The Wall Street elite seems completely befuddled by the Occupy Wall Street movement. The demonstrators are called "unsophisticated," or misguided, or much worse (mobs, communists, and more). Here's a short note to the titans of Wall Street to help them understand what's happening.
Let me start with the Wall Street Journal, which seems to be the most confused of all. In its Friday edition, the Journal editorial board couldn't understand why the protestors would want to protest JP Morgan and hedge fund manager John Paulson. The Journal also couldn't understand why the protesters were failing to champion something as wonderful as the Keystone Pipeline, which the Journal assures us would create many jobs.
The Journal can be forgiven for this basic confusion. It must be hard work to channel Rupert Murdoch's cynicism, greed, and ideology every day, so here are some answers so that the editorial board doesn't have to knock itself out with fresh research.
The protesters are annoyed with JP Morgan because it, like its fellow institutions on the street, helped to bring the world economy to its knees through unprincipled and illegal actions. The Journal editorial board apparently missed the news carried in the Journal's own business pages that JP Morgan recently paid $153.6 million in fines for violating securities laws in the lead-up to the 2008 financial collapse. JP Morgan, like other Wall Street institutions, connived with hedge funds to peddle toxic assets to unsuspecting investors, allowing the hedge funds to make a killing at the expense of their "mark," and the world economy.
The protestors are not enamored of Mr. Paulson either, since he played this role together with Goldman Sachs. Paulson made a fortune by teaming up with Goldman to bundle failed mortgages, which Goldman then peddled to its customers, in this case some unsuspecting German banks. Paulson shorted these assets and thereby profited as the bank's investments collapsed. For this little maneuver, Goldman paid $560 million to the SEC in fines. Of course this is a small amount compared to the profits that Goldman reaped for years playing in toxic assets. On Wall Street, misbehavior pays, at least up until now.
Mr. Paulson actually made some extraordinary statements in the New York Times on Friday (hard even to believe the nonsensical quotations are correct, but there they are, in the paper of record). He too expressed befuddlement about the protests against his business dealings. Didn't the protestors know that he had created 100 high-paying jobs in NYC? 100?
What the protestors do know is that Mr. Paulson's success in shorting toxic assets bundled for gullible investors has netted him billions. In 2007, he reportedly took home $3.7 billion by betting against the U.S. mortgage market. And the protestors can also do their arithmetic. Paulson's take home pay was enough to cover not just 100 jobs at $50,000 per year but rather approximately 70,000 jobs at $50,000 per year. Nice try, Mr. Paulson, but the people in Liberty Plaza don't think your hedge-fund play is really worth the compensation of 70,000 people. Nor do they understand why hedge fund managers pay a top tax rate of 15% on their hedge-fund earnings.
The Journal, Paulson, and others who accuse the protestors of being "unsophisticated," somehow have forgotten a basic point. It's not just Paulson, or Goldman, or JP Morgan that parlayed their unethical behavior into vast fortunes at the expense of hapless investors. Just name a big name on Wall Street in the past decade, scratch the surface, and uncover a financial scandal. Bank of America, Goldman, JP Morgan, AIG, Merrill Lynch, Countrywide Financial, Lehman Brothers are only the start of the list.
Maybe the Journal forgot to mention this because it itself is enmeshed in a series of scandals, ranging from hacking phones in the U.K. that has created a full-fledged crisis for its parent News Corporation, to last week's resignation of the European publisher. Murdoch is not just running an organization of corporate propaganda, but a criminal enterprise, at least in the U.K.
The protestors are not envious of wealth, but sick of corporate lies, cheating, and unethical behavior. They are sick of corporate lobbying that led to the reckless deregulation of financial markets; they are sick of Wall Street and the Wall Street Journal asking for trillions of dollars of near-zero-interest loans and bailout money for the banks, but then fighting against unemployment insurance and health coverage for those drowning in the wake of the financial crisis; they are sick of absurdly low tax rates for hedge-fund managers; they are sick of Rupert Murdoch and his henchman David Koch trying to peddle the Canada-to-Gulf Keystone oil pipeline as an honest and environmentally sound business deal, when in fact it would unleash one of the world's dirtiest and most destructive energy sources, Canada's oil sands, so that Koch can profit while the world suffers. And they are sick of learning how many Republican politicians - the most recent news is about Herman Cain - are doing the bidding of the Koch brothers.
