Main points:

How, one must ask, has a party with such objectives successfully gained power?

The first approach is to find intellectuals who argue that everybody will benefit from policies ostensibly benefiting so few. Supply-side economics, with its narrow focus on tax cuts, has been the main theory employed, because it directly justifies tax cuts for the very wealthy. But it is untrue that the tax cuts of the Reagan era unleashed an upsurge in trend US economic growth. Since the economy is now nearing full employment, the benefits of fiscal stimulus would be especially small.

The second approach is to abuse the law. One way has been to give wealth the overriding role in politics it holds today. Another is to suppress the votes of people likely to vote against plutocratic interests, or even disenfranchise them.

The third approach is to foment cultural and ethnic splits. This is sometimes described as the “Southern strategy”, which shifted the old South from the Democrats to the Republicans, after the former enacted civil rights. Yet this is too limited a view of the strategy. More interesting is the echo of the antebellum South itself. The pre-civil war South was extremely unequal, not just in the population as a whole, which included the slaves, but even among free whites. A standard measure of inequality jumped by 70 per cent among whites between 1774 and 1860. As the academics Peter Lindert and Jeffrey Williamson note, “Any historian looking for the rise of a poor white underclass in the Old South will find it in this evidence.” The 1860 census also shows that the median wealth of the richest 1 per cent of Southerners was more than three times that of the richest 1 per cent of Northerners. Yet the South was also far less dynamic.

The results say a lot about our political divisions.

By John Bargh @ WashingtonPost.com, Nov. 22

[....] Conservatives, it turns out, react more strongly to physical threat than liberals do. In fact, their greater concern with physical safety seems to be determined early in life: In one University of California study, the more fear a 4-year-old showed in a laboratory situation, the more conservative his or her political attitudes were found to be 20 years later. Brain imaging studies have even shown that the fear center of the brain, the amygdala, is actually larger in conservatives than in liberals. And many other laboratory studies have found that when adult liberals experienced physical threat, their political and social attitudes became more conservative (temporarily, of course). But no one had ever turned conservatives into liberals.

Until we did [....]

"I suppose it's worth the hundreds of thousands of tax payer dollars to keep this moron on the golf course and out of the White House."

10 years ago November, Bear Stearns was publicly gasping for air, and the economic crash began to unfold. Still continuing for many.

By Declan Walsh & Nour Yasset @ NYTimes.com, 15 minutes ago

• The attackers sprayed gunfire and exploded bombs at a crowded mosque.
• The unusually ruthless assault was one of the deadliest attacks in the country’s modern history.

By Martin Pengally @ theguardian.com, Nov. 23

Discussing the air force when speaking to a different service, president again praises F-35, which is not invisible and has faced a costly development process

[....] According to the pool report of the president’s Thanksgiving Day visit to Coast Guard Station Lake Worth Inlet, in Florida, Trump told his audience he had discussed the “invisible” plane with “some air force guys”. He asked them, he said, if it would perform in a dogfight like similar planes he had seen in movies.

“They said: ‘Well, it wins every time because the enemy cannot see it, even if it’s right next to it, it can’t see it,’” Trump said.

The coast guard members laughed, some perhaps aware that the president speaking to them about the air force was a reversal of his remarks in Puerto Rico in October, when he spoke to an air force audience about the coast guard.

Contra to his earlier expressions of pride about being responsible for a cut in the cost of the F-35 – a claim that experts have said is at best contestable – Trump also told coast guard members of his pride in having increased military spending [....]

That's the way it was described in the picture briefing books written for his attention span?

Yeah, he's phoning it in on speakerphone, Donald's all ears. And thumbs. Reminds me a bit of Jean Cocteau in the underworld, because that's indeed where Trump resides.

By Robert Cattrell @ New York Review of Books, Dec. 7 issue, available free online now

Review of Masha Gessen's new book

Early in Vladimir Putin’s first presidency I spoke to a Moscow banker, with reason to care on this point, who said he detected no trace of anti-Semitism in Putin personally, but that Putin would encourage popular anti-Semitism in a second if he thought that doing so would serve his interests. So far, Putin has not felt the need to demonize Russia’s Jews. He has instead identified the enemy within as Russia’s homosexuals, whose persecution is one of the main themes of The Future Is History, Masha Gessen’s remarkable group portrait of seven Soviet-born Russians whose changing lives embody the changing fortunes and character of their country [....]

By Cecelia Kang @ NYTimes.com, 45 minutes ago

• The Federal Communications Commission plans to scrap net neutrality rules requiring broadband providers to give consumers equal access to all content on the internet.
• A rollback of the regulations would represent a significant victory for broadband and telecom companies like AT&T and Comcast and would amount to a strike against consumers.

[....] The proposal, made by the F.C.C. chairman, Ajit Pai, is a sweeping repeal of rules put in place by the Obama administration. The rules prohibit high-speed internet service providers, or I.S.P.s, from stopping or slowing down the delivery of websites. They also prevent the companies from charging customers extra fees for high-quality streaming and other services.

The announcement set off a fight over free speech and the control of the internet, pitting telecom titans like AT&T and Verizon against internet giants like Google and Amazon. The internet companies warned that rolling back the rules could make the telecom companies powerful gatekeepers to information and entertainment. The telecom companies say that the existing rules prevent them from offering customers a wider selection of services at higher and lower price points [....]