For years, the country watched its populist desire for healthcare, tax, trade and financial reform run into the reality of elite politicians handing out trillions of dollars’ worth of corporate welfare and bank bailouts as the economy collapsed. Not surprisingly, a new Rasmussen poll on attitudes toward government and corporations shows 75 percent of the country “can be classified on the populist or Mainstream side of the divide” while just 14 percent “side with the political class.”

As if to confirm the chasm, this “political class” — consultants, politicians, lobbyists and commentators — has been denigrating populism as too overwrought to be taken seriously. Listen to a typical pundit defending AIG’s bonuses or criticizing demands for a new trade policy, and you will inevitably hear the word “populist” accompanied by the word “rage” and/or “dangerous,” followed by tributes to the status quo.

This elite propaganda, says Georgetown University’s Michael Kazin, dismissively implies “that anger from ordinary people is emotional, coming from people who don’t understand how the economy works and are just lashing out at their social betters.”

The caricaturing cribs from Richard Nixon’s playbook. Whereas the 36th president got himself reelected by steering the country’s anger at the Vietnam War into anger at countercultural war protestors, today’s political class portrays the public’s outrage as the nation’s biggest problem, rather than what the public is justifiably outraged at.

Today, though, Tricky Dick’s tactics aren’t working, and not just because 2009′s economy is far worse than 1972′s.

This is the era when “You” are Time magazine’s person of the year — an era whose information and interactivity revolution now has us looking to ourselves for direction, not officialdom’s gatekeepers. Additionally, America has lately been taught to expect results from democracy. TV viewers get to decide “American Idol” winners, Facebookers get to change their site’s bylaws, and voters get to autonomously use Obama campaign resources to win elections — and we get to do all this from outside the press clubs and smoke-filled rooms.

This profound rewiring of instincts and expectations is why the vilification of “populist rage” has failed as a political barbiturate, why the country still seethes, and why both parties are suddenly listening to “the people” instead of the Establishment. This is why, for instance, Republicans are staging “Tea Party” protests against federal spending and why Democrats are pushing bills to expand healthcare, reregulate Wall Street and cap executive pay — because they know the political class, however offended, can no longer stop a voter backlash.

Admittedly, contradiction is everywhere: Republican rallies bewail deficits the GOP manufactured, and Democrats lament deregulatory schemes they originally crafted. But no matter how hypocritical the response is, it is a response, and that represents change from decades of aloof government. It suggests a democratic renewal whereby populism — i.e., advocating what the public wants — isn’t merely one popular brand of politics, but is politics itself.

In all the ovation and self-congratulation, however, two big problems were left unmentioned.

First and foremost is the simple fact that this is not some brilliant P.R. move in the Nixon-to-China vein. On the contrary, many (though certainly not all) Wall Street financiers have long professed their support for gay rights, culminating in their pivotal role helping legalize gay marriage in New York state. That’s, in part, because it’s an effective strategy to divert attention from their economic agenda.

Taking a page out of corporate greenwashing strategies, many of the most offensively greedy, right-wing thieves in the business world have long touted their personally progressive position on select social issues like gay rights as a means of publicly presenting themselves as Good and Decent People. Not surprisingly, the particular progressive causes they choose tend to be those that do not impact their businesses or personal economic situations. In some cases, in fact, these thugs seem as if they are leveraging their stands on such progressive issues as a quid pro quo bargaining chip for their personal financial interests. As just one example of where that kind of dynamic may have played out, recall that almost immediately after Wall Streeters underwrote Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s campaign to legalize gay marriage, Cuomo launched a public (though ultimately unsuccessful) campaign to halt the extension of a so-called millionaires tax on those same Wall Streeters.

This isn’t to say that Wall Streeters’ support for marriage equality isn’t a good thing; it most certainly is. (As a strong supporter of marriage equality, for instance, I’m glad those Wall Streeters helped New York State legalize gay marriage.) It’s only to say that Blankfein’s support of gay marriage isn’t some hard-to-believe coup; it’s probably exactly what many “average Americans” would expect from a Manhattan investment banker.

