politicians on the Hill and in the White House are the 1% also.

do the protestors realize this?

I get your comparison about the many being defined by the few, busdriver.  I think I have mentioned in posts that I don't think everyone who supports the Tea Party movement is racist (I can't speak for all, just myself.)

I don't expect to shake up anyone's opinion of the OWS crowds....I'm just posting my arguments and counterimpressions.

Actually, I didn't even see the basis for the astroturf charge until I started to read about who was bankrolling certain Tea Party candidates....Alaska's challenge to the Republican nominee comes to mind but there are lots of other examples I think.  Would you really disagree that the TP movement, though sprung independently and from the grassroots, is now solidly aligned with the Republican Party?

See, the OWS movement ---- an unorganized leaderless mishmash of anti-status quo demonstrators ---- is not aligned with any political party.   It's way too soon to tell if  OWS participants and sympathizers will help Democrats by getting energized and canvassing and voting or will hurt them by staying home because Obama is seen as one of the politicians that has been coopted by Big Money interests.  

I want to comment on something in your post, though, about the fact that TARP has been paid off and the taxpayers didn't lose, but got back more than the bailout.     And that's true, but it doesn't mean that the millions of average Americans burned by the Wall Street speculation and laid low by the recession that followed have benefited....they haven't been made "whole" in anything close to the fashion that the speculators themselves have.

Credit has remained tight, stagnating the economy, foreclosures continued, and 14 million people remain unemployed. 

Compared to the something like $20 billion in bonuses that the banking/financial industry awarded themselves in each of the two years following the meltdown, most Americans are barely stagnant in income and some are sinking.  

That's what the demonstrations are about.   

   

-- Edited by jazzy on Sunday 16th of October 2011 08:04:42 PM

-- Edited by jazzy on Sunday 16th of October 2011 08:06:58 PM

"But the OWS nationwide is not confined to just these types. Ordinary Americans are showing up, elderly, middle-aged, young couples with their babies in strollers, to join marches (at least on weekends or days off) to make their presence known too. There is deep dissatisfaction with our gridlocked political system and our behemoth TBTF financial system

Their presence has started to give a voice to millions of people who feel voiceless, unrepresented by lobbyists or media or even their elected officials. The movement has had an impact important to a democratic society --- spurring discussion and attention on important issues that were getting ignored by the media and distorted by politicians because they're too damn complicated. And it's no doubt caused many people to do their own research and reading into the background of what the demonstrators are saying and that's a good thing."

Change "OWS" to "Tea Party" in your first sentence, and "financial system" to "government" and you could be talking about the Tea Party protests. I know that you try to be rational and unbiased, jazzy, but I suspect that you may end up focusing on the few racists in the Tea Party and consider most of the other protesters to be "astroturf," do you not?

It is the same overwhelming bias that we all have. We see everything through a political bias, and end up seeing only what we want or expect. You focus on the ones that you think have the right message, not paying attention to the rest.

Do you remember who blocked the first passage of the TBTF bank bailout? It was the house Republicans, and the only way Bush ended up getting it passed was through the strong support of Obama and the Democrats.

re: GE

Maybe its better to have the Camel in the tent than outside?

BTW, would anyone want to fly a plane with an engine made in China? Technology transfer and trade works . Its too bad that the profits for jet engine manufacture, will stay in China, because GE does't want to pay US taxes. ? 

-- Edited by longprime on Sunday 16th of October 2011 04:27:04 PM

  Here's the problem with just focusing on "kiddos" and "obnoxious college students" in the crowds of demonstrators and the "cool kids" theory of what drives the OWS protests:   it's only half true. 

The people who can devote themselves to sleeping on the ground day after day are going to be young and scruffy and some of them are going to be naively idealistic and some are going to be radical even.   But the OWS nationwide is not confined to just these types.   Ordinary Americans are showing up, elderly, middle-aged, young couples with their babies in strollers, to join marches (at least on weekends or days off) to make their presence known too. There is deep dissatisfaction with our gridlocked political system and our behemoth TBTF financial system. 

I disagree that the demonstrators are not out there doing good.

