Politics & Power Quote by Arianna Huffington

Teetering is a deliberately unstable verb: you can almost see the floor give way beneath the people who are supposed to anchor the economy. Huffington borrows the most legible crisis image of the era, AIG in the bailout autumn, and repurposes it as a moral mirror. Then she twists the knife: if the system could mobilize overnight to save one sprawling institution and its “counterparties,” what does it say that it can’t—or won’t—do the same for the broad base that supposedly legitimizes capitalism?

The intent is political, but it’s also strategic journalism. By comparing the middle class to a “too big to fail” firm, she forces readers to accept a heretical premise: ordinary households are the real systemic risk. The subtext is that collapse is not a natural disaster; it’s a policy choice, enabled by a hierarchy of urgency where balance sheets get sympathy and families get lectures.

“Played by the rules” is the emotional payload. It invokes the postwar contract—work hard, stay responsible, and you’ll get stability—while implying that the rules have been rewritten mid-game. The phrase also preemptively rebuts the favorite counterargument that hardship is a result of individual failure. If rule-followers are sinking, the referee is the problem.

The 2009 timestamp matters because it sits at peak bailout memory, when anger at elites was still fresh and bipartisan rhetoric about recovery hadn’t yet curdled into fatigue. Huffington’s move is to keep that outrage pointed, not at abstract “Wall Street,” but at a rescue logic that treats corporations as citizens and citizens as rounding errors.