, should Putin choose to do so. Russia has air and ground forces arrayed along the 1,500 mile northern and eastern borders of Ukraine--to say nothing of its Black Sea Fleet birthed at the Ukrainian port of Sebastopol. The question was only whether he would choose to do so.

As Americans, we tend to view world events through rose colored glasses, and so we did as the Ukraine crisis escalated. We cheer on the toppling of autocrats and the birth of nascent democracies, and we frame events through a Manichaean lens of good and evil, of 'good guys' and 'bad guys.'

Our good guy/bad guy rubric is not consistent, however. We support young democracies, until election results don't fit our preferred narrative. We decry brutal, autocratic regimes, but make exceptions for countries with important economic or historical ties. And former enemies can become friends--black hats exchanged for white--when the confluence of democratic change, political alignment and economic interests align.

But if there is has been one immutable adversary over the past century, it is Russia. The Berlin Wall may be no longer, the Soviet Union a relic of the past, but it has been a quarter century since the end of the Cold War and Russia has lost little of its 'evil empire' sheen. We still see ourselves as we did a half a century ago, Rocky and Bullwinkle, fighting for Truth, Justice and the American Way against Boris Badenov, Natasha and the one-eyed Fearless Leader. We are the good guys. They are not.

As the Soviet Union was collapsing, it seemed for a brief moment that a change in that paradigm might be possible. To assuage historical Russian fears of encirclement by the west, President George H. W. Bush promised Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev that the United States would not take advantage of the dismemberment of the Soviet Union to draw former Warsaw Pact nations into the NATO alliance.

Yet, within just a few short years every former Warsaw Pact nations joined NATO. And while that fact was not proof of American perfidy--after all, those countries had ample reason to seek refuge in the west and in NATO--the elder President Bush's assurances were never integrated into American policy. Before long, the policy of containment that George Kennan prescribed to control Soviet expansionism in the 1940s found new life. The encirclement of Russia--in particular the expansion of NATO membership to Ukraine and Georgia--became central tenets of post-Soviet American policy, and for the ascendent Neoconservatives the break-up of the Russian federation was the ultimate stated goal.

Even as American political groups backed reformist parties in Russian elections, Putin emerged as a powerful and popular President of Russia in large measure due to his steadfast opposition to the continuing humiliation of Russia at the hands of American and NATO policies. He worked steadfastly to solidify Russia's security perimeter and to return prestige to the Russian state. Putin's ambitions were not secret, and his hostility to U.S. and European designs on Ukraine was well established.

Events in Georgia in 2008 presaged what was to come in Ukraine. After Georgia elected a pro-western government, Russia intervened militarily--ostensibly to protect the ethnic Russian populations within the Georgian provinces of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Vice President Dick Cheney decried Putin's action, declaring that "Russian aggression must not go unanswered, and that its continuation would have serious consequences for its relations with the United States, as well as the broader international community."

But Putin's actions in Georgia did go unanswered. Russian intervention in Georgia was quick, decisive and brief--and he got away with it. For all the bellicose inclinations of the second Bush administration and the Neocon embrace of Georgia President Mikheil Saakashvili, there was no U.S. or European response of any substance. The international community quickly turned its attention to other matters, and Russia continues to occupy Georgian sovereign soil to this day.

Writing in the Washington Post, Bush administration State Department official Elliot Cohen sums up the widespread critique--from the Republican right to the Washington Post editorial page--of President Obama's performance, "President Obama’s history of issuing warnings and, when they are ignored, moving on smartly to the next topic gave a kind of permission... Absent a severe penalty — one that inflicts pain where Putin can feel it, to include Russia’s economy and his personal wealth and control of that country — the lesson learned will be, “You can get away with it.”

Cohen concludes by demanding tough American, "The world is a darkening place, and the precedents being set are ones that will haunt us for decades to come unless the U.S. administration can act decisively and persistently against Russia." Cohen dismisses the importance of Putin's invasion of Georgia that occurred on his watch, labeling Georgia a country of no consequence that provoked--and therefore implicitly deserved--Russia's ire. The truth is just the opposite, however. Ukraine is of far greater import to Russia strategically, historically and politically. Georgia proved out for Putin the central premise that while U.S. and NATO policy has been and remains to tighten its strategic noose around the Russian heartland, limited actions to control its perimeter would not be met with a significant response.

No one has any illusions that Putin's actions to date in the Crimea can be rolled back by force, or expects to hear a version of President George H. W. Bush's words of warning to Saddam Hussain--"this will not stand, this aggression against Kuwait..."  When Florida Senator and Presidential Aspirant Marco Rubio weighed in the "8 Steps Obama Must Take to Punish Russia," the gap between rhetoric and the facts on the ground only widened. "This is a critical moment in world history," Rubio declared, mirroring Dick Cheney's tone years before. "The credibility of the alliances and security assurances that have preserved the international order is at stake. If Putin’s illegal actions are allowed to stand unpunished, it will usher in a dark and dangerous era in world affairs."

Yet, when faced with an issue of historic consequence, Rubio's eight steps lacked the urgency of his rhetoric: Stronger denunciations. Barring Russia from international organizations. Limiting Russian visas to the U.S. There is no call for the U.S. to match Russia's proposed $15 billion aid package to address Ukraine's massive economic problems--the best we have seen is John McCain's proposal to provide $1 billion in loan guarantees. There is no call to arms, no commitment to building a Ukrainian resistance. No threat of retaliation against the Russian homeland. The closest Rubio comes to urging a show of force was his call to admit Georgia into NATO. But Rubio knows well that admitting Georgia into NATO is infeasible because Russian troops already occupy Georgian soil, a fact that could immediately compel NATO action against Russia in Georgia's defense.

It is all just words. Only the inaction of the Bush administration in 2008 keeps one from wondering wistfully what would Dick Cheney do...

To date, the presumption has been that Putin's objectives will be satisfied with the annexation of the Crimea, and the swiftness of the Russian-Georgia war supports this thesis. But this is a unique moment for Russia to--in its mind--restore the integrity of its borders. One can imagine that Putin must have considered at least four different intervention possibilities. First, seizing Crimea and securing the Black Sea Fleet, as has been accomplished to date, followed by the restoration of the Crimea to Russian sovereignty. Second, moving beyond the Crimea to occupy a swath of eastern and southern Ukraine with majority ethnic Russian populations, under the pretext of providing a land corridor to the Crimean peninsula that the first scenario would lack. Third, seizing all of the majority Russian territory across eastern and southern Ukraine to the Moldovan boarder. And fourth, taking all of Ukraine, and thus fully securing the Russia-Ukraine border, as well as the Russian gas pipelines that traverse central Ukraine, passing through Kiev, to Europe.

Each of these possibilities would entail increasing levels of difficulty, occupying lands with increasingly hostile local populations, and incurring increasing levels of opprobrium from the west. With the first two or three scenarios, Putin can move forward with his proposed referendum to establish de jure support for the de facto partition of the country.

It may seem like we are embarking on a new dark and dangerous era, as Cohen and Rubio suggest. But apparently Dick Cheney saw the onset of that era years ago, under his watch. Perhaps George H. W. Bush had a more subtle grasp of the exigencies of dealing with Russia than Rubio or Dick Cheney. The elder Bush recognized the importance of acknowledging that Russia has its own strategic interests within its region, and that even with the collapse of the Communist regime, it would have the power to assert itself. Unlike Rubio and Cheney, Bush eschewed a Manichean world view, and could accept that other nations have interests and perspectives that are different than ours. Russia, Bush and the Paleoconservatives around him understood, would be less dangerous if it were not backed into a corner.

But that was not the path we chose. Instead, we chose to push Russia to the wall at every opportunity possible, and now we are surprised that it is pushing back. Putin is playing with a strong hand on his home turf. His ultimate intentions in the Ukraine in the current crisis are opaque. But his goals have been know for years.

Putin at the crossroads.

Vladimir Putin and I share a special bond. We both grew up believing that the Ukraine was part of Russia. My father's family was Russian, or so the story went. One parent was from the city of Uman, south of Kiev, and the other from the long-disappeared town of Ivangorod.

When I went to Kiev in 1989 as part of an international finance commission, there was no mention of the Ukraine as the nation-state it would become just two years later. It was still the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, just one of many teetering Soviet Republics being held together by Mikhail Gorbachev's vision of restructuring and openness that might forestall the urge to independence and democracy. But even then it was the Ukraine. Dating back a more than a thousand years to its inception as the Kievan Rus, it remained the integral southern realm of the Russian state.

