Bailout Outrage Races Across the Web

The Internet is flooded with angst about Treasury Secretary Paulson's proposed $700 billion bailout—and inspiring old-fashioned street protests

By Moira Herbst

Arun Gupta was enraged as he learned the details of Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson's plan to fix the U.S. banking system with $700 billion in taxpayer funds. The 43-year-old copy editor and freelance journalist, who publishes his own alternative newspaper, The Indypendent, needed to channel his angst but couldn't find a live protest to attend. So on Sept. 22, he sent an e-mail to some politically active friends in New York. Within days, they'd planned a protest against the bailout in New York and at 80 other locations in the U.S. on Sept. 25.

"I couldn't sit back while this plan gets rammed through Congress," says Gupta. "We live in a digital world, but change has to happen in an analog world. We married the two—the Internet helped us organize like wildfire." Gupta, now working with the online organization truemajority.org, says he expects hundreds and possibly a thousand protesters to converge at the protest near Wall Street. Protesters plan to build a pile of "citizen junk" that the government should also purchase in front of the iconic bull sculpture.

Much of the populist outrage against the bailout is building on the Internet, in blog posts, and Web sites. And not all of the posts are created by left-wingers like Gupta. The Internet is now swirling with petitions, debates bordering on rants, and biting satire about Paulson's plan and its potential consequences. The calls to arms come from across the political spectrum—from right-wing enemies of taxes to libertarians and left-wing progressives. They demand that Congress amend, scale back, or scrap the plan altogether.

Online Rage

The anger fueled much of the political theater in Washington this week. Yet Democrat and Republican lawmakers are working behind the scenes to bat out a deal (BusinessWeek.com, 9/24/08) with Paulson and the Bush Administration.

A lot of the online rage is channeled in the form of signatures on petitions and electronic letters to members of Congress. Senator Bernie Sanders (Independent-Vt.) is circulating a popular one on the left-wing blog Huffington Post. The 1.9-million member Service Employees International Union is also circulating a sign-on letter to Congress that reads in part: "No deal. No blank check." StopTheHousingBailout.com reasons: "A bailout tells responsible Americans that they are suckers."

The anger is coming from right-leaning groups as well. The National Taxpayers Union's "No More Bailouts!" petition reads: "Bailouts that keep mismanaged organizations afloat delay natural corrections to unsound business practices.…Enough is enough. No more bailouts. Not with my tax dollars."

The conservative site townhall.com features a similar petition. Right-wing blogger Patrick Ruffini, meanwhile, urges Republicans to vote against the bailout, since "God Himself couldn't have given rank-and-file Republicans a better opportunity to create political space between themselves and the Administration."