That gets to the second, even bigger problem: What, then, is the movement for equal rights really saying to “average Americans” when that movement promotes someone like Blankfein as its chief public spokesman? And what is the muted reaction to the HRC announcement saying about what is acceptable in America?

To answer that question, consider who Blankfein is — and recall specifically that he is not some quiet, buttoned-up executive in a staid manufacturing industry, nor is he known as a new Lee Iacoca or Steve Jobs — aka a person widely revered (rightly or wrongly) for how his innovation and business savvy (supposedly) helped the world. On the contrary, Blankfein is the singular — and rightly detested — poster boy for the lies, crimes and avaricious schemes that destroyed the economy, impoverished millions of Americans and ripped off taxpayers.

This is a man who refused to tell Congress the truth about the basic facts of how the firm he led bet against — and profited off — the destruction of the American economy. As Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi documented, in 2010 Blankfein “went to Washington and testified under oath that Goldman Sachs didn’t make a massive short bet and didn’t bet against its clients” — even though the Senate’s “Levin report proves that Goldman spent the whole summer of 2007 riding a ‘big short’ and took a multibillion-dollar bet against its clients, a bet that incidentally made them enormous profits.” Blankfein’s lying was so egregious, the Senate Subcommittee on Investigations has recommended that the Justice Department consider perjury charges against him.

Blankfein is also the CEO who oversaw Goldman at the very moment that the firm engineered the infamous Abacus deal, a deal that was so insidious, that it ultimately drew a record $550 million fine from the Securities and Exchange Commission. Lately, he’s made headlines personally lawyering himself up in preparation for possible criminal prosecution, which is probably a smart move because he’s already being formally deposed in a civil lawsuit related to the SEC settlement. And, of course, this says nothing about Blankfein and Goldman’s central role in the deceptive mortgage securitization schemes that, ya know, cratered the entire global economy.

Considering all of this through the prism of HRC’s decision to promote him and the political/media world’s supportive reaction to that decision, we see a disturbing message: namely, that in America, if you commit the most odious economic crimes against humanity, you can not only get taxpayers to bail you out, you can not only keep your job atop the most powerful corporations, but you get to keep your social status as well. In this case, you get to be promoted as the cheery spokesman of a progressive social cause.

This elucidates a troubling double standard between how we see civil rights/equality and how we see economic justice. Most mainstream organizations (and certainly all progressive organizations) would never willfully brand themselves to opponents of the former — that is, they would never make their spokespeople open proponents of bigotry, prejudice and homophobia, and they would never do so in the name of reaching “average Americans” (yes, there are of course still groups like Focus on the Family and the Family Research Council that align themselves with that kind of hate, but at least as they do so it’s considered controversial and cause for widespread criticism). Yet, when a group pushing the progressive cause of civil rights and social equality promotes one of the avatars of economic injustice as a spokesman, there’s either no criticism at all — or widespread applause.

To be sure, when it comes to divisive political issues, there are no perfect high-profile spokespeople for public awareness campaigns. Everyone has a flaw, nobody is pure, and almost nobody is universally liked. But there’s a clear and obvious difference between imperfect and villainous. When a progressive group refuses to find the former and instead willfully aligns itself with the latter, it may help the specific and worthy cause at hand in the short term (in this case, marriage equality). But over the long haul, it sanitizes that villain and, worse, helps legitimize all he represents — including all the terrible things he represents.

That’s why Blankfein probably jumped at the chance to be HRC’s spokesperson — it’s a great deal for him, even as it gives the big middle finger to the millions of Americans he harmed in this recession.

So when former Pennsylvania senator turned Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum late last week cited his roots in the Keystone State as reason to support more fracking and oppose any regulation of the process, it provided a disturbing example of the power of Big Money over our political system.