When we met with an emissary of the Metropolitan (head prelate in charge) of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church--a man with the long black beard and colorful vestments of one's imagination--he said nothing of independence or statehood. Rather, he worked himself up into a full rage as he described the seizure of the land and murder of the clerics of his church by the Uniate Catholics in the western Ukraine. For centuries, the Ukraine was riven by the sectarian tensions between the Orthodox and Catholic branches of Christian faith, and the bordering nations--primarily Catholic Poland and Orthodox Russia--played a tug-of-war for control, as the borders shifted from one century to the next. Now, our host assured us, as Communist control was weakening, the war of ages was ramping back up, and the Orthodox Church was preparing for battle with its Roman antagonists.

Faced with this raging scarlet-faced prelate, I betrayed nothing of my own Russian roots. Even in the wake of the Orange Revolution that came a little more than a decade after our lunch with the Ukrainian Church emissary, both Putin and I remained unconvinced of the independent status of the Ukraine. For me, it remained a question of identity. Russia is a nation with a long history and deep cultural roots. The literature. The poetry. The massive scale of Siberia. The massive suffering of the Gulag. To acknowledge Ukraine as a nation meant that I must recast my own roots from Russian to Ukrainian. 

The challenge for Putin is tougher. He has made clear that his identity is not simply Russian, but Soviet. The collapse of the Soviet Union was, in his terms, the greatest catastrophe of the 20th century. And the center of the Soviet Union was Russia and the Ukraine. Subduing Ukraine's schismatic wars and crushing the aspirations of the Ukrainian peasant farmers (kulaks) was central to the formation of the Soviet empire under Joseph Stalin.

Not to belabor the details, but Simon Sebag Montefiore's biography of Stalin In the Court of the Red Tsar, describes Nikita Krushchev's rise from Ukrainian Communist Party leader to inside member of Stalin's court largely on the basis of his ability to outperform his quotas of Ukrainians killed month after month until the numbers totaled in the hundreds of thousands. This is the history whose loss Putin laments.

The Sochi Olympics that close this week were supposed to mark the culmination of Putin's career. Over the past few months alone, Putin was named the most powerful man in the world by Forbes magazine, he strategically out-maneuvered the Americans in Syria, exposed and thus undermined Saudi threats to fund attacks against the Olympics, and offered refuge to American public enemy number one, Edward Snowden. Last week, Putin stood at the opening ceremony in Sochi in his great coat like a commissar of old on the Kremlin wall. At the apex of his power, he broadcast images of himself as the post-modern Soviet man riding horseback bare chested across the Siberian taiga, dressed in camouflage after slaying a tiger in the wild, and in his martial arts attire after hand to hand combat.

Then it all fell apart. First, the Russian team was humiliated in Olympic Hockey. Then, just as Putin thought things could not get worse, the Ukrainian protests exploded into public view. With Putin's support, Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych plied the Syrian gambit. The regime labeled the protesters terrorists and unleashed the anti-terrorist units of the Ukrainian armed forces. But it was to no avail. The Syrian gambit, it now appears, demands a ruthless absolutism at the top and loyalty across the officer corps that Yanukovych did not possess. Within days, the protesters and the Parliament assumed control, the Orange Revolution constitution was reinstated, and Russia's southern flank lay exposed.

Control over Ukraine has been the cornerstone of Putin's goal of reestablishing the Soviet empire in fact if not in name. Ukraine's departure from the Russian orbit--if not undone by some act of force or diplomatic miracle--looms to undo all that he has accomplished in his decade and a half in power. The looming presence of the Russian military that keeps authoritarian regimes across Russia's near abroad in line will have been shown to be a chimera. Putin's arguments that the opposition in the Ukraine was primarily instigated by the Roman Catholic Church and the American CIA have been rendered quaint. Ukraine, even Putin must be coming to realize, is a real place.

What happens next is unclear. It is easier for me than for Putin. It seems my family was Ukrainian after all, and I will just have to deal with that. I will have to unfriend my former compatriots Anna Ahkmatova and Aleksandr Pushkin. I can continue to embrace Nikolai Gogol. I will remain skeptical of my Grandmother's claim that we were related to Leon Trotsky.

But for Putin, this is a tougher moment, and his options would appear to be limited. Unlike the Russia-Georgia war, there is no standing army against which to fight. Unlike his Chechen wars, Ukraine cannot be brutally subdued outside of public view. Certainly putsch's can still work--the Egyptian military has proven that recently--and a terror campaign against domestic opponents is not out of the question--as Putin has himself supported in Syria. But each of those both demand a ruthless Ukrainian leadership and a supportive Ukrainian military, they cannot simply be imposed from the outside. And then there is Khrushchev's approach, but for all of Putin's posturing, he does not have the will to power of a Stalin or a Khrushchev. 

Putin has the resources in place for a military response. His armies lie across Ukraine's northern border, and his Black Sea Fleet remains berthed in its Ukrainian home port of Sebastopol, on the southern tip of the Crimean peninsula. The annexation of all or part of the Crimea to preserve Russia's naval access to the Bosphorus is not out of the question. Unlike Kaliningrad Oblast, the Russian outpost on the Baltic Sea, separated from the Motherland by Lithuania and Belarus, the Crimea is adjacent to Russia across the Strait of Kerch. But a military assault from the north against the entire Ukraine in the absence of a complicit host government and military is inconceivable.

Putin could choose to adapt to a the reality. He could offer the new Ukrainian government the $15 billion aid offer that he put on the table early on in the crisis to forestall Ukraine's acceptance of the Association Agreement with Europe. This would demonstrate goodwill and further bind Ukraine's economic future to Russia's. 

But that would be a weak response. Losing Ukraine means losing his position as an historical Russian figure. Instead of comparisons to Peter the Great, who expanded the Russian empire into the Ukraine, Putin's place would be alongside Mikhail Gorbachev, an earlier handmaiden of Russian decline and humiliation. To Russian nationalists, it would bring cries of 'who lost Ukraine', and it would send the message across Russia's near abroad that Putin's plans for the reassertion of the Soviet sphere of influence have come crashing back to earth. It would compromise the leadership of authoritarian regimes in each of the lesser states that Putin has wrapped so tightly around Russia's perimeter. Even Russian democrats would be given succor. 

The Sochi Olympic Games were supposed to mark the pinnacle of Putin power and prestige, but instead it may mark the moment of his undoing. Ukraine's success would show Putin's to be a Potemkin regime, with little behind the facade of strategy and power but the machinations and ego of one man.

Putin must have another plan. He must have something more. He must have one more move to change the trajectory of the Ukrainian drama. Because if he doesn't, all that he tried to build will come crashing down, and that will be his legacy. Just one man riding across the taiga, a bare chested leader with no one following behind.

Rage of a privileged class.

Tom Perkins, co-founder of the iconic venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, caused a stir recently with his Wall Street Journal letter "Progressive Kristallnacht Coming?" Perkins fears that recent protests over Google buses in San Francisco and growing resentments around income inequality could ultimately turn to violence against the wealthy.

As protests have grown against the white Google buses plying the streets of the Mission to bring young techies down to the Silicon Valley, it was the Counterforce anarchists breaking Google bus windows that for Perkins evoked images of Kristallnacht. One might have thought that as a long time resident of the area, Perkins would have a greater sense of perspective. Protest--whether about income inequality, bank lending practices, gentrification, LGBT rights, Black Power, immigrant rights, the wearing of animal fur, the list goes on--is deeply rooted in Bay area culture and history. And the periodic involvement of self-styled anarchist groups--be it the Counterforce, Anonymous or the Black Bloc--have periodically elevated the tenor of otherwise peaceful protests, increasing the potential for property damage along the way. Protest happens, and in the worst cases the police show up. Sometimes it leads to greater public attention on important issues. Sometimes it contributes to constructive civic debate.

Perkins was roundly vilified for his use of a Nazi metaphor. We have seen this story before, as when billionaire Steven Schwarzman compared an Obama administration proposal to require financiers like he and Perkins--along with Warren Buffett and Mitt Romney--to pay the same income tax rates as the rest of us to Hitler's invasion of Poland.

The thing about Nazi metaphors is that they end conversations rather than encourage them. Perkins actually had a real point to make. There is real and growing animosity in the Mission, and it should be a cause for concern. Not very long ago, the Google buses were a source of bemusement rather than resentment. They began as a symbol of hip, socially responsible capitalism--a sort of corporate carpooling that takes cars off the road and mitigates the adverse environmental impacts of rapid economic growth in the tech sector. Similarly, the burgeoning techie population in the Mission began as a benign phenomenon, just one more population migration into a city that has long attracted post-college kids, bringing new energy to the city, along with a plethora of new restaurants and cafes.

