The shuttle picked me up at 5:45 and it was all women. One of them said she was from Philadelphia, but she and her husband moved to Oklahoma City. “We didn’t want to live here,” she said, tight-lipped. There was something about the way she said it that I assumed it was the usual preliminary to a racist rant, so I didn’t say anything.
Then the black lady got in the van. She introduced herself as Denise. She had a lipstick-red blouse that strained across the biggest chest I’ve ever seen, elaborate gold rings on every finger, and long red nails. She started talking about Anthony Weiner: “I swear, women should run the world. How much worse could it get?” she said. “Except for that Sarah Palin. How stupid can one person be?”
Now see, I thought the Oklahoma woman would be upset. But she chimed right in. “Caribou Barbie, they call her,” she said. “She’s really crazy. I told my husband if she gets elected, we’re moving to Canada.”
Denise says she wishes Obama had waited another eight years before he ran: “I don’t think he knows what he’s doing, he’s too friendly with those Republicans.”
“I don’t know why people vote for them,” I said. “Every single time you give Republicans the majority, they try to get rid of Social Security and Medicare.”
“Ain’t that the truth?” Denise said. The driver chimed in: “Vote ’em all out, that’s the only thing that’ll work.”
“No, it won’t,” I said. “The lobbyists are the problem. All the campaign money is the problem.”
“You can say that again,” the Oklahoma woman said.
“Soon we won’t be saying the pledge of allegiance to America, we’ll be saying it to China,” Denise said.
“More likely we’ll be saying it to GE or Exxon,” I said.
See? People really are paying attention.
New Word for us all to learn– “Plutonomy.”
Two PDFs from Citigroup have surfaced to show us that the income gap, the crash, and how the elite are treating the Bottom 90% really and truly is, and has been, the goal. Feature, not bug.
It’s sickening, really.
Part 1 of “Plutonomy”: http://www.cps-news.com/wp-content/misc_pdfs/Citigroup_Plutonomy_Part_1_Oct162005.pdf
Part 2: http://www.cps-news.com/wp-content/misc_pdfs/Citigroup_Plutonomy_Part_1_Oct162005.pdf
Good reading,
–MF
That’s somewhat heartening. Hope your flight was smooth!
Then the so-called ‘undecided’ are our problem. People who aren’t undecided but really uncaring, stupidly uninformed or just can’t be bothered.
btw, thanks for the pdf. in comments. Both are part 1.
Part 2?
Sorry, susie. I’m reading backwards in time.
(What a great story this is!)
That’s a neat story. 🙂
I’m just thinking of all the times me, or some friend or relative, has said ‘if so-and-so gets elected, or such-and-such happens, I’m moving to Canada’. It’s like the minor chord subtext of our national anthem. And how lucky for our nice Canadian neighbors that all of us who think about it don’t actually do it. Canada would have to move to western Russia to get away from us.
woudl this be a reverse cab driver anecdote???
About plutonomy:
Scary.
Even scarier when you realize that the data is a decade out of date, and that the uberclass has made even greater gains since then under Bush and Obama.
What is to be done?