It’s not often we get to see a truly grassroots movement form and grow before our eyes, but that’s exactly what may be happening with the Occupy Wall Street protest that began in the Big Apple. The map above shows the extent of planned protests all over America:
The movement known as “Occupy Wall Street” has spread far beyond its starting point in lower Manhattan. CBS News correspondent Bigad Shaban reports that it now has offshoots in 25 cities nationwide, and political leaders from both sides are weighing in. From D.C. to Alabama to Portland, demonstrators protest everything from corporate greed to joblessness to economic inequality.
To recap where the rage is coming from: as the graph above shows, we saved Wall Street and a bunch of other streets when they fucked up totally. In 2008 a handful of large investment banks crashed the economy using an unregulated instrument trading on shadowy international markets called Credit Default Swaps. When those investment vehicles crashed the banks found themselves owing hundreds of billions of dollars to investors on the other side of the bet, money they could not pay. If those banks went down checking and savings accounts would have locked up. We the People rode to the rescue, ponying up almost one-trillion clams directly, and created multi-trillion dollar lines of credit. We bought the crashed CDS and made good on them, and we loaned the wealthiest corporations on earth trillions of dollars at no interest. Think how well you could do if you could borrow a few billion paying zero interest and with no principle repayment schedule. Would you feel obligated to spread that around to the people who made it possible at great sacrifice? The banks felt no such duty.
As millions of middle-class jobs evaporated and the stock market lost half its value almost overnight, they first gave themselves rounds of multi-million dollar bonuses, the largest in history. Then they lobbied politicians for even more money and fought regulation that could prevent it from happening again tooth and nail. These sons of bitches bankrolled corrupt politicians who ran on a platform of ending unemployment payments and cutting services to the 99% of the country that saved their sorry asses. They then pushed for legislation that would steal bought and paid for Social Security and Medicare benefits and transfer the money into the pockets of billionaires, while continuing to charge us full boat for those same benefits. Scumbags like Paul Ryan and the rest of the Teaparty Republicans were only too happy to oblige.
In the aftermath of the catastrophe created by years of tax cuts for billionaires and deregulation of financial institutions the rest of us were on the hook for, Fox News and other conservative grifters pushed the narrative that it was all Obama’s fault, the middle-class’ fault, home-owners’ fault, basically everyone’s fault except the people who did it and the conservative policies that allowed it to happen. A wave election put the most extreme Republicans in power in a generation. Once sworn in those conservatives did everything they could to make the economy worse in the belief it would help them win more power in 2012, where they would be able to enact more of the same policies that created the catastrophe in the first place.
That’s about it. If this movement continues to grow the Teaparty is over, conservatives will share the same fate of former Egyption President and Libya’s bloodhtirsty diactator. And any democrat who does not join the President in protecting the middle-class base will soon have reason to fear in a democratoc form of government: We are the 99%.
… any democrat who does not join the President in protecting the middle-class base …
This assumes the President is protecting the middle-class base, which works only if you define as that base as “top management at Goldman-Sachs et al“.
Everyone who has been paying attention knows the story you just told. What surprises me is how many people just don’t get it at all. All over facebook and in the comments of any article I read about Occupy Wall Street, there are a lot of people who evidently don’t know or don’t care what happened over the past few years. A major criticism has been “the protesters are wearing clothes made by corporations and they carry phones made corporations.” It amazes me how someone can miss the point entirely. It was only a handful of corporations that destroyed the economy.
Mainstream media commentators think they’re out to loot iPads. Republicans call them “mobs.” I think these people are rightly scared, as Paul Krugman points out.
It ought to be interesting to see how well people have learned from the repeated bailouts we’ve seen in the financial sector the last couple decades. The protesters are a hugely important part of it. We’ll have to see which version of the story the rest of the country believes and what message they’ll send the politicians because of it. It’s basically a choice between “fleece, lie, misdirect, repeat” and “I’m tired of being robbed.”