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In a Message to Democrats, Wall St. Sends Cash to GOP
WASHINGTON - If the Democratic Party has a stronghold on Wall Street, it is JPMorgan Chase.
Its chief executive, Jamie Dimon, is a friend of President Obama's from Chicago, a frequent White House guest and a big Democratic donor. Its vice chairman, William M. Daley, a former Clinton administration cabinet official and Obama transition adviser, comes from Chicago's Democratic dynasty.
But this year Chase's political action committee is sending the Democrats a pointed message. While it has contributed to some individual Democrats and state organizations, it has rebuffed solicitations from the national Democratic House and Senate campaign committees. Instead, it gave $30,000 to their Republican counterparts.
The shift reflects the hard political edge to the industry's campaign to thwart Mr. Obama's proposals for tighter financial regulations.
Just two years after Mr. Obama helped his party pull in record Wall Street contributions - $89 million from the securities and investment business, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics - some of his biggest supporters, like Mr. Dimon, have become the industry's chief lobbyists against his regulatory agenda.
Republicans are rushing to capitalize on what they call Wall Street's "buyer's remorse" with the Democrats. And industry executives and lobbyists are warning Democrats that if Mr. Obama keeps attacking Wall Street "fat cats," they may fight back by withholding their cash.
"If the president doesn't become a little more balanced and centrist in his approach, then he will likely lose that support," said Kelly S. King, the chairman and chief executive of BB&T. Mr. King is a board member of the Financial Services Roundtable, which lobbies for the biggest banks, and last month he helped represent the industry at a private dinner at the Treasury Department.
"I understand the public outcry," he continued. "We have a 17 percent real unemployment rate, people are hurting, and they want to see punishment. But the political rhetoric just incites more animosity and gets people riled up."
A spokesman for JPMorgan Chase declined to comment on its political action committee's contributions or relations with the Democrats. But many Wall Street lobbyists and executives said they, too, were rethinking their giving.
"The expectation in Washington is that ‘We can kick you around, and you are still going to give us money,' " said a top official at a major Wall Street firm, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of alienating the White House. "We are not going to play that game anymore."
Wall Street fund-raisers for the Democrats say they are feeling under attack from all sides. The president is lashing out at their "arrogance and greed." Republican friends are saying "I told you so." And contributors are wishing they had their money back.
"I am a big fan of the president," said Thomas R. Nides, a prominent Democrat who is also a Morgan Stanley executive and chairman of a major Wall Street trade group, the Securities and Financial Markets Association. "But even if you are a big fan, when you are the piñata at the party, it doesn't really feel good."
Roger C. Altman, a former Clinton administration Treasury official who founded the Wall Street boutique Evercore Partners, called the Wall Street backlash against Mr. Obama "a constant topic of conversation." Many bankers, he said, failed to appreciate the "white hot anger" at Wall Street for the financial crisis. (Mr. Altman said he personally supported "the substance" of the president's recent proposals, though he questioned their feasibility and declined to comment at all on what he called "the rhetoric.")
Mr. Obama's fight with Wall Street began last year with his proposals for greater oversight of compensation and a consumer financial protection commission. It escalated with verbal attacks this year on what he called Wall Street's "obscene bonuses." And it reached a new level in his calls for policies Wall Street finds even more infuriating: a "financial crisis responsibility" tax aimed only at the biggest banks, and a restriction on "proprietary trading" that banks do with their own money for their own profit.
"If the president wanted to turn every Democrat on Wall Street into a Republican," one industry lobbyist said, "he is doing everything right."
Though Wall Street has long been a major source of Democratic campaign money (alongside Hollywood and Silicon Valley), Mr. Obama built unusually direct ties to his contributors there. He is the first president since Richard M. Nixon whose campaign relied solely on private donations, not public financing.
Wall Street lobbyists say the financial industry's big Democratic donors help ensure that their arguments reach the ears of the president and Congress. White House visitors' logs show dozens of meetings with big Wall Street fund-raisers, including Gary D. Cohn, a president of Goldman Sachs; Mr. Dimon of JPMorgan Chase; and Robert Wolf, the chief of the American division of the Swiss bank UBS, who has also played golf, had lunch and watched July 4 fireworks with the president.
Lobbyists say they routinely brief top executives on policy talking points before they meet with the president or others in the administration. Mr. Wolf, in particular, also serves on the Presidential Economic Recovery Advisory Board led by the former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul A. Volcker.
