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发帖数: 29846 | 1 By Dan Gainor
December 9, 2011
According to police, a letter bomb was recently sent to the CEO of Deutsche
Bank in Frankfurt, Germany. It was only a matter of time.
Left wing protesters – from the union loonies at SEIU to the equally loony,
but more radical Occupy Wall Street crowd – have been targeting bank
executives for some time. It was bound to happen that someone would take all
the venom aimed by the media and the left at so-called “banksters” and
turn it into a Unabomber homage.
The term “bankster” sounds cute. Though the way the left uses it, “
bankster” would be hate speech if applied to some protected class they
support. The website www.Banksterusa.org, for example, claims it wants “to
be your go-to site for updates on the financial services re-regulation fight
in Congress and for progressive net-roots campaigning against the big boys
on Wall Street.” Appears benign, except the logo for the site is riddled
with about three dozen bullet holes.
The site says the term was “popularized in the 1930s by Ferdinand Pecora.”
That comment links to a New York Times opinion piece about a 1930s
congressional investigation into Wall Street, headed by Pecora who was “
imbued with the crusading fervor of the Progressive Era.” BanksterUSA.org
is “part of the Center for Media and Democracy,” funded to the tune of $
200,000 by the Open Society Institute, the charity arm of lefty investor
George Soros. Apparently, some Wall Street money is OK, even for crusading
progressives
But bankers are still evil. Evil enough that the left has taken not just to
the streets, but to their homes. Protesters in Washington and New York have
done their best to intimidate the banking community. Fortune magazine’s
Nina Easton was eyewitness to one such 2010 protest in D.C., sponsored by
the radical union SEIU. “Last Sunday, on a peaceful, sun-crisp afternoon,
our toddler finally napping upstairs, my front yard exploded with 500
screaming, placard-waving strangers on a mission to intimidate my neighbor,
Greg Baer,” she wrote.
Scumbags from SEIU (OK, that’s redundant), openly trespassed onto the
property and terrorized Bear’s 14-year-old son, who was home alone. Take a
look at the photo of dozens of frothing protesters posed around the front
porch of the man’s home and ask yourself how you’d react if that were your
home. The Washington Post so ignored the story that ombudsman Andy
Alexander asked why it took nine days for the paper to cover protests with
an item that only ran online. “Still, not a single word about the protests
had appeared in the printed Post. How could this be?” The obvious answer,
because it made the left look bad.
In October of this year, Occupy Wall Street protesters went even further.
They “marched to the houses of Rupert Murdoch, JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie
Dimon, billionaire David Koch, financier Howard Milstein and hedge fund
mogul John Paulson.” (Strangely, they skipped Soros.) When Dimon spoke in
Seattle protesters surrounded his hotel and police had to use pepper spray
just to get him out of the hotel.
Despite the left’s broad brush attacks on bankers, some bankers bring it on
themselves. Witness former N.J. Democratic Gov. John Corzine, turned
walking federal investigation. As MF Global’s top executive, he was so
grossly incompetent “that about $1 billion of customer money could not be
located,” wrote The New York Times. It’s hard to tell how his case will
turn out, since he is so well-connected politically. But at least he can
comfort himself in knowing that stripes can be slimming.
This is the environment where Obama delivers his new economic agenda.
Remember, this is the president who got over $10 million more than Sen. John
McCain from financial firms last election cycle. Goldman Sachs (Yes, the
guys the Occupiers hate so much) was Obama’s second highest contributor.
That didn’t stop him from going to Osawatomie, Kansas, to promote talk of
class warfare. “Their philosophy is simple. We are better off when
everybody is left to fend for themselves and play by their own rules,” he
said of opponents.
Osawatomie was an appropriate choice for Obama, though for different reasons
than he had planned. Obama had wanted to channel his inner Teddy Roosevelt.
Roosevelt had spoken at Osawatomie in 1910 to push a progressive economic
agenda. The current president (Pull date: Nov. 6, 2012) used his trip to
emphasize his Kansan roots and to push class warfare.
Osawatomie was once ground zero for another type of warfare when the area
was called “Bleeding Kansas” and John Brown’s abolitionists fought
violently against pro-slave forces. In the 1856 “‘Battle of Osawatomie’
five of Brown’s men, including one of his sons, were killed and the town
burned.” In 2011, the class war promoted by Team Obama, the Occupiers and
the rest of the radical left is only now turning violent.
What followed in Obama’s speech were a series of instructions on how to run
a business from the community organizer turned Lecturer-in-Chief, with
regular assaults on bankers, businessmen and conservatives who dare have a
different view of the world. According to Obama, anyone who opposes his
common sense solution for banks is just evil. “Now, unless you’re a
financial institution whose business model is built on breaking the law,
cheating consumers, or making risky bets that could damage the entire
economy, you have nothing to fear from these new rules,” he told the crowd.
That’s certainly the consistent left-wing view on banks. Take formerly sane
CNBC host turned MSNBC lunatic Dylan Ratigan (please). He loves the term “
bankster” with all it entails. He even has a new book coming out titled “
Greedy Bastards: How We Can Stop Corporate Communists, Banksters, and Other
Vampires from Sucking America Dry.” In one TV appearance, he took ownership
of the term, saying “At the end of the day … the Euro currency, the Euro
Zone, was a bankers’ concept or banksters’, if you’re going to use my
word.”
Watching Ratigan, those of us who can bear it, is reminiscent of the Great
Depression era hatred for bankers, landlords and businesspeople. It’s a
theme the left and the media have institutionalized, especially with bankers
. The famous Frank Capra movie, “It’s a Wonderful Life,” pits the lovable
Jimmy Stewart as a community Building and Loan head against the evil Mr.
Potter, played wonderfully by Lionel Barrymore. Viewers are taught
successful people are Scrooge-like and to be vilified.
Sixty-five years later, that movie has turned into a holiday classic. Every
single year, we are reminded that it’s a wonderful life, as long as you
aren’t a bankster. If you’re one of those, it might just be a wonderfully
short life if the left has its way. |
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