Economists for Occupy Wall Street

A short video from economists who understand what #OWS is, and why it is protesting this country's unsustainable, rigged system.

Occupy Economics from Softbox on Vimeo.


From econ4.org.

How They Really Feel

This man's comments speaks volumes on the attitudes of the wealthy. His disdain for those with less money is palpable. He clearly is equating people's value with the size of their portfolio. Rich people are better.



And it is not just an arrogant attitude; he is also egregiously wrong,his intellectual honesty clearly compromised by his ideology. Notice that he claims to be subsidizing the 99% because he is making big bucks. It is especially ridiculous in light of the massive amounts of money our government has directed at the 1%, and especially the 0.1%, who operate under a self-serving delusion that everything they have is because of skill and hard work. Overlooked by this dickhead are the endless flows of government contracts and concessions to big Pharma, defense contractors and the like. Overlooked are the multi-million dollar giveaways by state and municipal governments as they compete to entice corporations to locate in their areas.

Richie Rich also ignores huge sums given to banks as part of their bailout, money bank executives then used to pay outsized bonuses. And just this week we read that those banks earned roughly $13 billion in interest directly the result of the sweetheart deal they received for tanking the US economy. Here is the gist of it, as related by AllGov:

Thanks to the Federal Reserve’s generous lending during the 2007-2009 financial crisis, banks that were teetering and at risk of collapsing wound up making billions of dollars in profits, according to Bloomberg Markets magazine.

After combing through 29,000 pages of Fed documents released to Bloomberg by court order, the publication determined that banks earned about $13 billion in income by taking advantage of the Fed’s below-market rates. These loans were made without informing the public or Congress of which institutions were borrowing heavily to stave off disaster.

Finally, have a look at the chart below. The corporations in these sectors are generally run by individuals who espouse rugged individualism, a can-do attitude, and the glories of a free market. They also almost always bitch about high taxes and government regulation. As you can see, they rarely pay their share of taxes, but they sure know how to pull in those tax subsidies- nearly $223 billion from 2008-2010.

Source: Citizens for Tax Justice

That's some serious corporate welfare. And from their government-subsidized profits, they pay outsized compensation to people like the guy in the video. If corporate boards claim that their executives deserve their often huge compensation, then those corporations don't need and don't deserve government support.  If you cannot live without taxpayers like me subsidizing your bottom line, then your insistence on fat bonuses is even more morally obscene than it already is.

Or is this a problem only when the recipients are the 99%?

The implicit message: It's just good business, complete with tax write-offs, when rich guys are in on it, and it's socialism only when the poor receive it.

We Are The Many

Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation, or APEC, is in town. Security is tight and Waikiki is cordoned off.  Among the festivities was a performance by Makana, a popular local musician, for the numerous leaders from Asia, including China and Japan, along with the US. President Obama was there. You can read more about how the APEC forum turned out here.

As our local newspaper explains, Makana gave an unexpected and gutsy performance in which he sang his new song, We Are the Many, while he shows off an Occupy with Aloha shirt. The video below shows him singing. You will see why it was bold. In my view it was also highly appropriate.

Was anyone offended? Tough shit. If any world leader was offended, it serves to demonstrate why Occupy Wall Street is necessary in the first place.

The second video is a better-quality, professionally recorded version of the same song. Good job, Makana.

More on How People Are Fighting Back

Here is more on how people are fighting back against an unsustainable and deeply damaging banking system; not the one most of us grew up with, to be sure, but the one it has become. It was a good weekend, what with my beloved mother's birthday, Guy Fawkes Day (for which the BBC dutifully broadcast V for Vendetta), all in addition to #OWS efforts to encourage the 99% to move their money. 

Growing anecdotal information suggests that quite a few of us pulled accounts from the likes of Bank of America, Chase, and Wells Fargo, and took their business to credit unions and community banks. 

The Credit Union Times reported 40,000+ new accounts on Saturday. Other branches around the country reported hundreds to thousands of new accounts.

For their part, mega-banks say they are pleased with the action, because it is cleaning out the small accounts, the ones with high margins and low profitability. A Motley Fool apologist admits to much, but still defends Wall Street banks:

What’s important is realizing there are injustices with bailouts, cronyism and money in politics. People should really be upset about them. But they should realize at the same time that the economic system we have in the United States, compared to the rest of the globe, has created more wealth for everybody than almost any other country on Earth.

Bullshit, the banking system we had until a few years ago did indeed, play a crucial role in America's development, but not the one we currently have. Apparently it is too much trouble for him to show even the dimmest awareness of the massive changes that have taken place.

America's small regional banks are (mostly) not the problem. It is the global banking giants that are undermining the middle class. Read some details on this from a British banking perspective at George Monbiot's excellent column called The 1% are the very best destroyers of wealth the world has ever seen. 

Reinstate Glass-Steagall

Why Cain Connects With Republicans

This is another reason why #OWS is fighting back: The country's socio-economic standing in the world continues to deteriorate. One measure of that can be seen in a widely disseminated story that America's poorest of the poor now represent 1 in 15 citizens, those who's income is 50% or less than the official poverty level. 

