It’s all too easy find naked greed and just plain stupidity in America’s boardrooms. In a target-rich environment filled with the likes of BP and all the bailed out banks setting up shop faster than Starbucks stores in Manhattan, let’s pick perennial California magnificent malfeasant assopoly Pacific Gas and Electric for today’s lesson.
One of the few things garnering any bipartisan support these days is that America is embroiled in a Class War. The wealthy are doing OK by their own admission. They just want to be more OKer than they are and are willing to hire lobbyists, fund gigantic super-pacs, shut factories, or buy politicians to do it. Their chant is, “Taxes? Taxes? We don’t need no stinking taxes…you do…and more of ‘em too!”
Everybody knows Newt Gingrich loves to pontificate, but now he’s decided to simply elect himself Pope – not that you’d recognize it from his public statements. And, Rick Santorum is the leader of the lemming wing of the GOP that’s running over the cliff and pulling their party down behind them. The seem a bit confused over the principle of separation of church and state.
The Bay area has a long history of protest. At 1960s UC Berkeley, Vietnam war opponents started as idealistic, flowers in your hair protestors who morphed into building grabbers. Next door, the hard-scrabble neighborhoods of East Oakland are the perfect breeding ground for discontent. It’s the right place for the Occupy movement to set up tents. Plenty of people with grievances and lots of rich people to snub. But, Occupy Oakland has a dark side.
All voting blocks – left and right – have fallen for the charlatans’ siren song at some point. As a result, they make such counter-intuitive deviations from common sense they end up hurting their causes more than helping them. Evangelicals are taking their turns this time around.