  Their presence has started to give a voice to millions of people who feel voiceless, unrepresented by lobbyists or media or even their elected officials.    The movement has had an impact important to a democratic society --- spurring discussion and  attention on important issues that were getting ignored by the media and distorted by politicians because they're too damn complicated.  And it's no doubt caused many people to do their own research and reading into the background of what the demonstrators are saying and that's a good thing.

From a blog I read while looking up something else:

....what they created was a question in the minds of those who ordinarily shun politics, which is most of America.  Who are these protestors? Where did they come from? What do they want? What’s the message, dammit, what’s the message? We want to know!

People began to try to solve the mystery of the message for themselves. What is it about Wall Street, they asked themselves? What do bankers and bond salesmen have to do with all this? These are the very questions the real powerbrokers desperately do not want people asking.  (How else to explain Dancing with the Stars?)

It also created an opening for powerful progressive voices to step up and provide answers of their own. Elizabeth Warren, in her inimitable way, explains the social contract – not exactly the stuff of entertainment weekly – and the video goes viral. Alan Grayson sums up Wall Street’s sins, over the pale ridicule of conservative court jester P.J. O’Rourke on Bill Maher, and gets a standing ovation.

The upshot?  People have connected the wanton rapaciousness of Wall Street to the problems in their own lives.  They are beginning to ask why there have been no prosecutions after the biggest economic disaster in nearly a century.  They start to question why there’s been no laws to keep it from happening again.  They begin to seriously contemplate why nothing that helps average people can get through congress, why the president provides speeches but no action.

....The spin doctors are doing what they can to adjust, of course.  The right’s media memes now center around the purported poor hygiene and supposed silly clownishness of the protestors, a whisper campaign that hints at dark, secret forces behind the protests, and, hysterically, invoking the spectre of the rise of socialism.

All that has to happen to overturn the idea that the protests are wrong because the protestors are just weird freaks, is for average Americans to show up, even for a day, and show support.  That’s already happening.

 

 

-- Edited by jazzy on Sunday 16th of October 2011 12:01:42 PM

^^BD- On This Week this morning, Colin Moynihan a NYT columnist who has been covering OWS, stated that these folks have no plans to leave and are making arrangements to stay through the winter, into spring . Seriously? Seriously? Gosh do they ever need to get lives.... They are doing nothing to improve humanity squatting in a park. Very hypocritical IMO. Imagine if they harnessed that energy and worked tutoring struggling kids, feeding the homeless, visiting the elderly, etc......but echoing you and SLS, it's about the party.

The bigwigs who took down Wall Street and helped create this crisis aren't the ones that these misguided people are protesting. 

Oh, yes they are.   When they talk about "Wall Street greed" that's exactly what they're talking about, even though, like most people they can't explain it very well.   It only happened less than four years ago.  It's too recent for the financial industry's apologists to rewrite that history in a way that's believable.

I can't speak for the people in the actual Occupy groups, but the majority I would say don't want corporations to go away, they want them to be accountable and responsible and, if it's not asking too much, not take the largesse of tax breaks from the U.S. government while they shut down jobs here and create jobs overseas.  That some American companies with global operations don't pay their fair share of taxes ought to anger everyone ---- who else is paying for the global security force they get from the U.S. military?   The rest of us, the taxpayers.

Is executive compensation out of whack compared to the average wage earner?  You know it is.   It's one of the issues that creates the anger that spurs Occupy activities not only in NYC but elsewhere around the country. 

There might be some disconnect between the demonstrators anger at corporations that manufacture overseas and their obvious lack of boycott of Apple products or anger at Jobs.   But has Apple taken tax breaks?  Has it manipulated the tax code to pay zero in federal taxes?   Has it flooded K street with cash to create an unregulated free for all for themselves as the banking industry has?

When Apple products failed in the marketplace, did they accept the consquences and regroup without a government bailout?    We didn't see Apple and its fellow tech competitors joined together in an interconnected hydra of TBTF coming to the government and demanding a bailout with taxpayer dollars or they'd crash the economy.

