Monday, November 21, 2011
"Yes, It is Wall Street Fault"--It's clear that there is a vast rift in this country between the Tea Party crowd and the Occupy Wall Street movement. It would be great if these groups could get together on some major issues, but don't count on it. To the Tea Party crowd, one of whose leaders I heard on the radio today, saying, as I have heard at least a dozen times in the last couple weeks, this mantra: "Those Occupy people are all wrong. They should be mad at the government in Washington. The politicians caused all this"-------To which I can only add, "Huh"? Even those like Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire mayor of New York City, can't come clean. Said the mayor to protesters in his city : _________“I hear your complaints,” Bloomberg said. “Some of them are totally unfounded. It was not the banks that created the mortgage crisis. It was plain and simple, Congress who forced everybody to go and give mortgages to people who were on the cusp … [T]hey were the ones who pushed Fannie and Freddie to make a bunch of loans that were imprudent, if you will … And now we want to go vilify the banks because it’s one target, it’s easy to blame them and Congress certainly isn’t going to blame themselves.”_______________ As long as the "big lie" of unbridled federal government "interference in the economy" continues to divide the hoi polloi, his interests, and those of others among the Top One Percenters, will be safe. The fact is such opinions about the benign financial macroeconomy--whether the result of ignorance or mendacity-- are totally counterfactual, as this column by Gene Lyons in salon makes clear. Not that the government officials in the Executive or Legislative branches of the US government are not to blame. They are. But the blame comes from a sin of omission for the most part, not commission. Deregulation killed the golden goose that kept most American recessions from becoming so ingrained and lasting. The friends of Wall Street in the Clinton and Bush and Obama administrations deregulated the banks, then bailed them out when they went into the ditch. They had too. "Too big to fail" you know. Even the far Right's favorite "bete noire's", the public private mortgage holders FannieMae and Freddic Mac were late to the vast housing market bubble. http://www.salon.com/2011/11/10/yes_it_is_wall_streets_fault/singleton/
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The Teabaggers aren't going to agree on anything unless it meets the criteria of the mantra they've been chanting for several years now: (1) 'Government' is to blame for everything; (2) We need to dismantle 'Government'; (3) Obama is the main source of all of our ills, and (4) Obama has to go.
ReplyDeleteThe 'Occupy' movement doesn't agree with any of this, and rightly so. I don't, either.
As the author of your quote says, it's not that government is blameless - but reducing the size of government so (in Norquist's terms) we can 'drown it in a bathtub' isn't the solution.
Well I will say the 1% (Wall Street) is certainly shaken or at least their supporters are. They have now devised
ReplyDeletean organized effort to silence the 99% using brute force. To me that is a certain indication of guilt
Yes! You don't give the Highway Patrol the night off on New Year's Eve, Will. Somebody has to watch big business so the citizens can watch the government(s).
ReplyDeleteIt's not likely to get very pretty any time soon, Mike, that's for sure.
ReplyDeleteWell pretty soon we will see those giant pepper spray containers in each cops hands as they spray all of the 99%...
ReplyDeleteI agree with you guys...its gonna get ugly out there soon enough. No rest for the weary in this country. If you dont have the bucks you dont have a voice.
Yeah, Marty, it was sickening what happened down at UC/Davis. People in charge need to answer for that before some coppers bust out cans of napalm.
ReplyDeleteYes, people who have money don't sit on a sidewalk to protest--they give donations to political action committees which have guys and ladies in sharp suits and briefcases go to Washington and do their "protesting" for them. We need better answers.
It seems to me to be a false dichotomy that lays the blame at the door of either Wall Street or Congress as if in a corporatocracy these institutions were somehow separate.
ReplyDeleteWithout agreeing with the Tea Party who are in my opinion absurdly simplistic and misinformed I can also blame the Obama regime which to all intents and purposes is no different to the last regime or to the next one.
Like all the dodgy regimes it props up around the world (including the one I live in) America is a failed state, a failed Enlightenment experiment that has gone long past its 'use by' date.
Obviously the portents were never good, if we attempt to found a society on the basis of genocide no good is likely to come of it and it never has in my opinion.
There is nothing salvageable in the polity or the economy of the United Sates or its satellites, no political solutions within what is on offer, no hope of salvation without revolution and the overthrow of the existing order of gangsterism at home and abroad.
The Occupy movement and the Tea Baggers are symptoms of the same malaise, opposite sides of the same coin,one blaming the criminal bankers the other blaming the criminal presidency.
So far as I can see, de-federalisation (balkanisation if you like) and localism is the only hope for America and the world now.
Unless this happens fairly soon, a combination of the corporate bosses and the political actors in the military industrial complex will destroy the world with their lust for power and their pathological greed.
The sad fact is so far as I see it that the United States has to be deconstructed before it causes any more terminal damage to the global ecology as it slides down the tubes to historical obsolescence.
The state religion -capitalism is very, very sick and now euthanasia is the only realistic remedy.
So here's a novel idea then, America could survive in the form of a union of soviet socialist republics I think, personally I very much doubt there is any other solution to the problem and I suspect that the criminals that run the place know this all too well.
Well put as always, AA.
ReplyDeleteI wish we had a broader sprectrum of political pluralist options in America, AA, but you've hit the nail on the head. The powers that be know there is no viable solution in our FPTP electoral system and the parties are basically offering fear of things getting worse, not really making any changes. Our Constitution was designed by merchants and slave holders and naesent banking interests over 200 years ago.
Some of these political protections for the individual against the government are worth keeping; but we have made little progress against corporate powers in amending that document or in changing the laws. Private powers govern most citizens' lives; this is something that tea partiers can't seem to grasp.
We are a corporatocracy. For the people to be sovereign the preponderence of corporate money must be taken out of incumbent-driven politics, basic and psychological medical care, housing, and job creation in a down economy.
Perhaps England can help show us the way in the future.
I think most of the "tea" has gone.....as far as with what was done Doug with this orchestrated malice.There are more prevalent manners to do this as if you ever looked at what is going on within other arab nations - isn't this kind of the same?
ReplyDeleteWell, not really existing as a country with a government of our own is one thing we are rather good at Doug, but we have had hundreds of years to perfect our non-existence under the watchful eye of the Britiish empire.
ReplyDeleteYou guys had no staying power with regard to that one, tea baggers again of course, but there we are, what goes around comes around as they say so now we are wondering why we pay taxes without representation too :-)
The "West Lothian Question", yes, that is a curious situation. I took for granted a localism for England would have to come about.
ReplyDeleteI suppose so Jack. The center is not holding that's for sure.
ReplyDeleteI suppsoe so Jack. The center is not holding that's for sure.
ReplyDeleteI suppose so Jack. The center is not holding that's for sure.
ReplyDeleteI suppose so Jack. The center is not holding that's for sure.
ReplyDeleteYes indeed Doug
ReplyDeleteDoug there shall be other means I do believe from up here.
ReplyDeleteI hope so Jack.
ReplyDelete