To End This Financial Crisis, Americans Are Going to Have to Get Angry

[marmar]

via AlterNet:



To End This Financial Crisis, Americans Are Going to Have to Get Angry

By Steve Fraser, Tomdispatch.com. Posted February 11, 2009.

FDR alone didn't pull America out of the Great Depression. The passion of ordinary citizens did. Can we do it again?

Editor's note: Sometimes it's the small gesture that defines the end of an age. Richard Fuld, CEO of Lehman Brothers, the single financial firm the Bush administration allowed to collapse into bankruptcy in what may someday be thought of as the slow-motion Crash of '09, made one of those gestures recently. Just to be clear, we're talking about a man who, between 1993 and 2007, took home a tidy $466 million in pay. (That's no misprint, though it's a pay level that it would take factories of workers cumulative lifetimes to reach.) Then, in 2008, the year his firm would collapse, Fuld was awarded another $22 million in what was called "retirement pay."

But that's the big picture. Here's the small one that catches our shape-shifting moment perfectly. Fuld was recently outed for "selling" his wife their jointly held $14 million, 3.3 acre Florida beach-front mansion -- one of five houses the two of them owned, including their 8-bedroom main domicile in Greenwich, Connecticut -- and the lovely touch is the selling price: $100. That's right, one hundred bucks "in a possible attempt," writes the British Times, "to move assets beyond the reach of infuriated investors of the collapsed bank." Smooth move, Dick! Just petty and sleazy enough for a $488 million man.

Fuld and the other CEOs, who lived fabulous lives in their many mansions and passed out money as if it were sand, have been slow to grasp changing times. After all, as late as last December, according to the Wall Street Journal, John Thain, CEO of Merrill Lynch, "let it be known" that he expected a $10 million bonus in a year in which the company he oversaw had a nifty $28 billion in losses. Like Fuld, these men have proven remarkably tin-eared as well as lead-fingered and, in a season of catastrophe for their firms and for so many Americans, they still managed to pass out a staggering $18.4 billion in bonuses.

It helps, of course, to have a memory. I mean a real memory, a deep sense of what happened once upon a time. Steve Fraser, TomDispatch regular and expert on American Gilded Ages, who has written Wall Street: America's Dream Palace, a superb history of our country's kaleidoscopic range of attitudes toward Wall Street, knows that this country went through such a moment with just such a set of tin-eared former titans once before. And while the two moments, 1929 and 2009, differ in striking ways, it's instructive to know how it all fell out for the Richard Fulds of another age. -- TomDispatch editor, Tom Engelhardt

The "Best Men" Fall
How Popular Anger Grew, 1929 and 2009

By Steve Fraser


Obtuse hardly does justice to the social stupidity of our late, unlamented financial overlords. John Thain of Merrill Lynch and Richard Fuld of Lehman Brothers, along with an astonishing number of their fraternity brothers, continue to behave like so many intoxicated toreadors waving their capes at an enraged bull, oblivious even when gored.

Their greed and self-indulgence in the face of an economic cataclysm for which they bear heavy responsibility is, unsurprisingly, inciting anger and contempt, as daily news headlines indicate. It is undermining the last shreds of their once exalted social status -- and, in that regard, they are evidently fated to relive the experience of their predecessors, those Wall Street "lords of creation" who came crashing to Earth during the last Great Depression.

Ever since the bail-out state went into hyper-drive, popular anger has been simmering. In fact, even before the meltdown gained real traction, a sign at a mass protest outside the New York Stock Exchange advised those inside: "Jump, You Fuckers." ........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/workplace/126325/to_end_this_financial_crisis%2C_americans_are_going_to_have_to_get_angry/

[midnight]

1. That's right. Since the eighty's reagan has told poor working class

people that they don't get tax cuts, any financial breaks, and that they should just pull themselves up by their own boot straps like he did during the depression. On the flip side of this mindset, reganites, and there comrades think nothing of tax cuts, and financial breaks. Why? I don't know why. Tear down this money war!

[Somawas]

6. Oh no. Reagan gave working people the shift and shaft.

Great thread about it here: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=132x8186612

[soothsayer]

2. too bad the fluoride in the water makes us passive

[tom_paine]

4. Don't forget Prozac, Xanax, Paxil and all the other somas!

And we must never forget the most powerful drug of all...TELEVISION.

http://www.moderateindependent.com/v3i6tv.htm

[tom_paine]

3. As always, the Bushies have a Plan for that contingency.

1) 30,000,000 people who have been energized with Naziganda/Bushiganda until they are mentally configured like Nazis, and indistingusishable in their political beliefs from the Knoxville Church Shooter. It's just that they haven't murdered yet in the defense of these identical beliefs.

http://web.knoxnews.com/pdf/021009church-manifesto.pdf

But the Bushies know quite well that, when they get back into power and pick up Bushification/Nazification like they were never gone, that a Greater Depression that they've engineered is going to make the other 29,999,999 of the mental carbon copies of the Knoxville Shooter upset and much more likely tro respond when they get "permission from authority" to do the Brownshirt Thing to Liberals.

Which leads us to...

2) The Nascent Bushie Dictatorial State, is designed to give those 29,999,999 other potential Brownshirt and Good Germans, that "permission from authority" Obviously, they can't do that while Obama is keeping the throne warm for them, but not to worry. The coming Greater Depresssion and the Bushie control of the voting system ensures it.

American Nazi Tyranny is now merely a matter of enforcing laws, already on the books, to their fullest extent against target groups like Liberals and so forth. For now, they sit like an evil ignition key, waiting for the correct "trigger event" to start up.

There's more, but you get the idea.

The Bushies crashed the economy because Greater Depression = pre-Nazi conditions.

pre-Nazi Conditions + an American Subject Populace for the last 30 years re-engineered to be the mental twins of the pre-Nazi Germans by 30 years of relentless and repetitious Bushiganda and other thing = THIS TIME, in the Greater War that follows the Greater Depression, I believe it's America's turn to play the Nazi Role.

Speculation? Maybe. Time, and only time, will tell.

I amnot yet saying I 100% am predicting this to be so, but certain things that I have observed lately indicate to me that something like that is coming.

Of course, if this thing doesn't morph into a Greater Depression, and it's very possible that by Fri. the 13th, we shall be much more confident about that sad upcoming eevnt, then this line of speculation is ABSOLUTELY WRONG.

Which I hope it is WRONG. Who wants to reprise the Nazi role in DubyaDubyaTwo, even if it is "NEW and IMPROVED with EXTRA PLAUSIBLE DENIABILITY" this time.

I mean, who wants to reprise the Nazi role in DubyaDubyaTwo BESIDES Freepers and the others of he 29,999,999 who 100% agree with the Knoxville Church Shooter's political philosophy, but have yet to kill in it's name...

http://web.knoxnews.com/pdf/021009church-manifesto.pdf

[DemReadingDU]

5. Oh, we'll get angry. But not until we are cold, hungry, homeless, jobless

Many people still don't see any crisis. Life is still normal, nothing has happened to affect them, yet. They still have a job, food, a place to live, and heat. When people lose things, then they will be come very angry.