MAIN STREET IS FURIOUS AT WALL STREET, BUT WHERE DOES THE RAGE GO?

By Jerry D. Rose

On August 19, 2009 Robert Kuttner, co-editor of The American Prospect, published in the Washington Post an op-ed column, “Rage the Left Should Use,” in which he posed the question of the appropriate focus of Main Street “rage” at Wall Street domination of U.S. government shown in such disappointing developments as taxpayer-financed bailouts of financial and manufacturing corporations and the apparent fact that “health care reform” is either dead or morbidly ill as a result of the exercise of corporate power which has been used to kill or emasculate the legislation.  In his analysis, Kuttner minces no words in casting blame on President Obama and his corporation-dominated administration for this failure, a failure compounded by the effective Wall Street sidelining of any viable progressive movement.  Toward the end of his indictment of the administration as insufficiently bold in “standing up” to these regressive forces, he offers the following anti-climatic conclusion, leaving the reader hanging in uncertainty for an answer to the question implicitly posed in the title of his article.

One way or another, hard times produce popular anger at callous elites. Presidential leadership and progressive organizing energy to connect the mounting outrage to the real economic abuses are overdue. Otherwise, even a ticket of Sarah Palin and Mark Sanford could pick up the pieces.

Since the weakness of both Presidential leadership and progressive organizing energy were the essence of Kuttner’s diagnosis of the problem, his appeal to these very forces as the antidote to same seemed to me remarkably discordant and unhelpful for any true guidance in how popular rage should be “used” to promote progressive action against these “callous elites.”  In a comment on the Common Dreams reprint of this article  I entered the following observations at 11:42 a.m. August 19, 2009 (slightly edited here):

……………………………………………………………………………………………………….

Mr. Kuttner takes us to the doorstep of a reasonable anticipation of an appropriate focus for populist rage—then with his final words he drops us in a barren field in which there is little prospect for the assuaging of our angst. “Presidential leadership and progressive organizing energy” are precisely, in his own analysis, the missing elements in our present woes, not only “overdue” but nowhere in sight.

As I was reading his devastating if reluctant indictment of today’s presidential leadership, I was almost holding my breath in anticipation of his definition of an appropriate focus for our rage. Here at last I was thinking, one of the stable of Obama-apologizers housed at Nation and American Prospect magazines would say it’s time for the people to get hopping mad at those ENABLERS of the power of Wall Street and other “elites”: namely the President and those “energized progressives” many of whom are energized (think Organized for America, Sierra Club and Health Care For All if you want examples) to support Obama’s policies no matter their progressive or regressive content. The people of this country are entitled to a furious attack on elite domination in every thing from war-making to health-providing. Since they (along with the usual suspects of the Republican know-nothings) are the forces that allow the financial firms and drug industries to continue to dominate our political system, it is quite “useful” for the people to follow the example of Jesus and wrathfully throw out of the temple the money-changers AND their liberal enablers. In short I’m suggesting that the very kind of anger at a sell-out administration and Democratic Party and a sell-out liberal establishment that is so often displayed in the comments on these CD pages must become the language as well of people on the streets of this country. Short of this becoming the fact, Kuttner’s grave threat of a “Palin/Sanford” presidential ticket in 2012 is an all-too-real possibility, but one that cannot be averted by deflecting our rage onto those “awful Republicans” while the benign Democrats are feeding themselves at the corporate trough.

…………………………………………………………….

Jerry D. Rose is editor of The Sun State Activist