Martin Shkreli, the former hedge-fund manager turned pharmaceutical CEO who was arrested last week, has been described as a sociopath and worse.

In reality, he’s a brasher and larger version of what others in finance and corporate suites do all the time.

Federal prosecutors are charging him with conning wealthy investors.

Lying to investors is illegal, of course, but it’s perfectly normal to use hype to lure rich investors into hedge funds. And the line between the two isn’t always distinct.  

Hedge funds are lightly regulated on the assumption that investors are sophisticated and can take care of themselves.

Perhaps prosecutors went after Shkreli because they couldn’t nail him for his escapades as a pharmaceutical executive, which were completely legal – although vile.

Shkreli took over a company with the rights to a 62-year-old drug used to treat toxoplasmosis, a devastating parasitic infection that can cause brain damage in babies and people with AIDS. He then promptly raised its price from $13.50 to $750 a pill.

When the media and politicians went after him, Shkreli was defiant, saying “our shareholders expect us to make as much as money as possible.” He said he wished he had raised the price even higher.

That was too much even for the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, Big Pharma’s trade group, which complained indignantly that Shkreli’s company was just an investment vehicle “masquerading” as a pharmaceutical company.

Maybe Big Pharma doesn’t want to admit most pharmaceutical companies have become investment vehicles. If they didn’t deliver for their investors they’d be taken over by “activist” investors and private-equity partners who would.

The hypocrisy is stunning. Just three years ago, Forbes Magazine praised Shkreli as one of its “30 under 30 in Finance” who was “battling billionaires and entrenched drug industry executives.”

Last month, Shkreli got control of a company with rights to a cheap drug used for decades to treat Chagas’ disease in Latin America. His aim was to get the drug approved in the United States and charge tens of thousands of dollars for a course of treatment.

Investors who backed Shkreli in this venture did well. The company’s share price initially shot up from under $2 to more than $40.

While other pharmaceutical companies don’t raise their drug prices fiftyfold in one fell swoop, as did Shkreli, they would if they thought it would lead to fat profits.

Most have been increasing their prices more than 10 percent a year – still far faster than inflation – on drugs used on common diseases like cancer, high cholesterol, and diabetes.

This has imposed a far bigger burden on health spending than Shkreli’s escapades, making it much harder for Americans to pay for drugs they need. Even if they’re insured, most people are paying out big sums in co-payments and deductibles.

Not to mention the impact on private insurers, Medicare, state Medicaid, prisons and the Veterans Health Administration.

And the prices of new drugs are sky-high. Pfizer’s new one to treat advanced breast cancer costs $9,850 a month.

According to an analysis by the Wall Street Journal, that price isn’t based on manufacturing or research costs.

Instead, Pfizer set the price as high as possible without pushing doctors and insurers toward alternative drugs.

But don’t all profit-maximizing firms set prices as high as they can without pushing customers toward alternatives?

Unlike most other countries, the United States doesn’t control drug prices. It leaves pricing up to the market.

Which enables drug companies to charge as much as the market will bear.

So what, exactly, did Martin Shkreli do wrong, by the standards of today’s capitalism?

He played the same game many others are playing on Wall Street and in corporate suites. He was just more audacious about it.

It’s easy to go after bad guys, much harder to go after bad systems.

Hedge fund managers, for example, make big gains from trading on insider information. That robs small investors who aren’t privy to the information.

But it’s not illegal unless a trader knows the leaker was compensated – a looser standard than in any other advanced country.

Meanwhile, the pharmaceutical industry is making a fortune off average Americans, who are paying more for the drugs they need than the citizens of any other advanced country.

That’s largely because Big Pharma has wielded its political influence to avoid cost controls, to ban Medicare from using its bargaining clout to negotiate lower prices, and to allow drug companies to pay the makers of generic drugs to delay their cheaper versions.

Shkreli may be a rotten apple. But hedge funds and the pharmaceutical industry are two rotten systems that are costing Americans a bundle.

