by Simon Maloy

Our language has not yet caught up with the political phenomenon that is emerging in Zuccotti Park and spreading across the nation, though it is clear that a political paradigm shift is taking place before our very eyes. It’s time to begin to name and in naming, to better understand this moment. So let me propose some words: “political disobedience.”

Occupy Wall Street is best understood, I would suggest, as a new form of what could be called “political disobedience,” as opposed to civil disobedience, that fundamentally rejects the political and ideological landscape that we inherited from the Cold War.

Civil disobedience accepted the legitimacy of political institutions, but resisted the moral authority of resulting laws. Political disobedience, by contrast, resists the very way in which we are governed: it resists the structure of partisan politics, the demand for policy reforms, the call for party identification, and the very ideologies that dominated the post-War period.

Occupy Wall Street, which identifies itself as a “leaderless resistance movement with people of many … political persuasions,” is politically disobedient precisely in refusing to articulate policy demands or to embrace old ideologies. Those who incessantly want to impose demands on the movement may show good will and generosity, but fail to understand that the resistance movement is precisely about disobeying that kind of political maneuver. Similarly, those who want to push an ideology onto these new forms of political disobedience, like Slavoj Zizek or Raymond Lotta, are missing the point of the resistance.

When Zizek complained last August, writing about the European protesters in the London Review of Books, that we’ve entered a “post-ideological era” where “opposition to the system can no longer articulate itself in the form of a realistic alternative, or even as a utopian project, but can only take the shape of a meaningless outburst,” he failed to understand that these movements are precisely about resisting the old ideologies. It’s not that they couldn’t articulate them; it’s that they are actively resisting them — they are being politically disobedient.

And when Zizek now declares at Zuccotti Park “that our basic message is ‘We are allowed to think about alternatives’ . . . What social organization can replace capitalism?” ― again, he is missing a central axis of this new form of political resistance.

One way to understand the emerging disobedience is to see it as a refusal to engage these sorts of  worn-out ideologies rooted in the Cold War. The key point here is that the Cold War’s ideological divide — with the Chicago Boys at one end and the Maoists at the other — merely served as a weapon in this country for the financial and political elite: the ploy, in the United States, was to demonize the chimera of a controlled economy (that of the former Soviet Union or China, for example) in order to prop up the illusion of a free market and to legitimize the fantasy of less regulation — of what was euphemistically called “deregulation.” By reinvigorating the myth of free markets, the financial and political architects of our economy over the past three plus decades — both Republicans and Democrats — were able to disguise massive redistribution toward the richest by claiming they were simply “deregulating” when all along they were actually reregulating to the benefit of their largest campaign donors.

This ideological fog blinded the American people to the pervasive regulatory mechanisms that are necessary to organize a colossal late-modern economy and that necessarily distribute wealth throughout society — and in this country, that quietly redistributed massive amounts of wealth to the richest 1 percent. Many of the voices at Occupy Wall Street accuse political ideology on both sides, on the side of free markets but also on the side of big government, for serving the few at the expense of the other 99 percent — for paving the way to an entrenched permissive regulatory system that “privatizes gains and socializes losses.”

Lucas Jackson/Reuters
A protest march through the financial district of New York on October 12.

The central point, of course, is that it takes both a big government and the illusion of free markets to achieve such massive redistribution. If you take a look at the tattered posters at Zuccotti Park, you’ll see that many are intensely anti-government and just as many stridently oppose big government.

Occupy Wall Street is surely right in holding the old ideologies to account. The truth is, as I’ve argued in a book, “The Illusion of Free Markets,” and recently in Harper’s magazine, there never have been and never will be free markets. All markets are man-made, constructed, regulated and administered by often-complex mechanisms that necessarily distribute wealth — that inevitably distribute wealth — in large and small ways. Tax incentives for domestic oil production and lower capital gains rates are obvious illustrations. But there are all kinds of more minute rules and regulations surrounding our wheat pits, stock markets and economic exchanges that have significant wealth effects: limits on retail buyers flipping shares after an I.P.O., rulings allowing exchanges to cut communication to non-member dealers, fixed prices in extended after-hour trading, even the advent of options markets. The mere existence of a privately chartered organization like the Chicago Board of Trade, which required the state of Illinois to criminalize and forcibly shut down competing bucket shops, has huge redistributional wealth effects on farmers and consumers — and, of course, bankers, brokers and dealers.