Mr. Wolf was the only Wall Street executive on the panel and became the board's leading opponent of what became known as the Volcker rule against so-called proprietary trading, according to participants. Such trading did nothing to cause the crisis, Mr. Wolf argued, as the industry lobbyists do now. (The panel concluded that the crisis established a precedent for government rescue that could enable big banks to speculate for their own gain while taxpayers took the biggest risks.)
Mr. Wolf and Mr. Dimon, who was in Washington last week for meetings on Capitol Hill and lunch with the president, have both pressed the industry's arguments against other proposed regulations and the bank tax as well - saying the rules could cramp needed lending and send business abroad, according to lobbyists.
Both men are said to remain personally supportive of the president. But UBS's political action committee has shifted its contributions, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. After dividing its money evenly between the parties for 2008, it has given about 56 percent to Republicans this cycle.
Most of its biggest contributions, of $10,000 each, went to five Republican opponents of Mr. Obama's regulatory proposals, including Senator Richard C. Shelby of Alabama, the ranking minority member of the Banking Committee.
The Democratic campaign committees declined to comment on Wall Street money. But their Republican rivals are actively courting it.
Senator John Cornyn of Texas, chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, said he visited New York about twice a month to try to tap into Wall Street's "buyers' remorse."
"I just don't know how long you can expect people to contribute money to a political party whose main plank of their platform is to punish you," Mr. Cornyn said.
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Show AllAnd we can send a message to the pigs on Wall Street by descending in mass and choking off its streets. We do it in waves of people-as one group gets carted off the next one takes its place.
Contact JP Morgan and let them know what you think about unfettered capitalism:
/www.jpmorganchase.com/corporate/Home/contact-us.htm
A perfect representation and reason as to why the U.S. desperately needs campaign reform in the form of public financing of campaigns!!!
What's being described in this report is exactly what campaign financing is today: BRIBERY!!!!
It should be prosecuted as such!!! It's way past time to give our government back to the people!!!
AND JUSTICE ROBERTS SHOULD BE IMPEACHED!!!!!
Yes- impeach! Roberts is not representing the people. Sorry excuse for a Supreme Court of the United States of America-really. One would find such in a fascist society or a dictatorship ruled by oligarchs- or are we?
Please throw out every one of those politicians who keep giving our hard-earned tax dollars to the military-industrial complex while cutting off every damn human service we need to survive in this America. What happened to noble America- the good life in America? If these politicians dare to raid people..pensions, take away Social Security, Medicare while talking bottom lines and their corrupt budgets- throw them out. If they don't talk to the folks and from the perspective of human needs for our society- throw them out.
And arranging health care of Americans- for profit with a mandatory confiscature was designed to create a democrat failure. Sure. Whose idea was that? No one was onboard. Thanks corporate Democrats. I guess you did your job overthrowing health care for us too. You are now on your own.
We need Medicare for anyone who wishes it and restriction on corporate profiteering to guide us through the costs of living and health care war.
Yes this is bribery plain and simple. Some people should be going to jail over this.
If you go to the streets nothing will change for the better. They will simply send waves of their cops into the streets and they'll sip imported coffee as they watch the chaos from their windows high up in their skyscrapers.
JP Morgan doesn't care what you think about unfettered capitalism. They would care only if a few hundred thousand of their customers pulled their money and their investments out of the company, permanently.
Capitalism is amoral. The people at the top are amoral, if not completely sociopathic. They want money. They want the power to shape society to their desires. They don't care who gets hurt unless it costs them a lot of money. Laws and regulations are simply something for them to work around until they can buy enough politicians to change the laws: witness the demise of Glass-Steagall. Prove to them that they are financially better off under a fair, regulated system of finance and capital, and they will support you. Prove to them that their short-sightedness guarantees their demise, and they'll help you. Nobody has made that case to these people.
There are two other ways to change capitalism. Either progressives buy enough politicians to do their bidding, or millions of people hit the streets and blood starts to flow. There is a fourth way: get on with your life and wait for the system to fail and fall, as it will. Without a true, committed mass movement, funded by those few capitalists who believe in representative democracy and the American Constitution and progressive ideals, there will be no peaceful change.
"They don't care who gets hurt unless it costs them a lot of money."--agreed and a choking off of the surrounding streets of Wall Street stopping and harassing people from going to work should cost them something in lost dollars, no? Of course they don't care and the cops will be rolling in just as they were during the Civil Rights marches and sit ins.
