Politics
- Obama’s Narrow Victory – NYTimes.com
- A Debate-Night Mystery: Will Mitt Romney Hedge on Foreign Policy? – Conor Friedersdorf – The Atlantic
- Obama Returns to Form – Clive Crook – The Atlantic
- President Obama’s answers in second debate pull double-duty for him, against Mitt Romney – Boston.com
- Second US presidential debate: Obama versus Romney – live coverage | World news | guardian.co.uk
- Presidential debate: Candy Crowley shows bite as Hofstra town hall’s no-nonsense moderator – NY Daily News
Continuing on the theme I began to explore yesterday with looking at Barlett & Steele’s The Betrayal of the American Dream I going to also pick up and read Chrystia Freeland‘s (formally managing editor at the Financial Times and now a Editor-at-Large at Reuters) Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else.
- Interview: Chrystia Freeland, Author Of ‘Plutocrats’ : NPR
Journalist Chrystia Freeland has spent years reporting on the people who’ve reached the pinnacle of the business world. For her new book, Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else, she traveled the world, interviewing the multimillionaires — and billionaires — who make up the world’s elite super-rich. Freeland says that many of today’s richest individuals gained their fortunes not from inheritance, but from actual work.
“These super-rich are people who, as they like to say, ‘did it themselves,’ ” Freeland tells NPR’s Steve Inskeep. “And what’s interesting for me, and actually I didn’t expect it, I think it’s a paradox of this sort of working super-rich, which is that you would think … that having done it yourself, you might have more sympathy, be closer to the 99 percent.”
But, she says, that’s often not the case. “In many ways, that personal history of really feeling like, ‘I did this! By myself!’ actually creates more of a chasm between them and the rest of us, and, I would say, a certain degree of disdain.”
Those at the very top, Freeland says, have told her that American workers are the most overpaid in the world, and that they need to be more productive if they want to have better lives.
“It is a sense of, you know, ‘I deserve this,’ ” she says. “I do think that there is both a very powerful sense of entitlement and a kind of bubble of wealth which makes it hard for the people at the very top to understand the travails of the middle class.” (read the rest of this article…)
- Rise of the Super-Rich Isn’t Just a US Phenomenon – US Business News – CNBC
- Why Are There So Few Female Plutocrats? – The Daily Beast
- The Rise of the New Global Elite – Chrystia Freeland – The Atlantic