There is no small irony in the demographics of the street protests. The community of artists, progressives and bohemians who now find themselves being squeezed out by a new, wealthy hipster population themselves arrived in the Mission and the adjacent Noe Valley neighborhood a few decades ago, when they in turn displaced the working class, largely Latino, residents at that time. The gentrifiers are being gentrified.

But it was Perkins words as he walked back from his Nazi allusions that were most illuminating. He is, after all, not Steven Schwarzman. He is not a big Republican contributor. He is not even a billionaire. He is friends with and voted for Jerry Brown, and intends to again "even though he raised my taxes 30%." And he agrees that income inequality is "probably and possibly" the number one challenge facing the nation.

Yet even as he sought to put the controversy behind him, he remained--like Schwarzman--trapped within his own sense of entitlement, of being unfairly victimized by an unappreciative world. He was unable to look at the circumstances and seek to understand how others might experience it. "It’s absurd to demonize the rich for being rich and for doing what the rich do, which is get richer by creating opportunity for others.... Let the rich do what the rich do, which is get richer. But along the way, they bring everybody else with them when the system is working."

Is it really absurd? For many in the American middle class, letting the rich do what the rich do has not been an effective formulation for increasing either economic opportunity or outcomes. The three greatest forces that have undermined middle class incomes over the past several decades have been the advent of free trade, technological change, and financial deregulation. Each of these have created cohorts of winners and losers. Free trade was heavily supported by and benefitted corporate America, which saw increased profitability and capital mobility through outsourcing, and along the way it benefitted the American consumer and lifted millions around the world out of abject poverty. These are good things, but they did not come without a price, and that price was paid by the domestic manufacturing sector and the industrial middle class.

Similarly, technological change has dramatically increased domestic productivity--defined as economic output per hour of labor worked--which has driven corporate profitability to new heights. It has transformed society and created a new class of young, uber-wealthy entrepreneurs. But this increased profitably and labor productivity again did not translate into higher domestic wages, and along the way new technologies destroyed myriad occupations upon which millions derived their living, as technologist Jeron Lanier has observed.

And little needs to be said about the impacts of financial deregulation.

These changes have been largely enabled by federal legislation, supported, if not instigated, by the lobbying and political contributions of those who would benefit. The rich, to use Perkins' formulation. However, it should be noted, particularly in light of the current protests, that the wealth in the tech sector in particular has been the least directly enabled by federal legislation, though the entire online world comprises companies that are effectively free riders on years of federal investment. The core value of Google, Facebook and others lies in their use of user data and user generated content, control over which has been effectively ceded to them voluntarily by users. Thus, the artist in the Mission has been an unwitting co-conspirator in the accumulation of wealth in the tech sector. As Jaron Lanier has observed, this ceding of value is exchange for "free" services has neither a necessary nor preferable outcome for the mass of users of the Web, and it has been a further contributor to the issues of economic stratification underlying the protests in San Francisco.

In that light, is it not reasonable that artists or others living in the Mission might feel some resentment toward the rich? Could they not interpret the past several decades--years of flat real incomes for many cohorts of society--as ones in which the rich continually adjusted the rules to their own benefit, but largely failed, as Perkins suggested, to bring everybody else with them. For those who saw their livelihoods directly undermined by these changes, is resentment not a natural response? Is it reasonable, as Perkins would have it, that instead they reflect equanimously on the larger benefits to the world--and to the rich--of free trade and new technologies, and say to themselves, well, if my livelihood is the price of progress, that is fair enough... I will just have to start over.

Class resentments--I use the term class deliberately as it is the term that Perkins chose to describe the rich--are a problems common to many societies, exacerbated by images of elites using their political and economic power to solidify their advantages. The challenge for democratic societies has always been to build both economic structures that enable people to believe that they or their children will not be shut out of the opportunities that the future may bring, and political institutions that enable conflicts and differences to be addressed, if not resolved.

Increasingly, we are failing on both accounts. Perkins' plea to the artists and anarchists in the Mission that the rich be appreciated, respected and left alone to do their thing stands in stark contrast to a national political climate in which the defaming and demonizing of groups across society has been elevated to an art form. In recent years, teachers, public employees, retirees, union members, immigrants and others have been the target of withering political assault for partisan political purposes. The demonization of bankers and the rich is really just the most recent evolution in a toxic political climate where the notion of respecting and appreciating the diverse roles that different groups play in our national economy and civic life has been ground into the dust. If appreciation and respect is what Perkins wants, he should engage directly with the communities involved rather than complain about the lot of the rich on the pages of the Wall Street Journal. And perhaps he should consider that respect and appreciation are rarely given to those who do not show it to others.

Against that backdrop, the current protests have really been unremarkable. Hopefully, they will lead to real engagement and understanding across groups within the community. Reaching out, rather than lashing out. And Perkins should take comfort from the comment on one anarchist website. Things could be worse: "So, what, the Irish starved because Oliver Cromwell took their land, the Ethiopians are having their land taken away from them now, and all the bloody far left can do is to protest Google Buses."

90% of life is showing up.

As trumpeted across the media, the four day meeting of the Third Plenum of the 18th Central Committee of the Communist Party has ended, and China's leaders announced that among the decisions were an "easing of" its one-child family policy and the abolition of its "re-education through labor" camps. As much as these policy changes are being trumpeted as evidence of how far China has come, they really are a reminder of how far China and its leaders have to go.

In the wake of the shutdown of the federal government last month, Chinese President and Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping took the opportunity to remind the world of the failings of the American political system. Year after year, as China's foreign exchange reserves have piled up, the leaders of the regime have gone to great pains to critique America for its profligacy and political instability, among myriad other failings. China's much heralded rise, and its ambitions to supplant American leadership, reflect not just its growing economic and military power, but the values of frugality, stability and conservatism Chinese leaders eagerly contrast with the chaos and moral decay of the west.

Little is ever said amidst these frequent rebukes of the role that America has played in enabling the resuscitation of the Chinese people, to say nothing of the Chinese Communist Party itself, from the depths of economic calcification reached in the 1970s. Much is made of the success of the market reforms instituted under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping beginning in 1978, and indeed the growth trajectory of China's GDP has been extraordinary. But the success of China's economic transformation could not have happened absent the free trade policies of the United States, and to a lesser extent western Europe, that enabled that growth.

Under American global leadership since the end of World War II, international trade policies have uplifted the Asian continent out of severe poverty. Japan led the way, in the wake of the devastation of WWII, building a manufacturing juggernaut enabled by American business insight and market access. The Japanese model of export driven economic growth and development then became the model for the Asian tiger nations of Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong and South Korea, which like Japan have risen from abject poverty a half-century ago to among the highest levels of per capita income in the world.

That was the American half-century. As we opened our markets, our share of global GDP steadily declined. Our trade policies actively supported the rise of Asia out of poverty and the globalization of our leading corporations. That real middle class incomes stagnated at home should have come as no surprise. It was simple economics.

But the Asian Tigers, and even Japan, were relatively small countries, who as trading partners were able to build their domestic economies around export trade with America without destroying the host upon which they fed. Through that economic period, there were unintended consequences that exacerbated the challenges we now face. The combined reinvestment of Asian nation trade surpluses in US dollars--and the similar practice embraced by OPEC nations selling us oil--led to relative stability in the US dollar and enabled steady increases in US borrowing without the increases in US interest rates or declines the value of dollar assets that would otherwise have undermined Asian growth.

But it was trade in goods and services with China and India, respectively, that ultimately showed the limit of the export driven model, as the damage to the US economy and middle class has now become too extreme to ignore. The challenges we now face--underinvestment in infrastructure, chronic deficit spending, and socially debilitating inequality--have conspired to contribute to the fraught domestic politics that President Xi now trumpets as the rationale for the world to turn to China for future leadership. China's gleaming new cityscapes--and the Chinese dream of Xi's rhetoric--are being built not upon the ingenuity of the Chinese system, but instead upon the hollowing out of the American economy.

The policy changes Xi and his colleagues announced this week only draw attention to the depravity that remains central to the Chinese system. Even as there is a rising wealthy population within the Chinese elite and urban cores, economic growth within China remains dependent upon the Foxconn-style factory model that is one step short of a slave economy. The Communist Party social and economic policies continue to drive Chinese peasants from their land while securing billions of dollars in stolen wealth for Party members. Dissent and banned religious practice remains punishable by prison and the Orwellian "re-education" that is to be moderated, but not eliminated, under recently announced Party reforms.

The Party plans to modify the decades old one-child policy is perhaps the most shocking reminder of the starkly immoral nature of Communist Party control over the most intimate aspects of Chinese personal life. Unauthorized pregnancies continue to be aborted by force up until birth, and children found to have been born in violation of the law remain at risk of being "confiscated" by police. The proposed may relax the rules surrounding who is to be allowed more than one child, but does nothing to curtail this most fundamental power of State control over the population.

