In his 1971 essay, Mau-Mauing the Flak-Catchers, Tom Wolfe alleges that community groups would scare government into giving them funds by threatening social conflict if they were not supported to prevent it.
Isn't that pretty much what Paulson did with the bailout?
[WS:] It is interesting that such an obvious racial slur comes from someone like you, James. Mau mau was a name given by the British colonizers to a popular revolt in Kenya that called itself by different names. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mau_Mau_Uprising
Of course, for the Brits, there were nothing but a bunch of gangsters, but that is hardlly suprising. However, creating the cognitive frame of "racialized" gangster metaphor for a community movement strikes me as reactionary - something you would find in the Repug (or Tory?) talking points rather than in the progressive discourse of any kind. Using the same frame to characterize bankers is fundamentally no different than using anti-semitic slurs to critique the finance capital - a common trope amoung Euro-fascists. Wojtek
--------------------------------------------------------------- "When a candidate for public office faces the voters he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is the fact that they are quite incapable of weighing ideas, or even of comprehending any save the most elemental — men whose whole thinking is done in terms of emotion, and whose dominant emotion is dread of what they cannot understand. So confronted, the candidate must either bark with the pack or be lost. [...] All the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre — the man who can most adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum. The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men." - HL Mencken ----------------------------------------------------------------