There are two amazing diaries on the wee-hours Rec List: Claire McCaskill calling for a maximum wage for TARP recipients, and The Field's diary supporting Obama's call for continued community organizing. Add to those with xysea's compelling righteous rant yesterday, and some things Herself and I are hearing, and it might be time to put the Villagers on notice:
The Natives are restless!
More below the fold....
Richest Americans income doubled as tax rates slashed. (Bloomberg)
Exxon-Mobil posts $40.6 billion annual profit - Oil giant breaks record for largest annual profit by a U.S. company. (MSNBC)
Add that to the three diaries I cited above, and you begin to suspect there really is, as Norbrook suggested yesterday, a separate village we'll call Vortex. Wall Street and Big Oil executives live there. The media, including Limbaugh and Zephyr Teachout, live there. So do too many of our elected representatives at the federal and state levels. They live in nice houses in gated communities. They socialize with and validate themselves against one another. So long as life is good for the Villagers of Vortex, life is good ... period.
Except that the Natives - the rest of us - are getting very restless. Way more restless than they know. So far we're still just joking about things like wanting the pitchfork concession. But for how long?
My agent, despite being a tough-as-nails negotiator, is one of the kindest and gentlest souls you'll ever meet. So much so that some of the darker scenes in my novels have given her nightmares. Yet just yesterday she suggested that perhaps what America needs is a sniper picking off random rich people. "They need to be more afraid," she said, before she immediately backed away from the comment. "Of course I hate violence and I'd hate myself if anyone really did that."
Springoff the Second, despite being a pain-in-the-powerfuls'-ass news reporter, is also one of those kind and gentle souls. How much of a pain? A local sheriff whose corruption she was exposing once told her she'd better learn who she could take down and who she should leave be, for her own good. She promptly pulled out her notebook, began writing, then looked up and said "Was that a threat, Sheriff? Let me make sure I have the quote right."
Just yesterday she was describing conversations she's hearing in her newsroom and around the state capital she covers: "People are angry, mom. I've never seen it this bad before. Some of them are right-of-red conservatives and they're spitting mad about these rich guys. They're using words like 'uprising.' And I hear the same thing again and again - 'I'm just waiting for someone else to start it.'"
Some of our leaders get it. They know how restless we Natives are. President Obama called the Wall Street Villagers "shameful" and hinted that he may direct new Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner to reclaim the estimated $18 billion in bonuses paid from TARP funds. Obama is also using Rush Limbaugh as the poster child for the Hate and Greed wing of the GOP, trying to cut sensible Republicans out of that fold and isolate the Hate and Greed mongers. And Senator McCaskill dared the Villagers to complain they'd be underpaid if their annual incomes were "only" as much as that of the President of the United States.
Some criticized President Obama's Inaugural Address for being too sober, too stark and devoid of soaring rhetoric. Perhaps that's because Obama recognizes exactly how restless we Natives are, and he knows that sober, cool, pragmatic words may be all that stands between the hope of peaceful change and a righteous but unchecked rage sweeping across the land. Let the rhetoric be too soaring and stir too many passions, and the passions may be too difficult to rein in before "someone starts it."
In Michael Moore's film SICKO, there's a wonderful segment where Moore is in a French restaurant, listening as Americans living overseas talk about a cultural difference they've seen: "In America, the people are afraid of the government," one woman says. "In France, government is afraid of the people."
That may be true, but as our jobs vanish and our homes are at risk, as we and our children fall ill and we can't get access to health care, as we see our life's work flicker and fade while Exxon-Mobil posts all-time record profits and Wall Street executives divide twice as much of our money in bonuses as President Obama's stimulus bill allocates for new public safety spending, reasonable people should rightly wonder how much longer fear will outweigh a rising swell of anger.
I'm old enough to remember a generation, only a few years older than mine, who were angry and committed enough to be tear-gassed and shot rather than meekly submit to the destruction of our nation's values. They weren't the first, but merely among the most recent in a long line of American patriots - colonial revolutionaries, anti-slavery advocates, union organizers, spurned veterans, civil rights activists, and others - who were willing to risk life and limb to make good on the promise of "a more perfect Union."
So to the Villagers of Vortex, content in the comfortable echo chamber of each other's support, we Natives have a message:
We're restless. Change is coming. One way or another.