The semantic games — the talk of deregulation rather than reregulation — would have been entertaining had it not been for their devastating effects. As the sociologist Douglas Massey minutely documents in “Categorically Unequal,” after decades of improvement, the income gap between the richest and poorest in this country has dramatically widened since the 1970s, resulting in what social scientists now refer to as U-curve of increasing inequality. Recent reports from the Census Bureau confirm this, with new evidence last month that “the number of Americans living below the official poverty line, 46.2 million people, was the highest number in the 52 years the bureau has been publishing figures on it.” Today, 27 percent of African-Americans and 26 percent of Hispanics in this country — more than 1 in 4 — live in poverty; and 1 in 9 African-American men between the ages of 20 and 34 are incarcerated.

It’s these outcomes that have pushed so many in New York City and across the nation to this new form of political disobedience. It’s a new type of resistance to politics tout court — to making policy demands, to playing the political games, to partisan politics, to old-fashioned ideology. It bears a similarity to what Michel Foucault referred to as “critique:” resistance to being governed “in this manner,” or what he dubbed “voluntary insubordination” or, better yet, as a word play on the famous expression of Etienne de la Boétie, “voluntary unservitude.”

If this concept of “political disobedience” is accurate and resonates, then Occupy Wall Street will continue to resist making a handful of policy demands because it would have little effect on the constant regulations that redistribute wealth to the top. The movement will also continue to resist Cold War ideologies from Friedrich Hayek to Maoism — as well as their pale imitations and sequels, from the Chicago School 2.0 to Alain Badiou and Zizek’s attempt to shoehorn all political resistance into a “communist hypothesis.”

On this account, the fundamental choice is no longer the ideological one we were indoctrinated to believe — between free markets and controlled economies — but rather a continuous choice between kinds of regulation and how they distribute wealth in society. There is, in the end, no “realistic alternative,” nor any “utopian project” that can avoid the pervasive regulatory mechanisms that are necessary to organize a complex late-modern economy — and that’s the point. The vast and distributive regulatory framework will neither disappear with deregulation, nor with the withering of a socialist state. What is required is constant vigilance of all the micro and macro rules that permeate our markets, our contracts, our tax codes, our banking regulations, our property laws — in sum, all the ordinary, often mundane, but frequently invisible forms of laws and regulations that are required to organize and maintain a colossal economy in the 21st-century and that constantly distribute wealth and resources.

In the end, if the concept of “political disobedience” accurately captures this new political paradigm, then the resistance movement needs to occupy Zuccotti Park because levels of social inequality and the number of children in poverty are intolerable. Or, to put it another way, the movement needs to resist partisan politics and worn-out ideologies because the outcomes have become simply unacceptable. The Volcker rule, debt relief for working Americans, a tax on the wealthy — those might help, but they represent no more than a few drops in the bucket of regulations that distribute and redistribute wealth and resources in this country every minute of every day. Ultimately, what matters to the politically disobedient is the kind of society we live in, not a handful of policy demands.

Bernard E. Harcourt is chair of the political science department and professor of law at The University of Chicago. He is the author of several books, most recently “The Illusion of Free Markets: Punishment and the Myth of Natural Order.”

By David A. Fahrenthold and Paul Kane

On Tuesday evening, a landmark jobs proposal from a Democratic president came before the Democratic-controlled Senate. There were 50 votes for it and 49 votes against it.

And it failed.

Just as everybody expected.

The fate of the bill — which lost by winning, in a vote that didn’t really matter in the first place — made perfect sense in the Senate. It may be the Washington institution most warped by the current culture of gridlock, transformed from a balky but functional legislative body into a strange theater of failure.

The reason: In the Senate, it takes 60 votes to do anything big. And neither party has them.

So the huge tactical question is not whether big ideas will lose. It is who will own the failure politically.

