Occupying Wall Street
I’ve been down to the Occupy Wall Street protest a few times in the past couple of weeks. When people ask me about it I’m not always sure how to explain it. Unions, anarchists, environmentalists, disillusioned Tea Partiers, celebrities and everyone in between can be seen down there on any given day. There are so many disperate groups. They all want different outcomes and have different goals, but they all have one thing in common: they are all really mad about the current economic and political situation. In an op-ed, NY Times columnist Paul Krugman has summed it up better than I have been able to:
What’s going on here? The answer, surely, is that Wall Street’s Masters of the Universe realize, deep down, how morally indefensible their position is. They’re not John Galt; they’re not even Steve Jobs. They’re people who got rich by peddling complex financial schemes that, far from delivering clear benefits to the American people, helped push us into a crisis whose aftereffects continue to blight the lives of tens of millions of their fellow citizens.
Yet they have paid no price. Their institutions were bailed out by taxpayers, with few strings attached. They continue to benefit from explicit and implicit federal guarantees — basically, they’re still in a game of heads they win, tails taxpayers lose. And they benefit from tax loopholes that in many cases have people with multimillion-dollar incomes paying lower rates than middle-class families.
Makes me want to go re-watch Sidney Lumet’s classic film Network. Because I’m mad as hell and I can’t take it anymore. Read the full article on the NY Times web site.
