The New York Times and Wired magazine are tracking the email and internet campaigns which have taken off in reaction to the US government’s plan to bail out Wall Street.
But email letters to congressman are old school, man. techPresident reports that a new internet meme, BuyMyShitpile took off yesterday:
“This afternoon at 4 ET, protesters inspired by the BuyMySh#%tpile meme and anti-bailout emails circulating around the web will amass near the Wall Street’s famous bull sculpture with, in the words of organizer and activist Andrew Boyd, “their 8-track cassette collections, their old Spice Girl CDs, their surf boards that got bit by sharks and old Enron stock certificates” they’d like Congress to take off their hands.”
Read the full story here.
Whatever the economics of this bailout, you can’t get around the political illegitimacy of socialising the costs of blunders made by people who earned yearly salaries higher than the net earnings of most peoples families for all of history. The cultural legacy of being told that there was a better, smarter kind of person who rightfully ruled the world from its financial hubs is inconsistent with the solidarity required to hand over $700 billion of communal assets. Those who keep warning that only such a payment can avoid a crash of the system, should really have paid more attention to ensuring that people on minimum wage, or no wage, had some investment in the system which would make them give a rats.