To review: In an Oklahoma speech last week, Santorum said, “I come from Pennsylvania [where] we’re doing a little bit of [fracking] in Pennsylvania, thank God.” He then went on to say fracking is “the new boogeyman” — the “new way [for environmentalists] to try to scare you [by] saying, ‘Look what’s going to happen. Ooh, all this bad stuff’s going to happen, we don’t know all these chemicals and all this stuff.’ Let me tell you what’s going to happen: Nothing’s going to happen.”

I don’t know for sure what sickened residents of Dimock or Canton would say in response to Santorum’s declaration that “nothing’s going to happen” — nor do I know for sure what the response would be from the Oklahomans who, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, have likely experienced pretty serious earthquakes thanks to fracking. My guess is that they wouldn’t cheer on such statements from a lowly city councilman, much less a presidential candidate — and they almost certainly wouldn’t mimic the right-wing activists who wildly cheered on Santorum’s head-up-the-ass statements.

That’s just a guess, of course — but what isn’t a guess is that Santorum has now put himself squarely to the far right of both the already-conservative Pennsylvania Republican Party and even the drilling industry itself.

As the Associated Press reports, the state’s Republican legislators just passed a bill “that could force Pennsylvania’s booming natural gas industry to help pay for a wide range of state and local government programs [and] toughen safety standards” for fracking. While the GOP bill is certainly not perfect — AP reports that “environmental groups were split over the bill, and the industry has been largely silent on it” — unlike Santorum, it at least acknowledges the reality of the health and safety concerns surrounding fracking. The legitimacy of such concerns are conceded even by the fracking industry in Pennsylvania: As Santorum’s hometown CBS affiliate previously reported, “The president of the Marcellus Shale Coalition, which represents natural gas companies, said the group now believes the natural gas exploration industry is partly responsible for rising levels of contaminants found in area drinking water.” And that admission came before the EPA’s headline-grabbing revelation of groundwater contamination in heavily fracked Pavillion, Wyo.

Considering this, Santorum’s, ahem, controversial position can only be explained as the behavior of a person who not only famously doesn’t actually live in Pennsylvania, but more important, was long ago bought and paid for by the oil and gas industry.

As the Center for Responsive Politics reports, Santorum is one of the top U.S. Senate recipients of campaign contributions from the oil and gas industry — and what makes those numbers so stunningly outsized is the fact that he remains one of the top Senate recipients even though the last time he ran for Senate was in 2006. Put another way, this is not a run-of-the-mill legislator who happened to get a few afterthought contributions from the industry; this is a guy who was such a sycophantic apostle of the industry that he received enough oil and gas money to keep him on the top-recipient list a full six years after he was voted out of office — that is, a full six years after he raised a single dollar for a Senate campaign. In baseball terms, it’s the equivalent of Hank Aaron racking up so many home runs that he was able to hold the record well after he retired — only with Santorum, it’s not home runs, it’s oil and gas cash.

For the industry’s part, spending that kind of cash was clearly brilliant. With Santorum ahead in national Republican presidential primary polls, the oil and gas money has presciently purchased a potential major-party nominee who gives them an unthinkably powerful spokesperson: a candidate willing to actually cite his fracking-scarred state as reason to support less regulation of fracking. As expenditures go, that’s about the best political investment money can buy.

After the financial meltdown, for example, Congress witnessed an unexpectedly spirited fight over enacting pay caps at bailed-out financial institutions. Beneath the overheated rhetoric, the brawl revolved around determining how much is enough to compensate Wall Street’s government-subsidized scam artists.

Today, that conflict has metastasized into a battle over taxes. Marked by mind-numbing arguments over Mitt Romney’s IRS returns and esoteric catchphrases like “Buffet Rule,” the skirmish is really just a proxy war over how much individual income we are going to collectively deem “enough” before the next dollar of income is subjected to a less preferential levy.

Even at the state level, “enough” has gone mainstream, as Democratic New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo just signed an executive order barring state contracts from going to firms that pay executives more than $199,000 a year. Again, the idea is that such a salary is more than enough to attract skilled workers to taxpayer-funded firms.

