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Let's give all the heroic capitalists a little competition.
Dr. Michael Hudson, professor of economics at UM Kansas City, has details:
"[T]he demand isn't simply to make a public bank, but is to treat the banks generally as a public utility, just as you treat electric companies as a public utility.... Just as there was pressure for a public option in health care, there should be a public option in banking.
"There should be a government bank that offers credit card rates without punitive 30% interest rates, without penalties, without raising the rate if you don't pay your electric bill.
"This is how America got strong in the 19th and early 20th century, by essentially having public infrastructure, just like you'd have roads and bridges.... The idea of public infrastructure was to lower the cost of living and to lower the cost of doing business."
The Public Option in Banking: Another Look at the German Model | Truthout
For the last 500 years (at least) the only thing worse for any politician than getting caught doing business with organized crime was losing control of the money organized crime generates every year.
Bank of American, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and Citibank are criminal organizations served by Republican AND Democratic administrations alike. FLUSH them all from Wall Street and government and straight into prison starting in November 2012.
What's generating the regular interest payments on the SS Trust Fund, Einstein?
Hank Paulson's bail money?
"In the US, North Dakota is the only state to own its own bank. It is also the only state that has sported a budget surplus every year since the 2008 credit crisis. It has the lowest unemployment rate in the country and the lowest default rate on loans. It also has oil, but so do other states that are not doing so well. Still, the media tend to attribute North Dakota's success to its oil fields..."
Maybe you think Wall Street deserves bigger bonuses.
"The assets of the Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance Trust Funds represent the the accumulation over time of the difference between income and outgo. The growth of the assets from the end of December 1986 through the end of December 2010 is shown below by calendar quarter...What's generating the regular interest payments on the SS Trust Fund, Einstein?
Hank Paulson's bail money?
"In the US, North Dakota is the only state to own its own bank. It is also the only state that has sported a budget surplus every year since the 2008 credit crisis. It has the lowest unemployment rate in the country and the lowest default rate on loans. It also has oil, but so do other states that are not doing so well. Still, the media tend to attribute North Dakota's success to its oil fields..."
Maybe you think Wall Street deserves bigger bonuses.
There is NOTHING of value in the Trust Fund. All shortfalls are covered by issuance of NEW debt. The SSA and CBO says so.. Don't want to do this here. There were PLENTY of threads to beat this into submission..
Wall Street Bonuses are None of My Business and they really are NOYB too.. No more than our opinion on signing bonuses for the NFL players or a recording contract bonus..
I think part of the answer to your question about why it's not getting better has to do with voters, even those who pay daily attention to politics, continuing to "choose" between Republican OR Democrat in the voting booth.Um, the government now writes 90%+ of the mortgages, how come it's not getting better?
Sorry, the Tea Party stands for personal liberties and freedoms and detests government intrusion. OWS does not.
Good luck convincing America otherwise.
Bernard E. Harcourt said:Occupy Wall Street is best understood, I would suggest, as a new form of what could be called political disobedience, as opposed to civil disobedience, that fundamentally rejects the political and ideological landscape that we inherited from the Cold War.
Civil disobedience accepted the legitimacy of political institutions, but resisted the moral authority of resulting laws. Political disobedience, by contrast, resists the very way in which we are governed: it resists the structure of partisan politics, the demand for policy reforms, the call for party identification, and the very ideologies that dominated the post-War period. . . .
One way to understand the emerging disobedience is to see it as a refusal to engage these sorts of worn-out ideologies rooted in the Cold War. The key point here is that the Cold Wars ideological divide with the Chicago Boys at one end and the Maoists at the other merely served as a weapon in this country for the financial and political elite: the ploy, in the United States, was to demonize the chimera of a controlled economy (that of the former Soviet Union or China, for example) in order to prop up the illusion of a free market and to legitimize the fantasy of less regulation of what was euphemistically called deregulation. By reinvigorating the myth of free markets, the financial and political architects of our economy over the past three plus decades both Republicans and Democrats were able to disguise massive redistribution toward the richest by claiming they were simply deregulating when all along they were actually reregulating to the benefit of their largest campaign donors.
