The decline in the vigor of American self-government is directly tied to the decline in the vigor of American mobs.
Quoting Mark Sanfranski (emphasis added)
The primary problem with the American political economy is that in the last 10-15 years, elite, moderately liberal technocrats have made common cause with the elite, moderately conservative rentiers of the financial and corporate world to form an incipient oligarchy. One sees their fellow Americans paternalistically as children. The other sees us as sheep to be sheared. It’s a common enough ground on which to unite and it is the reason you see a very liberal Democratic Obama administration and a Pelosi-Reid Congressional leadership counterintuitively putting corporate regulation in impenetrable shadows not seen since before the Stock Market Crash of 1929 as if they were the minions of Jay Gould and J.P. Morgan.
This is why liberals waiting for Obama to do the right thing will have a very long wait indeed. And while it may seem counterintuitive, it’s really quite understandable – the elites have joined together to protect their interests over ours.
CPS concludes
In the light of Samuel Adams’s justification for mobbing, an act of protest against an unrepresentative government, mobs are now justified. In the light of Samuel Adams’s justification of crushing mobs with republican fervor, the “incipient oligarchy” would oppose it. The saints and knaves are now both Tories, as subject to overthrow as any pompous British aristocrat that ever held a sinecure from George III or got elected by a rotten borough that had been under the sea for 500 years.
It’s time to bring back the mob or at least the spirit that drove the mob. There are offenders that need to be punished.
The alternative is the slow constriction of whatever’s left of the American capacity for self-government by a tyranny of bureaucratized piety and institutionalized looting.
As examples of the institutionalized looting, I present
Western Union fined for allowing money laundering to Mexico
US banks caught laundering money for drug cartels
There have been no criminal prosecutions. One stated reason was the banks are Too Big Too Fail and indictments would hurt the financial system. Instead we have a corrupt system that funnels money to the elites.
“There’s no capacity to regulate or punish them because they’re too big to be threatened with failure,” Blum says. “They seem to be willing to do anything that improves their bottom line, until they’re caught.”
And when they’re caught, they get slap-on-the-wrist fines and promise to be good (nudge, nudge, wink, wink.)
Today’s circumstances, with the elite determinedly crafting rules for the mass but not for their class, have an ominous portent for the future of America as a democratic republic, but violence is not yet required.
Political engagement is.
By the way, the two blogs I quote here, Zenpundit and Committee of Public Safety are not left-wing at all, but right-tilting. But there’s plenty of common ground and they obviously share concerns that many on the left have too. Of such things genuine coalitions are born. Because, for real change to happen, we need a broad-based movement composed of people across the political spectrum.
“A riot is an ugly thing”¦.and I think it’s just about time we had one!” Heh.
I agree, there’s is some good common ground here for activists of the Left and Rght. Regardless of very real philosophical and policy differences, I think many on both ends of the political spectrum would see government by looting, anti-democratic elite game-rigging, the destruction of the middle-class, and similar things as wrong and threatening to democracy
Change often starts on the edges, then moves inwards. This time the change seems to have started, in various forms but still related, on most of the edges.