The Senate’s top two leaders have spent the past nine months trying to trick, trap, embarrass and out-maneuver each other. Each is hoping to force the other into a mistake that will burden him and his party with a greater share of the public blame.

On Tuesday, as usual, it was hard to tell whether anyone was winning.

“Democrats have designed this bill to fail — they have designed their own bill to fail — in the hopes that anyone who votes against it will look bad,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), one of the two combatants, said Tuesday.

But at the same time McConnell was blaming Democrats for the measure’s demise, he was hoping for it to go down, too. He had pushed for Tuesday night’s vote because he knew it would reveal that some Senate Democrats were against their own president’s plan. Indeed, two voted no — three, if you count a late-game maneuver by Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (Nev.) to preserve his procedural options going forward.

For Reid, the bill’s failure was an opportunity to cast Republicans as spurning solid ideas for creating jobs, including a Democratic plan to raise taxes on millionaires.

“I guess Republicans think that if the economy improves, it might help President Obama,” Reid said on the Senate floor Tuesday. “So they root for the economy to fail.”

The vote on Obama’s jobs proposal was, technically, a vote on “cloture” — to force the Senate to proceed to a formal debate on the legislation. These measures require 60 votes for passage, more than the simple majority required to pass the bill itself.

So, by that chamber’s logic, a vote of 50 to 49 was as much a failure as a vote of 99 to 1.

The Senate’s strange turn this year is partly a result of these odd rules — and the bitter political times.

The House is in Republican hands. The White House is held by a Democrat. Stuck between them is the Senate, whose rules require the kind bipartisan cooperation that neither side seems capable of providing.

But this drama is the creation of its protagonists, Reid and McConnell.

The two are remarkably similar. Reid, 71, grew up in a Nevada cabin, the son of a miner who committed suicide. McConnell, 69, struggled with polio during childhood. Both of them moved up through local elected offices and reached the Senate in the 1980s.

Today, both are quiet loners in a Capitol full of backslapping, glad-handing pols. They are inside men, masters of procedure and rules, skills they now deploy to try to get each other to make politically costly mistakes.

“It’s how these parties try to build majorities for their positions,” said Sarah Binder, a historian of Congress at George Washington University. “It’s certainly not a great use of time — I mean, debating a bill that’s not going anywhere. At the end of the day, one has to wonder why they can’t sit down and talk about a bill that’s going somewhere.”

This spring, Reid won a round when he forced Republicans to vote on an austere budget plan approved by the House. That bill failed, and some Senate Republicans took embarrassing votes against a GOP plan.

Then, in the summer, McConnell scored his own victory-in-failure.

He made Democrats vote on Obama’s months-old budget request — which by then seemed far out of step in a Capitol focused on spending cuts. The measure failed. But every Democrat was made to oppose the president’s ideas.

The two men rejoin this battle nearly every morning when the Senate opens for business. Reid often speaks first, with the mien of an exasperated grandfather. He simply can’t believe that “my good friend” across the aisle is trying to pull a fast one.

McConnell often follows. His manner is that of a disappointed innocent: He knows the American people expect more of Democrats and thought that this time they would do better.

“Democrats are showing the American people that they have no new ideas for dealing with our jobs crisis,” McConnell said this week. “Democrats’ sole proposal is to keep doing what hasn’t worked.”

If this is theater, the audience doesn’t appear to be responding. Neither Reid nor McConnell seems to be doing well in public opinion polls. In August, a Quinnipiac University poll showed that only 18 percent of registered voters had a favorable opinion of Reid, and only 14 percent thought favorably of McConnell. In both cases, more than 40 percent didn’t know enough about the leader to form an opinion.

But the fight keeps on. A high point in the two leaders’ battles came last week — although understanding it required a trained parliamentarian.

Reid was about to make Republicans take a vote that could embarrass some of them: The bill would let the United States punish China for undervaluing its currency. A “no” vote could make some Republicans look soft on China.

McConnell, in turn, was trying to make Democrats vote on Obama’s jobs plan, and on the idea of the Environmental Protection Agency regulating “farm dust” as an air pollutant.