HOW TO DEAL WITH YOUR UNCLE BOB  

In preparation for the holidays, here’s a survival guide for dealing with your right-wing relatives.

The great American middle class has become an anxious class – and it’s in revolt.

Before I explain how that revolt is playing out, you need to understand the sources of the anxiety.

Start with the fact that the middle class is shrinking, according to a new Pew survey.

The odds of falling into poverty are frighteningly high, especially for the majority without college degrees.

Two-thirds of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck. Most could lose their jobs at any time.

Many are part of a burgeoning “on-demand” workforce – employed as needed, paid whatever they can get whenever they can get it.

Yet if they don’t keep up with rent or mortgage payments, or can’t pay for groceries or utilities, they’ll lose their footing.

The stress is taking a toll. For the first time in history, the lifespans of middle-class whites are dropping.

According to research by the recent Nobel-prize winning economist, Angus Deaton, and his co-researcher Anne Case, middle-aged white men and women in the United States have been dying earlier.

They’re poisoning themselves with drugs and alcohol, or committing suicide.

The odds of being gunned down in America by a jihadist are far smaller than the odds of such self-inflicted deaths, but the recent tragedy in San Bernadino only heightens an overwhelming sense of arbitrariness and fragility.

The anxious class feels vulnerable to forces over which they have no control. Terrible things happen for no reason.

Yet government can’t be counted on to protect them.

Safety nets are full of holes. Most people who lose their jobs don’t even qualify for unemployment insurance.

Government won’t protect their jobs from being outsourced to Asia or being taken by a worker here illegally.

Government can’t even protect them from evil people with guns or bombs. Which is why the anxious class is arming itself, buying guns at a record rate.

They view government as not so much incompetent as not giving a damn. It’s working for the big guys and fat cats – the crony capitalists who bankroll candidates and get special favors in return.

When I visited so-called “red” states this fall, I kept hearing angry complaints that government is run by Wall Street bankers who get bailed out after wreaking havoc on the economy, corporate titans who get cheap labor, and billionaires who get tax loopholes.

Last year two highly-respected political scientists, Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page, took a close look at 1,799 policy decisions Congress made over the course of over twenty years, and who influenced those decisions.

Their conclusion: “The preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.”

It was only a matter of time before the anxious class would revolt.

They’d support a strongman who’d promise to protect them from all the chaos.

Who’d save jobs from being shipped abroad, slam Wall Street, stick it to China, get rid of people here illegally, and block terrorists from getting into America.

A strongman who’d make America great again – which really means make average working people safe again.

It was a pipe dream, of course – a conjurer’s trick. No single person can do this. The world is far too complex. You can’t build a wall along the Mexican border. You can’t keep out all Muslims. You can’t stop corporations from outsourcing abroad.

Nor should you even try.

Besides, we live in a messy democracy, not a dictatorship.

Still, they think maybe he’s smart enough and tough enough to pull it off. He’s rich. He tells it like it is.

He makes every issue a test of personal strength. He calls himself strong and his adversaries weak.

So what if he’s crude and rude? Maybe that’s what it takes to protect average people in this cruelly precarious world.

For years I’ve heard the rumbles of the anxious class. I’ve listened to their growing anger – in union halls and bars, in coal mines and beauty parlors, on the Main Streets and byways of the washed-out backwaters of America.

I’ve heard their complaints and cynicism, their conspiracy theories and their outrage.

Most are good people, not bigots or racists. They work hard and they have a strong sense of fairness.

But their world has been slowly coming apart. And they’re scared and fed up.

Now someone comes along who’s even more of a bully than those who for years have bullied them economically, politically, and even violently.

The attraction is understandable, even though misguided.

If not Donald Trump, then it will be someone else posing as a strongman. If not this election cycle, it will be the next one.

The revolt of the anxious class has just begun.

LOOK WHO’S BUYING AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

According to an investigation by the New York Times, half of all the money contributed so far to Democratic and Republican presidential candidates—$176 million—has come from just 158 families, along with the companies they own or control.