And who here can afford to go to NY, occupy wall street and then pay all the lawyers so that you can get home again?
I know the Banksters can, but they will just sit up there and enjoy the show and get a big bonus for the "Inconvience".
Only the super rich can screw us now.
Get real, my friend! You're talking about pocket change and a minor inconvenience to these people. Unless you change their thinking, you'll change nothing. Your anger will hurt only you, not them. You need to be smarter than they are.
OK you go surround Wall Street with your troops and find out how smart that Idea was.
Sorry if it wasn't.
"Punishment" would need to be life sentences in prison to be effective and that won't happen, so quit falling for the "punishment" line..its a red herring to distract you from the need for re-regulation.
New Deal financial industry regulations kept the banksters and their predecessors under control from 1935 to 1985. Until those regulations are restored to law and new regulations added to address post-1935 bankster schemes, banksters will create serial bubbles and crashes that will keep pushing the working class further down and keep enriching the banksters and the politicians they own.
$89 million in Wall Street contributions to Democrats assures that the Democrats will do everything they can to prevent real reform.
It seems the role of parties is to divide and conquer the people with the people's money.
So in frustration we take to the streets thinkin "We'll show um this time!" and the next day the corporate media reports what "rabble rousers" we are and the Boys in Black break some windows and escape by running through your picket and the ones who are behaved and the elderly get busted.
There has got to be a better way of gettin screwed than this.
Wall Street and Washington are so far removed and divorced from the rest of America it is like they are on another planet. If we can somehow separate them from us it would do wonders for us. Through the media practically all we hear and read about are Wall Street and Washington. The problem we have is that we the people cling to that news like we are actually apart of it. We are even convinced the only thing we can do to get ahead is to invest in Wall Street and vote for self interested and self absorbed politicians that will do anything to keep the status quo going. The whole idea now has been manipulated so we think that being part of the investment class is smart and the only way to survive. Stand up and turn your backs on these crooks and thugs. They do not care nor ever will.
First a total economic collapse, then a breakup of the USA. Savor the words "former United States fo America".
Hey! I like that! I'm going down to "the former United States" for a visit. I am from "the former United States". It wasn't a civil war that took it down (like in Yugoslavia), it kind of just dissolved from corruption, like the Soviet Union or the Roman Empire.
Long live the Former United States!
"'If the president wanted to turn every Democrat on Wall Street into a Republican,' one industry lobbyist said, 'he is doing everything right.'"
Would someone please tell me how to distinguish a Wall Street republican from a Wall Street Democrat? It seems to me that both smell pretty much the same.
q
Yes, the smell is the same, and it is putrid.
Just what happens when anything rots for long enough.
"Mr. Wolf and Mr. Dimon, who was in Washington last week for meetings on Capitol Hill and lunch with the president, have both pressed the industry's arguments against other proposed regulations and the bank tax as well - saying the rules could cramp needed lending and send business abroad, according to lobbyists."
The rules could cramp needed lending"? What a joke. TARP and other monies given to the too-big-to-fail were not used to lend, as they were intended. Instead, as many financial analysts have reported, the bailout money found a home in the GLOBAL equity markets and hyper-leveraged instruments.
"In today's America, the only incomes that rise are in the financial sector that risks the country's future on excessive leverage and in the corporate world that substitutes foreign for American labor. Under the compensation rules and emphasis on shareholder earnings that hold sway in the U.S. today, corporate executives maximize earnings and their compensation by minimizing the employment of Americans." – Paul Craig Roberts
..http://www.economyincrisis.org/articles/show/3444...
Who the hell do these banksters think they're bull-$hitting? Let these no-loyalty- to-the-U.S. bastards fail now instead of prolonging their inevitable death while future generations are being destroyed by their greed!
"He is the first president since Richard M. Nixon whose campaign relied solely on private donations, not public financing."
At first, Mr. Obamageddon said he would take public money. Once he understood he would be limited, he changed course.
Maybe this is what he meant when he said "I am change you can believe in."
Jeevee
YES. You can check his contributers record.
The Wall Street crooks are feeling buyers' remorse, Gee, what the hell do they think main street is feeling with that two to three trillion dollars of our taxpayers dollars the president and congress gave away to a few on Wall Street for their welfare program? It's time those crooks on Wall Street had to earn an honest day's living like the rest of us and that they end their damn class war on us. That's a message we need to send these super rich parasites on the rest of us.
