America’s business leaders have not exactly shied away from offering political views. Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg has accused President Obama of creating a hostile environment for investment and job-creation, while General Electric’s Jeff Immelt says the administration is out of sync with entrepreneurs.

All of which makes particularly curious the deafening silence of business leaders about the tea party that’s now taking over the GOP and about to take over a chunk of Congress. Maybe business leaders see it as a relatively harmless fringe group advocating the fiscally responsible small-government positions most CEOs agree with. Business leaders should take a closer look.

Even if it’s now on the fringe, the tea party won’t be for long. By fueling the Republican surge in the midterm elections, the tea party has become the single most powerful force in the GOP. It’s backing at least 14 Senate candidates, both challengers and incumbents, and is playing a significant role in scores of House races. It has already shaken the GOP to its core, defeating establishment Senators Lisa Murkowski in Alaska and Bob Bennett in Utah, and exerting a strong gravitational pull on many other Republicans, such as Arizona’s John McCain. It will be a force in the run-up to the 2012 presidential election. Presidential aspirant Newt Gingrich has already declared his fealty, and Sarah Palin has become its grande dame.

Beyond fiscal rectitude and less spending, tea party candidates are targeting the central institutions of American government. The GOP Senate candidate from Kentucky, Rand Paul, is among several who want to abolish the Federal Reserve. They blame the Fed for creating the Great Recession and believe that the economy would be better off without a single institution in Washington setting monetary policy. Even Maine’s stolid Republican Party, now under tea party sway, has called for eliminating the Fed. In a Bloomberg poll a few weeks ago, 60% of tea party adherents wanted to overhaul or abolish the Fed (compared with 45% of all likely voters).

Another tea party target is the Internal Revenue Service. South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint, who has emerged as the Senate’s leading tea party incumbent, says that his “main goal in the Senate will not only be to cut taxes, but to get rid of the IRS.” Mr. DeMint’s goal is echoed by many tea party candidates, including Arkansas Rep. John Boozman, now running for Senate.

At the least, business leaders who complain about uncertainties caused by Mr. Obama’s policies might be concerned. John Castellani, the former head of the Business Roundtable who is now running the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, told Bloomberg Businessweek this month, with remarkable understatement, “This kind of extremism makes it much harder to plan from a business perspective.”

GE’s Mr. Immelt may be unhappy with President Obama, but he’ll be far unhappier if the tea party takes over the GOP. Tom Borelli, director of the Free Enterprise Project of the National Center for Public Policy Research, a conservative think tank and vocal supporter of the tea party movement, has demanded Mr. Immelt’s resignation, calling GE an “opportunistic parasite feeding on the expansion of government.” Among Mr. Immelt’s alleged sins: taking federal subsidies for clean energy. In a press release last week, the National Center for Public Policy Research stated clearly: “Liberal CEOs are the next target for tea party activism.”

Presumably, business leaders should also be uncomfortable with the Tea Party’s nativism. At the first national convention of the “Tea Party Nation” last February in Nashville, Tom Tancredo, former Colorado congressman and now Tea-Party-sponsored candidate for governor (as an Independent), brought the crowd to its feet by denouncing the “cult of multiculturalism” and accusing immigrants of threatening America’s Judeo-Christian values. “This is our country,” he declared to wild cheers. “Take it back!”

More than half of Tea Party backers say they’d be more likely to vote for a candidate who supports changing the 14th Amendment to prevent the children of non-citizens born in the U.S. from automatically becoming citizens. And Tea Partiers strongly support Arizona’s recent immigration law making failure to carrying immigration documents a crime and giving police broad powers to detain anyone suspected of being in the country illegally. “We’re all Arizonans now,” says former Alaskan Gov Sarah Palin.