In the real world, none of these bills are likely to become law. But the real world was not really the point.

Finally, Reid took an unusual step: He gathered enough votes to declare McConnell’s tactics formally out of order.

That amounted to only a small change in the Senate’s rules. But it was a real loss for McConnell, because the precedent might limit the minority party’s ability to make the majority party take votes it dislikes.

McConnell took to the floor. After months of theater, he really did seem to be mad at Reid.

“I like him. We deal with each other every day,” he said. “We are fundamentally turning the Senate into the House.” There, the majority rules absolutely, and there is no art to failure.

The title of the white paper is, admittedly, a mouthful: “The Way Forward: Moving From the Post-Bubble, Post-Bust Economy to Renewed Growth and Competitiveness.” It was commissioned by the New America Foundation, which hoped that it might “re-center the political debate to better reflect the country’s deep economic problems,” according to Sherle Schwenninger, the director of the foundation’s Economic Growth Program. Its authors are Daniel Alpert, a managing partner of Westwood Capital; Robert Hockett, a professor of financial law at Cornell and a consultant to the New York Federal Reserve; and Nouriel Roubini, who is, well, Nouriel Roubini, whose consistently bearish views have been consistently right. It is scheduled to be released on Wednesday.

I don’t know that anything at this point could re-center the political debate, so unyielding are the two parties. But as Congress prepares to take steps, through the deliberations of the already deadlocked supercommittee, that will likely further wound our ailing economy, “The Way Forward” ought to at least give our politicians pause.

Its analysis of our problems is sobering. Its proposed solutions are far more ambitious than anything being talked about in Washington. And its prognosis, if we continue on the current path, is grim. “Unless we take dramatic steps, it will be Japan all over again,” says Alpert. “Continuous deflation, no economic growth, in and out of recessions. And high unemployment.” Adds Hockett: “It will be like the economic version of chronic fatigue syndrome. A low-grade fever all the time.”

The paper’s central premise is something I’ve been hearing from Alpert for more than a year now: this time, it really is different. What he and his co-authors mean by that is that the bursting of the debt bubble three years ago was not just a severe example of the ups and downs that are an inevitable part of American capitalism. Rather, it was the ultimate consequence of the modern global economy. Chief among the changes that have taken place is the integration of China, Russia, India and other countries into the global economic mainstream. The developed world once had maybe 500 million workers. Today, say the authors, we’ve added another two billion people to the global work force.

That change alone has had a great deal to do with the stagnant wages, income inequality and the oversupply of labor in America that was masked by rising home prices and access to credit. The bursting of the bubble exposed how much the American economy depended on cheap credit. Now that the curtain has been pulled back, cheap credit alone can’t fix our problems. The country is in a deflationary cycle that is very difficult to get out of: as wages decrease (or more workers become unemployed), people become afraid to spend. Assets like homes drop in value. Businesses react by lowering prices and laying off yet more workers — which only triggers a new round of deflation. The only thing that doesn’t change is the unsustainably high debt that was accrued during the bubble.

How can we break this cycle? Like most mainstream economists, Alpert, Hockett and Roubini roll their eyes at the calls for immediate government deficit reduction, which led to the creation of the supercommittee. Reducing government spending in the short term will only make things worse.

Instead, they believe that this is perhaps the best time in recent history for the government to take on a sustained infrastructure program, lasting from five to seven years, to create jobs and demand. “Labor costs will never be lower,” says Hockett. “Equipment costs will never be lower. The cost of capital will never be lower. Why wait?” Their plan calls for $1.2 trillion in spending — not all by the government, but all overseen by government — that would add 5.2 million jobs each year of the program. Alpert says that current ideas, like tax cuts, meant to stimulate the economy indirectly, just won’t work for a problem as big the one we are facing. Indeed, so far, they haven’t.

Their second solution involves restructuring the mortgage debt that is crushing so many Americans. It is a complex proposal that involves, for some homeowners, a bridge loan, for others, a reduction in mortgage principal, and, for others still, a plan that allows them to rent the homes they live in with the prospect of buying them back one day.