Who are these people?  They’re almost entirely white, rich, older and male—even though America is becoming increasingly black and brown, young, female, and with declining household incomes.

According to the report, most of these big contributors live in exclusive neighborhoods where they have private security guards instead of public police officers, private health facilities rather than public parks and pools.

Most send their kids and grand kids to elite private schools rather than public schools. They fly in private jets and get driven in private limousines rather than rely on public transportation.

They don’t have to worry about whether Social Security or Medicare will be there for them in their retirement because they’ve put away huge fortunes. They don’t have to worry about climate change because they don’t live in flimsy homes that might collapse in a hurricane, or where water is scarce, or food supplies endangered.

It’s doubtful that most of these 158 are contributing to these campaigns out of the goodness of their hearts or a sense of public responsibility. They’re largely making investments, just the way they make other investments.

And the success of these investments depends on whether their candidates get elected, and will lower their taxes even further, expand tax loopholes, shred health and safety and environmental regulations so their companies can make even more money, and cut Social Security and Medicare and programs for the poor—and thereby allow these 158 and others like them to secede even more from the rest of our society.

These people are, after all, are living in their own separate society, and they want to elect people who will represent them, not the rest of us.

How much more evidence do we need that our system is in crisis? How long before we make it work for all of us instead of a handful at the top? We must not let them buy our democracy. We must get big money out of politics. Publicly-finance political campaigns, disclose all sources of campaign funds, and reverse “Citizens United.”

Just like that, Pfizer has decided it’s no longer American. It plans to link up with Ireland’s Allergan and move its corporate headquarters from New York to Ireland.

That way it will pay less tax. Ireland’s tax rate is less than half that of United States. Ian Read, Pfizer’s chief executive, told the Wall Street Journal the higher tax rate in the United States caused Pfizer to compete “with one hand tied behind our back.”

Read said he’d tried to lobby Congress to reduce the corporate tax rate (now 35 percent) but failed, so Pfizer is leaving.

Such corporate desertions from the United States (technically called “tax inversions”) will cost the rest of us taxpayers some $19.5 billion over the next decade, estimates Congress’s joint committee on taxation.

Which is fueling demands from Republicans to lower the corporate tax rate.

Donald Trump wants it to be 15 percent.

Mike Huckabee and Ted Cruz want to eliminate the corporate tax altogether. (Why this would save the Treasury more money than further corporate tax inversions is unclear.)

Rather than lower corporate tax rates, an easier fix would be to take away the benefits of corporate citizenship from any company that deserts America.

One big benefit is the U.S. patent system that grants companies like Pfizer longer patent protection and easier ways to extend it than most other advanced economies.

In 2013, Pfizer raked in nearly $4 billion on sales of the Prevnar 13 vaccine, which prevents diseases caused by pneumococcal bacteria, from ear infections to pneumonia – for which Pfizer is the only manufacturer.

Other countries wouldn’t allow their patent systems to justify such huge charges.  

Neither should we – especially when Pfizer stops being an American company.

The U.S. government also protects the assets of American corporations all over the world.

In the early 2000s, after a Chinese company replicated Pfizer’s formula for Viagra, the U.S. Trade Representative put China on a “priority watch list” and charged China with “inadequate enforcement” against such piracy.

Soon thereafter the Chinese backed down. Now China is one of Pfizer’s major sources of revenue.

But when Pfizer is no longer American, the United States should stop protecting its foreign assets.

Nor should Pfizer reap the benefits when the United States goes to bat for American corporations in trade deals.

In the Pacific Partnership and the upcoming deal with the European Union, the interests of American pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer – gaining more patent protection abroad, limiting foreign release of drug data, and preventing other governments controlling drug prices – have been central points of contention.

And Pfizer has been one of the biggest beneficiaries. From now on, it shouldn’t be.

U.S. pharmaceutical companies rake in about $12 billion a year because Medicare isn’t allowed to use its huge bargaining power to get lower drug prices.

But a non-American company like Pfizer shouldn’t get any of this windfall. From now on, Medicare should squeeze every penny it can out of Pfizer.