AD
>>"I understand the public outcry," he continued. "We have a 17 percent real unemployment rate, people are hurting, and they want to see punishment. But the political rhetoric just incites more animosity and gets people riled up."
You can not have the people riled up now can you? How does anyone expect the Bankers and Wall Street to fix this problem if everyone gets riled up?
The people should just sit at home eat corn chips and watch Fox News and let the lobbyists fix this mess.
Sheeple are easily persuaded to follow the tainted wisdom of their alleged superiors.
Someone wiser than I says around here, "Stop saying Fox N..s" (see, my keyboard won't even type it).
There is only Fox TV. Stop using the 'N' word.
By regarding society from a class perspective, one can see through the machinations of the rich. Marx explained that "in any epoch, the ideas of the ruling class are the ruling ideas..." The ruling class insists on control. Hence it demands unchallenged domination of the political system. It acts to mold all social institutions -- including schools, media, & political parties -- to serve its own interests. Any group that might oppose it (such as militant labor unions, leftist intellectuals, antiwar types, consumer & environmental advocates, etc) it tries to marginalize, coopt or destroy.
The political system that best serves the interests of the rich is the one that A) obediently does their bidding, while B) posing theatrically as a "democracy," in a convincing enough way so that most people don't catch on that they're simply being played. Objective "B" serves to greatly reduce resistance.
The illusion of "choice" and "free elections" is very important to the ruling class. They recognize that this pretty illusion makes their job much easier, so they want to preserve it. The rituals of campaigns & elections function to con most of the population into believing that "they're free." Most people will never clearly recognize that the choice they're being offered is a highly contrived one. They're being forced to choose between 2 parties which are united against them, rigged to serve the interests of their oppressors.
In today's US, especially at the national level, elections are worse than worthless -- they simply perpetuate illusions & waste time. They are degrading & repulsive exercises in Madison Avenue PR techniques, where "the truth" is off limits from the get-go. Effort should be directed not at participating in this system, but at bringing it down, exposing its corrupt essence, & building genuinely constructive alternatives.
CODA
We are trained against solidarity our whole lives.
Maybe not in our families or certain personal influences, but on a societal/cultural level we are never taught that one person's suffering belongs to everyone, and that we are all responsible for alleviating anyone's suffering in our society.
Even further, we are taught that other struggling people are our competition, our enemy.
So we have a tendency to compartmentalize our political picture, as if all of these 'issues' are separate - war, immigrants' rights, environment, corporate welfare, unemployment, globalism, outsourcing, healthcare... But in reality, these are all part of the same overarching problem. The biggest fear of the ruling class is that all the people will figure that out and turn against their true enemy.
For any movement to become successful we need to learn how to overcome those obstacles, we need to learn why/how we are alienating potential allies.
I think it is all or nothing right now, and 'nothing' is winning...How do we harness the 'all'?
Armed rebellion and the execution of the oligarchy is the only way I can see. I hope a fairly compassionate socialist force is able to do this. They need have no qualms about disposing of our rulers--as a whole, they are a ruthless, heartless bunch who are used to 'doing what's necessary' to get their way. Oh, they have good manners, and they are educated and they have banks of lawyers. But that doesn't mean they are not murderers and slavers. They are descendants of rum runners and slave traders and other ruthless men who became very good at accumulating power and money. This country has never belonged to anyone but them, so it's not time to take it back, it's time to take it, period.
No, we can't get behind this type of sentiment. To quote an old song “If we can’t do it with love in our hearts… cause we’re supposed to be something different”. No to executions. No to convictions without trial. You state that the oligarch are evil people, all? Should we kill people based on the size of their bank accounts? Where is the cutoff, 1 mil, 200 thou, 100 thou? Yes, an individual who commits a crime deserves to be prosecuted, but only if they have committed a crime, were presumed innocent yet found guilty. If what you say about the ‘generations of oligarchs’ is true, then they’ve been deprived of real values, real humanity for generations, well then are they not sick, in need of help, therapy, training? Yes to changing the society, but if we proceed with hate, we change nothing. Christ, Gandi, Martin Luther King… haven’t we learned anything yet? If we can’t change things by pressing our humanity instead of our hate and anger, then it’s all a moot point, nothing will change and the race will perish. Good you’ve been paying attention, good that your outraged at the situation. Now join together with the people and make changes, but leave the hate out of it please.
Very good post. Thank you!
