Money Can’t Buy Trustworthiness

It may have to do less with the class you’re born into and more with how your income compares to those around you.

.. At the lowest end of the class gradient, every single driver stopped to let the pedestrian entering the crosswalk continue on his way. Midway up the class ladder, about 30 percent of drivers broke the law and cut off the pedestrian so that they could keep going. At the upper end of SES, almost 50 percent of drivers broke the law to put their own needs first. At the most basic level, these findings offer a provocative warning. When you’re vulnerable, upper-class individuals are more likely to disregard the trust you place in them if doing so furthers their own ends.

Again, significantly more upper-class individuals indicated that they would lie—that they would intentionally betray the trust the job-seeker placed in them as an honest supervisor.
.. More upper-class individuals inflated their rolls, thereby ensuring they’d receive larger sums of money from the experimenters than they deserved

The Warren Brief

Warren’s interest in debt, she says, is partly personal. “My daddy and I were both afraid of being poor, really poor. His response was never to talk about money or what might happen if it ran out—never ever ever. My response was to study contracts, finance, and, most of all, economic failure, to learn everything I could.”

.. In the spring of 2009, after the panel issued its third report, critical of the bailout, Larry Summers took Warren out to dinner in Washington and, she recalls, told her that she had a choice to make. She could be an insider or an outsider, but if she was going to be an insider she needed to understand one unbreakable rule about insiders: “They don’t criticize other insiders.” That’s about when Warren went on the Jon Stewart show, and you get the sense that, over that dinner, she decided to run for office.

John Roberts and the Color of Money

This is why money isn’t speech. Freedom of speech as a functional element in democratic life assumes that such freedom can be meaningfully deployed. But the unleashing of yet more money into politics allows a very limited class of people to drown out the money “speech” of everyone else—but especially those with a deep, overwhelmingly well documented history of being denied voice and presence in American political life.

Now take the work of the Roberts Court in ensuring that rule of cash, the engine of political power for an overwhelmingly white upper-upper crust, with combine those decisions with the conclusions of the court on voting rights, and you get a clear view of what the five-justice right-wing majority has done. Controlling access to the ballot has been a classic tool of white supremacy since the end of Reconstruction. It is so once again, as states seizing on the Roberts Court’s Voting Rights Act decision take aim at exactly those tools with which African Americans increased turnout and the proportion of minority voters within the electorate. There’s not even much of an attempt to disguise what’s going on.

U.S. Currency Finally Achieves Universal Suffrage

The decision from the nation’s highest court, which was greeted with cheers from advocates and interest groups that have long worked tirelessly on behalf of money, ensures that U.S. dollars can no longer be disenfranchised, and for the first time in history, guarantees that every single one of them will be free to participate in the democratic process with no restrictions whatsoever.