American drug companies also get a free ride off of basic research done by the National Institutes of Health.

Last year the NIH began a collaboration with Pfizer’s Centers for Therapeutic Innovation  – subsidizing Pfizer’s appropriation of early scientific discoveries for new medications.

In the future, Pfizer shouldn’t qualify for this subsidy, either.

Finally, non-American corporations face restrictions on what they can donate to U.S. candidates for public office, and how they can lobby the U.S. government.

Yet Pfizer has been among America’s biggest campaign donors and lobbyists.

In 2014, it ponied up $2,217,066 to candidates (by contrast, its major competitor Johnson & Johnson spent $755,000). And Pfizer spent $9,493,000 on lobbyists.

So far in the 2016 election cycle, it’s been one of the top ten corporate donors.

Pfizer’s political generosity has paid off – preventing Congress from attaching a prescription drug benefit to Medicare, or from making it easier for generics to enter the market, or from using Medicare’s bargaining power to reduce drug prices.

And the company has donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to the candidacies of state attorneys general in order to get favorable settlements in cases brought against it.

But by deserting America, Pfizer relinquishes its right to influence American politics.

If Pfizer or any other American corporation wants to leave America to avoid U.S. taxes, that’s their business.

But they should no longer get any of the benefits of American citizenship – because they’ve stopped paying for them.

PAUL RYAN’S 7 TERRIBLE IDEAS

Yesterday, the new Speaker of the House, Paul Ryan, summed up his House Republican agenda – vowing to pursue legislation that would frame a stark choice for voters in 2016.





“Our No. 1 goal for the next year is to put together a complete alternative to the left’s agenda,” he said. 

Despite the speech’s sweeping oratory and careful stagecraft, Ryan clings to seven dumb ideas that are also cropping up among Republican presidential candidates. 

Here they are, and here’s why they’re dumb:

1. Reduce the top income-tax rate to 25% from the current 39%.  A terrible idea.  It’s a huge windfall to the rich at a time when the rich already take home a larger share of total income that at any time since the 1920s.

2. Cut corporate taxes to 25% from the current 35%.  Another bad idea.  A giant sop to corporations, the largest of which are already socking away $2.1 trillion in foreign tax shelters.

3. Slash spending on domestic programs like food stamps and education for poor districts.  What?!  Already 22% of the nation’s children are in poverty; these cuts would only make things worse.

4. Turn Medicaid and other federal programs for the poor into block grants for the states, and let the states decide how to allocate them.  In other words, give Republican state legislatures and governors slush funds to do with as they wish.

5. Turn Medicare into vouchers that don’t keep up with increases in healthcare costs.  In effect cutting Medicare for the elderly.  Another awful idea.

6.  Deal with rising Social Security costs by raising the retirement age for Social Security.  Bad!  This would make Social Security even more regressive, since the poor don’t live nearly as long as the rich.

7. Finally, let the minimum wage continue to decline as inflation eats it away.  Wrong again.  Low wage workers need a higher minimum wage.

These 7 ideas will harm most Americans.  Ryan is wrong. 

On Wednesday, 14 people were killed at a social services agency in San Bernardino, California. The gunman apparently was Muslim and was influenced by ISIS. 

In light of this, and of the Paris bombings, the FBI reports a sharp upturn in threats on mosques and to Muslims in the U.S.

In Connecticut, police are investigating reports of multiple gunshots fired at a local mosque. Two Tampa Bay-area mosques in Florida received threatening phone messages. One of the calls threatened a firebombing.

In an Austin suburb, leaders of the Islamic Center of Pflugerville discovered feces and torn pages of the Qur’an.

The hatefulness and hateful responses extend beyond the tragedies in Paris and San Bernardino. 

Two weeks ago, a gunman killed three at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado. Later, in explaining his motive to the police, he said “no more baby parts” – a reference to videos that wrongly claimed that Planned Parenthood was selling body parts of fetuses. 

It’s a lie that Carly Fiorinia continues to restate. 

