What’s going on here? The answer, surely, is that Wall Street’s Masters of the Universe realize, deep down, how morally indefensible their position is. They’re not John Galt; they’re not even Steve Jobs. They’re people who got rich by peddling complex financial schemes that, far from delivering clear benefits to the American people, helped push us into a crisis whose aftereffects continue to blight the lives of tens of millions of their fellow citizens.
Yet they have paid no price. Their institutions were bailed out by taxpayers, with few strings attached. They continue to benefit from explicit and implicit federal guarantees — basically, they’re still in a game of heads they win, tails taxpayers lose. And they benefit from tax loopholes that in many cases have people with multimillion-dollar incomes paying lower rates than middle-class families.
This special treatment can’t bear close scrutiny — and therefore, as they see it, there must be no close scrutiny. Anyone who points out the obvious, no matter how calmly and moderately, must be demonized and driven from the stage. In fact, the more reasonable and moderate a critic sounds, the more urgently he or she must be demonized, hence the frantic sliming of Elizabeth Warren.
So who’s really being un-American here? Not the protesters, who are simply trying to get their voices heard. No, the real extremists here are America’s oligarchs, who want to suppress any criticism of the sources of their wealth.
I see the police are providing an education by beating protestors, destroying their medical gear, sending riot cops in to stop “serving food without a permit” and throwing protestors camping gear in garbage trucks.
Yes, this is an education. They are teaching them that the police and elites are their enemies.
I’ve rarely been as upset with bankers as I have been recently.
When I heard some banks were planning to charge fees for debit cards and require higher minimum balances on checking accounts, it seemed outrageous.
After all, didn’t the banking industry receive something like $700 billion dollars in taxpayer money in a bailout just a few years ago?
And now they want to charge me for using my debit card at Starbucks?
No wonder masses of people have been protesting against corporate greed on Wall Street in New York City.
The last time my bank — New York Community Bank nee Ohio Savings Bank — charged me an annual fee sometime back in the ’90s, it was $15 per year. Now the bank wants to charge me $5 per month per account or, in my case, $10 per month or $120 per year, a feckin’ 700 percent increase.
Yes, I could change banks, but there’s no guarantee that the next bank won’t adopt the policy as well and then there’s the hassle of reconfiguring automatic deposits and payments in the new account. The $5 fee could be the straw that breaks the loyal conservatives back.
[T]he real reason we regulate, or should regulate, is to protect ourselves from the consequences of excessive competition with one another.
The essence of the problem is nicely captured in a celebrated example devised by Thomas Schelling. Schelling noted that hockey players who are free to choose for themselves invariably skate without helmets; yet when they’re permitted to vote on the matter, they support rules that require them. If helmets are so great, he wondered, why don’t players just wear them? Why do they need a rule?
His answer began with the observation that skating without a helmet confers a small competitive edge—perhaps by enabling players to see or hear a little better, or perhaps by enabling them to intimidate their opponents. The immediate lure of gaining that edge trumps more remote concerns about the possibility of injury, so players eagerly embrace the additional risk. The rub, of course, is that when every player skates without a helmet, no one gains a competitive advantage—hence the attraction of the rule.
As Schelling’s diagnosis makes clear, the problem confronting hockey players has nothing to do with imperfect information, lack of self-control or poor cognitive skills—shortcomings that are often cited as grounds for government intervention.7 And it clearly doesn’t stem from exploitation or any insufficiency of competition. Rather, it’s a garden-variety collective action problem. Players favor helmet rules because that’s the only way they’re able to play under reasonably safe conditions. A simple nudge—say, a sign in the locker room reminding players that helmets reduce the risk of serious injury—won’t solve their problem. They need a mandate.
For Occupy to be successful, on its own terms, will require shutting down Wall Street and probably all of NYC. There must be so many people on the street that it is impossible to arrest them all or to get rid of them without resorting to a lot more than a whiff of grapeshot. The elites must be be faced with a decision tree “negotiate or lose a ton of money and be massively inconvenienced or shoot hundreds of thousands of people and build mass detention camps.” That will require two or three million people occupying New York City.
Remember, modern elites are trained to think in terms of cost-benefit analyses. If the cost to them of not giving in is less than the cost of not giving in, they won’t give in. It took trillions of dollars to bail out Wall Street. They take home billions of dollars in personal bonuses. You must cost them, personally, more than that, for them to want to give in.
That is not to say, of course, that we’re not getting there.
Local residents are weighing in on the national debate over banks charging debit card usage fees, with Williamstown resident Dan Reid summing up his feelings in one word.
“Ridiculous,” Reid, 41, said about the recent announcement that Bank of America will start charging customers a $5 monthly fee early next year if they use their debit cards to make purchases.
“It makes me angry,” he said. “They keep piling stuff onto poor people and the government [the Republican Party, JH] approved it.”
Reid added that if his bank ever put such a policy in place, he’d either switch banks or stop using a debit card altogether.
The real writer is one who really writes. Talent is an invention like phlogiston after the fact of fire. Work is its own cure. You have to like it better than being loved. —Marge Piercy, For the young who want to in The Moon Is Always Female
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At day’s first light, have in readiness, against disinclination to leave your bed, the thought that “I am rising for the work of man.” Must I grumble at setting out to do what I was born for and for the sake of which I have been brought into the world? Is this the purpose of my creation, to lie here under my blankets and keep myself warm? “Ah, but it is a great deal more pleasant!” Was it for pleasure, then, that you were born and not for work? —Marcus Aurelius
Let me respectfully remind you, life and death are of supreme importance. Time swiftly passes by and opportunity is lost. Each of us should strive to awaken-- Awaken! This night your days will be diminished by one. Take heed. Do not squander your life. —Zen Evening Gatha
Take an ax to the prison wall. Escape. Walk out like someone suddenly born into color. Do it now. —Rumi, Quietness