This week, the US aircraft carrier George Washington arrived in the Philippines from Hawaii. The stories were so familiar from other disasters in recent years. The helicopters arriving over the horizon, coming to the aid of the population devastated by Typhoon Haiyan needing not just food and water, but the most basic help from building and securing aid distribution capacity, to recovering, identifying and burying the dead. The carrier and accompanying ships brought aid, logistics and people trained and capable of responding to the need on the ground.

Nine years ago, in the days following the 2004 tsunami, it was the US carrier Abraham Lincoln and the Navy hospital ship Mercy that steamed from the Persian Gulf to Banda Aceh, that city on the northern tip of Sumatra that had born the brunt of the tsunami and seen tens of thousands of its residents die. Like Banda Aceh, the Philippines are located close to the Chinese mainland--just 700 miles from Hong Kong--yet once again it was an American flotilla that steamed over 5,000 miles to bring critical aid, while the Chinese sat on their hands.

Last month, President Xi trumpeted China's rising essential role in the region at the Asia-Pacific meetings that President Obama chose not to attend due to turmoil in Washington. Yet just a few weeks later, he was nowhere to be seen as the people of the Philippines faced their crisis. The Chinese government committed just $100,000 to the Philippines relief effort after the typhoon struck.

President Xi has a long way to go to build the credibility of China as a modern state to be looked to by the world for leadership. Just the name of its recent meeting, the Third Plenum of the 18th Central Committee of the Communist Party, is a reminder that while much in the world has changed over the past quarter century--from the fall of the Berlin wall to the Arab spring--China remains a throwback the Cold War era. As much as Xi would like to show the world the face of a man whose time in Iowa left him an admirer of American freedoms, the pronouncements from his first plenum are a stark reminder of the deep corruption and cruelty that lie at the heart of the Chinese system, and of the ghosts of Tiananmen that still haunt the Chinese leadership.

But it is the response to Typhoon Haiyan that has demonstrated how far China has to go before it will be embraced as a global leader. Leadership is not just about words at meetings of world leaders, or reserves held bank vaults, but about conduct in the world. It is not about what you do to build up your own country, but what you do to uplift others. President Xi and his colleagues disappeared this week when their neighbors across the water were crying in pain, and their inaction spoke volumes. Because, at the end of the day, leadership is not about ideology or rhetoric, it is about showing up.

Secrecy and intelligence in a free society.

Twenty years ago, an article entitled Secrecy and Intelligence in a Free Society was written by the Center for the Study of Intelligence that explored the challenges of intelligence and secrecy within a free society. The summation of the CIA document could have been penned this week:

"Free society needs intelligence. It needs secrecy. But there has been a loss of proportion, a loss of confidence and trust, and a lack of understanding on all sides. These must be overcome because the free society needs to make wise use of the capabilities at its command — and I include covert capabilities in this. It is high time that a mending took place."

The article was part of a self-study within the CIA which came twenty years after the Church Commission review of intelligence oversight which was formed in the wake of Watergate-era abuses, and twenty years before our current crisis of intelligence. The The recurring need to review the conduct of intelligence activities speaks to the continuing tension surrounding the role of intelligence and secrecy within our government and society.

Yet the fundamental expectations of Americans are that the nation's intelligence apparatus will continue to be employed effectively to keep Americans safe, whatever scorn and derision may be cast upon those agencies from time to time for whatever abuses of power may occur. This was demonstrated dramatically with the criticism directed toward intelligence services for failing to disrupt the plans of the Tsarnaev brothers whose bombs in Boston were constructed from cookware that can be purchased at Amazon.com and explosive material readily obtainable from fireworks stores and gun shops in many states. 

It has been remarkable to me in recent days to encounter three vastly different reactions to the events and testimony surrounding the National Security Agency disclosures of the range of its electronic eavesdropping activities.

For his part, NSA Director James Clapper has seen little if anything to apologize for in the conduct of the NSA surveillance programs. He has not been insensitive to criticism, but rather confronted clearly the notion that gathering intelligence is the central charge of the NSA and serves an essential purpose: "Leadership intentions is kind of a basic tenet of what we collect and analyze."

The dilemma of intelligence and the perspective of the intelligence operative was dramatically presented in the movie Three Days of the Condor, which presents the dilemma of intelligence gathering impinging on liberty in a free society. At the end of the movie, Robert Redford's character has taken the stance of Edward Snowden, and delivered information on CIA intelligence gathering methods to the New York Times, convinced of the outrage that will ensue. Redford's CIA counterpart challenges his idealistic belief that Americans would readily sacrifice their comfort for their idealism and principles.

"Ask them [the American People] when they're running out [of oil]. When it's cold at home and the engines stop and people who aren't used to hunger ... go hungry! They won't want us to ask [for their permission] ... They'll want us to get it for them."

In contrast to James Clapper's sanguine stance, the NSA's tapping of Angela Merkel's phone sparked the demand by Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Diane Feinstein that the NSA cease the "collection of intelligence on leaders of US allies – including France, Spain, Mexico and Germany." Yet, rhetoric aside, Feinstein's stance, particularly as Senate Intelligence Committee Chair, is untenable. For example, Mexico is certainly an ally, but it is also a country rife with the corruption of public officials. It would be irresponsible for our intelligence services not to assess the extent to which the President of Mexico is being influenced by--to say nothing of personally corrupted by--the leaders of the drug cartels.

It is unarguable, along the same vein, that Saudi Arabia--widely proclaimed to be one of our strongest allies--is responsible for the funding of radical Islamic groups, including many no doubt who are at war with us. Certainly Senator Feinstein is not suggesting that the US intelligence services--particularly the least invasive electronic intelligence programs of the NSA--cease the use of all means available to us to understand the lay of the land in the volatile and evolving Middle East. Or perhaps her stance is that it is OK to surveil the leaders of Arab or Muslim states with whom we are allied, but not European states. And what about Israel, who has famously spied on us? Does our president not want the best possible intelligence to divine which of Benjamin Netanyahu's words are--like Feinstein's--rhetoric to appease a domestic audience and which mark true lines in the sand?

In contrast to Senator Feinstein, whose public comments certainly cannot reflect her stance in the closed confines of the Senate Intelligence Committee, I was surprised this week by the comments of a friend at Google. He suggested that people within Google are just beginning to recover from the realization that the federal government has been using its resources to monitor private Internet communications.

My friend explained the shock on the part of the tech community by suggesting that it would have taken a massive amount of computing power to hack into the encrypted communications backbone, unless it had a backdoor. He readily accepted the notion that the NSA had the computing muscle to do it, and reluctantly acknowledged that as an infrastructure funded early on with military research money, it was not inconceivable that there were backdoors into the system. Backdoors, as one hacker scolded another in the movie WarGames thirty years ago, are not secret.

My friend commented that the disdain within the tech community for government was validated by the HealthCare.gov fiasco, and no doubt that disdain contributed to the shock of learning that the same government that could not launch an effective e-commerce website after three years of planning had nonetheless successfully hacked into areas of the Internet infrastructure presumed to be unassailable. For my friend and his colleagues at Google, it has been a rude awakening. Like the early stages of grief, it is not apparent that people in the tech world have get fathomed the implications of their new understanding of the world around them.

The NSA issue revolves around the nature of secrets, and the security infrastructure that undergirds a free society. The NSA is charged with giving the President of the United States the best possible intelligence, and given that charge it is unlikely to foreswear an effective means of gathering intelligence, absent a clear and compelling--to say nothing of urgent--rationale.

The NSA surveillance activities constitute violations of privacy, not the murder or suborning of foreign leaders, after all. If it meant that the NSA was able to advice President Obama that it believed that Angela Merkel would ultimately support keeping Greece in the Euro, that was worthwhile intelligence that contributed to global economic stability at a fragile time. If it meant that the NSA has been able to suggest that Vladimir Putin would support a middle ground on Syria, or to suggest how far Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is inclined to support Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, so much the better. Perhaps it is even useful if those adversaries are not sure how much we know.

At the end of the day, NSA Director James Clapper's testimony rang true. He appeared to be neither lying nor disingenuous. And for my friend at Google, this has been an awakening. Alone among the three, Senator Feinstein's remarks evinced dissembling and calculating disingenuousness. The film analogy for her, of course, is Claude Raines, in Casablanca. Senator Feinstein, Chair of the United States Senate Intelligence Committee was shocked, shocked to hear what the National Security Agency was doing on behalf of the American people.