A week before the shooting at Planned Parenthood, gunmen opened fire on Black Lives Matter protesters in Minneapolis who were demanding action against two white Minneapolis police officers involved in the fatal shooting of Jamar Clark, 24, an unarmed black man, on Nov. 15.

Evidence shows the accused shooters were linked to white supremacist organizations operating online.

Hate crimes will never be eliminated entirely. A small number of angry, deranged people inevitably will vent their rage at groups they find threatening. Some will do so violently.

But such hatefulness is being encouraged by Republican politicians.

Perpetrators of hate crimes often take their cues from what they hear in the media. And the recent inclination of some politicians to use inflammatory rhetoric is contributing to a climate of hate and fear. 

Some candidates are fomenting animus toward Muslims.

Huckabee says he’d “like for Barack Obama to resign if he’s not going to protect America and instead protect the image of Islam.”

Ben Carson says allowing Syrian refugees into the United States is analogous to exposing a neighborhood to a “rabid dog.” Last September Carson said he “would not advocate that we put a Muslim in charge of this nation.”

Trump has advocated registering all Muslims in the United States and putting American mosques under surveillance.

He’s also claimed that Muslim-Americans in New Jersey celebrated by the “thousands” when the World Trade Center was destroyed on September 11, 2001, although there’s no evidence to back that claim.

Indeed, much of Trump’s campaign is built on hatefulness. And Trump not only fails to condemn violence he provokes but finds excuses for it.

After a handful of white supporters recently punched and attempted to choke a Black Lives Matter protester at one of his campaign rallies, Trump said “maybe he should have been roughed up.”

Trump began his campaign last June by falsely alleging Mexican immigrants are “bringing crime. They’re rapists.”

Weeks later in Boston, two brothers beat with a metal poll and urinated on a 58-year-old homeless Mexican national. They subsequently told the police “Donald Trump was right, all these illegals need to be deported.“

Instead of condemning that brutality, Trump excused it by saying “people who are following me are very passionate. They love this country and they want this country to be great again.”

I’m not suggesting any presidential candidate is directly to blame for hate crimes erupting across America.

But by virtue of their standing as presidential candidates, their words carry particular weight. They have a responsibility to calm people with the truth rather than stir them up with lies. 

In suggesting that the staff of Planned Parenthood, Muslims, Black Lives Matter protesters, and Mexican immigrants are guilty of venal acts, these candidates are fanning the flames of hate.

This itself is despicable.

WHY THE SHARING ECONOMY IS HARMING WORKERS – AND WHAT MUST BE DONE

In this holiday season it’s especially appropriate to acknowledge how many Americans don’t have steady work.

The so-called “share economy” includes independent contractors, temporary workers, the self-employed, part-timers, freelancers, and free agents. Most file 1099s rather than W2s, for tax purposes.

It’s estimated that in five years over 40 percent of the American labor force will be in such uncertain work; in a decade, most of us.

Already two-thirds of American workers are living paycheck to paycheck.

This trend shifts all economic risks onto workers. A downturn in demand, or sudden change in consumer needs, or a personal injury or sickness, can make it impossible to pay the bills.

It eliminates labor protections such as the minimum wage, worker safety, family and medical leave, and overtime.

And it ends employer-financed insurance – Social Security, workers’ compensation, unemployment benefits, and employer-provided health insurance under the Affordable Care Act.

No wonder, according to polls, almost a quarter of American workers worry they won’t be earning enough in the future. That’s up from 15 percent a decade ago.

Such uncertainty can be hard on families, too. Children of parents working unpredictable schedules or outside standard daytime working hours are likely to have lower cognitive skills and more behavioral problems, according to new research.

What to do?

Courts are overflowing with lawsuits over whether companies have misclassified “employees” as “independent contractors,” resulting in a profusion of criteria and definitions.


We should aim instead for simplicity: Whoever pays more than half of someone’s income, or provides more than half their working hours should be responsible for all the labor protections and insurance an employee is entitled to.

