Chris Hansen's problem is that he isn't a big enough scumbag.

You see, the reason the NBA this week turned away Hansen's bid to buy the Sacramento Kings and move them to Seattle was that he was honest about his intentions. If he had followed the established NBA model, he would have gone about this thing entirely differently.

Clearly, the chief reasoning of NBA owners for declining to add Hansen and Steve Ballmer to their list of owners was that they were from Seattle. When the NBA ripped their team of 41 years out of Seattle back in 2007, it was intended as an object lesson for the rest of the league: Unless you bow to our extortion demands, you will lose your team.

Sacramento, obviously, got that lesson. After teetering on losing the Kings because of the failure to build a new arena, the city gave up every ounce of its soul in its desperate effort to keep the NBA in town. The new arena deal requires the taxpayers to foot about 60 percent of the tab.

So of course the NBA was going to reward the city that gave in to their extortion demands. And it would continue to punish the city that insists on limiting the taxpayers' role in enriching billionaire owners and their exposure to ever-ratcheting arena costs.

You see, Seattle thought it had done everything right for years. Its fans always supported the Sonics -- even when they sucked, the team still averaged 15,000 a game -- and were among the most rabid and knowledgeable in the league. (I was myself a season ticket holder for over a decade.) There's a reason so many NBA teams are populated with players from Seattle high schools: It is a basketball-saturated town.

We even bellied up to the bar in the 1990s on the arena demands -- spent $100 million tearing apart and renovating the old Seattle Center Coliseum, three-quarters of which was paid for by Seattle taxpayers. When it reopened in 1995, David Stern came and proclaimed the new facility as state-of-the-art for the next generation.

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Steven Pearlstein has written an op-ed for the Washington Post that deserves front page status. Unfortunately, in the dead-tree version of The Post, it was relegated to the back page. But every single person using the "job creator" meme needs to answer this question: who are truly demanding entitlements?

I am the misunderstood superhero of American capitalism, single-handedly creating wealth and prosperity despite all the obstacles put in my way by employees, government and the media.

I am a job creator and I am entitled.

I am entitled to complain about the economy even when my stock price, my portfolio and my profits are at record levels.

I am entitled to a healthy and well-educated workforce, a modern and efficient transportation system and protection for my person and property, just as I am entitled to demonize the government workers who provide them.

I am entitled to complain bitterly about taxes that are always too high, even when they are at record lows.

Teacher Ken at DKos called my attention to the op-ed and ends his post this way:

There are these obnoxious statements:

I am entitled to all the rights and privileges of running an American company, but owe no loyalty to American workers or taxpayers.

I am entitled to confidential information about my employees and customers while refusing even to list the company’s phone number on its Web site.

But even with all he lists, Pearlstein realizes he has not exhausted the sense of entitlement of folks like these.

Which is why he ends with this:

I am entitled to everything I have and more that I still deserve.

Like, if you are Mitt Romney, your belief you are entitled to be President of the United States?

Exactly. So remind me again in this most wealthiest nation in the world with ever-growing economic inequality, just who is it who is so frickin' entitled?

Anyone who has read "Atlas Shrugged" recognizes the underlying subtext in Mitt Romney's appeal to those attending the $50,000/plate fundraiser: he's stroking those supermen egos and all but threatening to go Galt on 47% of the American population. He fed into their notions of how much these uber-wealthy are giving to the undeserving moochers.

Our buddy Rich Eskow explained it better than I ever could:

Their resentment is as great as their wealth. It seemed like an unfortunate slip from an unpleasant individual when another hedge funder, Steve Schwarzman, compared the loss of his tax breaks to Hitler's invasion of Poland. But we now know that this sense of outrage is shared by many, if not most, of his peers: Hedge funder Daniel S. Loeb. The unnamed CEOs of Fareed Zakaria's acquaintance. Scandal-ridden bank CEO Jamie Dimon.

You'd think they'd be kissing the ground Barack Obama walks on, given their embarrassment – or what should be an "embarrassment" – of riches.

But they're enraged. Why?

Because it isn't enough.
At no time in modern history has the top 1 percent – or the top 0.1 percent, or the top 0.01 percent – owned more of our wealth or paid less in taxes.

But it isn't enough.

The Wall Street executives who broke laws weren't indicted, and those who ruined their own businesses were saved – their wealth and incomes protected – by the very people who are being financially destroyed by their actions.

It isn't enough.

Our government relaxed the regulations, razed the rules, and leveled the laws so they could ruin both the economy and the Gulf of Mexico, and has left us vulnerable to their ongoing predations.

It isn't enough.

What do they want?

They want more – more tax breaks, more protection from the law.

They want more than that. They want--no, they are convinced that they should be exalted for being wealthy. There are studies that have come out that have shown that the wealthier a person is, the less altruistic and empathetic he or she is. Now that's a huge generalization and doesn't apply to many wealthy people I know.

