Sunday, 02 October 2011 07:06 Daniel Greenfield
The last time I passed the Days of Rage protesters in downtown Manhattan, amid their litter of expensive camping equipment, iPhone chargers, mobile hotspots and handwritten cardboard signs, they reminded me of people who walk up to you in bars pretending that they just discovered a new brand of beer they want to share with you. Those people are plants, so are the people with torn cardboard signs surrounded by a few thousand dollars of equipment.
The Days of Rage are an Obama election rally, coordinated ahead of time to coincide with Obama’s own descent into class warfare. Which makes them a pro-government rally.
Where are the unemployed cannery workers, the bilked Madoff investors, the homeowners used as fronts for the massive Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac swindle by progressive billionaires like the Sandlers? Where are the victims of Buffett’s insurance companies and the ordinary taxpayers who show up to Tea Party rallies, who are paying for all the crony capitalism?
They’re absent because the Days of Rage are more like a temper tantrum meant to manufacture the perception of public outrage, while lying about the things that the public should be outraged about.
The sheer cost of HUD’s scams, the money diverted to friends of politicians, and the entire edifice of a corrupted capitalism where money is made by failing and then getting bailed out by the government deserves a real day of rage– but it’s not one that people from organizations funded by all that stolen money are going to express. You might as well ask members of the Communist Youth Movement to denounce the Politburo.
People who are as detached from the economic turmoils of a sinking economy as possible are the worst possible representatives of populist outrage. And why should they worry, as long as rogue billionaires like George Soros or Warren Buffett keep trying to run the country to suit their own interests and agendas– then they can expect a steady paycheck.
The exploitation of outrage is always an exercise in hypocrisy. But it’s a particularly pungent odor when the upper class mimes revolution, when they really mean status quo. This isn’t 2008, it’s 2011. These aren’t rallies meant to bring down a government they oppose, but to keep a government they support, with some bottom line differences, in power. To divert attention from its failures by resorting to a wholly phony populism that’s little more than a subway stop game of three-card monte.
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