Academia, by contrast, is playing host to the flip side of this long-overdue discussion, as tuition and athletic controversies highlight the absurdity of the “not enough” argument.

At the University of Colorado, for instance, oilman-turned-president Bruce Benson recently floated the “not enough” rationale in defending a $49,000 raise given to an administrator already being paid $340,000 a year. “I’ve got to pay for good people,” he said, implying that such a huge salary boost, paid for by massive tuition increases, was barely enough to keep the university competitive.

Similarly, USA Today recently reported that new college football coaches now make an average of $1.5 million a year — a 35 percent year-over-year increase from their immediate predecessors’ average of $1.1 million. Though Republicans regularly claim public employees such as teachers, police officers and firefighters are paid exorbitant salaries, the GOP almost never notes that coaches tend now to be, by far, states’ highest-paid public employees. Coaches retain that status in the face of budget pressures because school administrators constantly insist that they never have enough coaching-salary money to retain the best talent.

In all of these conflagrations, the forbidden six-letter word — “enough” — is the omnipresent ghost raising necessary-but-uncomfortable queries such as: Is a million dollars enough before one faces slightly higher taxes? Is $199,000 a year enough for a government contractor? Is $350,000 a year enough to attract a “good” university administrator? Is $1.1 million a year enough for a college coach?

It’s a shame such self-answering questions even need to be asked. But with Gallup’s latest poll showing most Americans believe a $150,000 annual salary makes one “rich,” it’s clear most of us would probably respond with an emphatic “yes” to all of them. That’s because most of us know what “enough” is. Now it’s just a matter of openly embracing it and finally replacing the era’s ethos of greed with a much-needed spirit of dayenu.

For a single news cycle, the interchange made headlines focused on the president’s subsequent request that the questioner send her husband’s resume to the White House. But as heartwarming as that human interest angle was, it buried the real news in the interchange: namely, that Obama showed himself to be either wholly ignorant of the reality facing high-tech workers today, or simply willing to echo the self-serving lies of his high-tech CEO friends. Whichever it is, the president’s claims are clearly at odds with the basic facts of the high-tech labor market.

Though the unemployment rate for the high-tech industry is certainly lower than the overall unemployment rate, the sector is far from the full-employment status that tech CEOs claim. No matter what the industry is “telling” Obama, there remain thousands of highly skilled engineers in America who are either underemployed thanks to tech companies use of the controversial “permatemp” status, or completely out of work. That’s because, as I noted last week, despite the political rhetoric to the contrary, our universities are producing far more Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) workers than allegedly worker-starved tech companies are willing to employ. Indeed, a generation of jobless engineers exists not because, as tech CEOs insist, they don’t possess the skills to fill open jobs, but because those tech CEOs aren’t looking for domestic workers. On the contrary, they are looking for foreign workers who will simply accept lower wages and fewer workplace rights than Americans.

That brings us to the president’s comments about the H-1B program — an instrument so antithetical to the interests of American workers that India’s Commerce Minister officially christened if the “outsourcing visa” in 2007. As Rochester Institute of Technology professor Ron Hira has expertly documented in congressional testimony and detailed reports, this visa both allows American high-tech companies to replace their domestic workers with cheaper foreign workers, and also allows foreign outsourcing firms to move huge swaths of America’s existing high-tech industry offshore for the long haul.

In the first scenario, which I reported extensively on in my 2008 book “The Uprising,” a high-tech company will simply terminate an existing American worker — typically, a more senior worker whose longtime service at the company has resulted in higher wages. Then, the company will use an H-1B visa to import a foreign replacement for that worker — one who accepts far lower wages and benefits, both because the wages in their home country are lower that what they are being offered on the H-1B temporary visa, and because their H-1B visa status is wholly controlled by the employer. That means that most foreign H-1B workers wouldn’t dare ask for the same wages as their American counterparts because it would mean asking for equality from an employer who has the unilateral power to deport them.

