Sunday, October 9, 2011

There's something happening here

Testify, Paul!

What’s going on here? The answer, surely, is that Wall Street’s Masters of the Universe realize, deep down, how morally indefensible their position is. They’re not John Galt; they’re not even Steve Jobs. They’re people who got rich by peddling complex financial schemes that, far from delivering clear benefits to the American people, helped push us into a crisis whose aftereffects continue to blight the lives of tens of millions of their fellow citizens.

Yet they have paid no price. Their institutions were bailed out by taxpayers, with few strings attached. They continue to benefit from explicit and implicit federal guarantees — basically, they’re still in a game of heads they win, tails taxpayers lose. And they benefit from tax loopholes that in many cases have people with multimillion-dollar incomes paying lower rates than middle-class families.

This special treatment can’t bear close scrutiny — and therefore, as they see it, there must be no close scrutiny. Anyone who points out the obvious, no matter how calmly and moderately, must be demonized and driven from the stage. In fact, the more reasonable and moderate a critic sounds, the more urgently he or she must be demonized, hence the frantic sliming of Elizabeth Warren.

So who’s really being un-American here? Not the protesters, who are simply trying to get their voices heard. No, the real extremists here are America’s oligarchs, who want to suppress any criticism of the sources of their wealth.
Plutocrats are so habituated to thinking only a quarter ahead they can't see that their destruction of the American economy and their refusal to lift a well-manicured pinkie toward its restoration leads toward Madame Defarge. Liberals want to prevent revolution, yet the moneyed interests can't even tell how to protect their own long-term interests.

Occupy Wall Street isn't carrying pitchforks. That won't always be true. Can we please step back from the abyss?

4 comments:

flymorgue2 said...

Lucky Enron did not give PK a pitchfork as a going away present from his corner office advisor job or those plutocrars likely'd be hoisted on their own pitchtard.

lovable liberal said...

I think I'm starting to understand your handle. Eat bullshit, 100 billion flies can't be wrong. Then come here to get swatted down with your clinging little bits of bullshit.

You wingnuts never give up a slander even if it's well debunked, as long as you can use it. It's a wonder any of you got out of grade school.

The true story, not the lies that Rush tells you, is here.

But tomorrow you'll be passing on the same bullshit. This in fact makes you a liar.

flymorgue2 said...

Read the 'true' story - funnily, link to pro-Enron story no longer working. hypocrisy is what it is

lovable liberal said...

My prediction comes true.

You have no facts, only a non-working link that doesn't change the refutation of your half-wit slander.

Honestly, do you have anything?