Congressional efforts to impose stringent restrictions on executive compensation [at government-subsidized banks] appeared to be evaporating yesterday as House and Senate negotiators worked to fine-tune the compromise stimulus bill.
Lawmakers' Goal to Cap Executive Pay Meets Resistance
Washington Post
February 12, 2009
It's hard enough to lose a job. But for a growing proportion of U.S. workers, the troubles really set in when they apply for unemployment benefits.
More than a quarter of people applying for such claims have their rights to the benefit challenged as employers increasingly act to block payouts to former workers.
Employers Fighting Unemployment Benefits
Washington Post
February 12, 2009
Two nations between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are ignorant of each other's habits, thoughts and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones or inhabitants of different planets; who are formed by different breeding, are fed by different food, are ordered by different manners, and are not governed by the same laws: The rich and the poor.
Sybil, or the Two Nations
Benjamin Disraeli
1845
Someone please explain to me why we haven't had a revolution in this country yet, because I don't fully understand it -- given that our political and business elites both seem to have a death wish bigger than Marie Antoinette's.
all right we are two nations.
The Big Money
John Dos Passos
1936
Update 2/12 10:00 AM ET: My question was rhetorical, of course -- if we got through 1933 without a revolution, then presumably the system will muddle through its latest exercise in human misery, too.
What I was really wondering is how the American elites could feel so confident in their own entrenched positions that they could so blatantly ignore or defy reality -- as illustrated by the two Washington Post stories juxtaposed above.
The answer, I suppose is either that they have lived so long in the bubble of power and privilege that they no longer realize that moments like July 1789 or October 1917 can happen, or that they are supremely confident that populist rage can always be channeled to the right, where it can be easily controlled.
Either way, it amounts to the same thing: A total unawareness that at the end of the day, the only thing standing between them and the guillotine is sheer social inertia.