Greenwald: The virtues of public anger and the need for more

[bridgit]

'With lightning speed and lockstep unanimity, opinion-making elites jointly embraced and are now delivering the same message about the public rage triggered this week by the AIG bonus scandal: This scandal is insignificant. It's just a distraction. And, most important of all, public anger is unhelpful and must be contained or, failing that, ignored.

This anti-anger consensus among our political elites is exactly wrong. The public rage we're finally seeing is long, long overdue, and appears to be the only force with both the ability and will to impose meaningful checks on continued kleptocratic pillaging and deep-seated corruption in virtually every branch of our establishment institutions. The worst possible thing that could happen now is for this collective rage to subside and for the public to return to its long-standing state of blissful ignorance over what the establishment is actually doing.

It makes perfect sense that those who are satisfied with the prevailing order -- because it rewards them in numerous ways -- are desperate to pacify public fury. Thus we find unanimous decrees that public calm (i.e., quiet) be restored. It's a universal dynamic that elites want to keep the masses in a state of silent, disengaged submission, all the better if the masses stay convinced that the elites have their best interests at heart and their welfare is therefore advanced by allowing elites -- the Experts -- to work in peace on our pressing problems, undisrupted and "undistracted" by the need to placate primitive public sentiments.'

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald

[malaise]

1. Get thee to the greatest page - excellent article

Eliot Spitzer is absolutely right that, even at AIG, there are far larger scandals than the bonuses, such as the undiscounted compensation of AIG's counter-parties such as Goldman Sachs (and just by the way: it is indescribably symbolic that Spitzer has been punished and disgraced for his acts of consensual adult sex while the targets of his prescient Wall St. investigations, who basically destroyed the world economy, remain protected and empowered). But the bonus scandal is illustrative of why the crisis happened, who caused it to happen, and the ongoing political dominance of the perpetrators. It is, as Robert Reich put it, "a nightmarish metaphor for the Obama Administration's problems administering the bailout of Wall Street."

[bridgit]

3. I'm glad to see Spitzer out & about talking these angles dude some stuff

[malaise]

9. Oh yes

He will be Fareed Zakaria's guest on CNN tomorrow.

[BuelahWitch]

2. I had to scroll too far down for this...

Kickarooni to the top.

[bridgit]

4. thanks

:kick:

[DCKit]

5. ENRON should have been the wake-up call for this BS.

And, as the model for what followed, the SEC (among others) should have known.

Then again, it was 43's* gubmint and the WH shut down far more investigations than it ever allowed. If nothing else, they were competent in their criminality.

[bridgit]

8. For people here in California ENRON was the wake-up call...

Disgusting the shit they pulled across states lines, and not juts ours but everyones's :puke:

[Laelth]

6. Hear, hear.

I don't care if the rage is misplaced or not. At this point, it is a useful catalyst for meaningful change.

:dem:

-Laelth

[GiveMeFreedom]

7. More from the OP's link

More from the OP's link

Congress sought to seize those bonuses because, for once, they were afraid of simmering public fury and responded to it rather than to the dictates of the corporate and lobbyist class that owns them and which they serve. Whatever marginal "unfairness" that tax might produce pales by many, many magnitudes when set aside the decade-long (and ongoing) pillaging of America's financial security and the future of its middle class by the financial owners of our political system.

They were afraid? We need them to be scared of the middle class. Corporations and Politicians need to know who "WE THE PEOPLE" really are! I hope this doesn't end and the re-regulation of the financial and corporate institutions is so staggering to their ability to harm the middle class that they live in fear of doing so. Maybe pitchforks and torches might be are only course of action if this does not happen.

[malaise]

10. They aren't afraid yet

but they will be.

[RagAss]

11. The rage hasn't even started yet !

[bridgit]

12. I think you're right