Many Tea Partiers similarly recoil from global institutions and agreements. Minnesota Representative Michele Bachmann, leader of the House’s Tea Party caucus, calls the Group of 20 summit “one short step” away from “one world government,” and suggests America withdraw from international economic organizations. “I don’t want the US to be in a global economy where our economic future is bound to that of Zimbabwe” she says. And a higher proportion of Tea Partiers oppose free trade than does the American population in general. In a recent WSJ/NBC poll, 61 percent of respondents who characterized themselves as Tea Partiers thought trade was bad for America.

Under normal times ideas like these wouldn’t gain much public traction. Why are they now? Because of the continuing effects of the Great Recession. History has shown that people threatened by losses of jobs, wages, homes, and savings are easy prey for demagogues who turn those fears into anger directed at major institutions of a society, as well as individuals and minorities who become easy scapegoats – immigrants, foreign traders, particular religious groups. Were it not for their ongoing economic stresses, Americans wouldn’t be receptive to abolishing the Federal Reserve and the IRS, or believe government and big business were conspiring against them, or turn nativist and isolationist.

Business leaders should be standing up to the tea party. And they should be actively supporting policies to relieve the economic stresses that fuel it. Their silence in both regards is not only bad for business; it threatens the stability of our economic and political system.

Next Tuesday Americans will be deciding whether to hand over even more of our government to corporations that have been plundering America  – such as Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Citibank, Wellpoint insurance, Massey Energy, and Halliburton, the giant oil services company.

Not every large corporation is irresponsible, of course, but plunderers that get away with it gain a competitive advantage over the more responsible, and thereby lead a race to the bottom.

Case in point: The staff of the presidential commission investigating the BP oil spill has just revealed that Halliburton executives knew the cement it was using to seal BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil well was likely to be unstable but didn’t tell BP or act on the information.

In a letter to the commission’s seven members, the staff found that the failure of the cement was a key factor in the blowout that caused millions of barrels of crude oil to escape into the Gulf of Mexico. (Not the sole factor, of course; most of the blame for the disaster, says the staff, still rests with BP and Transocean, the company BP hired to drill the well.)

Halliburton has not sat out this election. Last May, as Congress began investigating its role in the disaster, its political action committee made 14 contributions — 13 to Republicans and one to a Democrat. Many were involved in the investigation; others had responsibility for overseeing oil drilling in the Gulf. It was the biggest donation month for Halliburton’s PAC since September 2008.

Halliburton, in case you’ve forgotten, is not exactly a model citizen. It has evaded U.S. taxes and export bans through foreign subsidiaries; admitted to bribing foreign officials (a subsidiary paid $2.4 million to a Nigerian government official in exchange for favorable tax treatment); conceded in an internal memo (leaked to the Wall Street Journal) its cost controls for government contracts in Iraq were “antiquated” and its procurement “disorganized; was found by Pentagon auditors to have overcharged estimated at $27.4 million for meals served to American troops at five military bases in Iraq and Kuwait (in one camp billing for an average 42,000 meals a day but serving only 14,000).

The list of Halliburton’s crimes goes on and on. And yet, somehow, Halliburton goes on piling up profits. How? Because of its deep connections to Washington.

Dick Cheney hadn’t had any experience in the oil business when he became Halliburton’s CEO in 1995. But he did have experience in government – as George H.W. Bush’s Secretary of Defense. And those military ties were invaluable to the company. Under his reign, Halliburton rose from 73rd to 18th on the Pentagon’s list of top contractors, and the money garnered from government-sponsored agencies (such as the Overseas Private Investment Corporation and the Export-Import Bank) soared from $100 million in the five years prior to Cheney’s arrival to $1.5 billion a few years after.

As vice president to George W. Bush, Cheney made sure Halliburton’s stunning performance would continue (Cheney continued to receive checks from the company). According to congressional inquiries, Cheney’s vice presidential office was instrumental in forcing the Environmental Protection Agency to remove sections on climate change from reports in 2002 and 2003 (a process Christine Todd Whitman, then the E.P.A. administrator, subsequently described as “brutal.”) The Bush-Cheney administration also sought to control or censor congressional testimony about climate change by federal employees, and tampered with other reports in order to inject uncertainty into the climate debate.

