Terrorizing Main St. Next

This banker may be a jerk, but smashing up his home is wrong, and his children have been harassed and bullied at school. Meanwhile, in France, a 3M executive was taken hostage by workers. WSJ:

The attack reflects a virulent strain of social unrest that is appearing across Europe. Workers at a factory operated by the U.S. industrial conglomerate 3M Co. held their boss, Luc Rousselet, captive for more than 24 hours to protest planned layoffs. He was released on Thursday after a deal was reached, according to Reuters. Mr. Rousselet left his office early on Thursday morning to boos from about 20 workers.

Daniel Henninger:

Barack Obama meets with a flock of nervous bankers at the White House tomorrow to reassure them he understands their interests. Good luck. There has always been tension between the Democratic Party and the private sector. That tension is over. With its vote in the House of Representatives to punish corporate bonus payments, the national Democratic Party has disconnected itself entirely from the private sector.

The public bear-baiting of AIG's Ed Liddy, and then passage of the bonus bill, gave the nation a good look at the modern Democratic Party freed of constraints.

The current version of the party has largely broken free of any understanding whatsoever of the private sector -- how it works or what it needs to function.

True socialists at least think about markets so they can criticize them. The Democratic Party's leadership doesn't stir to even that level of engagement. In the House, Senate and some corners of the Obama White House, the party is acting as if the marketplace was the world of an alien tribe, which it has to control through intimidation or demands for protective tribute (read: campaign contributions).

This is not true of the entire 90% of self-identified Democrats who voted for Barack Obama. But Democrats who work in real jobs rather than work for the mothership in Washington must recognize that the party's obsessions are becoming ever less hospitable to a functioning economy, or Mr. Geithner's labors to that goal.[snip]

Wall Street's collapsed businesses and layoffs have devastated New York's tax revenues. So what? Attorney General Andrew Cuomo flogged Bank of America into giving up the names of Merrill Lynch bonus recipients. Imagine the coincidence this week when two of Merrill's most respected hands, analyst David Rosenberg and strategist Richard Bernstein, quit. Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal and the legislature are also mau-mauing AIG over bonuses.

Nor can it be said that these Democrats are merely scapegoating the private sector to deflect blame for the politicians' share of the mortgage debacle. Using the private sector as the party's punching bag is also now routine. Al Gore and John Kerry ran at Big Oil, Big Pharma and Big Insurance. With mercurial suppleness, so did the current president. These "big" industries are proxies for the whole world of owners and managers, who somehow now always find themselves beyond acceptable politics as enemies of the people's interests. A Democratic Party that was always anti-Wall Street is becoming anti- Main Street.

Gangsters terrorizing and running the country into the ground.

In my home town in Wisconsin, the bank (along with the churches) is the pillar of the community, making car loans and farm loans, helping small businesses be successful, and employing more than one widow with small children, as I recall.

Where do jobs come from? They come from people who pursue their dreams, provide for their families, and create wealth from their human capital--their own hard work and ingenuity. It spills over into new jobs as their business grows, the business of supplying the market, made up of individual American consumers exercising choice every day. If you're not responsive, you don't succeed.

Government is often unresponsive and unaccountable, but we appreciate its necessity for ensuring the rule of law, for safeguarding our life, liberty and pursuit of happiness.

At its worst, it is a parasite, a bully and steals our liberty--at our expense. This is where we are headed now.

When the only new jobs are government jobs we will all be slaves to the state.

Democrats hold up Europe as a model--but these are aging, bankrupt states where they have "free" health care which means leaving their grannies to die alone in un-airconditioned rooms while they are on their state vacation.