Consider for a moment the injured feelings of the plutocrat. He's the target of round-the-clock protests stretching from Oakland to Norwich. He's denounced by the Archbishop of Canterbury. Goodness, even those carefully-placed "news" stories about how George Osborne must scrap his tax on the super-rich, which once commanded at least a respectful audience, now meet with the puzzled mirth of a country that suspects a wind-up. At this point the penny loafer drops: they're called the 1% because they're lonely.
But through every cold weather front a little sunshine must peep. Which is why the gym-buffed corporate financiers, the chauffeured captains of industry and all the others whose membership subs are simply too big to qualify for the 99% club must have managed a brave little smile at the past week's changes of regime in Italy and Greece. Because that swap of Silvio with Mario, Papandreou with Papademos, shows that however much fashionable opprobrium is now being dumped on the results of free-market fundamentalism, the arguments used to justify it remain powerful.
Italy is one focus
