Stop the presses!

Been pretty remarkable over the past 24 hours or so to watch American journalists discover that not only are there people in the world who are stinkin' rich, but they like to do stinkin' rich people stuff.

Perhaps even more astounding is Republican senators piling on.

Come on. Hayward's little yacht race weekend is bad timing, no doubt. But this is the world we've made. We struck this bargain 30 years ago when we elected Ronald Reagan and embraced trickle-down economics, a system which made explicit our preference for allowing the rich to get as rich as they possibly could in the belief that was the only way for the poor to grab a foothold on the bottom rung of the ladder. The results of this decision, which the US press and Republican Party have embraced so thoroughly that to even raise the question of whether or not it's true is to be dismissed as un-American, are apparent every single day. That childhood poverty, which declined from the 1960s up through Ronald Reagan's election, then declined again during the Clinton administration, is back up to historical highs is no accident. It's the exact price we pay in order to allow the small group of people who consider themselves Tony Hayward's friends to live the lives they have.

If Republican senators and US journalists are going to start complaining about the situation, instead of simply accusing those who point it out of fomenting class warfare, they must be getting scared that the rest of us are going to start getting angry about it.

Wonder if they're right?