There's a perfectly legitimate reason why the Occupy movement centered on Wall Street.

Interesting article:

http://www.city-journal.org/2011/eon1007ng.html

-- Edited by jazzy on Saturday 15th of October 2011 11:03:29 PM

Busdriver:

 Krauthammer is admirable in his achievements, but not in his current work imo.

 A columnist of his stature should address the truth behind the frustration that put OWS in the streets --- Big Money interests that have too much power in our political system regardless of whether Democrats or Republicans are in office.   And the TBTF institutions that pose a danger to our future financial well being, yet remain unchecked.

No mention of that truth appears in Krauthammer's one-sided screed on the OWS crowds.   I get that he's a columnist for the right and one-sided is what columnists often do, but whereas there was a time when his writing had actual reporting and real critical thinking applied to an issue --- this recent column is the phone-it-in claptrap of a partisan shill.  

  With his platform and credibility among conservatives, Krauthammer has the power to prod Congress into enacting regulations with teeth and to remind the Tea Party Republicans who are eager to repeal even modest financial system reforms that populists look out for average Americans, not the Bigs.   He doesn't do that, which indicates whose side he's on.

As we all know, if you don't learn from history, you're doomed to repeat it.    Without checks, TBTF will happen again and if they're not bailed out, the livelihoods, savings, small businesses, and economic future of millions of not-too-big-to-fail Americans will be blighted.  The politicians and pundits that sit back and allow that possibility to occur get no respect from me.

Charles Krauthammer is a very admirable man. That is, if you happen to know anything at all about him, and don't despise him because he holds a conservative viewpoint.

Excellent interviewee.  Really.

There's some wisdom in that (long) post, winchester!

And I bet this bunch has never felt better about themselves.

-- Edited by hope on Friday 14th of October 2011 07:29:41 PM

-- Edited by hope on Friday 14th of October 2011 07:30:15 PM

Given the chances of any politician doing any jail time over their part in the the foundations of the housing bubble, it's kind of a pointless question, jazzy

They should, though. No matter how many times they push bs economics as social justice, they never seem to learn, do they?

When the rules they make are finally fully understood by those with the capital, they swell up like a yeast loaf looking for a way to make a buck - whether it's loaning money because some politicians can buy a voting bloc or selling scooters under Medicaid, they always fill all the available space.

The administration needs a villain to stand in for it's three years of kumbaya Carterism, green jobs bust, and entitlement pushing so they've elected the rich to step up.

Bon appetit.

-- Edited by catahoula on Friday 14th of October 2011 06:53:07 PM

You say it's government and that its the government asserting the control that oppresses the common American. You know, in 1776, that may have been true. It is not what's true now.

It is most definitely true now. To suggest otherwise is to deny reality.

The Obama/Pelosi/Reid triumvirate, and their minions who rammed through Obamacare, and EVERYONE, on BOTH SIDES of the aisle, who think it is the rightful role of government flatten the bell curve of human capabilities by "spreading the wealth around" through bailouts and entitlements are its epitome. To ignore or deny this is to ignore or deny the single greatest cause of the problem. Rick Sentelli’s Tea Party rant was not JUST about financial things, it was about the much larger notion of promoting bad behavior. In the name of “the little guy” liberalism does exactly that.

But with that said, I think I see some common ground between us in your post: The enemy of liberty is power. The protection of liberty requires that power, in all its forms, be made to check and balance itself. And insofar as there weren't enough checks and balances in the financial industry I'd agree with the overall gist of your point.

But....

The notion that it was only, or even mostly, "Wall Street Greed," or "The Rich," or "The One Percent" that caused the problems is just silly. It is short sighted, small minded thinking that sees only the part of the story that it wants to see, and is in denial of the reality of the situation. Sadly, this sort of thinking is much more characteristic of the left - and of the so-called Ninety-Nine percent - than it is of the right. OWS is just its most recent manifestation.

