What Happens When Angry Citizens Crash the Gates of America's CEO Class?

I was there when the so-called “Class War” went down. I saw the whole thing happen, on a cul-de-sac called Golden Pond Lane. Until now, no one has told the real story of what went on that warm spring day in Connecticut. So I will. Before I take you to that epic battle, bear with me for a brief digression -- I promise it will pay off later.

I was born and raised a few miles away from what was known as “The Serial Murderer Capital of the World” -- Santa Cruz, California circa early-mid-1970s. At one point there were three major serial murderers working the same beach town’s turf at once.

Over time serial killers lost their shock value and got absorbed into pop culture. Life returned to normal. But one incident from that scene haunted me then, and still gives me bladder-spasms today. It involved the most notorious of all the Santa Cruz serial killers, Edmund Kemper, who murdered and rapd hitchhiking hippie girls, chopping up their bodies and sodomizing the cuts. One day Kemper picked up a young dance student named Aiko Koo, drove her into the woods, and pulled out a gun to terrify her. It worked. As Kemper later said, “I pulled the gun out to show her I had it...she was freaking out. Then I put the gun away and that had more effect on her than pulling it out.”

Now here comes the really disturbing part: instead of killing her right then and there, Kemper put the gun down, stopped his car and got out, then closed and locked the door. I repeat: Kemper locked himself out of the car. With his gun inside, next to the girl.

Guess what the girl did? She unlocked the door and let him back in.

As Kemper himself later explained, “She could have reached over and grabbed the gun, but I think she never gave it a thought.”

She never gave it a thought.  It’s not the murder that’s so horrifying to me, it’s that she unlocked the door and let him back in.

That was us, “the people,” in the opening battle of the Great Class War a few weeks ago. You may have heard about this in the news: a group of protesters angry over AIG bonuses chartered a bus and toured the mansions where the AIG executives lived, going straight to their front doors. With no intention of Christmas caroling or trick-or-treating. No, this had class war written all over it. And for the first time, the plutocrats were running scared.

Here’s how the “Battle of Golden Pond Lane” unfolded: On Friday, March 20 -- after a week of populist rage over news that Americans were funding obscene multimillion dollar bonuses to the same AIG multimillionaires who ruined our economy, word spread about an anti-AIG bus tour of the mansions of the company’s execs, planned for March 21. The plan was to transform the bus into a kind of Class War Assault Vehicle, and steer it straight into the upper-class New England hamlet where all the AIG execs live: Fairfield, Connecticut. It was like Stripes meets Spartacus, and I wouldn’t have missed it for the world. The robbed would see exactly where the robbers lived, what their homes looked like, what their addresses were, where their front doors were located…

The bus tour was arranged by an organization called Connecticut Working Families, a group with deep ties to ACORN, the bogeyman of the Fox News bitter-cracker mob. That was all the plutocrats had to hear -- a busload of commies and ACORN panthers were heading into their neighborhood, like Mugabe’s goons, to burn down their mansions. For about 36 tense hours, suburban-New York’s plutocrats felt like the Byzantine Christians in 1453, with the barbarians just hours away from slaughtering and raping anything that moved in Fairfield, Connecticut. In a panic, nine AIG execs announced that they were handing back their million-dollar bonuses to the American taxpayers. It was incredible. For the first time in living memory, “the people” were starting to win. They had the power to instill fear and claw back some of their wealth.