Here, then, Wall Street and Big Oil, is what it comes down to. The protesters are no longer giving you a free ride, in which you can set the regulations, set your mega-pay, hide your money in tax havens, enjoy sweet tax rates at the hands of ever-willing politicians, and await your bailouts as needed. The days of lawlessness and greed are coming to an end. Just as the Gilded Age turned into the Progressive Era, just as the Roaring Twenties and its excesses turned into the New Deal, be sure that the era of mega-greed is going to turn into an era of renewed accountability, lawfulness, modest compensation, honest taxation, and government by the people rather than by the banks.
That, in short, is why Wall Street is filled with protesters and why you should wake up, respect the law rather than try to write it, and pay your taxes to a government that is ruled by people rather than by corporate power.
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1.You cannot legislate the poor into prosperity by legislating the the wealthy out of properity.
2. What one person recieves without working for, another person must work for without recieving.
3. The government cannot give to anyone anything that the government does not first take from someone else.
4.You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it.
5. When half of the people get the idea that they don't have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody is going to get what they worked for, that is the beginning of the end of a nation.
Except of course that never happened.
http://www.forbes.com/2008/07/18/fannie-freddie-regulation-oped-cx_yb_0718brook.html
They're simply trying the "Who? Me?" defense.
The WSJ stokes our fears to keep us under the Boys' Club control. They spread lies because they understand that few of us have time to sift through all the news releases to discover the facts.
They want us to remain trapped by the oligarchs.
As the gap became greater the have's move to gated, guarded communities further isolating them from the not's. Contrary to the myth perpetrated by the have's few of them have ever "walked a mile in the shoes of a have-not and those that have quickly forget what it was like when life was a struggle and happily immerse themselves in the illusion that somehow the not's are not's because they deserve to be.
The examples of Gapitalism are endless. I believe it was inevitable because with few exceptions political and financial power are bed-mates. The haves will always, again with a few exceptions, rig the system to their advantage and the disadvantage of the not's.
The have's petition their (their in the real sense as in owned by) politicians to pass laws and regulations favoring have's with tax breaks and worse weakening or eliminating laws that would inhibit their manipulation of the financial system at the expense of the not's. This is the way it is and will remain until the people say ENOUGH!
Capitalism is not the problem, Gapitalism is the problem. DOWN WITH GAPITALISM!
Capitalism morphed into Gapitalism many years ago. The illusion that all people in this country have equal opportunity to become wealthy is just that, an illusion, deliberatly perpetrated by the powerful to calm and delude the Citizenry.
The American elite, the individuals (Koch etc.), and corporate rich have long gamed the system by buying political influence and favor. The result is an ever widening gap between the haves and the have not's.
One example of the rigged system is education.
Average young Americans struggle to reach the first couple of rungs up the ladder of success incurring huge debts for a decent education at a state university, junior college or technical school. They take years paying off the loans instead of buying health insurance, using that money for investments, home ownership or additional education. Meanwhile the children of the elite go to private schools and are then sent off to the top universities where they make life long business contacts with other have kids. Then they graduate from school and using their own or their parents contacts go to work for an elite company with no debt and an immediate position with built-in upward mobility. Continued in Gapitalism Part 2.
I am an ordinary American citizen, not Aristotle. I have a typically American way of looking at problems. I believe in action, and in sooner or later FINISHING things - not just forever talking and thinking about those things. It seems to me that it would therefore follow that I am more interested in visualizing a better and more just future, and then making my way by fits and starts TO it, than I am in comfortably and oh-so-reasonably settling for a flawed, failed staus quo. We've been WSJ 'reasonable' long enough. Where has that gotten us? Now it's time to make good things HAPPEN - within the parameters of conventional law and elective politics where possible, but by OTHER legal and non-violent means where necessary.