The mind of the left sees anything and everything as an overly simplistic, black and white, us vs. them, "battle" between "the rich" and "the little guy." Anything and everything bad that happens is laid at the doorstep of "the rich," or if not "the rich," then "racist," or some other sort of dysfunction wholly attributable to conservatives, and conservatives only. It’s all a euphemism for the same thing: “Not one of us.” Every single argument that ever comes out of liberalism boils down to exactly that. Any chance that the left could possibly be complicit in its own hardship is simply not within its universe of possible explanations of, or solutions for, that hardship.

Greed is not a “rich” think or a “poor” thing or a conservative thing or a liberal thing. It is a human thing, common in equal amounts in every walk of life at every level of society. To point the finger only at Wall Street, and not also at the politicians who set up the system that Wall Street works within, and also at all of those people who took out the loans that they never had any right to take out, is to put blinders on and refuse to see the reality of the situation; it is to commit the simple-minded class warfare of the left. The Wall streeters want to make money, sure, and they'll use the system to do it. But the politicians want to buy votes, and THEY use the POLITICAL system to do that. And one of the biggest vote-buying schemes, since "The New Deal" and "The Great Society," was the easing of the mortgage rules by cronies on the left so "the little guy" could "participate in the American Dream."

The people who applied for and got all those loans were every bit as greedy and "working the system" as the vote-buying politicians who set up the system and the Wall streeters and banks who made the loans. If all of those mortgages that all those people had no business applying for had worked out the way they had hoped and those people had made a killing you can bet your own mortgage that all of those people would be bragging and preening about how smart they are and how great a job they did of playing the system. But since things did not turn out as they had hoped those people conveniently forget, or chose to ignore, or are ignorant of, their own greed and complicity in the fiasco and they revert to the same tired old “eat the rich” blah-blah-blah that has existed on the left since its inception in the French Revolution. They blame everyone else for the exact same kind of "playing the system" that they themselves did. But alas, this blindness, or ignorance, or conscious decision to ignore the side of the coin the left itself inhabits is the stock in trade of the mentality of mentality of class warfare that is the signature position of liberalism and the OWSers.

It is just as short sighted and small minded to use 20/20 hindsight to pin the tail on the donkey of "The One Percent" as the OWSers specifically and liberalism habitually does. But this too, sadly, is characteristic of the class warfare mentality and thought processes of the left. It loves to do forensics after the fact, with the luxury of all the time it needs, and analyze every scrap of evidence it can find and expose every uncrossed "T" and undotted "i" and point to it as if it is some sort of smoking gun, all without the pressure of having to make a decision RIGHT NOW with incomplete information and without a crystal ball, or possibly fail, and then shout "What were you thinking?! How could you?!" It is a specious, disingenuous manufacturing of a one-sided story solely for the purpose of promoting the cause of class warfare. It completely ignores, as Paul Harvey used to say, "The Rest of the Story," and specifically, the left’s own complicity in the tragedy.


-- Edited by winchester on Friday 14th of October 2011 08:08:34 PM

There are probably a great many things that could be graphed to make just about as many arguments about why we're in the sorry shape we're in, jazzy but since the housing bust is front in center, maybe Enric Jardi should have graphed median home prices.

http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2008/12/classic-case-shiller-hosuing-price-chart-updated/

Remarkably similar to your picture, isn't it? Not surpising, though... at least to someone who's making the claim that evil bankers seduced unsuitable borrowers into houses they could only pay for if values kept going up and up and up, while the bankers got richer and richer. 

Where does the push by a political party for increased lending to those unsuitable borrowers fit into that storyline?

-- Edited by catahoula on Friday 14th of October 2011 04:00:22 PM

The OWS mantra:

"Down with corporations!"

"We want jobs!"



-- Edited by winchester on Friday 14th of October 2011 02:21:42 PM

Neither political parties hands are clean on this matter.  

It sounds like an interesting book.  

I like Charles Krauthammer more than most pundits.  

The media have done a lousy job informing people of what happened leading up to the meltdown in 2008 --- it's just too complicated to explain. 

This book by an MIT professor, 13 Bankers, at least tries.   Lays out how there's blame for both political parties in deregulating and enabling banks to grow into mega-institutions that became TBTF --- a financial oligarchy is not putting it too strongly.

