thelastpsychiatrist.com - Chicago Tea Party. Adnotated.

It makes a lot of Americans insane that Wall Street execs are paying themselves gazillions in bonuses, even as they demolish their own firms and the financial system. They blame Wall Street for the financial crisis.ⁱ

Rick Santelli, former bond trader and now CNBC reporter. The highlight is 0:59-1:20.

(Link to video hereⁱⁱ)

It's worth hearing for yourselfⁱⁱⁱ, but here's the punchline: "ask anyone here if they want to pay for the mortgage of their neighbor with the extra bath, who can't afford the house."

Let's leave aside whether he is right or wrong. I sympathize with his perspective, though it's evident he thinks America is stronger than I think it is, he thinks it could recover without any government aid^iv, he thinks people will just buckle down and ride it out like they did the last Depression. I disagree, I think they get guns.^v

Let's leave that aside. What you need to observe is that his sentiment, shared by millions and millions of people, has the same fervor and anger as the "put the Wall Street bastards in jail" camp. You just don't hear about it very much.

Note also that he isn't angry at the government only, he's angry at other Americans. While there are millions of people who think their government and capitalism have failed them, he's speaking for the millions who think those people are the problem.

These are personal attacks about American against American, this is a new level of divisiveness.

Santelli knows enough about the stimulus package to criticize it on its merits, but what infuriates him is its symbolic meaning, a la Atlas Shrugged, that he's responsible to pay for his fellow Americans simply because he has the money.

On the other side, today you have South Carolina Representative James Clyburn saying that opposition to the stimulus package is a "slap in the face of African-Americans." What he doesn't realize is that saying it that way doesn't make people support the stimulus, it makes people resent African-Americans.

Maybe the best thing Obama could do is move as far to the left as possible. He will never be centrist enough, and certainly not rightward enough, to satisfy the Right. And he'll meanwhile infuriate the Obamaniacs who won't be able to recall if they were voting for Hope or Change.
Who knows.
But a prudent person will be less concerned with picking a side, and more concerned that sides are being picked.
Class warfare is back in earnest.

He calls for a Chicago Tea Party (he and the CBOE are in Chicago.) Before you jump with him or on him, a history lesson: the Boston Tea Party wasn't a protest about the British raising taxes on tea; they were protesting the reduction of the tax on tea, which meant the East India Company tea was even cheaper than the smuggled tea provided by wealthy colonists.

The British were using a low tax to seduce the colonists. Would colonists accept British rule -- the right to set taxes -- if it got them cheaper tea? Samuel Adams hadn't read the Grand Inquisitor but he heard about it. They dumped the tea before anyone had a chance to say the words that destroy civilizations: please take away our freedom, it's a small price to pay.^vi

1. Conveniently forgetting to mention that these are the exact same people who paid these exact "lot of Americans" salaries while they were demolishing the industrial base in the 80s, and then gave away "free" scholarships to undisciplined stupid cunts while they were demolishing the army in the 90s. Why's it noteworthy the Clinton crew then finally turned around to banking in 2000 ? Why's it not remarkable when they turned around to academia in 2010, leveraging the very same stupid cunts that they leaked in during the 90s ?!

   "The annoying part about my house being on fire is that the doorbell's burning" "Why the doorbell specifically?!" "It won't fucking stop ringing!"

   PS. There's also an article explaining how democracy attacks sanity (no, not the economic discussion, a sociological one) through inflating the basis so as to lower the average quality to the point where the diluted elite no longer satisfies its leadership function ; but obviously I can't find it now.

   Anyway, the point remains : given a normally distributed group, the average of the elite (under any relevant criterion) will far surpass the average of the rest of the group. Therefore, "extending the franchise" (ie, leaking any non-elite members into the elite) will bring down the average of the elite. If the elite is functional, meaning it does something, then it also necessarily has a functional threshold, meaning an average over which it must maintain itself to continue in its function. This threshold is definitionally over the average value for the group ("representative democracy" is the historical error proposing the threshold is no larger than that average, by the way) and therefore much over the average for the non-elite group. Obviously then the simplest avenue to destroying function in groups is the "extension of the franchise", yes ? [↩]

2. He linked youtube.com/watch?v=geubj3Ukugo [↩]
3. Nope, it certainly isn't. [↩]
4. Keks. Because "government" is somehow something else besides "a way to cut the pie". It has resources, in its own right, of itself. Why not ?! [↩]
5. And this'd be a problem because...

   What falsehood does this schmuck want to make true ? [↩]

6. This isn't... exactly right, but whatevers. [↩]