I often think that we get robbed by politicians and businessmen so often that we think it's our fault, and that we should just go home and get distracted
by alcohol,
sports,
or by junk tv.
Anything to get our minds off the sh*tty way we feel at being pantsed so often.
When you're so busy paying the bills, it's probably easier and less frustrating
to just screw yourself and get it over with.
Sick of doing that? So am I.
pt1- I don't believe in physically attacking any one person or thing,
but attacking the ideas and assumptions that the Powers' wealth and asphyxiating control over us are based on. Like: we trust in the fools who govern us; we trust that the law will be fair and will be applied to EVERYONE equally; that tomorrow will be better; we trust that capitalism is good without supervision; we trust that 40 years of employed drudgery will get us a paid mortgage and a pension...etc.pt-2 However, I'm not against a shocking act or two, for publicity purposes.
Any ideas? See below.
How about, lets keep reminding ourselves of the fact that this kind of criminal is roaming free and getting richer, just in case you or I should ever want to invest in the stock market? I say, let the brokers get a real job. They're not getting my money.
The story below, by Mark Ames, that I found on alternet, was basically about just such a shocking act; a chance to break through the invisible barrier separating us from those who steal our money. Mark clambered onto a bus to see how the rich and famous live. He writes about it as a voyage of discovery and a social event of significance. It's so amazing. He touches on some issues I wrote about in my 'middle'class' article. It promised so much, but alas.... At least others can copy it in their towns.
How about, lets keep reminding ourselves of the fact that this kind of criminal is roaming free and getting richer, just in case you or I should ever want to invest in the stock market? I say, let the brokers get a real job. They're not getting my money.
The story below, by Mark Ames, that I found on alternet, was basically about just such a shocking act; a chance to break through the invisible barrier separating us from those who steal our money. Mark clambered onto a bus to see how the rich and famous live. He writes about it as a voyage of discovery and a social event of significance. It's so amazing. He touches on some issues I wrote about in my 'middle'class' article. It promised so much, but alas.... At least others can copy it in their towns.
Sell maps, give tours for a free beer.
I would have made it a regular trip and just recover my costs, as a public service (whatsat?).
Here are some of the best parts:
checkitout- (originally posted on playboy.com)http://www.alternet.org/story/139479/what_happens_when_angry_citizens_crash_the_gates_of_america
What Happens When Angry Citizens Crash the Gates of America's CEO Class?
I was there when the so-called “Class War” went down. I saw the whole thing happen, on a cul-de-sac called Golden Pond Lane. ...
You may have heard about this in the news: a group of protesters angry over AIG bonuses chartered a bus and toured the mansions where the AIG executives lived, going straight to their front doors. With no intention of Christmas caroling or trick-or-treating. No, this had class war written all over it. And for the first time, the plutocrats were running scared.
Here’s how the “Battle of Golden Pond Lane” unfolded: On Friday, March 20 -- after a week of populist rage over news that Americans were funding obscene multimillion dollar bonuses to the same AIG multimillionaires who ruined our economy, word spread about an anti-AIG bus tour of the mansions of the company’s execs, planned for March 21.
The plan was to transform the bus into a kind of Class War Assault Vehicle, and steer it straight into the upper-class New England hamlet where all the AIG execs live: Fairfield, Connecticut. It was like Stripes meets Spartacus, and I wouldn’t have missed it for the world. The robbed would see exactly where the robbers lived, what their homes looked like, what their addresses were, where their front doors were located…
The bus tour was arranged by an organization called Connecticut Working Families, a group with deep ties to ACORN, the bogeyman of ...Fox News.... That was all the plutocrats had to hear -- a busload of commies and ACORN panthers were heading into their neighborhood, like Mugabe’s goons, to burn down their mansions.
For about 36 tense hours, suburban-New York’s plutocrats felt like the Byzantine Christians in 1453, with the barbarians just hours away from slaughtering and raping anything that moved in Fairfield, Connecticut.
In a panic, nine AIG execs announced that
they were handing back
their million-dollar bonuses to the American taxpayers.
It was incredible.
For the first time in living memory, “the people” were starting to win. They had the power to instill fear and claw back some of their wealth. And all because of the Magic Class-War Bus and its Angry Pranksters....
Joe Dinkin, the communications director for the Connecticut Working Families Party which organized the bus tour, ... “I’ve been getting all kinds of death threats and crazy calls today!” Dinkin told me, laughing nervously. “Rush Limbaugh attacked us on his show today, and that got all his crazy fans after me. They posted my cell phone number on Limbaugh’s site, and ever since then it’s just been crazy, the things these people said to me on the phone. Death threats… Man, the hatred in their voices is just crazy!” Dinkin was laughing, but I don’t think he knew just how ferocious a monster he’d pissed off ...
The next morning, I drove out to the AIG Bus Tour meeting point, in the depressed center of Bridgeport, Connecticut -- one of those decaying mid-sized cities that America seemed to have abandoned about 40 years ago.
By the time I arrived that morning, the parking lot next to the Domino’s pizza outlet was already crawling with media figures: reporters, cameramen and TV semi-celebrities. There was no way we’d all fit....-- New York Times, CNN, New York Post, NBC. ...
So one by one, they started pulling protesters off the bus to make room for the media. Eventually we -- media types -- all got our seats. As we pulled out, one of the reporters shouted, “Where are the protesters on this bus?” .....The bus arrangement mirrored the same elitist structure that was supposedly being challenged: people who mattered were on the bus that mattered; the nobodies were put into miserable minivans that followed behind us.