Oooh, so that's where all our tax funded bailout dollars went!
Oh no! I agree with Senator John Cornyn of Texas: "I just don't know how long you can expect people to contribute money to a political party whose main plank of their platform is to punish you." I have no idea why the peasants under neomedievalism would vote for anyone in the D&R Party of Bribery.
I'd rather listen to georgewashingtonsblog than the NY "lied us into the Iraq War" Times any day: A quote on that blog brings the real fight into view:
"You have to realize that what they’re trying to do is to roll back the Enlightenment, roll back the moral philosophy and social values of classical political economy and its culmination in Progressive Era legislation, as well as the New Deal institutions. They’re not trying to make the economy more equal, and they’re not trying to share power. Their greed is (as Aristotle noted) infinite. So what you find to be a violation of traditional values is a re-assertion of pre-industrial, feudal values. The economy is being set back on the road to debt peonage. The Road to Serfdom is not government sponsorship of economic progress and rising living standards, it’s the dismantling of government, the dissolution of regulatory agencies, to create a new feudal-type elite."
And so this continued corruption is what the taxpayers got for the financial bailout. With both Bush and Obama, the marching soldiers (congressmen) followed the corporate leaders. MSM greases the wheels of the scam.
mcoyote - interesting post with many accurate observations and useful questions. Especially your question: ...why/how are we (progressives) alienating potential allies[?]
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Example: The Tea Party phenomenon is the newest, broad based (however loosely-organized & ignorant), but at least angry response by the middle class to the depredations of the ruling elite.
Given who and what is really screwing the middle and lower economic classes in the US, these newly outraged citizens should have naturally become part of a progressive movement.
Instead, most Tea Partiers are becoming part of a new, reactionary right movement, co-opted and manipulated by fascists like Sarah Palin.
It's insane, but it happens for identifiable reasons -- more on which, later, in a subsequent post...
Instead, most Tea Partiers are becoming part of a new, reactionary right movement, co-opted and manipulated by fascists like Sarah Palin.
This once again invokes the central question of the last thirty years: Why does so much of the middle class vote against its own economic self-interest?
The other headline story up here now is about the public's reaction to the Supreme Court ruling on campaign finance. Among independents, which would include parts of the political spectrum from here to the tea party, 80% disagreed with the court.
In Massachusetts 51% of the voters identified as independent. Independent is the largest political party in the country right now. So what is corporate television doing? Working hard on making sure the left and the right of the independents don't get together and overthrow the corporate government. They've already started marketing the Sarah Palin v. re-elect Obama showdown of kabuki theater for 2012. Notice how much teevee promotion she's getting? Once again, substantive change will be kept off the table. The independent movement will be kept under wraps for one more cycle until someone "responsible" (Bloomberg?) can be maneuvered into place.
Good analysis IMO, especially that part about 'making sure the left and the right of the independents don't get together' which would constitute a truly nightmarish scenario for both corporatist parties. Only problem is that 'one more cycle' may turn out to be the practical limit of survival for the U.S. 'as we know it' in any case.
Exactly. Each and every one of us should be going to these tea parties, talking - politely - and handing out information that unites us rather than divides us.
The reason is: fundamentalist christianity. There aint no such animal as an integration of progressive politics and fundamentalist christianity, it doesnt exist and never will.
I am tired of everyone blaming progressives for this lack of unity on the real political front. Let me put it this way. If *civilized* humanity's adaptation to existence is somewhat existentially insane, fundamentalist christianity - or any similar religion - is an example of one of the most toxic, virulent, fanatical forms of this existential insanity.
Or, if you find that approach too harsh, we can substitute "immature" and "immaturity" for "insane" and "insanity."
A progressive worldview must be based upon a total allegiance to truth based upon a completely free, open and radical - "to-the-roots" - investigation and enquiry into the nature of the totality of existence.
Fundamentalist religionists are reality-fascists, and they seek to impose their narrative structure on Everything and virally infiltrate the entirety of the human mind. And they look at it as a war of good - them - against evil - everybody else.
You're off topic with this repetitive screed. Find a more appropriate article or learn to control your selective hate.
I find your kind alarming.
At its heart, the New Testament is such a radical screed: antiwar, anti-colonialist, anti-capitalist, feminist, with confrontational nonviolence. Back then you could overturn the biggest bank in town with one good kick or by swatting a bull on the tail with a gnarly whip, although you might get hauled into a Roman kangaroo court for your troubles.