Finally, they call for a “global rebalancing,” which includes a radical change in the current dysfunctional relationship between creditor and debtor nations, and even a new global currency that would be administered by the International Monetary Fund.

It is impossible to do justice to “The Way Forward” in this space. It is rich in supporting data, deeply nuanced, with as clear-eyed a view of our economic predicament as I’ve ever read. Though it is not exactly beach reading, by academic standards it is quite accessible.

 Posted by Suzy Khimm

A conservative journalist has admitted to infiltrating the group of protesters who clashed with security at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum on Saturday — and he openly claims to have instigated the events that prompted the museum to close.

Patrick Howley, an assistant editor at the American Spectator, says that he joined the group under the pretense that he was a demonstrator. “As far as anyone knew I was part of this cause — a cause that I had infiltrated the day before in order to mock and undermine in the pages of The American Spectator,” Howley wrote. (The language in the story has since been changed without explanation.)

(SOURCE: AP ) A group called the October 11 movement had organized the march in order to protest the U.S. government’s use of unmanned drones overseas, joined by a few members of the D.C. branch of the Occupy Wall Street movement, as the Post reported Saturday. Howley writes that a small number of protesters—himself included—had tried to move past the security guards at the main entrance of the museum. He says that one protester next to him got into a shoving match with a security guard in an antechamber before they hit the second set of doors that led to the museum itself. The guard pepper-sprayed the protester, spraying Howley as well.

But, according to his account, Howley was determined to escalate the protest further. “I wasn’t giving up before I had my story,” he writes, describing how he continued to rush past security into the museum itself. “I strained to glance behind me at the dozens of protesters I was sure were backing me up, and then I got hit again, this time with a cold realization: I was the only one who had made it through the doors....So I was surprised to find myself a fugitive Saturday afternoon, stumbling around aircraft displays with just enough vision to keep tabs on my uniformed pursuers. ‘The museum is now closed!’”

Howley, in fact, chides the protesters for not taking his lead and rushing into the museum after being pepper-sprayed. “In the absence of ideological uniformity, these protesters have no political power. Their only chance, as I saw it, was to push the envelope and go bold. But, if today’s demonstration was any indicator, they don’t have what it takes to even do that.”

At the same time, Howley criticizes the movement as being “disruptive,” even as he personally helped catalyzed the shutdown of a national museum. He warns ominously, “What began on Wall Street is now spreading, and the question still remains: is it dangerous? Socialist indoctrination methods are surprisingly effective.”

But Howley’s participation wasn’t cited in Saturday’s major media accounts of demonstration at the Smithsonian museum, which attracted significant coverage because of the protesters’ links to Occupy Wall Street. (The October 11 group — also variously called Stop the Machine — had organized an anti-war rally Thursday that morphed into an Occupy Wall Street event.) He maintains that his involvement was for “journalistic purposes,” though the move seems more reminiscent of provocateur James O’Keefe than the conservative coverage of Occupy Wall Street so far.

*Update: This post has been updated to clarify who was involved in the pepper-spray incident. The American Spectator also appears to have taken down the story, which is no longer available online. I have contacted both Howley and the Spectator’s editor-in-chief for comment. You can read the full text of Howley’s original story here.

By DIANE McWHORTER

Using an operating system of unadorned bodily witness, backed by a headlong courage that often tested the grace of his God, Mr. Shuttlesworth was the key architect of the civil rights revolution’s turning-point victory in Birmingham, the mass marches of 1963. Their internationally infamous climax, the showdown between the movement’s child demonstrators and the city of Birmingham’s fire hoses and police dogs, gave President John F. Kennedy the moral authority he needed to introduce legislation to abolish legal segregation, passed after his death as the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

True, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the reluctant leader whom Mr. Shuttlesworth virtually goaded into joining him in Birmingham, got the credit — and the Nobel Peace Prize — for their accomplishment. But that’s partly because Mr. Shuttlesworth was the un-King, the product not of polished Atlanta but of rough, heavy-industrial Birmingham. As the public face of the movement, King was its ambassador to the white world, while Mr. Shuttlesworth was the man in the trenches.