The Senator cannot have it both ways. If it is true that she is shocked, and that she believes that the NSA should not be gathering the best intelligence it can about the President of Mexico, then she should resign her position, because it suggests that she is not serious about defending the interests of the nation she is sworn to serve. If, on the other hand, she is not really shocked, but understands that there is a delicate balance--as the CIA study above noted--in managing the role of intelligence services in a free society, then she owes us not her feigned outrage, but her leadership in helping Americans understand that balance.

Through his revelations, Edward Snowden is forcing us to recognize what our intelligence services do on our behalf. This is not a movie with clearly defined good and evil characters, it is the real world and the answers are not simple. Perhaps it is time that we confront it honestly rather than just recoil in horror or feigned outrage. It is our government: We, the people. It is time we owned it and learned how to have a real discussion about the very real issues and choices surrounding secrecy and intelligence in a free society.

The anger of the Al Sa'ud.

There is something oddly satisfying about seeing the Al Sa'ud monarchy of Saudi Arabia throwing an international hissy fit. This story began last week when the Saudi government announced that it was rejecting the seat on the United Nations Security Council. In rejecting the seat—which it was awarded after concerted lobbying by the Saudi’s themselves—the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia lambasted the United Nations, and the Security Council in particular, for its failure to act against the Syrian regime of Bashir al Assad, as well as its failure to address the Israeli-Palestinian issue.

The rejection of the United Nations for failing to match the Kingdom’s longstanding "support of moderation and in support of resolving disputes by peaceful means" and intimations of dissatisfaction with the non-democratic structure of the Security Council was imperious and utterly without irony. The Saudis, after all, are one of the most repressive and feudal ruling elites in the world, who have a long history of covert funding of extremist Islamist terrorist groups across the globe. The rejection that began as a slap at the United Nations evolved in the ensuing days into a barely concealed assault on the foreign policy of the Obama administration. Not since 9/11 have Saudis grabbed the world stage to vent their anger at America with the full throated passion we have seen this week.

Prince Bandar bin Sultan—for many years a running buddy of the Bushes and the newly crowned head of Saudi intelligence—has seen the full betrayal of everything that matters to the Saudis, as the current American administration has repeatedly acted against Saudi wishes. The Saudis have watched as the Obama administration betrayed long-time American ally Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, and then turned its back on General Sisi after his coup against the Muslim Brotherhood. They have watched as Barack Obama vacillated  in his support of Sunni fighters in Syria and then walked away from a military attack on the Assad regime. They are now watching as Barack Obama pursues the possibilities for rapprochement with Iran, in the wake of the election of Hassan Rouhani, an action that would mark a complete and utter betrayal of everything for which the half-century old Saudi-American alliance has stood.

Of course, there never was an alliance between the United States and Saudi Arabia, at least not in the deeper sense of a coalition grounded in the pursuit of common interests. Ours has been a transactional political relationship that produced something that each side needed. We needed a stable and predictable supply of oil and a recycling of petrodollars. They needed the protection of U.S. military power to secure the interests of the Al Sa'ud regime against all enemies, foreign and domestic.

That was the relationship. Other issues—such as U.S. support of Israel and Saudi support of ultra-orthodox Islam—became points of tension along the way, but were never allowed to undermine the central rationale for the relationship.

Since the first oil embargo in 1973, the essential Saudi-American relationship has been predicated on 'you get our oil, we get your military,' as Jimmy Carter created the Rapid Deployment Force—the precursor to CENTCOM—to secure the Saudi oil fields and the Kingdom. Since that time, it has become standard fare to watch American presidents paying obeisance to one Saudi king or another.

It is oil—a geological coincidence—that had bought them everything. But somehow, Prince Bandar seems to have spent too many evenings watching Lawrence of Arabia, which celebrates the emergence of the Saudi nation, and not enough watching Syriana, which portends a post-apocolyptic vision, a world of declining oil reserves where growing rising popular anger turns Islamist terrorism against the Saudi homeland. The past weeks have been a rude introduction to a future of declining influence, where it is a race against time before the Al Sa'ud family century runs its course.

The endgame on Syria took the worst possible turn for the Saudis. The New York Times headline said it all. U.S. and Russia Reach Deal to Destroy Syria’s Chemical Arms. Syria was not at the table, to say nothing of the Saudis. Instead, the old Cold War adversaries sat down and worked things out. It was like the clock had been turned back a hundred years, to the early 20th century, with US Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov playing the roles of the British and French diplomats Sykes and George-Picot, who in 1916 secretly mapped out what would become the boundaries of the modern Middle East after the fall of the Ottoman Empire.

Oddly enough, when Vladimir Putin seized the moment to rebuild Russia's relevance in the world as he helped Barack Obama extract himself from a foreign policy mess of his own making, few back in the Washington, DC really had much to say about it. Unlike every other issue, where the pundits and politicians quickly go to the mattresses, criticism of the President was largely muted, even if it mean ceding some respectability to the ceaselessly self-promoting Russian. The relative quiet surrounding the Syria denouement did not reflect a return to the internationalist notion of decades past that partisan politics "ends at the water's edge," but rather sheer exhaustion and lack of any better ideas.

But it was Putin who really put Bandar in his place. Bandar had been lobbying the Russians for months to cut Assad loose. Last month, Bandar made his final play  as he brandished both the carrot and the stick to induce Putin to turn on Russia's long-time ally. First, as reported in Al-Safir, Bandar offered an alliance between the Saudis and the Russians (not members of OPEC) with the prospect of controlling the world oil markets. Then he offered a barely veiled threat to the security of Russia's 2014 Sochi Olympics. Give me Assad's head on a platter, Bandar proposed, and “I can give you a guarantee to protect the Winter Olympics next year. The Chechen groups that threaten the security of the games are controlled by us.”

For Bandar to sit across from Putin—whom he should have revered as a spymaster of the old school—and believe he could intimidate him was a dramatic misreading of Saudi power. Putin rejected Bandar's entreaties out of hand, and as to the Saudi's threats, Putin—whose career has been defined as much as anything by Russia's Chechen wars—responded, “We know that you have supported the Chechen terrorist groups for a decade. And that support, which you have frankly talked about just now, is completely incompatible with the common objectives of fighting global terrorism."

With a population that is one-sixth Muslim, and a country whose southern borders abut Muslim nations, the Russians are acutely aware of the threat posed to their nation from Muslim extremism. Mistaking a transactional relationship for an alliance, Bandar demonstrated that the Saudis have no common interests with the Russians, but instead confessed to what all presumed to be the case: As the paymasters of Islamic terror networks, the Saudis are the source of the very problems that are of the greatest concern to the Russian national security establishment. Putin's response mirrored the Bush Doctrine of a decade ago: "Any nation that supports terrorism we regard to be as a hostile regime." 

Then, as if the world were piling on just when the Saudis were down, came this week's headline, "U.S. surges past Saudis to become world's top oil supplier." The PIRA Energy Group report pointed to the resulting security of global oil supplies for years to come, a factor that can only undermine Saudi power and leverage.

Even if the Arab Spring has not yet arrived in the Gulf, it is becoming apparent that the Saudi's world is changing. The Saudis and the Gulf monarchies are under increasing pressure, both from increasingly restive populations as well as the consequences of over-leveraging that has left many of those states unable to support their current spending levels at the current market price of oil.

This week, the Al Sa'ud monarchy has seen its world begin to unravel. World leaders are no longer bending to their will. They have seen their long-held grip over American foreign policy in the region weaken. They made their play against the Russians, and Putin did not blink. The Saudis—who are used to dealing from a position of strength and leverage—are now being confronted with their own weakness. And weakness is the trait that the Al Sa'ud despise most of all.   

The long war.

A week after Government reopened, the focus of attention has turned to the war for control over the direction of the Republican Party. Earlier this year, Sarah Palin voiced her grievances with the subordination of true Republican principles by establishment Republicans, and, flashing her inimitable disdain toward the GOP establishment, she suggested it might be time for the Tea Party to split off from the GOP.

For as long as I can remember, the Republican Party has been riven between conservatives and moderates. Growing up in New England, the iconic profile of political courage was not that of the young JFK serving as commander of PT-109, but rather Joseph Nye Welsh standing up to Joe McCarthy during the Army-McCarthy hearings in 1954.

Welsh, a partner at a white shoe Boston law firm, was serving as counsel to the Army when he berated McCarthy for persisting in attacking an associate at his firm. His words--"You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir?"--publicly embarrassed McCarthy, and marked the end of his crusade to expose Communist sympathizers within the State Department and the Army itself. It was not a Democrat who took on McCarthy, but rather a high brow Boston Republican. It was not a cabal of Democrats in the Senate that led the ensuing campaign to censure McCarthy, but rather a small group of Republican Senators, led by Maine's Margaret Chase Smith and Vermont's Ralph Flanders, that brought him down.