Which brings us back to the Deepwater Horizon blowout. Halliburton’s executives knew the cement it used to seal the well was filled with mud — but Halliburton said nothing presumably because doing the job correctly would have cost too much. And, hell, Halliburton is in business to make money.

Halliburton isn’t on the ballot next Tuesday, but it might as well be.

This, from the Washington Post’s conservative pundit George Will:

Total spending by parties, campaigns and issue-advocacy groups concerning every office from county clerks to U.S. senators may reach a record $4.2 billion in this two-year cycle. That is about what Americans spend in one year on yogurt, but less than they spend on candy in two Halloween seasons. Proctor & Gamble spent $8.6 billion on advertising in its last fiscal year.

Those who are determined to reduce the quantity of political speech to what they consider the proper amount are the sort of people who know exactly how much water should come through our shower heads — no more than 2.5 gallons per minute, as stipulated by a 1992 law. Is it, however, worrisome that Americans spend on political advocacy — determining who should make and administer the laws — much less than they spend on potato chips, $7.1 billion a year?

In a word, Mr. Will, yes.

The number of dollars spent isn’t the issue; it’s the lopsidedness of where the dollars come from. Even if the total were only $1000, democracy would be endangered if $980 came from large corporations and wealthy individuals. The trend is clear and worrisome: The great bulk of campaign money is coming from a narrower and narrower circle of moneyed interests.

Anyone who doubts the corrupting effect has not been paying attention. Our elected representatives have been acutely sensitive to the needs of Wall Street bankers, hedge-fund managers, and the executives of big pharma, big oil, and the largest health insurance companies. This is not because these individuals and interests are particularly worthy or specially deserving. It is because they are effectively bribing elected officials with their donations. Such donations are not made out of charitable impulse. They are calculated investments no less carefully considered than investments in particular shares of stock. They are shares in our democracy.

Why $4.2 billion and not ten times that amount? Because the high-rolling political investors don’t need to spend a dollar more in order to exert overwhelming influence.

This figure, by the way, leaves out the tens of billions of dollars dedicated to lobbying, lawyering, and public relations — all of which deliver specific legislative outcomes the campaign money fuels. The economy of Washington, D.C. depends on this gigantic flow of funds (supporting the polished facades of refurbished hotels, fancy restaurants, trendy bistros, office complexes of glass and polished wood, well-appointed condos, hotels with marble-floored lobbies and thick rugs, restaurants serving $75 steaks and offering $400 magnums of vintage French wine.) Washington’s seven suburban counties are listed by the Census Bureau as among the nation’s twenty with the highest per-capital incomes.

Failing to include this larger apparatus in an estimate for how much money now greases the legislative skids is analogous to estimating the cost of private transportation in America by what’s purchased at the gas pump without mentioning automobiles, roads, and bridges.

Indeed, a full accounting of the cost of the flow of money into our political system would also include the carnage and roadkill in its path — the public’s increasing cynicism about democracy, and America’s decreasing capacity to do what most of its citizens desperately need.

If Republicans succeed in taking over the House and come even close to gaining a majority in the Senate, expect calls for the President to “move to the center.” These will come not only from Republicans but also from conservative Democrats, other prominent Dems who have been defeated, Fox Republican News, mainstream pundits, and White House political advisers.

After the 1994 midterm, when Dems lost the House and Senate, Bill Clinton was told to “move to the center.” He obliged by hiring the pollster Dick Morris, declaring the “era of big government is over,” abandoning much of his original agenda, and making the 1996 general election about nothing more than V-chips in televisions and school uniforms.

It happened in the 1978 midterm when Dems lost ground and Jimmy Carter was instructed to “move to the center.” He obliged by firing his entire cabinet, apologizing for the errors of his ways, and making the 1980 general election about absolutely nothing.

Oddly, though, after Republicans suffer losses in the first midterms they pay no attention to voices telling them to move to the center. If anything, Ronald Reagan and the two Bushes moved further right.