Let that sink in a bit. That is about 21 million people. They are not just unemployed, or down on the luck, or facing lean times, or whatever other cliche' gets bandied about. These are America's very poorest, and the number--and proportion-- are now higher than ever. As the original AP article states:

The ranks of America's poorest poor have climbed to a record high — 1 in 15 people — spread widely across metropolitan areas as the housing bust pushed many inner-city poor into suburbs and other outlying places and shriveled jobs and income 

New census data paint a stark portrait of the nation's haves and have-nots at a time when unemployment remains persistently high. It comes a week before the government releases first-ever economic data that will show more Hispanics, elderly and working-age poor have fallen into poverty. 

In all, the numbers underscore the breadth and scope by which the downturn has reached further into mainstream America.

And yet, some presidential candidates seem to think there is no connection between unemployment and the high crimes on Wall Street, Herman Cain for one. Cain, whom I view as the intellectual equivalent of a freak show at a second-rate carnival, argues instead that significant tax cuts for America's wealthiest are what is needed. This is at the core of his asinine 9-9-9 plan. Never mind that we have been cutting taxes on the wealthy for a generation; they are apparently not rich enough. Another round of tax cuts on the top 1% will somehow induce them to create jobs.

In effect, Herman Cain is telling us that there really is no banking problem in this country. Those mobs at #OWS are just lazy and disaffected; they just want to blame others for their own problems. You just aren't working hard enough, that's all.

Holy freakin' shit. Cain, you cannot be serious. Are you saying the big banks have not created a crisis? Not only is this a miserable misreading of America's deep economic difficulties, you want us to think that simply getting a job, never mind their scarcity, somehow fixes an entrenched banking issue, just makes it all go away. Or maybe we just need to keep working because the banks have not really created a crisis anyway, so don't worry about it. Is that it?

Herman Cain's position on complex politico-economic issues is what we so often find in conservative ideologues; it comes down to simplistic moralizing about what he considers to be other people's personal shortcomings, their defective characters, their basic immorality. His economic policies make no sense, and his bravado intertwined with appalling ignorance may be galling for some of us, but that is beside the point for most Republican primary voters. Cain is demonstrating a punitive, stern, father figure sense of morality. And that is what most Republicans instinctively look for in their candidates.

Gallows Humor

In solidarity with Occupy Wall Street, I share with you a few timely and appropriate funnies. They would be funnier if they were not so true.

This last one is my favorite. I recall the John Maynard Keynes quote: "Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men for the nastiest of motives will somehow work for the benefit of all."

Our Corrupt and Fraudulent Economy

Here's Dylan Ratigan from a while back, just in case you missed it the first time. Ratigan's anger is what Occupy Wall Street is all about.

I share that anger and disgust. The only thing unusual about his critique is that it aired on mainstream television.


Hat tip to Angel Guerrero for refreshing my memory.

Why Occupy Wall Street is Angry

This country once had a stable financial system. It was the direct result of the New Deal. The crash of '29 had been created by greed, lax rules, and government institutions unequipped and ideologically unprepared to tame capitalism's most rapacious players.

Enter FDR and the New Deal. With it Americans enjoyed roughly 50 years of prosperity and a largely stable banking system. The good 'ol days, as conservatives seem to pine. And there was good reason why we look fondly at what seems to have been our economic heyday. What conservatives forget is that we had far less income inequality, higher taxes, greater union membership, lower consumer, state and federal debt. We had a trade surplus, a much larger manufacturing base, and little outsourcing. And we did not have job-killing free trade agreements, such as NAFTA!

Underlying all of this was a rigid set of banking rules that, among other things, kept commercial banks out of the stock market and enforced prudent capitalization requirements. Upon assuming office, President Reagan immediately worked to overturn regulations and help Wall Street's rise to dominance, a rise that continues today despite Obama's half-hearted and ineffectual efforts to reprioritize Main Street.

Banks quickly capitalized on the changes Reagan set in motion; systemic banking failure began within a few years. Those failures have been with us in regular intervals ever since, all the while wealth continues to concentrate in the hands of those who created the economic chaos in the first place.

Here is Elizabeth Warren explaining the process.

Occupy Wall Street's Message

Leave town for a week and look what happens. Our corporatist media is finally paying some attention to Occupy Wall Street. Not that it is offering many insights. The prevailing characteristics seem to be that protesters are malevolent malcontents, dirty fucking hippies, and anarchists, all in a stew of disorganized resentment. In particular, the claim is that the OWS protesters do not have a coherent message.

No coherent message? Really? Anyone who cannot immediately grasp the significance of the protest is likely to be uninformed teabaggers, fearful of all that they don't understand, or class warriors, like the Republican presidential candidates, Romney and Cain in particular.

How obtuse, or ideologically rigid, do you have to be to not see that America's wealthy corporatist media is determined to delegitimize citizens who have decided to fight back against Wall Street's recklessness?

Here is Alan Grayson taking the small amount of time needed to explain to dickhead PJ O'Rourke what the Occupy Wall Street protests are all about.

The privileged class is letting its fear show. Nice to see we got their attention.