But without Mr. Shuttlesworth’s strategic acumen and troops, justice would have been dramatically delayed. And his failure to get his due may be yet another example of the country’s reluctance to face up to the “class warfare” that not only animates the current Occupy Wall Street demonstrations (yet another variation on the Birmingham template), but has long roiled the black community as well.

Among his movement colleagues, Mr. Shuttlesworth was known, with exasperation and admiration, as the Wild Man from Birmingham. He had been a lonely pioneer of nonviolent direct action in the 1950s, dispatching his followers to illegal seats in the front of Birmingham’s buses the day after the Ku Klux Klan bombed his bed out from under him on Christmas night in 1956. (“And this,” Mr. Shuttlesworth would later say, “is where I was blown into history.”)

He became increasingly frustrated trying to prod King, with whom he and two other black ministers founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1957, to fulfill their organization’s pledge to “redeem the soul of America.” If King was Hamlet, not quite able to make up his mind and break away from the ceremonial demands of his role, Mr. Shuttlesworth sometimes resembled the Road Runner. “I literally tried to get myself killed,” he said. He was involved in more bodily attacks, arrests, jail sentences and Supreme Court test cases than any other member of the S.C.L.C.

Mr. Shuttlesworth, born to young, unmarried parents and raised in hardship, had a long history of challenging not just white privilege but the prejudices of what he called the “tea sippers” of his own race, who had shunned his largely working-class movement until its success appeared inevitable, thanks to his efforts.

It was that experience that drove his often-tense relationship with King during the Birmingham protests. At one point the S.C.L.C.’s “Atlanta crowd” had tried to call off the demonstrations while Mr. Shuttlesworth was in the hospital recovering from injuries inflicted by one of the fire hoses of his equally determined nemesis, the arch-segregationist police commissioner Eugene (Bull) Connor. Mr. Shuttlesworth, who readily acknowledged being a “cussing preacher,” used some hurtful profanity in letting King know what he thought of this capitulation — and overruled him, declaring the demonstrations back on.

When King traveled to Oslo the next year to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, won mainly because of the success in Birmingham, Mr. Shuttlesworth was not included in the sizable entourage that accompanied him. There is a sense that he was paying the price for being the first S.C.L.C. leader to buck King’s authority — with the added insult of being right.

Not surprisingly, perhaps, the man forever being eased out of the limelight had his own passing superseded within hours by the head-of-state mourning that greeted the death of Steven P. Jobs. Mr. Jobs is being remembered as the “the man who invented our world,” in the words of one headline, celebrated for creating objects to which their owners relate as though they were human. Mr. Shuttlesworth’s legacy, though, reminds us of the not-so-distant era when the task of our heroes was to persuade society to regard as human a class of people who had long been treated as things.

A few years ago, after Mr. Shuttlesworth had survived a house fire, I teased him about his continuing record of close calls, saying that even though the segregationists hadn’t done him in, somebody was going to get him one way or the other. “Yeah, and when they do,” he replied, “God’s going to say, ‘They got a man.’ ”

Before Herman Cain got America excited about numeric repetition with his storied (and secret!) 9-9-9 plan, Florida Governor Rick Scott was selling the state of Florida on his own triple-integer gem. As a candidate for office, Scott announced that he was going to pursue what he called the "7-7-7 plan." And no, it didn't involve decapitating Gweneth Paltrow. Here's the St. Petersburg Times, back in July of 2010:

GOP front-runner Rick Scott unveiled his jobs plan Wednesday, his first major policy proposal in the race for the governor's mansion. The plan promises 700,000 jobs in seven years. (And it's seven steps, so it's called the 7-7-7 plan.)

“As governor, I’ll be Florida’s Job Creator-in-chief. I’ll be focused on putting Floridians back to work, not securing my next political job, and I’ll be accountable to taxpayers not beholden to special interest,” said Scott. “My 7-7-7 Economic plan will grow the economy, create jobs and increase wages.”

The seven tenets: Accountability Budgeting; Reduce Government Spending; Regulatory Reform; Focus on Job Growth and Retention; World Class Universities; Reduce Property Taxes; Eliminate Florida’s Corporate Income Tax.

