When you're born into wealth, make millions a year, or write legislation, chances are your life is pretty secure. When UnitedHealth Group CEO Stephen Helmsley wakes up in the morning, he's not worried about whether his family can go see a doctor or how he's going to pay groceries. Republican congressmen and senators aren't kept awake at night wondering if their insurance will hold up in the face of a serious medical condition.
They may be anxious about an extramarital affair coming to light, getting caught hiring undocumented lawnkeepers, or getting reelected, but these "fears" are so paltry compared to those of the average American family.
And thus, the 'progress' we end up making is for the most part incremental and wasteful, because when the people who make policy themselves are quite comfortable and don't stand to benefit from an initiative, they have no incentive to do anything other than the bare minimum.
Which begs the question: How do you make these people feel fear?
Some have tried. Connecticut Working Families organized a bus tour that stopped outside AIG executives' houses to protest their disgusting business practices:
"We’re going to be peaceful and lawful in everything we do," said Jon Green, the director of Connecticut Working Families. "I know there’s a lot of anger and a lot of rage about what’s happened. We’re not looking to foment that unnecessarily, but what we want to do is give folks in Bridgeport and Hartford and other parts of Connecticut who are struggling and losing their homes and their jobs and their health insurance an opportunity to see what kinds of lifestyle billions of dollars in credit-default swaps can buy."
The result?
But on Thursday, his house, like Mr. Haas’s, was being watched by private security guards.
And from a business publication:
Just as we felt after Chuck Grassley's suicide comments, the level of hotheadedness and anger directed individuals is way out of line, and it's likely that someone will get hurt or worse if the rhetoric keeps up like this.
Bill Maher, in his own sarcastic, yet poignant, way, 'suggested' that we ought to kill two bankers to scare the others into doing the right thing:
Now violence rarely solves our problems, and I would never advocate vigilante justice directed at bankers, healthcare CEOs, and their pet politicians, but the rhetoric from the masses needs to "change." Waiting for them to do the right thing, even when they're being pressed by the President, is too much like waiting for Godot.
The AIG protest bus was a start, but it didn't go nearly far enough, and it seems to have fizzled. And that won't work, because these cretins need to be harassed, demonized, and have angry crowds outside their houses all day and all night. Make it so their families and neighbors can't sleep. Hell, they've caused so many of us to be unemployed and uninsured, the least we can do use the free time they gave us to make their lives a living hell. One bus tour won't do that. Sustained fierce anger will.
We don't have the money to compete with them in the political arena, but the pain they've caused can be a wonderful motivator. "Yes we can" make their lives miserable until we get what we deserve as citizens of the greatest country on Earth.