YouTube video: You Can't Make It In America Anymore

Is a new American lumpencitizen revolution in the works?

Inasmuch that it's another tediously slow Emerald City news day and all, we'll provide our readers with an opportunity to leapfrog from a Standard-Examiner lead editorial which appeared in yesterday's edition. The Std-Ex Editorial Board gets off to a danged good start in the lead paragraphs when they try to characterise the mood in America, even as the less economically advantaged are shuffled off to "the Governator's" 21st century version of Steinbeck's great depression-era labor camps, while the fat cat bankers in America rake in billions in bonuses:

"Who do we shoot?"
-- "Muley," in the film version of John Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath."
Pitchfork politics. It sort of has a catchy ring to it, particularly if you're angry at the political and financial elite in our country.
And a lot of us are angry right now. That anger seems to be very bipartisan in nature. After all, not all of those AIG execs who thought they could grab a bonus on the sly can be Republicans. In fact, the two senators who received the most campaign money from AIG are the currently notorious Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., and, ahem, President Obama, when he was the Democratic senator from Illinois.
The recession, or embryonic depression, or whatever you call it, has a lot of scapegoats. Wall Street, Congress, President Bush, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, AIG, Bear Stearns, Republicans, Democrats ... the list is endless. We should be outraged that the political and financial classes we trust to lead economic policy allowed blind faith in past financial history to supersede caution against an expanding, defenseless. mortgage-based credit bubble.
To put it straight, we've got a lot of fixing to do. Optimism, faith and hope -- all admittedly wavering at the moment -- will be necessary to get that fixing accomplished.

And from that point, the Editorial Board goes completely off-track, we believe, with this stanza, which finishes the above paragraph:

We can't get sidetracked with emotional, pitchfork anger. We're seeing too much of that from precisely those who should have cool heads.

From there, the editorial board goes even more haywire through the rest of the editorial, complaining about incivility, and of course the threats to the personal safety of those bastards who were set to receive the outrageous multi-million dollar bonuses, despite their appallingly bad business judgment. Not that we condone that, BTW.

Nevertheless, we're going to point out what Thomas Jefferson wrote about this, in of all places, the U.S. Declaration of Independence:

When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness, [Emphasis added}.

Get a grip, Standard-Examiner Editorial Board. Here's a great video we googled up a couple of days ago which we believe better expresses the lumpencitizens' anger and angst, than any of the corporo-fascist crap you can post in your editorials. It's not about ivory tower lefty-righty ideology. It's about the more basic and fundamental ideology of survival. We believe this excellent video may very well capture the sentiment of our times in America.

"We can't make it here anymore":


We don't know that this is the current mood of the lumpen proletariat across the country, but we have a strong sense that it may well be.

And if the politically-jaded Std-Ex Editorial Board chooses invoke a quote from that dastardly neoCON Robert Shapiro to the effect that current American sentiment is "a spasmodic outpouring of ideologically incoherent rage," we'll just add that the Standard and their neoCON friends from Sanduskey obviously have no concept of the "dark side" of American Democracy, in a land where agile and aggressive Americans still believe that their government should be of, by and for "the people."

Remember people, that what the Std-Ex derisively calls "pitchfork anger" is the exact same motivation which propelled American colonialists to throw over King George.

Don't ever think it couldn't happen again.

Reader comments are invited, as always.