This is just creepy!!! (0.00 / 1)

i don't see the benefit of parading people in front of luxory homes will solove anything other than create more hostility between the classes.  What is the goal here?  I am not wealthy by any means but it doesn't mean I wouldn't like to get there some day.  I will bet most people feel the same way.  What's your point....show us big home where big bad rich people live.  We know that.  We know where the nice neighborhoods are.  We know the nice car they drive.

Why not instead of being envious and mad at these people, used that as a challenge to go to school, work hard, and climb tha ladders.  Why not promote entrepenourship where people can become financially independant insteed of being angry all the time because someone else is successful and lives in a big house.  You know what;  someone will always live in a bigger house, drive a better car, and make more money.  This is life and thats how it goes.  Even in communist and socialist countries there are the haves and have nots.  Your goal should be to become a have instead of letting jeolousy and anger eat at you the rest of your life.  

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by: rmoltaban @ Fri Mar 20, 2009 at 19:19:01 PM UTC

Creepy...and dangerous (0.00 / 0)

Look, I hate the people who ran the economy into the ground as much as the next guy. (I spent over 80,000 on my education and I'm barely getting by working retail at the moment) But this is a bad idea. Not everyone who is angry about the economy can control themselves. They don't all come to OpenLeft and blogs and communities like it and voice their frustrations while trying to find more effective ways to fix the economy so this doesn't happen again. Some of them, quite simply, shouldn't know where the people who run AIG live, because what they do with that information could be dangerous.

Its like that guy who listened to a ton of right wing talk radio before he killed a bunch of "liberals" late last year. I just read (I don't know where) that extremist sentiment regarding race, religion, etc. is on the rise as people become more frustrated by their lack of financial security. There are crazy people out there...we don't need to provide them with the addresses of the people responsible for this mess.

The CEOs of AIG and Bear Sterns and the rest of the firms who got rich while making the rest of us poor deserve a lot of distrust and anger at the moment, but creating a situation where they may be physically in danger is neither right or productive.

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by: KimmerDC @ Fri Mar 20, 2009 at 21:41:02 PM UTC

Maybe they should have thought about the consequences (4.00 / 1)

of their actions before they figured out a way to enrich themselves at their fellow citizen's expense.

Personally, I'm rather non-violent and I don't wish any personal injury on these banksters. But I won't shed a tear if the have to face a few bus-loads of people hanging around their houses making 'em nervous and embarrassed.


"It sounds wrong...
     ...but its right."

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by: SpitBall @ Fri Mar 20, 2009 at 22:37:35 PM UTC

[ Parent ]

I agree... (0.00 / 0)

If all that happens is a few bus loads of people embarrassing them. But unless there's a guarantee that that's all that will happen, I don't think their home addresses should be advertised.

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by: KimmerDC @ Sat Mar 21, 2009 at 03:57:51 AM UTC

[ Parent ]

I guess I missed the part where anyone was advocating violence. (0.00 / 0)

This is a leftwing site, not a rightwing one.

Personally, I think it's a good idea. Sometimes shame has the power to inspire good behavior where other methods fail. Or at least discourage bad behavior.

Montani semper liberi

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by: Sadie Baker @ Fri Mar 20, 2009 at 22:46:00 PM UTC

A beautiful testimonial from the Times! (0.00 / 0)

The New York Times story also includes a beautiful testimonial to one of the AIG executives:

Mr. Poling's father, Harold A. Poling, retired as the chief executive of Ford Motor Company in 1994. On Thursday, Cheryle Campbell answered the phone at Harold Poling's house in Bloomfield, Mich., where she said she had worked as a housekeeper for 20 years. She said she was not surprised to hear that Douglas Poling had decided to give back his bonus. "You'd think, being in the kind of job he is, that he'd be one of those sharks," she said. "But he's not at all."

Douglas Poling has lived in the same house on a dead-end street in Fairfield for 11 years. The local papers say that he and his wife have given generously to a homeless shelter, to the Westport Country Playhouse and the Fairfield Country Day School, a boys' prep school where tuition runs as high as $29,300 a year.

But on Thursday, his house, like Mr. Haas's, was being watched by private security guards.

Hurrah!

And that's the story of all those wonderful people at AIG who suffered the terrible misfortune of "earning" multi-million-dollar bonuses for destroying the American economy!

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by: Jacob Freeze @ Sat Mar 21, 2009 at 02:15:54 AM UTC

Historical form... (0.00 / 0)

These kinds of events -- if they become widespread -- could result in good outcomes.  They certainly did during the 1930's depression era.

Thousands of Foreclosure Evictions were stopped when groups of people organized, watched the sheriff's men take all possessions out of houses, even shovel the furnace coal into the street, and then when they left, move groups moved all the possessions back in, and stood armed guard with shotgun over the family and house.  Very rarely did the sheriff return.  

When farms were being foreclosed, several hundred farmers would gather and bid a penny or so on the lots of possessions, farm land and machinery being offered by the sheriff.  Anyone making a serious offer had to look into the eyes of some very dedicated farmers saving the land and household of their neighbors and friends.  When these events increased shortly after FDR took office, he rushed through the first AAA which had the Farm Home Loan Bank attached to it.  Auctions stopped, and so did the penny sales.  

In LeMar Iowa, they took a Probate Judge who was all too anxious to do foreclosures out to the edge of town, and threw a noose around his neck.  Didn't really hurt him, but they left him for someone else to release.  Foreclosures stopped, and the newly re-opened banks got all cooperative about opening up the loan windows again.  

Some folk seem to have forgotten the maxim, "Tiz the Squeeky Wheel that gets the grease."  People who are having the core of their lives -- their homes, jobs, income, food, health care and all the rest ripped out from under them need to stop acting like quiet little victims and make decent noise, noise that will force Congress's attention on those with the most at stake -- and that is not the bonus babies.  

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by: Sara @ Sat Mar 21, 2009 at 04:43:43 AM UTC