Taking It To the Streets?
by digby
Mike Lux writes:
On Tuesday, March 9th, several thousand people will be marching in Washington, DC – not to the capitol, but to the Ritz-Carlton, where the insurance industry that is still running things is meeting. There may be mass arrests, and serious disruption of the insurers’ event. On Sunday, March 21st, the immigrants’ rights movement is marching in DC. I hear that there will be several tens of thousands at this one, and that immigrant advocates are extremely angry at the Congress and White House for doing nothing on the issue after all the promises that have been made. And I’m hearing reports from community organizers working on banking issues that anger at the big banks has reached a boiling point, that with Congress listening to Wall Street more than the people, people are planning to take new kinds of demonstrations and direct action in the coming months directly to Wall Street and the K Street lobbyists running things. They will be taking demonstrations to bankers’ and business lobbyists’ offices, and picket their favorite lunch places and country clubs. And they will be moving their money out of the big banks and into community based banks and credit unions…People are going to be doing a different kind of dancing in the streets over the next few weeks and months – dancing and shouting and carrying sings and risking arrests.
Well that would be interesting, wouldn’t it?
In the interest of having that happen, I offer up this asinine discussion among AIG executives upon the suggestion that they might want to forgo their bloated bonuses for a while since the country was in a very bad mood after having been financially raped:
[E]mployees at AIG’s Financial Products division — the very unit whose trading had hastened the insurance giant’s collapse — were defiant, saying they were merely getting what they were due, recoiling at public accusations that they were behind their capitalizing on the company’s massive taxpayer bailout.
“I will stand behind every action I have taken in this company from Day One,” one employee said, according to a newly obtained transcript of a conference call the division’s head held last March with some of his staff.
But when another employee asked whether the staff would be getting a second round of bonuses promised for March 2010, his colleagues burst into laughter, apparently considering this a preposterous notion amid the public outrage.
Yet they did see that money, at least most of it. Last month, under a deal in which employees agreed to take a cut in their upcoming retention bonuses in return for an accelerated payment, AIG paid out about $100 million to employees at the firm. AIG is scheduled to pay the last of the bonuses this month.
Even so, neither time nor money has softened the employees’ feelings of wrongful persecution and their anger over becoming the subjects of scorn and ridicule. Seldom was that sense of victimhood more clear or more visceral than in the conference call of March 23, 2009.
Gerry Pasciucco, who had been hired to wind down Financial Products after the AIG bailout, was in Wilton, Conn., broadcasting his image and his voice to shaken, frustrated and furious employees in London, Paris and Hong Kong. Pasciucco quickly encountered a buzz saw of complaints over demands that they forgo the bonuses they were due. Emotions were running especially high in the London boardroom, where scores of staffers had gathered around a large table.
“I think it violates everything I believe in, and it’s un-American,” one employee said that day, according to the transcript of the call.
“This country is supposed to stand on due process,” said another…
“You made a commitment to us, and we made a commitment to you. And for anybody to look beyond that, as the politics and the media are at the moment, is missing the point,” said an employee. “You can’t expect us to just roll over and ignore that commitment because there is a bunch of immoral bigots that intend us to do something different. It’s not going to happen.”
Another was even more irate, lashing out at the public for scapegoating AIG employees. “To be honest with you, I really hope it blows up. I think the U.S. taxpayer deserves to lose a trillion dollars over this thing for the way they have behaved.”
And then he turned on politicians who had joined the anti-AIG posse. “They only care about the next election, just like we only care about the next bonus. Well, none of them cares about the country, none of us cares about the institution,” he said, adding: “They really don’t care, and I really don’t care. And frankly, if a trillion dollars gets lost, fine.”…
“Is this blackmail? To a certain extent, it is,” Pasciucco told employees that morning. “If the only reason you would give money back is because you are afraid for your family and you are afraid for your safety, then it is.”… I think it’s distasteful. It’s unfair. It’s unjust. I agree with you, it’s not American. It is McCarthy-ite. . . . It will be viewed as a horribly dark period.”
This is how the Masters of the Universe responded when told that their near destruction of the world economy meant they wouldn’t make as much money that year as they anticipated. That’s your free market in action — the big boys get paid no matter what.
I don’t honestly know if the country has caught on to this or not. It seems to me that the right has successfully misdirected the blame for this away from these arrogant asses and on to the Big Liberal Government, which failed to stop them (true) and is now inhibiting them from being the extremely upstanding productive citizens we all know they are (false). At the very least they’ve muddied the waters significantly which makes people fall back on comfortable anti-government tropes.
If, however, activists were able to get some attention with public demonstrations and the like (and force the mainstream media to cover it) it might help pass financial reform. There’s really no reason why the teabaggers should be able to corner the market on populist frustration.
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