The power elites are sissies

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This Balloon Juice page has been hanging open in a Firefox tab on my machine for the past week. I wanted to link to it here for two reasons.

First, the author points out a corporate media meme that should be troubling all of us these days: the idea that us everyday slobs have no business criticizing individuals and corporations who turned the global financial system into a pyramid scheme or whose possibly criminal negligence is responsible for runaway pollution of the Gulf of Mexico, and by extension that the President of the United States --- our First Among Equals --- is an unseemly "bully" for threatening to hold them accountable for their acts. That meme, of course, does not extend to a president's nakedly unconstitutional breaking of international treaties, the instigation of illegal wars, the elimination of habeas corpus on demand, or the bulk wiretapping of electronic communications by innocent civilians --- it only applies to picking on corporations and the man-children who direct them.

Second, the post hints at just how unaccustomed to criticism and populist anger these elites have become after 30 years of The Good Life. There are PR campaigns, executed not only though advertising but by marquee-name news commentators, that scold citizens for "vilifying" financiers and oilmen for the destruction they have sown. Why would the captains of industry bother with such nonsense? Because we make them nervous. They do not like their parasitic livelihoods and lifestyles to be criticized, because they're important people and therefore entitled to anything they wish: unearned income, untaxed riches, unwarranted power, and immunity from accountability. They are nervous because many, many people are beginning to understand that they are parasites out of control. And that they are terrified sissies. There's not a man among them; candy-ass jabronis. Revel in their fear.