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That's No Angry Mob, It's a Movement
A college friend of mine, after much quaffing from the keg, so to speak, would start singing a faux hymn that began, "We are sliding into sin -- whee!"
I've thought of his bleary tune from time to time as we all watched our financial institutions slide from thoughtless, wretched excess into calamity, aided and abetted by deregulation and bailouts, dragging the rest of us along on their speed bump-free ride.
You'd think there would be a modicum of contrition but mostly it has been deny, deny, deny combined with shivers of revulsion as an angry citizenry freely expresses its opinion. Former Clinton SEC chairman Arthur Levitt sniffed to The Wall Street Journal this week, "It has reached extremes of incivility that are intolerable," and on Friday the Journal editorially wrung its hands over "political Torquemadas" who would dare to prosecute Wall Street executives.
See here, you people, the seemingly dumfounded elite ask, why all this hollering? Well, it wasn't only those AIG bonuses that had folks mad as hell. For sure, they triggered the outburst last week. But then came an ABC News report that JPMorgan Chase -- recipient of 25 billion in bailout bucks, courtesy of taxpayers -- was pressing ahead with plans to spend $138 million dollars on two new corporate jets and a place to park them -- a state of the art hangar with a "vegetated roof garden." Presumably, bank executives will use the vegetation to hide behind when the mob arrives with tar and feathers.
And speaking of greenery, Wednesday's New York Times reported that last year 25 top hedge fund managers harvested salaries totaling 11.6 billion dollars. That's an awful lot of lettuce in these hungry times, especially when, as the Times calculates, hedge funds have lost an average 18 percent of their value.
By Thursday, Treasury Secretary Geithner was talking tough to Congress. He called for a vast expansion of government authority, promising to crack down on Wall Street's reckless behavior, including the murky markets of hedge funds and derivatives. He proposed "comprehensive reform -- not modest repairs at the margin, but new rules of the game."
But veteran Washington journalist William Greider, who has covered government, politics and the economy for four decades, fears that what Geithner and the Obama administration are proposing may not create reform but simply perpetuate more of the same and even lead to the creation of what he calls "a corporate state... a rather small but very powerful circle of financial institutions... Yes, watched closely by the Federal Reserve and others in government, but also protected by them. And that's a really insidious departure."
He expressed his concern to my colleague Bill Moyers in an interview for the current edition of Bill Moyers Journal on PBS. Greider agrees with most experts that the Geithner plan will end up placing reform in the hands of the Federal Reserve Board.
Twenty years ago, Greider wrote Secrets of the Temple: How the Federal Reserve Runs the Country, still considered the definitive account of the government bank. "One of the attractive qualities about the Fed is that it is this black box of technocratic expertise," he told Moyers. "And it knows things the rest of us don't know. And it's very expert at what it does... But it's a political institution. It makes public decisions for the rest of us. So to pretend that it's above all that is nonsense from the beginning...
"They couldn't stop deregulation," he continued. "In fact, they supported it, because they knew their major constituencies in finance and banking were all very much for it... So to tell them now, 'Wouldn't you like to just admit your mistake and put back some of the collateral lending functions into your control?' -- I don't trust them to do that."
What we ought to be seeking, Greider believes, "is creating a new financial and banking system, of many more, thousands more, smaller, more diverse, regionally dispersed banks and investment firms. The first obligation is to serve the economy and serve society. Not the other way around."
As for President Obama, "I understand his political dilemma. And I sympathize with it. But he's trying to govern by convincing people that we will be able to get the old good times back. And my view is that the good times ain't comin' back. For lots of reasons -- including the ecological crisis and global warming and the weakness of our economy. This is the hard part. The sooner the country comes to terms with that, acknowledges it as fact, not just fear, then we can start this great era of reform and revitalizing the country and society."
In his new book, Come Home, America: The Rise and Fall (and Redeeming Promise) of Our Country, William Greider sees the public's anger as good news for the country -- "America the Possible," he calls it.
"We're at a break point in our history," he said. "And it's not just the financial system, although that's front and center. It's the deteriorated economy, it's militarism looking out in the world, trying to find the next war. It's a lot of things coming at us, all at once. I believe, on the other side of all of these adversities, we can become a better country."