Today's simmering civil war within the Republican Party reflects sectarian animosities with deep roots. The image of Joe McCarthy, a Catholic farm boy from the upper mid-west, being humiliated by the Episcopalian, Phi Beta Kappa, Harvard lawyer is an enduring one that reflects the historic animosities between Main Street and Wall Street Republicanism. For many on the right in the GOP today, Welsh is no hero. It is McCarthy who is owed an apology, whose reputation in history has been been treated indecently. Evidence uncovered in the Kremlin archives, they argue, has proven the bulk of McCarthy's claims to be accurate. The State Department was in fact riddled with Soviet agents of influence. At best, in their view, McCarthy's tactics were ill-conceived. At worst, he was an American hero pilloried by the liberal left, but ultimately betrayed by moderates in his own party.

The demise of McCarthy at the hands of Republican moderates was just one moment in a recurring history of internecine warfare. Ten years after McCarthy's humiliation, the conservative wing of the party would find vindication with the victory of Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater over New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller. Notably, it was in response to Rockefeller's speech at the Republican National Convention accusing Goldwater of being an extremist--rather than against some Democrat attacks--that Goldwater uttered his famous words, "I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue."

Goldwater's words would become the defining defense of conservative Republicanism, just as the ensuing decades of success by conservatives in dominating the Republican Party politics and moving the GOP to the right ultimately began with the Goldwater campaign.

Growing up in famously Democratic Massachusetts, voters as often as not turned to Republicans for steady, mature leadership. John Volpe, Frank Sargent and Bill Weld--and later Mitt Romney--were moderate Republicans who became successful Governors of that deep blue state. Liberal Democratic Massachusetts--the world of academia and the professional classes--was a side show in Boston. Once you got past the liberal bastions of Cambridge, Newton and Brookline, the Democratic Party in Massachusetts was the captive domain of Billy Bulger--the powerful brother of recently convicted mobster Whitey Bulger--who as State Senate President dominated Massachusetts' well-honed patronage machine. It was the party of Billy Bulger and Joe Kennedy, the party of ethnic passions and Kennedy money. It was against that background that the Republican Party was rewarded for being the party of prudence and reason, and entrusted with the responsibilities of governing. "If you were not a Democrat in your 20's, you had no heart. If you were not a Republican in your 40's, you had no brain," the saying went. Republicans were supposed to be the grown-ups.

Sarah Palin--and her Tea Party compatriots--inherited a different Republican Party, one that was profoundly changed by Nixon's Southern Strategy that leveraged the passions of the Goldwater faction with the new realities on the ground that grew out of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The modern GOP has been more overtly divided between the northeastern elites that date back to the founding of the GOP, and its increasingly southern and western base. No events up until the formation of the Tea Party highlighted the regional and class resentments within the GOP more than Patrick Buchanan's presidential campaigns of "peasants with pitchforks" challenging the incumbent George H.W. Bush in 1992 and Bob Dole four years later. As Buchanan said at the time, "If the country wants to go in a liberal direction... it doesn't bother me as long as I've made the best case I can. What I can't stand are the back-room deals. They're all in on it, the insider game, the establishment game--this is what we're running against."

Only time will tell if the events of the past week rise to the historic significance of the McCarthy-Welsh standoff or the 1964 convention. But the capitulation of Ted Cruz and House Republicans in the recent debt ceiling battle is already being viewed in the eyes of Cruz and his supporters less as a defeat at the hands of President Obama and Senate Democrats than a product of abject betrayal from within the Republican ranks.

And this is an honest portrayal. Ted Cruz and his followers in the House indeed had victory within their grasp--many of them salivated at the prospect of going over the cliff--before they prostrated themselves before Mitch McConnell and other Senate Republicans, who, in the name of bipartisanship, yielded to the unholy alliance of Wall Street elites and Republican elders. The humiliation was complete, as summed up in the New York Times headline: At 11th Hour, G.O.P. Blinks in Standoff.

The battle within Republican ranks will only intensify in the weeks and months ahead. While the conventional wisdom is that Ted Cruz is leading the GOP down a path toward electoral suicide, conservative loyalists within the party reject that formulation. They argue instead that theirs is the only strategy that offers the GOP a path to success. Bipartisanship--the mantra of party leaders who have been vocal in berating Cruz and his followers--is itself what must be resisted. Bipartisanship--as FreedomWorks co-founder and former Republican Majority Leader Dick Armey famously said--is another name for date rape.

Conservative Republicans--harkening back to the Goldwater campaign--make the simple argument that the most committed wins. Goldwater might have lost--and lost badly--but that loss laid the groundwork for the decades of success that followed. Grover Norquist, founder of Americans for Tax Reform, solidified the modern Republican Party electoral strategy around a coalition of single issue, litmus test voting groups--non-negotiable pro-gun, anti-tax, pro-life, home-schoolers, property tax rights and other principles--that produced conservative success for decades.

For moderate Republicans, the absolutism inherent in Norquist's formulation is anathema to the notion of politics as the art of the possible, the politics that have enabled Republicans to win and govern successfully in blue states from Massachusetts to California. But conservatives push back and argue instead that GOP success at the national level over the four decades since Lyndon Johnson's second term in office was built around the strength of those convictions. Other than the loss to Jimmy Carter in the wake of the Watergate scandal, they argue, the Republican Party did not lose a straight up election to the Democrats for forty years from 1968 to 2008. Conservatives attribute Bill Clinton's victory in 1992 to Ross Perot taking 19% of the vote--largely from the Republican column--as Clinton beat Bush 43-38%.

While Republican strategists looking at demographic changes argue that it is imperative to broaden the GOP coalition from its aging, white base, conservatives are loath to abandon the absolutism of the Norquist strategy that has served the GOP well. People of faith within the GOP coalition point to New Jersey Governor Chris Christie's overwhelming popularity as a pro-life Republican governor of a traditionally blue state as evidence that there is no need to give ground on their core values. Similarly, second amendment voters point to the rapid fading of the gun issue nationally, even in the wake of repeated tragic events. They argue not only that ceding the gun issue is not critical to electoral success at that national level, but that to do so would cost the GOP the proven passions of the pro-gun voters.

Establishment Republicans and traditional large contributors who are urging the GOP to turn back from the trail that Ted Cruz is blazing, will be hard pressed to counter the passion and energy that the debt ceiling battle has unleashed. The argument that moderation is important to winning back public support that has turned against the GOP will once again be countered by those on the right who will argue that on election day, it is passion and core principles that brings out voters. The animosities voiced by Ted Cruz and his followers toward establishment Republicans mirror similar grievances dating back decades. They believe that they have been wronged by the establishment urge to bipartisanship and they will be loath to let it happen again.

Faced with the logic of the world according to Ted Cruz, a friend who is a national GOP strategist suggested that it was the Democrats who would ultimately benefit in elections to come from the rise of Ted Cruz. "My humble opinion is that they over estimate the Tea Party / social conservative base. Watch the Texas Governor's race. The Dem's will win... So called moderates will vote the Dem's in... Cruz strategy hurts Republicans in the long term. Hope you are well."

Uneasy lies the head.

At the end of 2012, after he had been safely ensconced in the White House for another four years, President Obama had a chance to put all of the budget wrangling to bed, for good. The Bush-era tax cuts--passed as the Republican solution to the accumulating surpluses beginning in the last years of the Clinton presidency--were set to expire at the end of 2012, and the President had a choice to make. He could make a budget deal with Congress to extend some or all of the tax cuts, or he could do nothing.

For a decade, it had been a Democrat mantra that the Bush tax cuts were the cause of our fiscal imbalances, and that they should be repealed at best, or allowed to expire, at worst. As President, Barack Obama had repeatedly talked about the need for more revenue. But, at the end of the day, even with his reelection behind him, he was not prepared to seize the moment. He was not prepared to allow tax rates to go up on the middle class, even if only to the levels in place at the end of the Clinton presidency. Thus, the moment was lost and the surge in federal debt continued.

Today, such a moment has been reached for Senator Ted Cruz. Newly arrived in the Senate, Cruz emerged as the majordomo of the House Tea Party Republicans who have chosen to use their leverage over the funding of the government and raising of the debt ceiling to win concessions on spending and the implementation of the Affordable Care Act. Like President Obama, Ted Cruz has the opportunity of a lifetime to change the course of American history, simply by convincing his minions in the House of Representatives to do nothing. Just as by doing nothing late last year, President Obama had the opportunity to resolve decades of partisan wrangling over deficits, so too Ted Cruz can achieve the equivalent of the Tea Party holy grail of a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution if he has the nerve to stand his ground.