A review excerpt:

 

As Simon Johnson and James Kwak recount in “13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown,” the struggle to keep bankers in check goes back to Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, with results that have usually been mixed. Given the leeway to undermine the economy, bankers and financiers have done just that.

To put it bluntly, as this book does: the efficient-market hypothesis does not work. It never has. Markets are not self-­correcting. Left to their own devices, bankers at the biggest institutions can’t seem to stop themselves from speculating with borrowed money until they inevitably crash the system.

Johnson, a professor of entrepreneurship at M.I.T.’s Sloan School of Management, and Kwak, a former consultant for ­McKinsey & Company, tell this story in matter-of-fact prose. Even their discussion of derivatives is accessible to ordinary readers (most of the time). Their conclusion: during only one period over the past two centuries was government regulation sufficiently restrictive to rein in Wall Street and the bankers. “The result,” they say, “was the safest banking system that America has known in its history.” Johnson and Kwak are referring to the 50 years from the 1930s through the 1970s.

Ronald Reagan, of course, brought us back to the efficient-market hypothesis with its faith in laissez-faire — a faith embraced, to one degree or another, by all of Reagan’s successors as well. Who needs government oversight when markets correct themselves, they agreed, and so they stood by as regulations disappeared or were canceled. Even the Obama administration, seeking to revive regulation, has not easily shaken off the old faith in markets — and “13 Bankers” needles the president’s team on this point.

For example, the authors skewer Lawrence H. Summers, the director of the National Economic Council, and thus Obama’s chief economist. In 1998, while he was deputy secretary in the Clinton Treasury, he opposed the efforts of Brooksley Born, then running the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, to regulate derivatives. Her efforts “provoked furious opposition, not only from Wall Street but also from the economic heavyweights of the federal government,” Johnson and Kwak write.

Drawing on previously published accounts (this book’s great virtue is its skillful synthesis of what is already on the record), Johnson and Kwak describe a phone call from Summers to Born that gives the book its title. “I have 13 bankers in my office,” he declared, “and they say if you go forward with this you will cause the worst financial crisis since World War II.”

No wonder derivatives remained unregulated. And in the end, they played a huge role in producing what was in fact “the worst financial crisis since World War II.”

Summers was dead wrong.

Oh I so hope that if they do start eating the rich, they start with Krauthammer. Someone must like "sour Kraut" in the group.

absolutely, cat.

BC's administration, underpressure to balance the budget, modernization, the R's, and belief that corporations and people were grownup enough to self-regulate, DEREGULATED. 

THEY were wrong. It took an additional 10 years to discover how wrong they were. So if you believe they were wrong, what should we do about it?

To believe that, lp, you have to believe Dodd and Frank had nothing to do with the sub-prime bubble.

Okay, this is funny.

The rest of the 53percent video/website is kind of pathetic, since people seem so unaware that the economy didn't have to suck this bad and that yeah, they really can go ahead and blame Wall Street...but this is cute.

http://the53.tumblr.com/post/11239186792/some-dogs-have-good-manners-so-do-their-owners  

common people fought to wrest top-down control away from the monarchies, the aristocracies, and the oligarchies.

In other words, both Tea Parties.

the presupposition behind "the stimulus worked" argument is that "top-down control" is the true and proper role of government.

It's not.

and yet, it's exactly what liberalism/progressivism seeks, as evidenced by everything Obama and the Democrats - The New Monarchy/Aristocracy/Oligarchy stands for.

And what the OWSera want is more of it. On behelf of "the little guy" Liberalism/Progressivism becomes everything it despises.

-- Edited by winchester on Thursday 13th of October 2011 07:14:04 PM

Winchester:

Nations were founded on the principles of monarchy too.   They changed.   Throughout history, common people fought to wrest top-down control away from the monarchies, the aristocracies, and the oligarchies.    Get over it already. 

 

Here, thought you'd enjoy the sentiment expressed:    

-- Edited by jazzy on Thursday 13th of October 2011 04:21:18 PM

I feel for you in NYC, zmom. The most emotion I can summon up out here is sadness. I think they are pathetic.