Could it be that Republican presidents understand a few things Democrats don’t? For example:

1. There is no “center” to American politics. The “center” is merely what most people tell pollsters they think or want at any given time. Trying to move to the center by following polls means giving up on leadership because you can’t lead people to where they already are.

2. By the first midterm the public is almost always grouchy because the president wasn’t a messiah and didn’t change the world. No single president has that kind of power. The higher the expectations for change at the start of an administration, the greater the disillusionment.

3. Presidents’ parties always lose the first midterm elections because the President isn’t on the ticket, and the opposing party has had time to regroup and refuel. It’s always easier for the party on the outs to attack — and to mass troops for the assault — than for the party inside to defend.

4. The economy trumps everything else, even though presidents aren’t really responsible for it. So when it’s bad — as it was during the first midterms of Carter, Reagan, and Clinton — voters penalize the president’s party even more than usual. When it’s very bad, the electoral penalty is likely to be that much larger.

Why are Democratic presidents so much more easily intimidated by the “move to the center” rhetoric after midterm losses than Republican presidents?

Because Democrats think in terms of programs, policies, and particular pieces of legislation. It’s easy to reverse course by compromising more and giving up on legislative goals. Bill Clinton never mentioned the words “health care reform” after the 1994 midterms.

Republicans think in terms of simple ideas, themes, and movements. It’s far harder to reverse course on these (look what happened to the first George Bush when he raised taxes), and easier to keep them alive: Republican presidents just continue looking for opportunities to implement them.

Republicans are also more disciplined (ask yourself which party attracts authoritarian personalities and which attracts anti-authoritarians). This makes it easier for them to stay the course. Their base continues to organize and fulminate even after midterm defeats. Democrats, on the other hand, are less organized. Electoral defeats tend to fracture and dissipate whatever organization they have.

Republicans are cynical about politics from the jump. Political cynicism fuels them. Democrats are idealistic about politics. When they become cynical they tend to drop out.

Message to Obama: Whatever happens November 2, don’t move to the center. Push even harder for what you believe in. Message to Democrats: Whatever happens, keep the courage of your conviction and get even more active.

It’s a perfect storm. And I’m not talking about the impending dangers facing Democrats. I’m talking about the dangers facing our democracy.

First, income in America is now more concentrated in fewer hands than it’s been in 80 years. Almost a quarter of total income generated in the United States is going to the top 1 percent of Americans.

The top one-tenth of one percent of Americans now earn as much as the bottom 120 million of us.

Who are these people? With the exception of a few entrepreneurs like Bill Gates, they’re top executives of big corporations and Wall Street, hedge-fund managers, and private equity managers. They include the Koch brothers, whose wealth increased by billions last year, and who are now funding tea party candidates across the nation.

Which gets us to the second part of the perfect storm. A relatively few Americans are buying our democracy as never before. And they’re doing it completely in secret.

Hundreds of millions of dollars are pouring into advertisements for and against candidates  — without a trace of where the dollars are coming from. They’re laundered through a handful of groups. Fred Malek, whom you may remember as deputy director of Richard Nixon’s notorious Committee to Reelect the President (dubbed Creep in the Watergate scandal), is running one of them. Republican operative Karl Rove runs another. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a third.

The Supreme Court’s Citizens United vs. the Federal Election Commission made it possible. The Federal Election Commission says only 32 percent of groups paying for election ads are disclosing the names of their donors. By comparison, in the 2006 midterm, 97 percent disclosed; in 2008, almost half disclosed.

We’re back to the late 19th century when the lackeys of robber barons literally deposited sacks of cash on the desks of friendly legislators. The public never knew who was bribing whom.

Just before it recessed the House passed a bill that would require that the names of all such donors be publicly disclosed. But it couldn’t get through the Senate. Every Republican voted against it. (To see how far the GOP has come, nearly ten years ago campaign disclosure was supported by 48 of 54 Republican senators.)