The charter bus slowly made its way from depressed working-class Bridgeport into Fairfield. It was like the anti-Heart-of-Darkness, a journey from decrepit Bridgeport, up-river into familiarly sterile middle-class suburbia, and then deeper still up-river to the socio-economic headwaters, a hamlet of unattainable luxury and civilization that we could only dream about. We’d gone from shit to champagne.
The reporters’ sneering and quipping died down to a hush as we slowly rolled past perfect, gleaming colonial mansions, with their grotesquely-vast front lawns and their perfectly-kept streets.
All of this divine luxury had a strange way of transforming the anger on our bus into something a lot more feckless, like awe and self-loathing. We didn’t belong here, and we knew it.
... What was this ugly beast doing here, in Fairfield, mucking up the view? The remaining half-dozen protesters who were kept on the bus like protected species also felt this awe. One of the protesters, Mark Dziubek, recently-downsized from a steel rolling mill, told me that even though he’s spent his whole life in nearby Southington, he’d only been through Fairfield once in his life.
...The bus stopped and let us out at the corner of Mine Hill Road and Golden Pond Lane. Last out of the bus were the showdown’s two stars, both African-Americans. One was a middle-aged pastor named Mary Huguley, and the other was Asaad Jackson, a 24-year-old ex-boxer-turned-activist sporting dreadlocks down to his beltline. They were going to confront the rich white AIG executive, Douglas Poling. He was the one who took the largest bonus, $6.4 million. Poling apparently was so unnerved by the scenario that he returned his bonus a day earlier, while Poling's fellow AIG exec neighbor up the street, James "Jackpot Jimmy" Hass, blubbered to reporters that he had also given back his multimillion-dollar bonus and couldn't people just look into their hearts and show him some mercy.
Huguley and Jackson deliberately and dramatically marched down Golden Pond Lane towards Poling’s mansion, while about 50 members of the media elite jostled and swarmed around them like worker bees with the queen. This scene unfolding was every American plutocrat’s worst nightmare, once unimaginable, now a reality that could be viewed from Poling’s second-story window: Two poor, pissed-off black people, surrounded by a phalanx of the liberal elite media, marches up to my hard-earned mansion in broad daylight, banging on my front door, demanding a cut of my wealth. On the deepest-fears scale, Willie Horton rates about a 2 compared to this class-war nightmare. As we got closer to 177 Golden Pond Lane, we saw some uniformed policemen standing at the edge of the cul-de-sac with three healthy-looking white men in weekend sweatshirts and baseball caps, and two undercover cop cars -- sporty SUVs --in the driveway of Poling’s neighbor. A regular Fairfield cop car slowly tailed our crowd from behind -- just want to make sure nothing happens here, folks…. Two menacing bodyguards patrolled Poling’s front yard: a shaven-headed guy in business casual wear with a goatee and shades, who tried giving the impression of a relaxed, experienced veteran; and a gorgeous Latino woman in a Ninja jumpsuit, who paced the lawn like a caged she-lion just begging for one of us lowlifes to stick our hand into her range, where she’d tear it off with some jujitsu move.
Poling was apparently gone that day --I imagine he was scouting out citizenship opportunities in plutocrat-friendly autocracies like Kazakhstan or Liechtenstein. So here we were: the big Class War showdown. Pastor Mary and Asaad Jackson gave the TV cameramen time to adjust their positions, then the mob moved forward right up to Poling’s driveway.
... It was amazing to think how vulnerable America’s elite are: they don’t use high walls and security fences and armed goons to guard their wealth, the way they do in so many countries. Instead, they just rely on our sense of shame, something innate that tells us, we don’t belong here, we’ll be leaving now, sorry…This was
the moment to smash that peasant sensibility.
Now that we’d smashed through that barrier and found ourselves
facing a robber-baron class
that only bothered pitching two security goons against 50 or so of us, the Great Class War was about to begin, right here, on Golden Pond Lane. The security goons blocked the two African-Americans from delivering a letter they were carrying to Poling. They had been instructed not to confront the bodyguards or anyone, so they didn’t. As reporters jostled for the money photo, the security goons started to threaten the rest of us if we so much as crossed over Poling’s gutter.
And then we walked back to the bus. What began as the promised opening shots in the Great Class War instead turned out to be something like a field trip for a high school civics class, with everyone learning the importance of being responsible. The organizer, John Green, deemed it a success, and since then his group has never flirted with anything remotely as incendiary again. By the time we got back, the news was already announcing the end of the Class War: “Outrage Over Bonuses Wanes.” Congress backed off from its posturing, news pundits backed off, and we, the people, returned to doing what we do best:
getting screwed. ...
___the end
I find something hard to believe though. How can you get so many 'mansions' on one public lane? To me, a lane meant two mud tracks going off into the wilderness. Oh, I see! They're being cute, in kind of a barbie-doll-house way. Lane means 'we're comfortable, anal, pure, white and rich, so f&*^%k off.'
I find something hard to believe though. How can you get so many 'mansions' on one public lane? To me, a lane meant two mud tracks going off into the wilderness. Oh, I see! They're being cute, in kind of a barbie-doll-house way. Lane means 'we're comfortable, anal, pure, white and rich, so f&*^%k off.'
-Costick67 ( 8^P
free pics from fotosearch.com
free pics from fotosearch.com
