I was amazed and heartened to catch the end of The Blind Side author Michael Lewis’s segment on 60 Minutes last night, in which he demolished the delusions behind Wall Street’s scandalous bonus system.

But I was even more astonished to see an online-only clip when I went to the 60 Minutes website today to learn more. Apparently Lewis would be right at home in our movement:


Watch CBS News Videos Online

Did they really edit this out of the broadcast? I wonder why…

As I said in a comment on the 60 Minutes site:

Lewis’ argument in this clip could apply equally well to Andy Rooney (assuming he makes a lot of money) or stars in any kind of star system – entertainment, sports, whatever.

What they all have in common is that they’re not paid directly by people – like your hairdresser is – but by corporations.

And what these corporations do is basically add a little private “tax” of their own to everything they sell – or looked at another way, they charge a little private income tax on all their employees and stockholders – to create a massive slush fund to pay truly monstrous salaries and bonuses to the few executives who are at the top of the heap, and the stars with whom they fraternize.

They don’t earn this money – like the Wall Streeters, they just siphon it off from a large revenue stream.

True, they don’t bring the economy crashing down…but neither do they “deserve” what they’re paid.

This is a democracy – I wonder why we don’t just pass a law against income exceeding a certain level – what a history teacher would consider reasonable, as Lewis says – or at least pass taxes of our own to claw those megasalaries that make everything we buy more expensive, and make all own own incomes a little bit lower, back for our benefit.

Those private corporate “taxes” are the kind of taxes the tea-partiers should be worried about – taxation without representation, or with the reduced representation of a stockholder – not taxation with representation, like our government imposes for us.

At least if our government doesn’t impose taxes that benefit us, but instead benefit the rich – we have only ourselves to blame, for not starting, joining, and pursuing political movements like this one to assert our power.