Here’s the third part of the perfect storm. Most Americans are in trouble. Their jobs, incomes, savings, and even homes are on the line. They need a government that’s working for them, not for the privileged and the powerful.

Yet their state and local taxes are rising. And their services are being cut. Teachers and firefighters are being laid off. The roads and bridges they count on are crumbling, pipelines are leaking, schools are dilapidated, and public libraries are being shut.

There’s no jobs bill to speak of. No WPA to hire those who can’t find jobs in the private sector. Unemployment insurance doesn’t reach half of the unemployed. 

Washington says nothing can be done. There’s no money left.

No money? The marginal income tax rate on the very rich is the lowest it’s been in more than 80 years. Under President Dwight Eisenhower (who no one would have accused of being a radical) it was 91 percent. Now it’s 36 percent. Congress is even fighting over whether to end the temporary Bush tax cut for the rich and return them to the Clinton top tax of 39 percent.

Much of the income of the highest earners is treated as capital gains, anyway — subject to a 15 percent tax. The typical hedge-fund and private-equity manager paid only 17 percent last year. Their earnings were not exactly modest. The top 15 hedge-fund managers earned an average of $1 billion.

Congress won’t even return to the estate tax in place during the Clinton administration – which applied only to those in the top 2 percent of incomes.

It won’t limit the tax deductions of the very rich, which include interest payments on multi-million dollar mortgages. (Yet Wall Street refuses to allow homeowners who can’t meet mortgage payments to include their primary residence in personal bankruptcy.)

There’s plenty of money to help stranded Americans, just not the political will to raise it. And at the rate secret money is flooding our political system, even less political will in the future.

The perfect storm: An unprecedented concentration of income and wealth at the top; a record amount of secret money flooding our democracy; and a public becoming increasingly angry and cynical about a government that’s raising its taxes, reducing its services, and unable to get it back to work.

We’re losing our democracy to a different system. It’s called plutocracy.

The latest jobs bill coming out of Washington isn’t really a bill at all. It’s the Fed’s attempt to keep long-term interest rates low by pumping even more money into the economy (“quantitative easing” in Fed-speak).

The idea is to buy up lots of Treasury bills and other long-term debt to reduce long-term interest rates. It’s assumed that low long-term rates will push more businesses to expand capacity and hire workers; push the dollar downward and make American exports more competitive and therefore generate more jobs; and allow more Americans to refinance their homes at low rates, thereby giving them more cash to spend and thereby stimulate more jobs.

Problem is, it won’t work. Businesses won’t expand capacity and jobs because there aren’t enough consumers to buy additional goods and services.

The dollar’s drop won’t spur more exports. It will fuel more competitive devaluations by other nations determined not to lose export shares to the US and thereby drive up their own unemployment.

And middle-class and working-class Americans won’t be able to refinance their homes at low rates because banks are now under strict lending standards. They won’t lend to families whose overall incomes have dropped, whose debts have risen, or who owe more on their homes than the homes are worth — that is, most families.

So where will the easy money go? Into another stock-market bubble.

It’s already started. Stocks are up even though the rest of the economy is still down because money is already so cheap. Bondholders (who can’t get much of any return from their loans) are shifting their portfolios into stocks. Companies are buying back more shares of their own stock. And Wall Street is making more bets in the stock market with money it can borrow at almost zero percent interest. 

When our elected representatives can’t and won’t come up with a real jobs program, the Fed feels pressed to come up with a fake one that blows another financial bubble. And we know what happens when financial bubbles get too big.

Barnes & Noble, Upper East Side, Manhattan on September 21st, 2010

Deep economic crises are fodder for demagogues who channel economic fear into a politics of resentment against “them.” In the 1930s it was foreign traders (mainly Europeans), immigrants, and Jews. Now it’s foreign traders (mainly the Chinese), immigrants, and Muslims.

Why do you suppose a half-dozen states are now considering (or have recently enacted) measures to end multicultural studies, bar children of undocumented workers from public schools, and allowed racial profiling? Every survey shows fewer undocumented workers in America now than three years ago.