This is why we can't have nice things. Former Bain Capital executive Edward Conard--showing that the .01 percent have their finger on the pulse of America--wrote a book declaring that massive income inequality is actually a good thing.

Conard understands that many believe that the U.S. economy currently serves the rich at the expense of everyone else. He contends that this is largely because most Americans don’t know how the economy really works — that the superrich spend only a small portion of their wealth on personal comforts; most of their money is invested in productive businesses that make life better for everyone. “Most citizens are consumers, not investors,” he told me during one of our long, occasionally contentious conversations. “They don’t recognize the benefits to consumers that come from investment.”

This is the usual defense of the 1 percent. Conard, however, has laid out a tightly argued case for just how much consumers actually benefit from the wealthy. Take computers, for example. A small number of innovators and investors may have earned disproportionate billions as the I.T. industry grew, but they got that money by competing to constantly improve their products and simultaneously lower prices. Their work has helped everyone get a lot more value. Cheap, improved computing helps us do our jobs more effectively and, often, earn more money. Countless other industries (travel, telecom, entertainment) use that computing power to lower their prices and enhance their products. This generally makes life more efficient and helps the economy grow.

The idea that society benefits when investors compete successfully is pretty widely accepted. Dean Baker, a prominent progressive economist with the Center for Economic and Policy Research, says that most economists believe society often benefits from investments by the wealthy. Baker estimates the ratio is 5 to 1, meaning that for every dollar an investor earns, the public receives the equivalent of $5 of value. The Google founder Sergey Brin might be very rich, but the world is far richer than he is because of Google. Conard said Baker was undercounting the social benefits of investment. He looks, in particular, at agriculture, where, since the 1940s, the cost of food has steadily fallen because of a constant stream of innovations. While the businesses that profit from that innovation — like seed companies and fast-food restaurants — have made their owners rich, the average U.S. consumer has benefited far more. Conard concludes that for every dollar an investor gets, the public reaps up to $20 in value. This is crucial to his argument: he thinks it proves that we should all appreciate the vast wealth of others more, because we’re benefiting, proportionally, from it.

Let's hear it for the Chicago School of Economics claptrap. For thirty plus years we've been hearing this and it yet the economy gets worse and worse for not only the 99 percent, but for the country as well. We went to the biggest creditor nation to the biggest debtor nation. The economy isn't driven by innovation and risk, you selfish ass. Let's stop perpetuating this meme once and for all.

The economy is driven by demand. Period. Full stop. All the innovation and risk in the world means nothing if people can't afford to purchase the products.

As Thom Hartmann puts it:

The Republicans got what they wanted from Wanniski's work. They held power for thirty years, made themselves trillions of dollars, cut organized labor's representation in the workplace from around 25 percent when Reagan came into office to around 8 of the non-governmental workforce today, and left such a massive deficit that some misguided "conservative" Democrats are again clamoring to shoot Santa with working-class tax hikes and entitlement program cuts.

I am sick and tired of these wealthy, selfish elites getting a platform to rationalize their avarice when we have demonstrable proof that all this "job creators" and "innovators" driving the economy is nothing but bovine excrement. Where are the damn jobs? Why are wages stagnating? Why is it that in the wealthiest nation in the world 1 in 5 children are going to bed hungry or malnourished?

Tell me, Mr. Conard, what innovation did you provide to the country when you acquired and broke up companies? Yes, some products have reduced in price due to innovation (it's lovely if you can afford a big screen plasma TV for under a grand, or get a laptop for under $500...but the number of American families who can afford that are falling dramatically) but other costs have gone up dramatically, like health care and education. But those facts are inconvenient to Conard:

More to the point, Conard doesn't seem to understand the negative consequences of income inequality, certainly not in any form beyond an abstract red line on a graph. Viewing the economy simply as risk and reward divides the population into rich and not-rich, rather than increasingly wealthy and vastly expanding poor. It collapses the lower and middle classes into a monolith of moral distinction; they're simply "not innovators," a label that occludes everything awful about poverty, from quality of life to its cyclical and self-reinforcing nature. Conard's model also assumes lower prices are a financial salve in and of themselves. But simply because food is cheaper does not mean that someone living below the poverty line can afford enough of it, especially as median incomes decline along with prices. And Timothy Noah points out that while the prices of goods have declined in the past few decades, the prices of other, more important services, like higher education and health care, have gotten drastically more expensive. How a shrinking middle class, having to work longer hours to keep itself healthy and increasingly unable to afford education, creates a greater amount of innovators is something Conard doesn't address. Not only do innovators suffer when an enervated society can't afford to purchase their products, but innovators themselves have to come from somewhere. The income inequality that Conard endorses as the reward for innovators is the very same process that prevents future innovators from coming up. Conard waves many of these concerns away. He came from a solidly middle class family and built up a massive personal fortune, and suffers from the biographical delusions of many self-made men, roughly: I did it, therefore everybody else can, too.

