The New 99%

The Washington Post today is reporting the formation of a quasi secret society calling itself The Other 99%.

Made up of the 99% of the 1% who are not quite rich and powerful enough to be comfortably above the law, this society, according to its charter, has tasked itself with joining the elite group of public and private sector wrongdoers for whom the Obama administration’s policy of looking forward and not backward always applies.

Prompting the start-up of this new society, according to sources, was a recent outbreak of rumblings from regulators about the possibility of looking into what legal proceedings perhaps could or could possibly not be pursued against human and corporate persons too close to the back of the Fortune 500 pack for the comfort of those falling anywhere between the One and the .05 Percent.

“That could have been me,” said one hedge fund manager in reference to a Wall Street colleague who recently had to bear the high cost of lawyering up in response to his SEC watchdog’s mistakenly taking seriously all the populist noise President Obama is making in this election year.

“Look,” said one person formerly known as a corporation, “I didn’t go to all the trouble of becoming a One Percenter just so the ghost of Ken Lay could haunt my dreams.”

Added a more traditionally human member of The Other 99%, “It’s a classic Catch-22. All the money you spend on retaining the army of high-end lawyers you need in case a watchdog jumps its leash keeps dropping your net worth below the point where you don’t need lawyers anymore to hold off the watchdogs.”

“Listen,” explained the pointman on the society’s all-star public relations team, “we don’t necessarily need the platinum get out of jail free card you find in the wallets of the Jamie Dimons of the world, or the Condoleezza Rices. We’re big boys. We can take the occasional slap on the wrist if we have to.

“But is it really fair or just that conceivably we could be held as legally accountable for a white or even ivory-collar crime as an original 99 Percenter is for snatching a little old lady’s purse?”

“Plan A,” according to the Other 99 Percent’s chief strategist, “is to negotiate for the same immunity arrangement the war boys have, or maybe the high-end government officials, or, knock wood, whatever unbelievably sweet deal Karl Rove finagled for himself.

“If that doesn’t pan out, we’ll probably just shoot for the diplomatic immunity of the foreign dignitaries.”

“Hell,” said one Other 99 Percenter, “on paper I’m practically Swiss anyway.”

“I’m from the Cayman Islands like Mitt,” said another.

“Actually,” said another, “I’m pretty sure we One Percenters are from a whole different planet. Pluto, I believe it’s called.”

In related news, the US Department of Justice, in response to continued criticism that it is unevenly applying the Obama administration’s policy of looking forward and not backward with regard to Iraq War-related crimes, assured human rights groups today that looking backward at the alleged criminal whistleblowing activity of Private Bradley Manning is actually a matter of looking forward to the day that everybody understands that when now President Obama repeatedly enlisted the services of government whistleblowers during the 2008 presidential campaign, he was of course calling for leaks that would be flattering to the US government in general and to his administration specifically.

DOJ spokesperson Anita Cooper further explained, “Even if we wanted to look backward to revisit the decision to go after Mr. Manning, we can’t really do so now because that is the same direction in which we would likely run into the crimes Mr. Manning allegedly leaked and in so doing helped create the need to keep looking forward for the good of the country.