Some Things Are Personal-- Like Your Child Drowning... Or Your Subordinates Talking Back To You

Since the start of OccupyWallStreet, a month ago, I've been furiously quoting passages by the two bards of the movement, David Korten and Corey Robin and then last night and Sunday night we showed the outstanding One Percent documentaries by Jamie Johnson. Corey and Jamie, especially, deal with the up close and personal aspect of the tenacious hold of privilege and entitlement from these people who claim they ARE America and rule by-- yes-- divine right. Monday morning I was moved to tweet this sentence from Corey's book, seeking to show just how personal it is for them:


Let's take a look at two more quotes, one from the Eric Cantor of the late 1700s and the other from a correspondent on an e-mail list. The first comes from Corey Robin's book, The Reactionary Mind:

"The real object" of the French Revolution, Burke told Parliament in 1790, is "to break all those connections, natural and civil, that regulate and hold together the community by a chain of subordination; to raise soldiers against their officers; servants against their masters; tradesmen against their customers; artificers against their employers; tenants against their landlords; curates against their bishops; and children against their parents."

And I'll leave you with this today, from an anonymous source: "I personally know of one actual billionaire. He is stunned people are focused on financial crimes. He feels personally attacked for being successful. This misses the proverbial elephant in the room: genuine populist anger with a system built to resist change. This country, our entire moral and legal code, is based on fairness. The traditional system does not provide even a hope for that. The housing/credit crash has stripped the game naked. Perversely, those responsible for the crash have been rewarded, which caused the stock market to recover, further benefiting the culprits, while forcing the 99% further into debt to pay for it. When few benefit while the 99% suffers, it's unfair. When small companies go under, without a glance from the government, while big companies get bailed out at our expense, people get pissed. It's not fair. A third of the world's wealth vanishes. Either it didn't exist in the first place or someone has it. Those someones, our oligarchs, our billionaires, do not like to be outed, for us to know their names, and how they manipulate the system to their benefit. They take that threat very seriously. And very personally. There are not that many of them, and they are known primarily to each other. They've got a lot to lose and finally, they are worried."