The problem with bashing prowar, anti-feminist, pro-corruption fundies is that a very few of them have evolved to the point where they can read their Bibles. They might even want to do some good for the world.
That is stolen tax payer money being given to a political party. The 'fat cats' don't seem to realize that. Actually, I have a better name for them, also starting with an 'f'. Does 'fascists' ring a bell? How dare they threaten anyone by withholding money they haven't earned! The ONLY way to deal with people like this is to shoot or hang them. I'd be compassionate and use the guillotine. It's time we got rid of this type of human being. We simply can't afford them.
After being convicted of economic treason, all these people should be executed by firing squad. They should be made to dig their own grave, a one hundred yard long, six foot deep trench. They stand at the edge, are shot, fall in and then a bulldozer unceremoniously pushes the dirt over them. Even that's too good for them.
Wall Street intends to bury the Democrats because they don't even want to hear the blather, the odorless gas, of "populist" talk. No matter how hard the D's try to be Republicans, the 'fat cats' will kill them anyway. Next stop: serfdom. Welcome to Czarist Russia.
This article is hilarious in a darkly farcical way.
That's so true.
Part of the reason might be because it is such blatant extortion that it almost comes off as a scene in a gangster movie.
After Massechusetts, Obama signals he 'gets it', so WallStreet sends a different signal. If the 'healthcare reform' circus wasn't enough, this should convince people, at last, that we need campaign finance reform, double quick. The peoples business should never be 'for sale'. Placing it on the auction block is why we're in this mess in the first place.
"If the president doesn't become a little more balanced and centrist in his approach, then he will likely lose that support,"
Does that mean he is supposed to come in from the right wingtip to the center of the right wing?
I think the only possibly effective thing we can do is for We the People to plan and carry out a general strike. That is the only thing that will bring a few hundred million people to the attention of the Oligarchy that has bought and paid for our government.
Stash some books and candles, buy some bags of rice and beans, then hunker down and catch up on your reading. If nothing moves, nobody reports for work, shops have no customers and no employees, the planes don't fly, the trains don't run, the trucks don't roll, the ships don't get unloaded, the power companies have nobody to run the grids.
A few days of that, perhaps repeated at intervals as needed, just might make the Oligarchy aware of We the People, acting like We the People, instead of we the sheeple as usual, might lead to a redress of grievances.
It could lead to martial law, the filling of the concentration camps, armed troops in the streets, kicking in doors, shooting people outside of curfew hours, etc., but then we'll see what this cesspool called the US Government is really like with the gloves off.
That could be healthy, too. Sure beats the long slide into the abyss in la la land.
Suggested reading while you are at home.
Sinclair Lewis "It Can't happen Here"
Sebastian Haffner "Defying Hitler"
William Shirer's "Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" and "Berlin Diary."
Jack London's "The Iron Heel" and "People of the Abyss"
George Orwell's "1984" and "Animal Farm."
That should get you through the first national strike, and prepare you to join the next.
Even if you don't strike, these make very educational reading.
As I recall correctly, the motto of the International Workers of the World is "One Big Union."
If some almost-progressives have a hard time seeing the democratic Party for what it is, the teabaggers have an even more difficult time seeing the repubs for what they are, because the repubs cater to the teabagger fundamentalist christian worldview.
Why arent more people disgusted enough to take to the streets? The fundamentalist christians wont because they wont see that people like Palin and all their redneck Senators are totally corrupt too, and such people have a hard time rebelling against authoritarian sytems - and capitalism is very much one - because they are slaves to one - christianity - and christianity is at the root of the social control system: they would have to radically question their worldview in a way that they are incapable of doing. They only hate the government when their fundamentalist boys and girls arent running the show. How many teabagger were out there protesting cheney-bush wrecking this country? They only get mad when their worldview doesnt TOTALLY dominate the country like it did under cheney-bush.
And upper-middle class liberals still have a comfortable amount of money and it aint their kids being sent to the meat grinders in Af-pak and Iraq, so life is still good for them.
Kitaj, seriously would you follow somebody saying "lets take to the streets"?
Do what in the Streets? We could become street people and claim the street but we would be on somebody else's turf who won't like it that you are taking it to their street.
They are pissed too but so far not at you.
If I correctly understood the post above me, it was talking about mass demonstrations... like... say 50, 60 million people, taking to the streets and partially shutting things down, and I was responding to that idea, which i agree with. I am not sure what you are saying to me.