AIG, and the People's Response

Singer Lloyd Marcus told the crowd assembled in Lake Eola Park on Saturday that he was going to give them his take on the first days of the Obama administration. Then he shrieked. That pretty much summed up the mood in the park Saturday afternoon, when more than 4,000 people attended the Orlando Tea Party, a conservative rally aimed at expressing discontent with Washington. "This is maybe the greatest single gathering of God-fearing patriots in the history of Orlando, Florida," local conservative radio host Bud Hedinger, who emceed the event, told the crowd. The attendees, many of whom said they'd heard about the rally on Hedinger's radio show, brandished flags and homemade signs bearing slogans such as "Repeal the pork or our bacon is cooked" and "Obama lied, liberty died."…Orlando Tea Party Draws More than 4000, Helen Eckinger, 3/23/2009

Meanwhile, back in the middle class that Vice President Biden said the Democrats were going to save, there are some cranky individuals out there, you know, those deemed worthless by the Obama Administration, those who go to work, pay their taxes, pay their mortgages, manage their household budgets, and try to plan for a retirement that looks like it might be very far off. These tea parties are marvelous events; and they’ve been happening nationwide. The people can differentiate between democratic leaders and a new George the Third.

Sadly, their events remind this writer a great deal of the farmers’ rallies in the Carter Administration in the 1970s, when family farmers drove their tractors to Washington to express their shock and outrage at the bias in federal farm policy toward subsidizing corporate farms, highly conglomerated competitors who could cut prices until they shut down any survivors, even as they salted out the land they managed. Fact is, those policies did just what those protesters claimed. The family farm, by and large, is now a hobbyist’s vocation. Big Agriculture, rather like big agriculture under Lenin and Stalin in the old USSR, simply wiped out the competition.

But this writer is going to continue to beat his drum, hoping that Joe Biden’s targets of salvation keep raising holy hell to stop the manic hypocrisy and lying in Washington, DC. Because, the only real bankruptcy that will be a tragedy in the next few years will be when people who really are responsible are left in the impoverished shadows of bailed out dinosaurs like AIG and Citibank.

If you wanted to have an example of how the government’s operation of the economy works, you couldn’t ask for a better one than the government’s handling of AIG. It works to the advantage of those who are most like the government: bloated; overbearing; tyrannical; greedy; grasping; arbitrary – a highly organized class of thieves.

Luther