It’s often joked that finding a person of color in an Abercrombie & Fitch catalog is like playing Where’s Waldo? Likewise, in a country that is only 80% white, it is always suspicious to see political movements that suffer a demographic skew.

While browsing photos of this weekend’s anti-World Bank and anti-IMF protests, we noticed a particularly Vermontish tinge to the protest crowd.  Other than the Metropolitan Police Department officers keeping order, can you spot the non-white protesters?

Not here:

Source: Michael Temchine, The Washington Post

Nor here:

Source: Michael Temchine, The Washington Post

Nor here:

Source: CNN

Pony-tail, check.  Flag desecration, check.  Birkenstocks, maybe. Diversity, nope.

Source: Alex Brandon, Associated Press

Black Bandanna: $5.  Che Guevara shirt: $36.  Criticizing the system from which you lavishly benefit: priceless.

Source: Alex Brandon, Associated Press

“I hear the Gap is having a sale!”

Source: Agence France-Presse

There he is!  Look to the right side of the photo; sail your eyes through the White Sea and there you will get your first glimpse of diversity.

Source: Agence France-Presse

Again!  Just behind ‘NO’.  Almost, missed him, didn’t you?

Source: Alex Brandon, Associated Press

In all seriousness, though, the protest crowd’s lack of diversity is typical for Washington’s protest movements. One might expect this sort of whitewashing on the Right, but from the Left it has become commonplace too.

On the Left, the typical narrative of world oppression a well-worn tale of woe: privileged white society relentlessly oppresses everyone else. Indeed, these protesters seem to aim their anger at the IMF and World Bank for being the ultimate manifestations of this struggle. Unfortunately, under the protesters’ narrative, their own lack of diversity belies their sincerity; they themselves are the privileged set—who, after all, can afford to travel to Washington on such a frivolous pretext?

In addition to demographics (i.e., entirely white, with one or two “exotic” faces), these protest movements also share the same frivolity and ephemeral imagination of an Abercrombie catalog.  Watch as privileged youth frolic on a warm spring day, all dressed in themed couture, exhibiting a casual solidarity.

And, like those models in the catalog, when the seasons change, they’ll move on to the next fashion.

We never thought we’d agree so ardently with Joseph Stiglitz, but he appears to be among the few voices on the Left willing to call out President Obama on the flimsier elements of his economic plans.

We have noted before (to deaf ears, alas!) that the Obama Administration is no stranger to Wall Street.  Not only did Wall Street types donate twice as much to his campaign than to McCain’s, but Mr. Obama then hired Larry Summers as his chief economic adviser.  Before returning to Washington, Mr. Summers, as we noted earlier, “earned” a princely $5.2 million advising the hedge fund D. E. Shaw one day a week for the past two years.  (Talk about lavish executive pay!)

Anyway, Stiglitz, too, has pointed out the blatant conflict of interest in the administration:

“America has had a revolving door. People go from Wall Street to Treasury and back to Wall Street,” he said. “Even if there is no quid pro quo, that is not the issue. The issue is the mindset.”

Stiglitz is also critical of the administration’s stimulus package, since only a fraction of it is destined to be spent in 2009.

Larry Summers on ABC's This Week

As we have noted before, hedge funds, private equity firms, and their employees donated nearly twice as much to the Obama campaign as they did to the McCain campaign.  After the election, the new administration appointed some of its backers and friends on Wall Street to oversee TARP bailout money.  Few have given much scrutiny to this obvious conflict of interest until now.

On Friday the White House released the financial records of some of the administration’s top advisers.  As it turns out, President Obama’s chief economics adviser, Larry Summers, “earned” $5.2 million advising a New York hedge fund one day a week for the past two years.  Though the President desperately yelped to express his “outrage” at excessive AIG bonuses, he has remained conspicuously mum on the Mr. Summers’s lavish executive pay for such little work in an industry he now oversees.

Some have wondered why the administration has been so harsh on Detroit, threatening bankruptcy and executive firings, while only gently nudging Wall Street banks.  The fact that the administration has drawn so many warm suits and generous contributions from Wall Street suggests Mr. Obama holds his friends in finance to a milder standard.

When the Bush Administration let oil companies draft energy policy and let pharmaceutical lobbyists draft the Medicare drug benefit, Democrats cried foul, and rightly so.

Now Mr. Obama surrounds himself with smart bankers and economists who frequently spin around the revolving door between government and the finance sector, having made a fortune on risky bets and now seeing that the taxpayers are left to clean up the mess.

Public anger over the bonuses paid by AIG was well-deserved, but the resulting tax action by the House was unwise.

The House voted 328 to 93 on Thursday to confiscate via the tax code 90% of retention bonuses paid by recipients of TARP funds.  Though it is a moral hazard to reward bonuses for huge losses, the White House has even admitted that nothing in the TARP rules prohibits recipients from writing out such hefty retention checks in the first place.

Rep. Charles Rangel, the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, the committee that writes the tax code, was at first possessed by a rare fit of good judgment in cautioning his colleagues against using “the [tax] code as a political weapon.”  However, as public outrage mounted, Mr. Rangel himself sensed which way public opinion was going and introduced the confiscation measure.  (Mr. Rangel himself is beset by his own tax, rent-control, mortgage, and car scandals, but that’s “none of your goddam business.”)

This tax risks poisoning the TARP program altogether since banks will balk at terms that require them to abrogate existing contracts and that force them to lose necessary talent to competitors. It also sets an example that all future business decisions are subject to political, not economic, scrutiny.  Though it is fair that recipients of public money be held to public standards of accountability—as politicized as that may be—it is important that Congress and the Treasury view these banks as investments; when they lose, the public loses.

Even if both houses pass the measure and the President signs it (his press secretary says he’s open to the idea), it will face Constitutional challenges in the courts for several reasons:

It is a bill of attainder, which punishes people or a group of people without the benefit of a trial.  Since Members of Congress have already publicly expressed that the purpose of the bill is to punish a particular group of people, they may have unwittingly proven the case to a court that their intention was never to set a national tax policy, but rather to react against an act that benefited a short list of people.

Similarly, the bill denies due process.  The Fourteenth Amendment stipulates that the government may not “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”  However unwise the bonuses were, they were lawfully distributed, and an explicitly confiscatory tax against this group of recipients without any sort of trial deprives the recipients of any sort of due process.

Furthermore, the tax is an ex post facto law, confiscating income already lawfully distributed.  Though Congress certainly has the authority to tax and to tax income already distributed (i.e. existing wealth), the power to tax involves the power to destroy, and there is no doubt as to the inention of this onerous 90% tax rate.

The bonuses amount to a tiny fraction of a sliver of the TARP, but as we have argued before, even a small portion misspent is still irresponsible.  Nonetheless, some commentators on the Right have labeled this row “cosmic myopia” and a “bonfire of the trivialities.”

Ideally, Congress and the Administration would tie future compensation packages to performance, but in the rush for due accountability, we cannot ditch the rule of law.