In addition, to restore some certainty to people’s lives, we need to move away from unemployment insurance and toward income insurance.

Say, for example, your monthly income dips more than 50 percent below the average monthly income you’ve received from all the jobs you’ve taken over the preceding five years. With income insurance, you’d automatically receive half the difference for up to a year.

It’s possible to have a flexible economy and also provide workers some minimal level of security.

A decent society requires no less.

We appear to be moving ever closer toward a world war against the Islamic State.

No sane person welcomes war. Yet if we do go to war against ISIS we must keep a watchful eye on 5 things:

1. The burden of fighting the war must be widely shared among Americans.

America’s current “all-volunteer” army is comprised largely of lower-income men and women for whom army pay is the best option.

“We’re staring at the painful story of young people with fewer options bearing the greatest burden,“ Greg Speeter, executive director of the National Priorities Project, told the Washington Post. NPP’s study found low- and middle-income families supply far more Army recruits than families with incomes greater than $60,000 a year.

That’s not fair. Moreover, when the vast majority of Americans depend on a small number of people to fight wars for us, the public stops feeling the toll such wars take.

From World War II until the final days of the Vietnam War, in January 1973, nearly every young man in America faced the prospect of being drafted into the Army.

Sure, many children of the rich found means to stay out of harm’s way. But the draft at least spread responsibility and heightened the public’s sensitivity to the human costs of war.

If we go into a ground war against ISIS, we should seriously consider reinstating the draft.

2. We must not sacrifice our civil liberties. 

U.S. spy agencies no longer have authority they had in the post-9/11 USA Patriot Act to collect Americans’ phone and other records. The NSA must now gain court approval for such access.

But in light of the Paris attacks, the FBI director and other leading U.S. law enforcement officials now say they need access to encrypted information on smartphones, personal and business records of suspected terrorists, and “roving wiretaps” of suspects using multiple disposable cell phones.

War can also lead to internment of suspects and suspensions of constitutional rights, as we’ve painfully witnessed.

Donald Trump says he’d require American Muslims to register in a federal data base, and he refuses to rule out requiring all Muslims to carry special religious identification.

"We’re going to have to do things that we never did before….we’re going to have to do certain things that were frankly unthinkable a year ago,” he adds.

We must be vigilant that we maintain the freedoms we are fighting for.

3. We must minimize the deaths of innocent civilians abroad.

The bombing raids have already claimed a terrible civilian toll, contributing to a mass exodus of refugees.

Last month the independent monitoring group Airwars said at least 459 civilians have died from coalition airstrikes in Syria over the past year. Other monitoring groups, including the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, also claim significant civilian deaths.

Some civilian casualties are unavoidable. But we must ensure they are minimized – and not just out of humanitarian concern. Every civilian death creates more enemies.

And we must do our part to take in a fair portion of Syrian refugees.

4. We must not tolerate anti-Muslim bigotry in the United States.

Already, leading Republican candidates are fanning the flames.

Ben Carson says no Muslim should be president.

Trump says “thousands” of Arab-Americans cheered when the Twin Towers went down on 9/11 – a boldface lie.

Ted Cruz wants to accept Christians refugees from Syrian but not Muslims.

Jeb Bush says American assistance for refugees should focus on Christians.

Marco Rubio wants to close down “any place where radicals are being inspired,” including American mosques.

It’s outrageous that leading Republican candidates for president of the United States are fueling such hate.

Such bigotry is not only morally odious. It also plays into the hands of ISIS.

5. The war must be paid for with higher taxes on the rich.

A week before the terrorist attacks in Paris, the Senate passed a $607 billion defense spending bill, with 91 senators in favor and 3 opposed (including Bernie Sanders). The House has already passed it, 370 to 58. Obama has said he’ll sign it.

That defense appropriation is larded with pork for military contractors – including Lockheed Martin’s F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, the most expensive weapons system in history.

Now Republicans are pushing for even more military spending.

We cannot let them use the war as a pretext to cut Social Security and Medicare, or programs for the poor.

