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Tweet Monday’s NY Times leads with a story on arrests of “Occupy Wall Street” protesters in Denver and Nashville. I don’t understand how can we give corporations free speech, yet deny people the right to assembly. On the Op-Ed page, Friedman gets it right in Did You Hear The One About The Bankers, Douthat misses the point in “What Tax Dollars Can’t Buy, ” and on the editors provide some data that supports the protesters, here.
Wall Street Protesters Hit the Bull’s Eye, NY Times, 10/30/11, here.
Occupiers of Zuccotti Park and other sites around the country have been criticized for the fuzziness of their goals.
[Actually, my demands, here, and suggested tax policy changes, here, are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time bound. ]
Their complaint that the privileged few in the top 1 percent are getting a disproportionate share of the nation’s prosperity, however, is spot on….
a reportpublished last week by the Congressional Budget Office shows that the share of national income going to the top percentage of households skyrocketed over the last three decades, even as it fell for the vast majority of American families.
The top 1 percent’s share of the nation’s total adjusted gross income was 17 percent in 2009, down from 23 percent two years before. But those people are still earning more than the entire bottom half of the population.
Since the mid-1980s the top 10 percent of Americans have increased their share at the expense of everybody else. But the lion’s share of these gains accrued to the richest 1 percent; and half of those gains went to the top 0.1 percent.
Occupy Protesters Regroup After Mass Arrests, NY Times, 10/31/11, here,
Protesters in Denver and Nashville regrouped on Sunday, a day after dozens of arrests at demonstrations inspired by Occupy Wall Street in both cities.
The demonstrators in Denver held a peace vigil in the evening. It followed a melee on Saturday night that was one of the most intense clashes with the police since the protest groups began gathering in a downtown park more than a month ago.
On Saturday, officers used pepper spray on the protesters, some of whom surged toward police lines. Two people were charged with assaulting an officer.
Tom Friedman gets it right in “Did You Hear The One About The Bankers“, NY Times, 10/29/11.
One consumer group using information from Opensecrets.org calculates that the financial services industry, including real estate, spent $2.3 billion on federal campaign contributions from 1990 to 2010, which was more than the health care, energy, defense, agriculture and transportation industries combined. Why are there 61 members on the House Committee on Financial Services? So many congressmen want to be in a position to sell votes to Wall Street.
We can’t afford this any longer. We need to focus on four reforms that don’t require new bureaucracies to implement. 1) If a bank is too big to fail, it is too big and needs to be broken up. We can’t risk another trillion-dollar bailout. 2) If your bank’s deposits are federally insured by U.S. taxpayers, you can’t do any proprietary trading with those deposits — period. 3) Derivatives have to be traded on transparent exchanges where we can see if another A.I.G. is building up enormous risk. 4) Finally, U.S. congressmen should have to dress like Nascar drivers and wear the logos of all the banks, investment banks, insurance companies and real estate firms that they’re taking money from. The public needs to know.
Capitalism and free markets are the best engines for generating growth and relieving poverty — provided they are balanced with meaningful transparency, regulation and oversight. We lost that balance in the last decade. If we don’t get it back — and there is now a tidal wave of money resisting that — we will have another crisis. And, if that happens, the cry for justice could turn ugly. Free advice to the financial services industry: Stick to being bulls. Stop being pigs.
Ross Douthat, NY Times, gets it wrong in In “What Tax Dollars Can’t Buy, ” NY Times, 10/29/11. Progressive tax structures are not about ‘soaking the rich.’ They are a recognition that people get rich because people buy their products or want to see them perform.
Index to recent posts.
- Occupy Wall Street Is News Fit To Print, 10/30/11, here.
- Occupy Wall Street – Demands, 10/28/11, here,
- Progressive Tax Policy, 10/28/11, here,
- Occupy Wall Street – Why are They There?, 10/19/11, here,
- Corporations Are NOT People, 10/13/11, here,
- Protesting Marked Cards and a Stacked Deck, 9/22/11, here,
- Saving the Economy, Part Deux, 9/12/11, here,
- Nuclear Power: Present Tense, 9/12/11, here,
- Saving the Economy, Numero Uno, 9/12/11, here,
- Zuccotti, the song, unmixed mp3, lyrics in pdf,