But to make that happen, Greider thinks, "People at large, I don't care whether they're middle class or upper class or working poor or union, non-union, have to find ways to come together themselves, perhaps in very small groups at first, and talk about their own stuff. Their experiences, their ideas their convictions, their aspirations for the country, themselves, their families, and then broaden out a bit, laterally. And have more people in the discussion. They don't have to become a giant organization, but they have to convince themselves that they're citizens...
"That's kind of the mystery of democracy. People get power if they believe they're entitled to power."
13 Comments so far
Show AllIt is very macrabre that just as everyone is concluding the best possibilty for survival is to grow your own food along comes HR 875.
It really creates pity for the poor guy who is being jailed for a great number of years for mailing letters with white powder to 50 or so banks etc.
The postings under yesterdays Krugman article showcased many informed and intelligent posters.
I wonder if Hillary would have been better?
One blowback I see from having a mulatto ( if mulatto is still PC) man oversee this wholesale sellout is that it gives racists a talking point against African Americans.
Being pro-life and pro-war is made compatible if the underlaying motive is control.
g ford,
I have to reply for the simple reason that your primary cause is weighted with what you term a 'mulatto' subject to racists eager to hold hostage for this financial feature film that was directed, produced, created, written and extorted from the American people by Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, Bush II and a group of behind the scenes power brokers intent on preventing passage of any presidential policy, Congressional act or even a SCOTUS ruling that would jeopardize the previous 30 years of Republican assurance of a very viable aristocracy in this country of peasants having never enough education, never enough money, never enough connection, and never enough information and absolutely never enough legal power to facilitate any constructive change.
This majority of what some refer to as 'sheeple' are mostly the kind, non-aggressive human beings having prior to this strong arming, been brain scrubbed by violence and manipulation. A hell of a lot of people are recent 'joiners' to this ongoing process of quantum progress. The streets they inhabit are not affluent neighborhoods.Instead the streets are the home to people who very much resemble them by an environment antithetical to any so-called 'American dream,' incorporating an 'ownership' mentality...
Its too late. I need sleep. Sorry for an incomplete 'statement of position.'
Former Clinton SEC chairman Arthur Levitt sniffed to The Wall Street Journal this week, "It has reached extremes of incivility that are intolerable."
Oh, really? Well, then by all means let me add my 2 cents, Mr. Levitt. FUCK YOU!
I find it deeply troubling to watch as journalists such as Bill Moyers and Willian Greider patiently explain to American audiences the ins and outs of the financial crisis and the various crimes of Wall Street executives, greed goons who, ably aided and abetted by thoroughly corrupt elected officials, have bankrupted the nation and brought it to its knees. What is so disturbing is this: Moyers and Greider are all but begging Americans to rise up in righteous indignation and hold these well-heeled thieves and swindlers and their official enablers accountable, yet relatively few Americans seem to grasp the seriousness of the situation, and fewer still have bothered to take to the streets or engage in any other public manifestations of disgust, anger, and indignation.
Wrecking the U.S. economy and looting the U.S. Treasury are not victimless crimes! Ask those who have been driven from their homes by bank forclosure! Ask the surviving family members of the increasing number of suicides, people driven to the final act of desperation by job loss, shame, and depression resulting from their inability to support their families! Ask those in law enforcement who respond to calls from men who, because they don't want their family members to be the ones who find the body, dial 911 before pulling the trigger! Ask the social workers who struggle to respond to alarming increases in child abuse and neglect, domestic abuse, substance abuse, etc., all directly related to rising levels of unemployment and homelessness!
And Obama's team wants us to reward greedy, theiving bastards who wrecked the economy in order to fuel their own extravagant lifestyles? Not No, but HELL NO!
The people who wrecked the economy are not capable of restructuring it. Until we hold them accountable for their crimes, until they are brought to justice and tried for their crimes, there will be no recovery. Until the theives and their enablers in government feel the pitchfork at their backsides ...
"People get power if they believe they're entitled to power," said Greider. He and Moyers understand the problem. Too many Americans don't, but perhaps as the situation worsens they will begin to understand and to grasp what is required of free people who intend to remain free.
".... may not create reform but simply perpetuate more of the same and even lead to the creation of what he calls "a corporate state... a rather small but very powerful circle of financial institutions... Yes, watched closely by the Federal Reserve and others in government, but also protected by them."
Mr. Greider has covered government, politics, and the economy for 40 years and comes in to express this fear to us? Huh? I do share his fear, but only because even an elementary school student can see that this is what we have had for a very long time now. That is the real purpose of the Federal Reserve system. What does this guy think we have been watching for the past year?
