The Facebook IPO, valued at tens of billions of dollars, is going to make some people very, very rich. Where does this incredible value come from? From the personal information that the millions of Facebook users willingly provide the dominant social networking site. Most of that data will be used to customize advertising designed to appeal to Facebook users. Every time you click on an ad, indicate a preference for anything, Facebook knows, and advertisers hungry for your business will know, too. Other folks, with potentially more sinister motives, are able to use the information, as well. Prospective employers, for instance, can discover things you didn’t include in your resume, and anyone else who might want to find out more about you, for whatever reason, will not find it hard to unearth your not-so-secret secrets. Big Brother may well be watching, and he certainly isn’t the only one.

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In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby,” Nick Carraway observes that “the rich are different from you and me.” Mitt Romney’s tax returns confirm it. The rich have access to deductions, evasions, loopholes and favorable rates we working stiffs can only dream of. The absurd truth is that the wages earned by those of us who get paychecks from employers are taxed at the highest rate of any income. The lucky stiffs who run hedge funds and private equity firms get to take income as carried interest, whatever that means. In tax terms, it means they get to make lots of money for investing other people’s money and have it taxed at obscenely low rates compared to what we working stiffs pay. Then there are the Cayman Islands accounts and Swiss banks. Show of hands, please. How many of you have Swiss bank accounts? I don’t resent wealth; like most Americans, I aspire to it. What I deeply resent is a political system that jiggers tax law to favor the rich over the rest of us, feeding the income inequality that destroys opportunity and stagnates growth. The wealth disparity in America already rivals that of many Third World countries and our storied social mobility is rapidly becoming a fondly remembered relic of bygone days.

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I’ve noticed that as the primaries heat up, all the Republicans are channeling the sainted Ronald Reagan. In the last debate before the South Carolina vote, Mitt Romney used the famous “shining city on a hill” line, and Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels repeated it in his rebuttal to Obama’s State of the Union address. Somehow, it doesn’t sound quite as stirring coming from their mouths. They both strenuously object to Obama pointing out that there’s a huge and growing disparity in income and wealth in this country. Romney calls it the “politics of envy,” replacing the overused “class warfare.” What’s painfully obvious, no matter how much they deny it, is that the shining cities in this country now feature a gilded mansion on the hilltop occupied by the very rich, while the rest of us live in hovels down in the valley, many of which are in foreclosure.

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It looks as though Congress, in the face of numerous protests, including the Wikipedia shutdown, is backing off passage of SOPA and PIPA, the laws which would have allowed the government to block or shut down websites suspected of posting pirated material. The laws, written on behalf of the film, music and publishing industries, had a laudable purpose, but were so broadly written that the unintended consequences might well have been the loss of the openness and freedom of the internet we now enjoy. We hear a lot of overblown complaints these days about government overreach, but passage of these laws would give the Feds much too much power to intervene in what we can see, hear and read.

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Every once in a while, we cartoonists find a happy accidental convergence that makes for a fun cartoon. I came up with Romney’s line first, and the other two just fell into place. The historical irony here is that Al Gore never actually claimed to have invented the internet. He rightly took credit for his role in the Senate in establishing the governmental groundwork that allowed the internet to flourish; this got twisted by his opponents into the exaggerated claim that he was solely responsible. Mitt Romney, on the other hand, DID put into place the Massachusetts health care reform that was the basis for Obama’s health care plan.

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The Romney campaign is rolling, both in votes and in cash. If he wins in South Carolina, with a much heavier concentration of evangelical Christians and Tea Partiers, it will likely be game, set and match. He’s already running his campaign as though Obama is his opponent, and not the assemblage of Republican wannabees, as-beens and looney-tunes who are still in the race. He is, of course, the most palatable of the bunch in the general election; apparently that trumps the doubts so many in the party have about him, at least so far. S.C. will be an intriguing test, though, with its history of no-holds barred campaigning (remember the flyer claiming that McCain fathered a Black child out of wedlock?) and surprise winners. It will be interesting to see if the charges that his Bain Capital Management group acted as greedy corporate raiders, trashing companies and laying off workers for a fast buck, will stick in a state much harder hit by the recession than Iowa and New Hampshire.

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Remember that moment in the State of the Union address two years back when the president chided the Supreme Court justices in attendance about their appalling Citizens United decision, predicting that a tsunami of anonymous cash would flood elections? Justice Alito responded by silently mouthing the words, “not true.”  Fast forward to 2012. As predicted by everyone but Alito, superpacs aligned with the candidates now dominate political spending. These beasts are allowed to raise and spend unlimited funds from donors who don’t have to reveal their identities, and they now outspend the actual campaigns by significant and growing margins. Technically, they are supposed to be independent of the candidates, but they are often, as is the case with Romney’s superpac (and one guesses Paul’s, Gingrich’s, and Obam’s, too) managed and staffed by the candidate’s former campaign workers. Thanks to the lack of transparency, we can’t know for certain, but it’s a good guess that most of that money doesn’t come from the elderly pensioner sending five bucks in the hope that  Social Security checks will keep coming for a few more years, or from some poor guy who got laid off last year and whose mortgage is under water praying that some kind of foreclosure relief is on the way. If the tiny Iowa caucus is any guide , tens, perhaps hundreds of millions will be spent on the Republican primaries alone. And just wait until the main event is underway. The presidential campaign alone is likely to cost more more than $1 billion, and it’s expected that the entire 2012 election will result in campaign spending of more than $6 billion, the bulk of it doled out by anonymously-funded superpacs  All of which raises the suspicion that the real candidates are the superpac donors, whoever they are, and that the entire election is just a vastly entertaining puppet show designed to distract us from what’s really going on behind the curtain. And the strings are invisible.

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I watched enough of the debates leading up to Iowa to conclude that the Republican candidates for president seem to live on a different planet than the rest of us, one where the only problem this country has is named Obama. Unemployment at 9 percent? Millions of homes foreclosed? The erosion of the middle class? The obscene income gap between the rich and the rest of us?  Cut taxes for the wealthy, destroy Social Security and Medicare and make sure health care and financial reforms don’t happen. Problems solved. Meanwhile, in the real world, the long economic slump continues to cause terrible pain for millions of Americans, and none of the right-wing fantasies indulged by the pretenders to the White House offer any hope at all. Am I alone in thinking that the the outrageous sum of $12.5 million spent by the campaigns in Iowa could have been put to better use? Say funding a food bank or two.

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Interesting story yesterday about how wide the economic gulf has become between members of Congress and their constituents.  According to the New York Times, the median net worth of the folks in Congress grew 15 percent from 2004 to 2010, while the public saw its net worth drop 8 percent. Senators and representatives have always been richer than the average American, but the gap has grown precipitously in recent years. The average member of Congress has a net worth almost ten times that of the general public; half of all members are millionaires, and many are much, much wealthier than that. Why does this matter? Do you honestly sense that anyone in Washington genuinely empathizes with the people who are suffering in this economy? Does anyone there really understand what it’s like to lose a job, watch precious savings evaporate, be unable to afford health insurance, apply for job after job with no success, lose a home to foreclosure? You wouldn’t know it by the words and actions–or lack thereof–coming out of the nation’s capital.

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