I knew we would hear it sooner or later. Willard ("Mitt") Romney sucked up to his "base" on the campaign trail in Florida yesterday.
THE VILLAGES, Fla. – Republican presidential frontrunner Mitt Romney on Tuesday compared the current anti-Wall Street protests to “class warfare.”
“I think it’s dangerous, this class warfare,” Romney said to an audience of about 50 people in response to a question about the protests over such issues as high unemployment, home foreclosures and the 2008 corporate bailouts.
He made his remark while greeting members of an overflow crowd that was unable to get into his official appearance before a larger group of about 300 at this central Florida retirement community.
The Wall Street protests, organized by a confederation of progressive groups, have spread beyond New York to other cities, including Chicago, Los Angeles and Boston. Two groups also have announced plans to set up an encampment in front of the White House as well.
Not to be outdone by somebody called "Mitt", Republican presidential candidate and former Godfather’s CEO Herman Cain went much further in his criticism of #occupywallstreet protests.
Speaking Wednesday, Mr. Cain, who continues to skyrocket in recent polls, slammed the protest movement, saying their criticism of Wall Street was misplaced. The Georgia Republican said, instead, that protesters should blame themselves.
“Don’t blame Wall Street, don’t blame the big banks, if you don’t have a job and you’re not rich, blame yourself!” Mr. Cain said.
“It is not a person’s fault because they succeeded, it is a person’s fault if they failed. And so this is why I don’t understand these demonstrations and what is it that they’re looking for.”
The former businessman joined Mr. Romney in criticizing the movement. Speaking earlier in the day, Mr. Romney said the protester were engaged in “class warfare,” adding that the movement is “dangerous.”
Asked Wednesday whether President Obama supports or opposes the movement, White House spokesman Jay Carney said that the administration “understands” why people are frustrated.
Some views are too batshit crazy for me to criticize. Elevating "blame the victim" into a political philosophy is one of them. Andrew Ross Sorkin, who Yves Smith characterized as "the best paid reporter at the New York Times and lapdog to bankers," wrote a more "serious" piece about the protests.
“I think a good deal of the bankers should be in jail.”
That is what Andrew Cole, an unemployed 24-year-old graduate of Bucknell University, told me Monday morning in Zuccotti Park, the epicenter of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Mr. Cole, an articulate young man dressed in jeans, a sweatshirt and with a blue wool beanie on his head, had just arrived by bus from Madison, Wis., where he recently lost his job.
There was nothing particularly menacing or dangerous about Mr. Cole. He said he had come to participate in Occupy Wall Street because he believed in its “anticapitalist” message. “I see Wall Street as responsible for the mess we’re in.”
I had gone down to Zuccotti Park to see the activist movement firsthand after getting a call from the chief executive of a major bank last week, before nearly 700 people were arrested over the weekend during a demonstration on the Brooklyn Bridge.
“Is this Occupy Wall Street thing a big deal?” the C.E.O. asked me. I didn’t have an answer. “We’re trying to figure out how much we should be worried about all of this,” he continued, clearly concerned. “Is this going to turn into a personal safety problem?”
As I wandered around the park, it was clear to me that most bankers probably don’t have to worry about being in imminent personal danger. This didn’t seem like a brutal group — at least not yet.
But the underlying message of Occupy Wall Street — which spread to Boston, Chicago and Los Angeles on Monday — is something the big banks and corporate America may finally have to grapple with before it actually does become dangerous.
At times it can be hard to discern, but, at least to me, the message was clear: the demonstrators are seeking accountability for Wall Street and corporate America for the financial crisis and the growing economic inequality gap.
And that message is a warning shot about the kind of civil unrest that may emerge — as we’ve seen in some European countries — if our economy continues to struggle.
Big banks and corporate America may finally have to grapple with this accountability/inequality thing before it actually becomes dangerous. What we've seen so far is a warning shot—we could become like those bankrupt socialists in Europe! One wonders what form this "grappling" will take. One side has billions of dollars to spend and can summon armies of thugs to do their bidding. The other side just ordered some more pizza.
Still, this is class warfare, and to prove it, Sorkin tells us what the real agenda of those kids in Zuccotti Park is—
In Zuccotti Park, several protesters were gathered around a laptop watching an online video that had just gone viral of Rosanne Barr, the comedian, recently interviewed by a newscaster.
“I am in favor of the return of the guillotine,” she told a newscaster, in reference to bankers, with a straight face. [video below] “I first would allow the guilty bankers to pay, you know, the ability to pay back anything over $100 million,” she said, before adding that they should go to “re-education camps and if that doesn’t help, then being beheaded.” She made the comments without a hint of laughter, yet the group watching around the laptop seemed to be quite amused.
I have often mused that a few public executions—in this case, beheadings—would have a most salutary effect on practices in the banking industry. Like Bank of America charging you a $5 monthly fee to use you debit card. But that was just an idle, amusing daydream. Rosanne is serious. She is eager to chop off some heads.
At first I dismissed #occupywallstreet as something small which would vanish quickly. I was wrong, and I'm glad I was. What strikes me is how little it takes to put the Fear of God into our seemingly impregnable elites. Maybe they're feeling guilty about something, or secretly ashamed. Nah! Sociopaths don't function like the rest of us do. No threat, be it ever so small, can be tolerated.
Related Post
Ran Prieur has some insightful comments on OWS:
"People are asking my thoughts on Occupy Wall Street. Here's an article about five ways OccupyWallStreet has succeeded:
http://www.energybulletin.net/stories/2011-09-30/five-ways-occupywallstreet-has-succeeded
But notice the level on which it has succeeded: public opinion. In the middle ages, there was universal agreement that the church was corrupt for hundreds of years before the church began to reform. Even then it did not reform because of public opinion, but because it was losing to competing churches. Wall Street has no incentive to change, because it has a monopoly on our lives. We can't buy houses or go to college without bank loans; we can't drive without oil companies; we can't eat without agribusiness. Predictable assholes are saying we have no right to protest if we use products made by the systems we're protesting against. They're so wrong, they're almost right: the whole reason we're protesting is that we can't get what we need without going through corrupt systems; but until we have other ways of getting what we need, we have no leverage to do anything but shout into the wind.
Something I wrote in an email the other day: I'm not hopeful about sudden positive change. At the global scale, fast changes tend to be destructive and traumatic, while good changes take decades. Maybe this is like one wave of the tide coming in. The next twenty waves will be smaller, but then one will go a little higher than this one, and eventually the giant blocks of money will be washed away, except for a few islands."
Posted by: xraymike79 | 10/06/2011 at 11:52 AM