How do you account for the outbreak of Islamophobia — fully nine years after 9/11? Why the clamor over a Muslim center near Ground Zero? Why do 18 percent of Americans believe President Obama wasn’t born in the United States, that he is a secret Muslim?

How do you explain the surging animosity toward foreign trade, particularly toward China? Candidates for midterm elections are running tens of millions of dollars of ads attacking their opponents for being too sympathetic to China.

Republicans have a long history of turning fears into resentments that animate voters. (Remember Willy Horton? Senator Joe McCarthy?) For years, Fox News, yell radio, and other outlets of the Republican right have built followings on hatefulness.

Now that the Great Jobs Recession continues, they have more fertile ground. Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, and Newt Gingrich are given megaphones by Fox News to bash immigrants and Muslims and to question the President’s patriotism.

Yet Democrats are entering the same terrain when they blame China. According to the New York Times, House speaker Nancy Pelosi has been encouraging Democratic candidates to go after China, after internal polls showed voters increasingly willing to blame China for our problems and strongly in favor of eliminating tax breaks for companies that do business in China.

Democrats must know high unemployment in America has little or nothing to do with China. Yes, China should allow the yuan to rise further against the dollar. But China’s under-valued currency isn’t the reason we’ve lost 15 million jobs since the end of 2007. No, the tax code shouldn’t reward companies for relocating jobs there. But this tax break is barely relevant to the situation we’re in.

Our jobs crisis is due to the collapse of demand in the U.S. after the housing bubble burst. No longer able to borrow against the rising value of their homes, the vast American middle and working class can no longer spend enough to keep the economy going.

If Democrats (or Republicans, for that matter) want to blame something, blame America’s record level of inequality – an almost unprecedented concentration of income and wealth at the top, and a smaller proportion for the vast middle.

The evidence is all around us. It’s no mere coincidence that 1928 and 2007 marked historical high-water points for shares of national income going to the top 1 percent. Today’s median wage is now 5 percent lower than it was at the start of the decade, taking inflation into account, while top earners are doing better than ever. The core assets of most Americans are their homes, whose values are now 20 to 40 percent below what they were three years ago, while the key assets of America’s wealthy are shares of stocks and bonds, whose values have declined far less. The official rate of unemployment is 4.4 percent for college graduates but 10 percent for those with only high school degrees and almost 15 percent for high school dropouts.

I’m not suggesting Democrats blame the rich for their success. Most came by their high earnings and wealth honestly. And surely a vibrant economy requires that entrepreneurs be rewarded for hard work and valuable insight.

But Democrats should admit America’s economic structure has become dangerously unbalanced — more unbalanced than it’s been in 80 years — and the imbalance is making it difficult if not impossible for the nation to emerge from recession. For these reasons, Democrats should recommit themselves and the nation to redresssing that balance. 

Are the Democrats so dependent on the campaign contributions from the wealthy they dare not speak of this? Or worried about being labeled “class warriors?” by the right? Or convinced by their pollsters that everyone in the vast middle assumes they’ll be rich some day and therefore can’t abide the truth?

Or convinced that bashing China is so much more effective?

China bashing doesn’t educate the public about what’s truly at stake and what must be done in the years ahead. Worse: It reinforces the politics of resentment, and further legitimizes other forms of isolationism and xenophobia.  

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America’s private sector generated 64,000 jobs in September — just about half the number needed to keep up with the growth in the labor force. (Government, meanwhile, shed jobs.) That means American workers are in worse shape today than they were a year ago. The Great Jobs Recession continues. And we won’t get out of it until we face and deal with the structural problem at its core: A record share of the nation’s income going to the top, leaving the vast middle without enough purchasing power to get the economy moving. (See AFTERSHOCK: The Next Economy and America’s Future.)

Not only is income and wealth in America more concentrated in fewer hands than it’s been in 80 years, but those hands are buying our democracy as never before – and they’re doing it behind closed doors.