Now, here's a critical detail about Scott's ambitious promise. The 700,000 jobs he promised to create would be his own doing. These would be 700,000 jobs generated on top of whatever growth was projected to occur without instituting any changes. Politifact Florida remembers this well:

Let's rewind to July 2010. State economists had already estimated Florida's recession rebound — no matter who the new governor might be — would add more than 1 million jobs by 2017.

[...]

Reporters wanted to know: If the state's expected growth alone was projected to restore 1 million jobs, did that mean Scott's structural changes to spending, regulation and the tax code would add 700,000 more?

"Are those jobs that are in addition to the number of jobs that are going to be created automatically, just without any change in tax policy over the next five or 10 years?" a reporter asked Scott while traveling on his campaign bus. (We know, because we have the video.)

Scott answered yes, then pointed out that jobs aren't created automatically. The reporter then corrected himself.

"Well, projected. The job creation that is projected over the next five years," he said.

"It's what's projected, yeah. It's what's projected, yeah," Scott said, nodding. "It's on top of that. If you do these things we're going to grow 700,000 more jobs."

But as we've been telling you, that Rick Scott is a bit of a trickster! And he soon decided to start giving himself the credit for the job growth already in motion. As you'd imagine, the promises of old have changed. Let's toss this back to Politifact:

In June, Scott spokesman Brian Burgess touted news that Florida had added 50,000 jobs since January, saying that Scott was going to count every one toward keeping his promise.

In the same few days, another Scott spokesman, Lane Wright, brushed off a question about Scott's original promise to create 700,000 jobs "on top of what normal growth would be."

"Gov. Scott committed to creating 700,000 jobs in seven years, and we are on track to meet that goal," Wright said.

In August, the governor himself weighed in. An Associated Press reporter reminded Scott that his jobs plan was designed to generate 700,000 jobs on top of those restored by the state's expected growth.

"No, that's not true," Scott said.

So, the reporter pushed, statements by his campaign were totally wrong?

"I don't know who said that," Scott said. "I have no idea."

(Here's a hint: It was "Rick Scott.") Politifact rates this a "full flip flop."

The other day, Time magazine’s Michael Scherer weighed in with a great post reporting that one of the wealthy individuals who would be impacted by Obama’s push for the “Buffett Rule” is none other than Mitt Romney.

As Scherer noted, much of Romney’s income comes from investments, making him exactly the sort of “millionaire and billionaire” that Obama has been talking about — those who pay a lower tax rate than many middle class taxpayers.

Now it looks like Obama’s outside allies are picking up this line of attack. Earlier today, Priorities USA Action — the group that has vowed to raise huge money for Obama’s reelection — put out a statement responding to an attack ad by the Rove-founded American Crossroads. The news in the statement, which comes from Bill Burton, is the swipe at Romney:

“The billionaires and oil companies funding these ads are desperate to stop President Obama’s plan that would ask them to pay their fair share in taxes to reduce our debt and create jobs. Mitt Romney, Rick Perry, and Karl Rove will spend millions on false television ads because they know that the American public strongly supports the President’s plan that will finally ensure billionaires do not pay a lower tax rate than middle class families. No fair-minded American thinks that someone like Mitt Romney should pay an estimated 14 percent tax rate while hardworking Americans are paying far more.”

This is a sideswipe, but it’s a significant one. Clearly, if Romney becomes the GOP nominee, Obama’s outside allies (if not the Obama campaign itself) will turn Romney himself into the public face of the very sort of tax unfairness Obama is seeking to rectify. This is one of Romney’s unexplored vulnerabilities.

It’s been widely pointed out that Romney would have a tough time making a general election issue out of Obama’s health care plan, since Obama can reply by thanking him for his pioneering approach to health reform in Massachusetts and his role in creating the model for the hated “Obamacare.” But tax fairness may be even more central to the 2012 campaign than health reform. Romney would seem to be a less than ideal messenger to rebut Obama’s call for fairer taxation, since an argument over the topic will serve to highlight that Romney himself is profiting handsomely from the current unfair tax rates that Obama is calling out as stacked against the middle class.