We should seriously ask ourselves the question, "Why are Americans so passive in the face of massive economic violence perpetrated on themselves and their children?"
It appears to me to be the result of one of the most successful social conditioning campaigns in history. Whatever relates to commodities and productivity has become supremely real; whatever relates to political obligations has become supremely unreal. Social bodies such as governments have become simply targets for exploitation to which no loyalty or even elementary moral consideration is required. On the other hand, corporations can be permitted even the most invasive destruction of privacy because of the commodities they control.
Having given their loyalty to the corporate system, Americans become deeply conflicted at stories of corporate robbery. Since they usually share the same values as the corporations that have robbed them, they are often half-tempted to celebrate the successful heists, heists they themselves would have gladly participated in, despite what they tell themselves. The government and the values it represents have become an abstraction (inspiring or otherwise) to them, the representative of a power that is alien to their lives, while the values of the corporate world are ever present and pressing.
In trying to understand their attitude, it is critical to view the outside and inside of the crisis from their perspective. They see themselves as inside the corporate system, but view the government from the outside. They also see the “financial crisis” as a phenomena external to the system they are a part of. It is largely an abstraction to them, something that pundits talk about, but which doesn’t directly affect their world, even if they lose their job or house. This “externalizing” attitude applies to the crisis as a whole. Since they are actually an intimate part of the system and what they do is by definition the result of worthy motives, the crisis must be caused by abuses of the system which are external to the system’s normal operations. Therefore, the crisis is the result of a fortuitous combination of circumstances that threatens the smooth operation of the system, but is not part of the system itself.
Their ability to see this crisis as the inevitable result of the ordinary operation of profit system has been systematically deleted. This is one reason why the corporate media so easily runs diversionary maneuvers that distract attention from the primary theft – the robbery of trillions of dollars by those who caused the crisis. That robbery is an abstraction to most Americans, but when some culprits are found to be receiving bonuses from the tax money, their outrage swells because the crime has become personal at that point. In other words, they have a strong affinity toward private profit, but public obligations have become unreal, which demonstrates why such crises are inevitable. The witnesses of the crime cannot see it as a crime because their attitudes have been shaped by the same causes as the crimes themselves.
So strongly have they internalized the profit system that they see the system as a victim in the same way as they feel their own victimization. The dominant analysis of the crisis as the fault of various malefactors - reckless speculators, greedy and overpaid executives, and the self-indulgent American consumer — allows the evil to be personalized and externalized at the same time. The cause is always external to the system itself, just as the system that they participate in is not part of the “financial crisis” which the system generated. The key theme of media coverage of the crisis is to reinforce its personal and subjective aspects, to focus microscopically on personal faults and moral failings so as to isolate causes away from the nature of the system itself. The mortgage crisis is explained as the result of unregulated personal greed, as if this evil could be separated from the nature of the profit system, which obviously depends on it as the primary motivating force behind all economic activity.
What we must see is that by internalizing the profit system so profoundly, Americans have no vantage point outside the system to criticize it without condemning themselves. Until they can face their own moral visage in the mirror, they will remain easily manipulated victims of their own victimization.
Sioux Rose
BOYD: Profound and interesting post. Makes a lot of sense!
Only in America where you have Wall Street psychopaths play the role of victims and martyrs.
Bring America Back !!!!............Winship...nice piece..but of course
Anger is Good !!!!! Do you think they had the Boston Tea Party because
the Patriots were pleased and happy with the British Tax for the King ????
***Winship and his ilk, Moyerites need to complete the puzzle, connect
the Dots. They treat the economic crises as apart from other events.
***The Big Bailouts were and are the shock and awe to our US/World Economics,
just as 40,000 laser guided missiles were the shock & awe to the defenseless
soverign nation of Iraq !!! Duh !! What collateral damage, Duh !!
***The initial Trillions of taxpayer $$$ went to and are going to the
US Dept of Defense for the false flag War on Terror !!!! Once the Neocons
saw how easy it was to dip into our pockets, it was just a matter of time
before they could justify dipping into the Treasury for golden parachutes,
CEO bonuses, multi bailouts and US National indebtedness to folks like
China and Japan. But the Neocon chuckle is how they gonna collect from
a superpower ??? They'll just drop a laser on the BoC !!!! Chuckle.