Hundreds of millions of secret dollars are pouring into congressional and state races in this election cycle. The Koch brothers (whose personal fortunes grew by $5 billion last year) appear to be behind some of it, Karl Rove has rounded up other multi-millionaires to fund right-wing candidates, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is funneling corporate dollars from around the world into congressional races, and Rupert Murdoch is evidently spending heavily.

No one knows for sure where this flood of money is coming from because it’s all secret.

But you can safely assume its purpose is not to help America’s stranded middle class, working class, and poor. It’s to pad the nests of the rich, stop all reform, and deregulate big corporations and Wall Street – already more powerful than since the late 19^th century when the lackeys of robber barons literally deposited sacks of cash on the desks of friendly legislators.

Credit the Supreme Court’s grotesque decision in Citizens United vs. the Federal Election Commission, which opened the floodgates. (Even though 8 of 9 members of the Court also held disclosure laws constitutional, the decision invited the creation of shadowy “nonprofits” that don’t have to reveal anything.)

According to FEC data, only 32 percent of groups paying for election ads are disclosing the names of their donors. By comparison, in the 2006 midterm, 97 percent disclosed; in 2008, almost half disclosed.

Last week, when the Senate considered a bill to force such disclosure, every single Republican voted against it – thereby revealing the GOP’s true colors, and presumed benefactors. (To understand how far the GOP has come, nearly ten years ago campaign disclosure was supported by 48 of 54 Republican senators.)

Maybe the Disclose Bill can get passed in lame-duck session. Maybe the IRS will make sure Karl Rove’s and other supposed nonprofits aren’t sham political units. Maybe pigs will learn to fly.

In the meantime we face an election that marks an even sharper turn toward plutocratic capitalism than before – a government by and for the rich and big corporations — and away from democratic capitalism.

As income and wealth has moved to the top, so has political power. That’s why, for example, it’s been impossible to close the absurd tax loophole that allows hedge-fund and private-equity managers to treat much of their income as capital gains, subject to a 15 percent tax (even though they’re earning tens or hundreds of millions a year, and the top 15 hedge-fund managers earned an average of $1 billion last year). Why it proved impossible to fund expanded health care by limiting the tax deductions of the very rich. Why it’s so difficult even to extend George Bush’s tax cuts for the bottom 98 percent of Americans without also extending them for the top 2 percent – even though the top won’t spend the money and create jobs, but will blow a $36 billion hole in the federal budget next year.

The good news is average Americans are beginning to understand that when the rich secretly flood our democracy with money, the rest of us drown. Wall Street executives and top CEOs get bailed out while under-water homeowners and jobless workers sink.

A Quinnipiac poll earlier this year found overwhelming support for a millionaire tax.

But what the public wants means nothing if our democracy is secretly corrupted by big money.

Right now we’re headed for a perfect storm: An unprecedented concentration of income and wealth at the top, a record amount of secret money flooding our democracy, and a public in the aftershock of the Great Recession becoming increasingly angry and cynical about government. The three are obviously related.

We must act. We need a movement to take back our democracy. (If tea partiers were true to their principles, they’d join it.) As Martin Luther King once said, the greatest tragedy is “not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.”

What can you do?

1. Read Justice Steven’s dissent in the Citizens United case, so you’re fully informed about the majority’s pernicious illogic.

2. Use every opportunity to speak out against this decision, and embarrass and condemn the right-wing Justices who supported it.

3.  In this and subsequent elections, back candidates for congress and president who vow to put Justices on the Court who will reverse it. 

4. Demand that the IRS enforce the law and pull the plug on Karl Rove and other sham nonprofits.

5. If you have a Republican senator, insist that he or she support the Disclose Act. If they won’t, campaign against them.

6. Support public financing of elections.

7.  Join an organization like Common Cause, that’s committed to doing all this and getting big money out of politics. (Personal note: I’m so outraged at what’s happening that I just became chairman of Common Cause.)

8. Send this post to your friends (including any tea partiers you may know).