The effects of this particular use of the H-1B visa are not surprising. As the Government Accountability Office noted, many high-tech “employers said that they hired H-1B workers in part because these workers would often accept lower salaries than similarly qualified U.S. workers.” That is borne out by wage statistics from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services agency, which the New York Times reports found that “the median salary for new H-1B holders in the information technology industry is actually about $50,000″ as compared to much higher wages for similarly skilled domestic workers. And in case you believe President Obama’s mind-boggling assertion that H-1B visas are “reserved only for those companies who say they cannot find somebody in (a) particular field,” remember that his own Department of Labor admits the opposite is true: The visa may be used and “H-1B workers may be hired even when a qualified U.S. worker wants the job, and a U.S. worker can be displaced from the job in favor of the foreign worker.”

As Hira reported in a study for the Economic Policy Institute, this straightforward use of the H-1B visa has easy to understand effects at some of America’s biggest tech firms:

In early 2009, Microsoft announced it would lay off 5,000 workers. After meeting that target by late 2009 it announced another round of 800 layoffs. Yet it continued to import H-1B workers, ranking fifth in FY08 and moving up to second in FY09 on the top H-1B employers list. It received 2,355 H-1Bs in those two years alone. Microsoft also extensively contracts with leading offshore outsourcing firms like Infosys and Satyam, which provide on-site personnel on guest worker visas. In addition, it recently signed a major three-year contract with Infosys to “handle all the technology services and support for Microsoft itself.” Given Infosys’ statements in its SEC filings, the vast majority of the workers servicing the Microsoft contract will almost surely be guest workers on H-1B and L-1 visas…

Hewlett-Packard announced layoffs of nearly 25,000 employees after its acquisition of EDS in 2008, yet H-P and EDS, and its offshore outsourcing subsidiary MPhasis, received 1,047 H-1Bs and L-1s in 2008 and 2009. Not all of those 25,000 jobs would be lost — approximately half of them were going to be offshored to workers in low-cost countries.

Of course, one of the most compelling arguments forwarded by proponents of the current H-1B program is that even though existing American employees are being put out of work by H-1B visa holders, at least these new arrivals to the United States might stay here, thus permanently adding their valuable high-tech skills to the overall American workforce. While that may be true for some of the H-1Bs who work directly for American firms, note the section in the above passage about foreign companies such as Infosys and Satyam, because it highlights that second, even more insidious way the H-1B program today operates — specifically, the way it works with non-American “consulting” firms.

Recall that such consulting firms whole business is helping American high-tech firms permanently move various IT services and operations overseas — not because workers in those countries are better skilled or educated, but because they will accept far lower wages and workplace standards. In this, we’re not talking about Microsoft or HP hiring a few lower-wage fill-ins — we’re talking about Microsoft or HP hiring an entire foreign firm like Infosys or Satyam to help them subcontract huge parts of their existing American business to foreign locales where wages are way lower, workplace regulations are lax, and unions do not exist. Once such contracts are in hand, these foreign subcontractors acquire thousands of H-1B visas from the U.S. government and dole them out to their own employees working on a contract basis inside major American high-tech firms inside the United States. Those employees are charged with helping those American firms permanently shift so-called “back office” services to low-wage locales like India. As the New York Times explained:

(Indian outsourcing consutancy firms) have used (the H-1B visa) to further their primary mission, which is to gain the expertise necessary to take on critical tasks performed by Western companies, and perform them in India at a fraction of the cost. Thousands of H-1B visas every year are being won by individuals acting as outsourcing ambassadors. Highly skilled and easily meeting the objective standards for excellence that the law requires, the employees interact with U.S. companies like Morgan Stanley and Boeing, gathering an outsourcing mandate and lubricating the flow of tasks to an Indian back office…

According to data compiled by ComputerWorld, this manipulation of the H-1B program is now one of the biggest ways the visa is used. As the trade magazine reported just three days before President Obama’s public defense of the H-1B program, foreign “offshore outsourcing companies” — read: companies that subcontract huge swaths of domestic work to low-wage locales offshore — now “make up the majority of the top 10 H-1B visa users in 2011.” This is why in a separate story, the Times went on to report that relatively few H-1B employees from offshore outsourcing firms seek permanent green cards. Far from the H-1B being used in the way its proponents assert — as a method of attracting new, high-skilled workers to become permanent residents and thus improving America’s overall high-tech workforce — the H-1B is now being used as a means of shipping America’s entire high-tech industry offshore.

