I love it when billionaires feel misunderstood. It sounds something like this: “I’ve fleeced you or just piled up gobs of money at your expense but, gee, that really wasn’t personal, I’m really a good guy with all the right motives, if you could just see it my way because, well, my way is the right way because, well, how do you think I made all that money if I wasn’t so smart?” Uh huh.  

   That’s sort of what Pete Peterson’s gripe is with me, apparently. I’m misrepresenting him. I don’t understand him. Or so he, via his press secretary, whines. Crawl down the rabbit hole with me because, putting aside the tiff we have going here, there is a bigger lesson: how conventional wisdom ruins our society and why it’s important to bang back at the conventional wisdom, which is often dead wrong.

Pete Peterson is a billionaire who has spent a chunk of his fortune—made mostly when his buy-out firm Blackstone went public—fanning the flames of the entirely phony debt and deficit “crisis”. In 2010, I wrote an e-book entitled, “It’s Not Raining, We’re Getting Peed On: the Scam of the Deficit Crisis”, as a modest way to actually lay out the facts about the phony “crisis”.

    Pete Peterson figures prominently in the book (more on that in a moment). I took the opportunity to write a very short article for Playboy magazine, which is in the current issue (subscription required even for the words!).

  The short article contains this paragraph:

    In my search to find something positive among the rubbish cascading across our eyes, let us behold a small ray of positive action. Citibank's CEO Vikram S. Pandit tried to stuff his pockets full of millions of dollars more in bank money. The shareholders were not buying it--and turned thumbs down on his proposed heist.

   Sorry, Vikram, you need a new plan:

Citigroup’s shareholders rejected the bank’s plan to award its chief executive, Vikram S. Pandit, $15 million in compensation, in a show of frustration about Wall Street pay.

At the bank’s annual meeting Tuesday in Dallas, a majority of investors voted against a proposal on executive compensation, which included approving Mr. Pandit’s pay package.

   Maybe this is a sign I am getting soft, or perhaps desperate for any tidbit of good news because this vote was simply advisory. That said, it's going to be hard for the board of directors to simply ignore a vote for Pandit's legalized robbery package which only garnered the support of 45 percent of the shareholders.

   If I was a "one percenter", I'd love the debate under way in the U.S. right now. What's not to love? You whine and cry about the "Buffett Rule", how unfair it is and hurts the "job creators", and, then, laugh all the way to the bank as you barely can see where the "Buffett Rule" hurts your pile of gold. Or, even better, you embrace the "Buffett Rule" and look like a "liberal" and still remain filthy wealthy. It's a joke.

The president and is Democratic allies are playing right into the game:

With a rousing speech on Tuesday to a receptive university audience of about 5,000 in this battleground state, Mr. Obama defined the coming contest as a clash of philosophies: His argument that tax fairness and the common good demand the richest Americans pay at least as much as middle-income taxpayers do, contrasted with Republicans’ opposition to any tax increases as job killers and class warfare, even at the cost of deep cuts in domestic programs.

While voters have not often rewarded candidates who advocate tax increases, Mr. Obama and his campaign advisers, in league with Democrats in Congress, express confidence that voters are on their side, with polls showing that Americans overwhelmingly agree that wealthy taxpayers should pay more and that they favor spending for programs like education, research and health care.

   So, let's turn first to the people who don't adjust their beliefs based on elections and polls--the Citizens for Tax Justice, which essentially says that this is a sham:

   Here is what austerity and the spread of the "American disease" does for people:

Europe’s long-running euro crisis may be cooling. But the economic distress it has left in its wake is pushing a rising tide of workers into precarious straits in France and across the European Union. Today, hundreds of thousands of people are living in campgrounds, vehicles and cheap hotel rooms. Millions more are sharing space with relatives, unable to afford the basic costs of living.

These people are the extreme edge of Europe’s working poor: a growing slice of the population that is slipping through Europe’s long-vaunted social safety net. Many, particularly the young, are trapped in low-paying or temporary jobs that are replacing permanent ones destroyed in Europe’s economic downturn.

   I have a piece in Tuesday's The Australian (if you are in the U.S. and you catch this on Monday, hey, it's the time machine effect), basically, arguing that the 2012 presidential elections won't change a whole lot.

    See it here.

    Or read it after the fold:

    Really. When I read The New York Times editorials about the economy, or the truly shallow reporting from most of the paper's reporters, often I think: the people at The New York Times actually are dolts. They don't understand economics--at all. But, more often, it's worth considering--they actually believe what they write, even if there is such a deep disconnect from one point to another.

 This was the most recent example--and, trust me, you could really find examples virtually every day in that newspaper, as well as virtually every traditional media organ. In an editorial entitled, "Pushing Back Against Austerity", the paper wags its finger at Europe:

Political leaders across Europe have begun to push back against the campaign of Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany to put the Continent’s economies into a straitjacket of unrelenting fiscal austerity. It is about time. Two years of insisting that weak economies carry out tax increases and spending cuts have brought nothing but recession and deepening indebtedness.[emphasis added]

   If you are one who is already bored by the 2012 elections and the rhetorical, mind-numbing repetition, here's a little taste of what you can expect all the way into the distant future of 2016. The poodle-for-the-rich governor of New York has determined that his path to the White House in 2016--and, despite the boring typical political dialogue, he is running--is to go after the people who have really destroyed the economy...you know, the teachers, firefighters and other public workers. I admit bias: I've thought this guy is the bottom of the pond for a very long time and nothing will change my mind, polls be damned.

Ah, yes, the great success:

Lawmakers on Thursday morning approved a hard-fought measure to cut the retirement benefits for future public employees in New York City and across the state, dealing a defeat to labor unions at the end of a dramatic all-night session.
...
“This bold and transformational pension reform plan is a historic win for New York taxpayers and municipalities,” Mr. Cuomo said in a statement. “Without this critical reform, New Yorkers would have seen significant tax increases, as well as layoffs to teachers, firefighters and police.”

   Really? Danny Donohue, president of the Civil Service Employees Association, has it right:

   A few months ago, I spent 5-6 hours interviewing Paul Krugman for Playboy magazine. It's now on-line here. He speaks candidly--surprise--about the economic misdeeds of Wall Street, the foolishness of the current austerity obsession and focus on the non-existent debt crisis, and a whole range of topics including his view that the Obama Administration did not understand the depth of the economic crisis.

  I start with this:

   See, this is a good example of how the conventional wisdom we hear day after day warps the brain. More people are, in fact, being pushed into minimum wage jobs:

The number of workers in New York state earning minimum wage has increased sharply since the start of the recession, one of the driving factors underlying a debate in Albany over whether to raise the hourly rate.

In 2011, the number of minimum-wage earners statewide stood at about 91,000, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. The figure represents a significant jump from 2008, when an estimated 6,000 people worked at the lowest rung of the income ladder.

The swelling ranks of minimum-wage earners has lent some ammunition to a push by Democratic Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver to increase the hourly rate for the first time since 2009. It was boosted that year to $7.25 an hour.

Mr. Silver has backed a bill that would an increase the wage to $8.50 an hour, a rate that would be among the highest in the nation. It would then be indexed annually to the inflation rate.

   But, the problem is that the solution is a cruel lie. The minimum wage today, if it reflected productivity gains over the last 30 years, should be between $19-$20 an hour. Raising the minimum wage, then, to $8.50 an hour seems like a big deal--except when you understand that it hides the vast robbery that has taken place of the past 30 years and it certainly will not make it possible for people to live with dignity and respect.