Too bad that Conard's self-serving rationalizations actively prevent that from happening.

Mitt Romney's former Bain Capital partner and current high-stakes donor Edward Conard wants all of us 99 percenters to know we've got it all wrong. If we really understood the economy, we'd be grateful that wealth is concentrated with the wealthiest .01 percent of the 1 percent, and we'd work really hard to double their wealth because it would be good for all of us.

Not only does he believe this, he's written a book about it, due to come out next month. I've already written to see if I can get a review copy of it, because I just cannot pass up such an exercise in self-adulation. In the meantime, Conard sat down for an interview with New York Times reporter Adam Davidson. His brazen responses to Davidson's questions reveal the extraordinary thought process of the investor class, who have become so incredibly removed from reality that they actually believe this stuff.

Take, for example, his assertion that doubling the wealth of the wealthy is really good for the rest of us. His argument goes like this:

Conard picked up a soda can and pointed to the way the can’s side bent inward at the top. “I worked with the company that makes the machine that tapers that can,” he told me. That little taper allows manufacturers to make the same size can with a tiny bit less aluminum. “It saves a fraction of a penny on every can,” he said. “There are a lot of soda cans in the world. That means the economy can produce more cans with the same amount of resources. It makes every American who buys a soda can a little bit richer because their paycheck buys more.”

It might be hard to get excited about milligrams of aluminum, but Conard says that we live longer, healthier and richer lives because of countless microimprovements like that one. The people looking for them, Conard likes to point out, are not only computer programmers, engineers and scientists. They are also wealthy investors like him, who are willing to risk their own money to finance improvements that may or may not work. There is a huge mechanism constantly trying to seek out and support these new ideas — entrepreneurs, multinationals and, crucially for Conard, investment firms and hedge funds and everyone down to individual bond traders.

And yet. I see an economy with trillions on the sidelines and wonder what a few more trillion dollars will do for the economy. What can be done with 4 trillion dollars squirreled away that can't be done with 2 trillion, after all? He doesn't seem to have much of an answer for that, but he's certainly willing to look down his nose at art history majors.

A central problem with the U.S. economy, he told me, is finding a way to get more people to look for solutions despite these terrible odds of success. Conard’s solution is simple. Society benefits if the successful risk takers get a lot of money. For proof, he looks to the market. At a nearby table we saw three young people with plaid shirts and floppy hair. For all we know, they may have been plotting the next generation’s Twitter, but Conard felt sure they were merely lounging on the sidelines. “What are they doing, sitting here, having a coffee at 2:30?” he asked. “I’m sure those guys are college-educated.” Conard, who occasionally flashed a mean streak during our talks, started calling the group “art-history majors,” his derisive term for pretty much anyone who was lucky enough to be born with the talent and opportunity to join the risk-taking, innovation-hunting mechanism but who chose instead a less competitive life. In Conard’s mind, this includes, surprisingly, people like lawyers, who opt for stable professions that don’t maximize their wealth-creating potential. He said the only way to persuade these “art-history majors” to join the fiercely competitive economic mechanism is to tempt them with extraordinary payoffs.

There's much, much more, but this last paragraph more or less turned me off to anything more he may have had to say. This writer is someone who writes, who reads, and who doesn't need to be fabulously wealthy to figure out solutions to her own little problems, like how to keep the pug from chewing the legs on the table or even how to pay for her daughter's college education. Conard, like so many wealthy people, assumes everyone on the planet wants to be wealthy and those who don't are really just a drag on the rest of society. Or, as Digby says, his message is really "f*ck you, you little art history parasite."

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Four years ago, my novel, Redemption, marketed as a near future political thriller, was published by St. Martin’s Press in the United States. There’s a scene at the very end of the book, where protesters, in numbers "intensified past what even a castrated media could ignore" converged on Washington:

Placards demanding voting reform, civil rights, impeachment, and repealing the Patriot Act vied for space with signs protesting global warming, Internet restrictions, and record unemployment. Demonstrations resembled a war zone more every day with barbed wire and concrete blockades and thousands of scowling armed police. Several protesters had been killed in riots, which had only fueled the anger of the growing crowds, violent clashes escalating. The roar of a hundred thousand voices as they chanted, "Of the people, by the people, for the people, who the hell are you!" with a forest of accusing fingers thrust at both a barricaded White House and Capital Hill was breathtaking.

Writers like myself try to imagine the future by extrapolating from the present. Sometimes we get it woefully wrong. And sometimes we get it frighteningly right. What I imagined half a decade ago was a rebellion of the American people against a corrupt system, with protesters united, rather than behind any single cause, by a sense of general injustice and a multitude of grievances. Today, it’s a reality.

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