The war should be paid for the way we used to pay for wars – with higher taxes, especially on the wealthy.

As we move toward war against ISIS, we must be vigilant – to fairly allocate the burdens of who’s called on to fight the war, to protect civil liberties, to protect innocent civilians abroad, to avoid hate and bigotry, and to fairly distribute the cost of paying for war.

These aren’t just worthy aims. They are also the foundations of our nation’s strength.

The next president of the United States will confront a virulent jihadist threat, mounting effects of climate change, and an economy becoming ever more unequal.

We’re going to need an especially wise and able leader.

Yet our process for choosing that person is a circus, and several leading candidates are clowns.

How have we come to this?

First, anyone with enough ego and money can now run for president. 

This wasn’t always the case. Political parties used to sift through possible candidates and winnow the field. 

Now the parties play almost no role. Anyone with some very wealthy friends can set up a Super PAC. According to a recent New York Times investigation, half the money to finance the 2016 election so far has come from just 158 families.

Or if you’re a billionaire, you can finance your own campaign.

And if you’re sufficiently outlandish, outrageous, and outspoken, a lot of your publicity will be free. Since he announced his candidacy last June, Trump hasn’t spent any money at all on television advertising.

Second, candidates can now get away with saying just about anything about their qualifications or personal history, even if it’s a boldface lie.

This wasn’t always the case, either. The media used to scrutinize what candidates told the public about themselves. 

A media expose could bring a candidacy to a sudden halt (as it did in 1988 for Gary Hart, who had urged reporters to follow him if they didn’t believe his claims of monogamy).

But when today’s media expose a candidates lies, there seems to be no consequence. Carson’s poll numbers didn’t budge after revelations he had made up his admission to West Point.

The media also used to evaluate candidates’ policy proposals, and those evaluations influenced voters. 

Now the media’s judgments are largely shrugged off. Trump says he’d “bomb the shit” out of ISIS, round up all undocumented immigrants in the United States and send them home, and erect a wall along the entire U.S.-Mexican border.  

Editors and columnists find these proposals ludicrous but that doesn’t seem to matter.

Fiorina says she’ll stop Planned Parenthood from “harvesting” the brains of fully formed fetuses. She insists she saw an undercover video of the organization about to do so.

The media haven’t found any such video but no one seems to care.

Third and finally, candidates can now use hatred and bigotry to gain support. 

Years ago respected opinion leaders stood up to this sort of demagoguery and brought down the bigots.

In the 1950s, the eminent commentator Edward R. Murrow revealed Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy to be a dangerous incendiary, thereby helping put an end to McCarthy’s communist witch hunts.

In the 1960s, religious leaders and university presidents condemned Alabama Governor George C. Wallace and other segregationist zealots – thereby moving the rest of America toward integration, civil rights, and voting rights.  

But when today’s presidential candidates say Muslim refugees shouldn’t be allowed into America, no Muslim should ever be president, and undocumented workers from Mexico are murderers, they get away with it.

Paradoxically, at a time when the stakes are especially high for who becomes the next president, we have a free-for-all politics in which anyone can become a candidate, put together as much funding as they need, claim anything about themselves no matter how truthful, advance any proposal no matter how absurd, and get away bigotry without being held accountable.

Why? Americans have stopped trusting the mediating institutions that used to filter and scrutinize potential leaders on behalf of the rest of us.

Political parties are now widely disdained.

Many Americans now consider the “mainstream media” biased.

And no opinion leader any longer commands enough broad-based respect to influence a majority of the public.

A growing number of Americans have become convinced the entire system is rigged – including the major parties, the media, and anyone honored by the establishment.

So now it’s just the candidates and the public, without anything in between.

Which means electoral success depends mainly on showmanship and self-promotion.

Telling the truth and advancing sound policies are less important than trending on social media.

Being reasonable is less useful than gaining attention.

Offering rational argument is less advantageous than racking up ratings.

Such circus politics may be fun to watch, but it’s profoundly dangerous for America and the world. 

We might, after all, elect one of the clowns.