All those shabby middle class Goliaths

Pity the poor Koch brothers out on the field of battle in the Valley of Elah, armed only with their Galtian superiority and $20 billion between them.  They are the oppressed, not those whom they would reduce to (deserved) penury.

Some of these trends pre-date Obama, but few have been retarded during his presidency, while many have accelerated.   Whether one finds this state of affairs desirable or not, no rational person can describe them as the by-product of a Marxist, business-hating egalitarian.  Quite the opposite.  The political power of America's richest has never been greater, and the level of their responsibility and collective burden has never been less.  Meanwhile, for ordinary Americans, the remaining remnants of their financial security and middle class comforts rapidly erodes.  It's true that the U.S. Government has little regard for the free market:  they intervene constantly in the free market on behalf of the nation's wealthiest and most powerful business interests; it's crony capitalism, corporatism:  government run by corporations (or, as Dick Durbin said of the Congress in which he serves:  "the banks own the place").

For billionaires to see themselves as the True Victims, to complain that the President and the Government are waging some sort of war against them in the name of radical egalitarianism, is so removed from reality -- universes away -- that's it's hard to put into words.  And the fiscal recklessness that the Kochs and their comrades tirelessly point to was a direct by-product of the last decade's rule by the Republican Party which they fund:  from unfunded, endless wars to a never-ending expansion of the privatized National Security and Surveillance States to the financial crisis that exploded during the Bush presidency.  But whatever else is true, there are many victims of fiscal policy in America:  the wealthiest business interests and billionaires like the Koch Brothers are the few who are not among them.

These self-pitying billionaires are different from you and me.  Their underlings and loyal retainers have deferred to them as corporate aristocracy for so long that they are ready to be corporate royalty who can have your head cut off for saying something critical of them.

Give them time.  They're coming for every liberty we have.