In the last iteration of the debt ceiling negotiations, in 2011, the resolution included the requirement that there be a Congressional vote on a balanced budget to the Constitution. Of course, such a vote required a two-thirds majority prior to even being considered by the states, and, as such, was a non-starter. But a balanced budget amendment remains the sine qua non of the libertarian and Tea Party world views, and now Ted Cruz has it within his grasp.

Ted Cruz may have felt heat before, somewhere in his life, but it is nothing like the pressure he will come under in the next 48 hours. For almost a week now, John Boehner and the House suicide caucus have faded from the front pages, and Cruz himself has been the target of unrelenting ire within the Republican establishment. DC elders, having failed to make progress in the House, turned to their attention to putting together a deal in the Senate, in the hope that at the last minute, faced with the fate of the world hanging in the balance, Ted Cruz and the radicals in the House would fold.

Karl Marx famously observed that historical personages and events appear twice, the first time as tragedy and the second time as farce. And thus it appears to be with these debt ceiling events, as this one has devolved into one more media extravaganza. Two years ago, world markets took the notion of an American default quite seriously. The Dow dropped over 16% as that prolonged negotiation dragged on, and bond market volatility was pronounced. Not so this time. With 48 hours to go before the apocalypse descends upon us--with dire predictions of rising Treasury bond yields and plummeting stocks--markets remain largely unaffected. The Dow is down less than 1% over the past month, and benchmark Treasury bond yields are lower now than one month ago. Investors, it seems, no longer take Washington predictions of doom too seriously.

There are two pivotal insights here. First, the bond markets appear to have internalized the simple truth that there will be no payment default on any U.S. Treasury obligations, come what may. When any Treasury securities come due--obligations that bear the full faith and credit of the United States of America--and are presented to the Federal Reserve Bank for payment--the same Federal Reserve that creates $85 billion each month out of whole cloth in its quantitative easing program--they will be paid. There are no effective constraints to such payments by the Fed, and to not pay maturing Treasury securities when due would violate the 14th Amendment to the Constitution.  

Second, from a bond market perspective--and given the fallacy of the potential for a payment default--all of the institutional pressures from the fiscal negotiations point to downward pressures on deficits, one way or the other. Therefore, the future looms to be one of reduced borrowing, reduced debt, and, the ravings of the anti-fed faction in the Cruz caucus notwithstanding, low inflation. All of those factors translate into lower bond interest rates, not higher ones. For now, with the global depression continuing to haunt Europe and Japan, or the Chinese yuan as little more than a proto-currency, investors have nowhere to go but the dollar.

Goldman Sachs has estimated that a failure to raise the debt ceiling would cause a 4.2% pullback in economic activity, thus the real consequence of a failure to raise the debt ceiling will be to throw the U.S. economy into recession. Goldman's report suggests that this, rather than any cash default, would be the material consequence of non-action by Congress.

This is the endgame that Ted Cruz is playing with. It is the path of least resistance to achieve the effective equivalent of a balanced budget amendment. But unlike the passage of a balanced budget amendment, there would be no phase in or time to prepare. Instead, if funding is curtailed effective this Friday morning, the impact will be harsh and it will be immediate.

The media consensus is that the Republican Party is the loser as a result of the ill-conceived strategy thrust upon them by Ted Cruz, and that Republicans must ultimately come crawling back to the President and the Democrats, take their medicine, and forsake their goals. But Ted Cruz does not have to play it that way. His is a high stakes game for the nation, as well as for Cruz himself. If he folds his cards now, just as victory lies within his grasp, the Tea Party movement will have been stripped bare and left with nothing but the continuing antics and buffoonery of their clown princess Sarah Palin, with Cruz relegated to the shadows. Instead of the resentments of his peers in the Senate, it will be the Tea Party base that will turn on Cruz for his weakness, and thus dash his own political ambitions.

But if Cruz confounds the odds and plays his ace card, he will cast the nation into an uncharted economic abyss. There is a reason that balanced budgets have not been achieved through the normal appropriation process: everyone, on both sides of the aisle, likes to spend money and bring home the bacon for their constituents. Members of Congress may like the Ryan budget in theory--for all his rhetoric, Ryan never specifies what he would cut to bring spending down to 19-20% of GDP--but in practice no one wants to cut anything that benefits their constituents or their contributors.

That is the outcome that could transform the nation, and its budget debates, as Cruz's most loyal Tea Party acolytes would learn the hard way that their Medicare and veterans benefits, and the other programs upon which they rely, are all the stuff of government. With tax receipts only covering 81% of mandatory and discretionary spending, everything would be cut back significantly. Ted Cruz will have delivered the holy grail to his followers, but in the face of the turmoil that ensues, he may find little he garners little gratitude or praise in its wake.

Peas in a pod.

They despise each other, call each other terrorists and gangsters. They cannot imagine ways in which they are similar. They occupy opposite ends of the political spectrum. They each believe that they stand for essential higher values that much of the public chooses to ignore at their peril. They believe their actions, as much as they might engender public resentments, are in service of long-term goals critical to the well-being of their supporters and, ultimately, the public at large.

And in service of those values, they are willing to exercise the greatest leverage they have, at the point in time when the impact of that leverage is greatest, to accomplish goals that have proven to be out of their reach through the normal workings of government.

In a nutshell, they disdain the regular order of things and the workings of government when it does not produce the outcomes that they desire. And to them, those outcomes warrant wreaking havoc on the larger economy if need be.

The Tea Party caucus in Washington, meet the Service Employees International and the Amalgamated Transit Unions that represent the BART transit system employees in San Francisco. While the Tea Party caucus continues to keep the federal government shut down and world markets in an increasing state of anxiety, the BART unions have proven that they are willing to shut down the San Francisco area economy if their demands are not met, regardless of the harm inflected on hundreds of thousands of people across the region. In what has traditionally been a union town, more than three quarters of the public are opposed to the proposed labor action by BART workers in a recent poll, most of them strongly opposed.

The Tea Party, of course, has been front and center in the movement to undermine the power of public sector unions exactly because of the leverage unions have been able to exert--through the ability to strike and elect political supporters to public office--to achieve their goals. And to be sure, the ability of public sector unions to strike has been one of four significant sources of fiscal instability undermining the finances of local governments across the country. The other three: public financing of political campaigns that contributes to corruption deeply embedded in our democracy, financial derivatives that place great risk on public sector balance sheets, and the mobility of capital that has drained urban economies of their middle class job base.

The problem of public pensions is directly related to these four factors. Public pensions themselves are not the problem, but rather an evolving underlying economy that has undermined the assumptions upon which those pensions were based. A bit over a decade ago, public sector pensions were largely fully funded, and the projected investment return assumptions appeared reasonable. The structure of those pensions did not change. What changed was the validity of the underlying economic assumptions, and the impact on local economies of the combined forces of globalization and technology.

Ultimately, the challenge to BART workers is that the median middle class incomes of taxpayers and transit riders who ultimately fund their wages and benefits have stagnated over the past decade. As such, BART workers are not simply asking for a fair share for themselves, but to improve their economic position relative to the commuting public that they serve. As such, fact finding and arbitration--the traditional means of resolving labor disputes--would be unlikely to achieve union demands. Arguments about the 1% and income inequality have little salience in a situation where the funding is derived from the BART riding public and local sales taxes. Larry Ellison does not ride BART, and even Google employees have their own bus system.

Like the Tea Party, BART workers have the strong support of barely one-quarter of the population. Yet, there is little doubt that those that support the goals and tactics of the BART unions particularly revile the Tea Party, and would be loath to acknowledge those things that they have in common. Both the Tea Party and Bart unions are attempting to use the threat of massive economic dislocations to achieve outcomes that they have otherwise been unable to achieve. And both find themselves confronting a public that finds economic blackmail to be an unacceptable strategy for the pursuit of parochial political and economic interests, and as such risk long-term public opprobrium that may undermine any near term gains they believe they can achieve.

The Taker Caucus

As a child of a family therapist, I have been trained from my formative years to look at events through the lens of family history. My grandparents included a Goldwater Republican from Chicago, a Nixon Republican from Montgomery, Alabama, and two Humphrey Democrats from Kiev. Thus, I am the picture of a modern Californian: part fiscal conservative, part social liberal, half immigrant. One documented, one not.

As a Californian, I am proud of my state's embrace of immigrants. They come from other states and other countries to imagine new technologies and build a future that exists only in their imagination. And they come from other countries with a willingness to work hard and a determined faith that their family's future will only be constrained by their own energy and imagination.