To be sure, it’s impossible to know if President Obama is simply ignorant of these facts, or merely doesn’t want to acknowledge them, for fear of alienating his campaign donors in the high-tech industry. But don’t discount the power of those donors to turn an incumbent president into their own public advocate — especially during an election season when that incumbent president has a well-known history of relying on high-tech donors to underwrite his election campaigns. Obviously, those donors have a vested financial interest in answering Obama’s fundraising call if — and when — that president seems determined to preserve the status quo and oppose any proposed pro-worker reforms of a program like the H-1B visa. After all, no matter if they are replacing domestic American workers with imported H-1B workers, or using the H-1B program to shift huge parts of their businesses offshore, those high-tech executives have a very lucrative scam going, and clearly, they don’t care if American workers are the ultimate victims.

Whether the president cares remains an open question — but based on his comments about the H-1B program last week, his ultimate answer doesn’t look promising.

Or does it?

Though it may be too soon to definitively answer that question, it’s not too soon to ask it. Because despite the celebratory hype, there’s no guarantee that a hyper-technologized education system is synonymous with genuine progress.

Ponder, for starters, the much-discussed issue of financial efficiency. As the tech website Gizmodo noted in a post titled “You Can’t Afford Apple’s Education Revolution,” the new iPad-based books might “only cost $15 a pop,” but “instead of selling an updated textbook every 5-10 years for $100, (publishers will) update and sell every year for $15,” and “it’s not like you can hand down an iBook from year to year … you expressly can’t.” It’s the same story with so many other vaunted education-branded technologies: They seem to promise resource-strapped school districts a way to constructively reduce expenditures, but the dazzle of flashy gadgets and interactivity often means budget-busting costs over the long haul.

Those costs might be justifiable when a new device is a sure bet to improve education. But a school’s wager on computer technology as a pedagogic panacea is often just that: a blind gamble, and one that evidence shows is hardly safe.

Here in Colorado, for instance, the nonprofit I-News Network recently reported that students attending the state’s “full-time online education programs have typically lagged their peers on virtually every academic indicator, from state test scores to student growth measures to high school graduation rates.” Stanford University researchers found similar results in their separate study of online schools in Pennsylvania. And after its exhaustive national investigation of the trend, the New York Times concluded that “schools are spending billions on technology, even as they cut budgets and lay off teachers, with little proof that this approach is improving basic learning.”

In lieu of empirical data, why are schools rushing into this brave new world of technology?

For one thing, there’s the allure of a quick fix, as gadgets seem to hold out the possibility that school districts can sustain huge budget cuts without sacrificing quality tutelage. The idea is that teachers can be replaced by cheaper computers, at once saving schools money, preventing tax increases for school resources, and preserving educational services. Even if data prove that’s a pipe dream, the desire for a cure-all has convinced many desperate schools to chase the fantasy.

There’s also political pressure from high-tech companies that, according to Education Week, “are thriving in the K-12 market.” As the Investigative Fund’s Lee Fang recently documented, these firms use some of the loot they’re generating to finance state-based political front groups, hire lobbyists, and employ has-beens like Gov. Jeb Bush as their public representatives. The result is a powerful political infrastructure that pushes state legislatures and local school boards to divert money away from proven education tools (teaching staff, textbooks, etc.) and into risky technology procurement.

There’s little doubt, of course, that some technologies may end up bringing about genuine advancements in education. But that possibility is no reason to suddenly ignore Ronald Reagan’s notion of “trust, but verify.” After all, before it was the Gipper’s, that motto was the mantra of the most devoted science and technology geeks — just as it should be schools’ mantra now.