***Winship, and from what I hear of Moyer===both, need a Big ReDirect..
it did not start on Wall Street, it did not start with Torture.
It all started prior to and on Sept 11, 2001==the Mother of all attacks
on Main Street--on American soil in lower Manhattan, NYC !! That's where
we need to re:direct our Anger. 9/11 is NOT a done deal !!!!
If you think a cave-dwelling boogieman, and 19 airline pilot school flunkies,
pulled off the technical genius which was 9/11, then You , as will our
current President Obama, enable the real terrorists to do it to us forever!
Until the real Truth of 9/11 surfaces, and is dealt with forcefully and
completely, look for Naomi Klein's book to be current eternally, or as long as the USA exists as a Nation. !
I highly suggest we not accompany Obama on his Holy Crusade to Tora Bora,
for folks--to be really honest, fire breathing dragons do not exist !!
Bill Greider sez:
"We're at a break point in our history," he said. "And it's not just the financial system, although that's front and center. It's the deteriorated economy, it's militarism looking out in the world, trying to find the next war. It's a lot of things coming at us, all at once. I believe, on the other side of all of these adversities, we can become a better country."
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This is the same well-intentioned but irrelevent nonsense that was fed to those in the civil rights movement in the early 60's. As long as we have a latter-day JFK (that'd be President Obama)who knows all the right things to say and means none of it, (based on what he has done)we will go from very bad to much worse and the collective rage will get closer and closer to the exploding point.
Greider observes:
"But to make that happen, people at large, I don't care whether they're middle class or upper class or working poor or union, non-union, have to find ways to come together themselves, perhaps in very small groups at first, and talk about their own stuff. Their experiences, their ideas their convictions, their aspirations for the country, themselves, their families, and then broaden out a bit, laterally. And have more people in the discussion. They don't have to become a giant organization, but they have to convince themselves that they're citizens..."
****************
More very well-intentioned and irrelevent twaddle. The central fact Greider, Moyers, Obama, all the rest of the "inside the beltway" technocrats (like Geithner, Summers, and Bernanke--a worthy trifecta to succeed Curley, Larry, and Moe as the 3 Stooges) along with their patrons on Wall Street and in the collective boardrooms of corporate America still do not get is that for growing millions of Americans there is no America in which they can believe.
These people include but are not limited to, Middle Eastern wars of aggression veterans who cannot get the care promised them. The newly homeless because their ARM mortgages have gone into default. The newly jobless due to layoffs, firings, and the stagnant economy.
The newly pensionless whose dilligent retirement savings in 401K plans has in large part vanished because it was invested in securities falsely valued and falsely insured against default. The growing army of immigrant workers for whom there is no work here in the US and nothing to go back to in their country of origin.
The growing numbers dwelling in tent cities--not druggies, drunks, illiterate, or lazy bums, but displaced Americans reduced to camping on public lands and in abandoned vehicles if they can find them. Inner-city Afro-Americans whose unemployment has been in the double digets for years now.
The working poor who have jobs at places like McDonalds, Wal-Mart, and minute market gas stations who make so little they have to go to "pay day lenders" to take out advance loans at extortionate interest rates against their next paycheck.
For these people sharing common values and visions of what they hope for the future is past because they have little or no hope for any kind of future except bleak. These people (in the tens of millions they are) have had it with talk and are ready for action.
***************
Greider concludes:
"That's kind of the mystery of democracy. People get power if they believe they're entitled to power."
***************
It's also the mystery of the revolutionary lynch mob. For any kind of civil government to survive, it must have the trust and respect of those over whom it governs. For growing segments of the US population, the US government has neither and when their collective consciousnesses reach a critical mass, there will be hell to pay.
Poet
Audit the Federal Reserve-HR-1207
http://www.voteronpaul.com/newsDetail.php?Ron-Paul-s-HR-1207-now-has-46-Cosponsors-623
"That's kind of the mystery of democracy. People get power if they believe they're entitled to power."
What's to argue with here? Do we want the same power that is, or do we want to take power and re-invent the system? One of the two is going to exist and no arguments to the contrary are going to change that.
The fact is, people that argue this point do not want power. They want to write about all the reasons they don't/can't/won't take power, but given the choice, they'll stick with their gilded cages, thankyouverymuch.
Tweet.
"The life of a single human being is worth a million times more than all the property of the richest man on earth." - Ernesto "Che" Guevara