From a Tea Party perspective, no doubt, the world that I embrace is emblematic of all they disdain. Social insurance reforms were implemented here years ago. Immigration reform pushes the boundaries of what is permissible within a federal context. The simple fact is that the work and energy here is driven by the young and the newly arrived. Industries from tech to Hollywood to aerospace are enabled by the qualities and motivations of the labor force, educational institutions and financial infrastructure. In this context, enforcing health insecurity as the grounding of personal freedom seems at best quaint, at worst cruel.

The Tea Party has all the elements of revanchist denial of the world as it is. Rick Santelli's original rant on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange that is credited with being the founding moment of the movement was itself steeped in the ironies and rhetorical manipulations that have defined the Tea Party. After all, Santelli stood before an audience of commodity traders on a cable network that caters to the financial markets and decried the behavior of "losers" who took on the no down payment mortgages and liar loans on offer from Wall Street. Santelli's rant justified the now deeply rooted denial across the entire industry of bankers and traders that they in any way contributed to the $24 trillion of losses across the national economy that the Dallas Fed has traced to the 2008 financial crisis. In the half decade since Santelli laid down the emotional foundation for the Tea Party, those traders and others have been made fully whole by TARP and other legislation, and Fed policies have restored upwards of $4 trillion to the balance sheets of the rescued Wall Street banks--funds that were effectively stolen from the accounts of retirees, pension funds and other savers across the economy. Yet, to this day, there has not been even a whisper of gratitude from Wall Street to the nation that paid the price for the arrogance and excesses of the financial sector.

The famous plea at an early Sarah Palin rally to "not let the Government get its hands on our Medicare" became the second foundational rhetorical manipulation of the Tea Party movement. Like Santelli's rant, this plea to protect the common folk from the predations of government harkened back to the anti-government language that served Ronald Reagan to such great effect. But if one can debate the complex roots of the financial collapse, the fact of Medicare as a government program is unarguable.

Suzanne Mettler, of Cornell University, has documented the extent of public attitudes denying their own use of government programs. Her data suggesting that 40% of Medicare users deny that they have used a social program is fundamental to the challenges underlying the divide in Washington today. If Reagan helped through his rhetoric to harden anti-government attitudes across a broad section of the American public, the process of cognitive dissonance--or simple denial--has now resulted in people who instinctively hate government apparently concluding that anything on which they depend must not be government. Thus, a large share of Medicare beneficiaries deny that they benefit from any government program, just as our leading bankers continue to deny that they are beneficiaries of public largesse.

As a Californian, I hear the continued slights of the Golden State's slide into fiscal irrectitude. Even as Jerry Brown has demonstrated what a principled elder statesman can accomplish, he is criticized for relying on a mix of tax increases and spending cuts to tackle the State's serious fiscal challenges. But the slings and arrows from the conservative right are a bit hard to take. In particular, it is hard to abide the pious words of supply side guru Art Laffer and former Club for Growth President Stephen Moore who, in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, extolled the policy paths of those states--largely those of the old Confederacy--who, in contrast to California, are eliminating their income taxes and pursuing supply side policies.

How easy it is to be one of those states that Laffer and Moore praise. How easy is the rhetoric of the Tea Party members of Congress who have brought the nation's business to a halt with their demands to end the binging on public money, the profligacy that is undermining our moral character and financial stability. With a rhetorical slight of hand that harkens back to Ronald Reagan's folksy indictments of welfare queens and food stamps, one Tea Party member of Congress after another repeats the calumnies against all those who would deny them the power they crave but have been unable to achieve through the regular order of things.

It is the rhetoric manipulations that are so galling. The arrogant claims to fiscal rectitude of the Tea Party bely the underlying realities. They are not the makers of their own imagination, but are rather in large numbers the takers that they have been so quick to disdain. Their members are older and more dependent on Medicare than the rest of the population. They might prefer to imagine that Medicare is not a government program, but it is, and this year its share of the federal budget will surpass Defense to become the largest area of expenditure after Social Security. They might imagine that what they are taking out of it is only what they put in over their in the workforce, but that is a far cry from the truth. The average Medicare recipient now takes out ten times what they paid in.

Medicare is a general welfare program. Say it slowly. And repeat.

But it is more than that. Too many of those Tea Party pols that quote shibboleths from the founders to somehow justify their own anti-democratic conduct, and who decry debt and profligacy, come from states that take more from the public trough than they put in. This is the essential problem with the Laffer/Moore hypothesis: The states do not stand alone. There are, in the Tea Party terms, makers and there are takers, and the flow of federal dollars dwarf the local dollars.

Here are some data points: Consider a cohort of Red states whose Tea Party members have been so quick to disdain the rest of us. Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, South Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee and Kentucky. Each of those states voted Republican in each of the past three presidential cycles, except for Virginia. And take a cohort of Blue states who in Tea Party eyes are the epitome of Liberal corruption, of all that troubles our nation--California, Massachusetts, New York, Connecticut and New Jersey--each of which voted Democrat over those same years, to confirm their lascivious nature.

Citizens in those Red states earn on average $24,000 per year, and taxes paid from those states to the federal government total just over $6,000 per capita. In contrast, citizens in the Blue states earn an average of $33,000, and the taxes paid per capita are a bit over $12,000. The Blue states are wealthier, and they provide more revenues to the Federal Government. No surprise there.

But due to our Constitutional framework, smaller states are better represented in Congress. 1.2 times better in this case. The Red states cohort here has one member of Congress per 556,000 people, while the Blue states have one per 651,000. The consequence of this over-representation often gets lost in the arrogance of the Red state hubris: They take back more than they give, and have succeeded in assuring that a disproportionate share of federal dollars flow back to their states to subsidize their economies and standards of living. While Red states pay in $6,000 per person, they get back $11,000 per person. In contrast, those Blue states pay in $12,000, but get back just two thirds of what they contribute, or just over $8,000.

There is nothing new in this. Literally dating back to Reconstruction, the federal dollars has invested disproportionate sums to build up the economy of the south. Military bases, waterways, electrification, hospitals, the list goes on. The bottom line is that today this cohort of Red states gets back over $4,000 per person more that they pay in, almost exactly the reverse of this group of Blue states, which contribute $4,000 more per capital than they get back. Those Red state residents are not just getting all of their federal dollars back, but a bonus equal to 20% of their per capita income. Courtesy of the Blue states. Courtesy of the Constitutionally defined power structure. And courtesy of the regular order of budget decision-making over the years that has, and continues, to pour money into smaller and rural communities.

This data set is not an aberration. Of the 20 states that take substantially more than they contribute, 14 voted Republican Bush/McCain/Romney. In contrast, of the 16 states that contribute materially more than they get back, only three--Texas, Nebraska and Arkansas--are red states, while 10 are deep blue.

I happen to believe that we do have a debt problem to attend to, and that entitlement spending is slowly usurping the capacity of the federal government to invest in needed areas. But it gets old listening to the same old rhetoric--from bankers whose industry has sapped the nation and retirees who prefer not to believe that they are beholden to the rest of us--about how everyone else is the problem.

From a Californian perspective, these numbers are stark. After all, that money that we send back--that primarily ends up subsidizing the economies of Red states--comes at a price: It increases the amount we must tax ourselves. You have to admire the brilliance of those anti-tax, small state Republicans. In a quite literal sense, when Californians approved an increase in income tax rates this past election day, we were agreeing to tax ourselves so that we could continue to send money to those states of the old Confederacy. This continuing flow of outside tax dollars from other states then allows politicians in those states to cut their tax rates on their own citizens and trumpet their anti-tax bona fides.

And this is celebrated on the pages of the Wall Street Journal as inspired public policy.

If the Tea Party Republicans want to radically reduce spending, how about a simple new rule that says that no state will receive back more money from the federal government than it pays in. That way, the excess tax receipts coming from those Blue states can be used to pay down the deficit, and those Red states can learn to walk the walk for a while and get along on their own without our money. A little fiscal rectitude is good for the soul. Jerry Brown tells us so frequently.

But if the Tea Party shuns this suggestion, I would suggest we give the Suicide Caucus a more apt name. The Taker Caucus. They are taking money from the rest of us, and rather than showing the least bit of humility or gratitude, they have make clear their intention to destroy the regular order of the democracy of which they are supposed to be a part, and from which they have taken so much, for so many years.

The discourtesy and ingratitude of too many of the Tea Party caucus is shameful. At our family gatherings, my Republican grandparents could not have had less in common with the Russian immigrants who sat across the table. As hard as they might try, they could never really understood each other. Their worlds were just too far apart. But they knew that their lives and futures would be forever intertwined, and based on that alone they built a foundation of respect and mutual appreciation. And that is how it should be in our politics. Our collective future depends on it.