This ideological fog blinded the American people to the pervasive regulatory mechanisms that are necessary to organize a colossal late-modern economy and that necessarily distribute wealth throughout society and in this country, that quietly redistributed massive amounts of wealth to the richest 1 percent. Many of the voices at Occupy Wall Street accuse political ideology on both sides, on the side of free markets but also on the side of big government, for serving the few at the expense of the other 99 percent for paving the way to an entrenched permissive regulatory system that privatizes gains and socializes losses.
The central point, of course, is that it takes both a big government and the illusion of free markets to achieve such massive redistribution. If you take a look at the tattered posters at Zuccotti Park, youll see that many are intensely anti-government and just as many stridently oppose big government.
Occupy Wall Street is surely right in holding the old ideologies to account. The truth is, as Ive argued in a book, The Illusion of Free Markets, and recently in Harpers magazine, there never have been and never will be free markets. All markets are man-made, constructed, regulated and administered by often-complex mechanisms that necessarily distribute wealth that inevitably distribute wealth in large and small ways. Tax incentives for domestic oil production and lower capital gains rates are obvious illustrations. But there are all kinds of more minute rules and regulations surrounding our wheat pits, stock markets and economic exchanges that have significant wealth effects: limits on retail buyers flipping shares after an I.P.O., rulings allowing exchanges to cut communication to non-member dealers, fixed prices in extended after-hour trading, even the advent of options markets. The mere existence of a privately chartered organization like the Chicago Board of Trade, which required the state of Illinois to criminalize and forcibly shut down competing bucket shops, has huge redistributional wealth effects on farmers and consumers and, of course, bankers, brokers and dealers.
The semantic games the talk of deregulation rather than reregulation would have been entertaining had it not been for their devastating effects. As the sociologist Douglas Massey minutely documents in Categorically Unequal, after decades of improvement, the income gap between the richest and poorest in this country has dramatically widened since the 1970s, resulting in what social scientists now refer to as U-curve of increasing inequality. Recent reports from the Census Bureau confirm this, with new evidence last month that the number of Americans living below the official poverty line, 46.2 million people, was the highest number in the 52 years the bureau has been publishing figures on it. Today, 27 percent of African-Americans and 26 percent of Hispanics in this country more than 1 in 4 live in poverty; and 1 in 9 African-American men between the ages of 20 and 34 are incarcerated. . . .
On this account, the fundamental choice is no longer the ideological one we were indoctrinated to believe between free markets and controlled economies but rather a continuous choice between kinds of regulation and how they distribute wealth in society. There is, in the end, no realistic alternative, nor any utopian project that can avoid the pervasive regulatory mechanisms that are necessary to organize a complex late-modern economy and thats the point. The vast and distributive regulatory framework will neither disappear with deregulation, nor with the withering of a socialist state. What is required is constant vigilance of all the micro and macro rules that permeate our markets, our contracts, our tax codes, our banking regulations, our property laws in sum, all the ordinary, often mundane, but frequently invisible forms of laws and regulations that are required to organize and maintain a colossal economy in the 21st-century and that constantly distribute wealth and resources.
Maybe.Sorry, the Tea Party stands for personal liberties and freedoms and detests government intrusion. OWS does not.
Good luck convincing America otherwise.
The public does not in fact stand with you on this, Si modo. It already supports OWS more than it supports the Tea Party. And that is going to increase, just as the movement will increase.
....
I think part of the answer to your question about why it's not getting better has to do with voters, even those who pay daily attention to politics, continuing to "choose" between Republican OR Democrat in the voting booth.Um, the government now writes 90%+ of the mortgages, how come it's not getting better?
State banks like the one in North Dakota can write mortgages at 2% interest and cap their credit cards at a 6% interest rate. Republicans and Democrats in DC seem to prefer using the Federal Reserve to fund Wall Street banks at near-zero rates of interest with none of the savings passed on to consumers.
The Germans may have a model worth taking a long, hard look at:
"Germany emerged from World War II with a collapsed economy that had degenerated into barter. Today, it is the largest and most robust economy in the eurozone. Manufacturing in Germany contributes 25 percent of gross domestic product, more than twice that in the UK.
"Despite the recession, Germany's unemployment rate, at 6.8 percent, is the lowest in 20 years.
"Underlying the economy's strength is its Mittelstand - small to medium sized enterprises - supported by a strong regional banking system that is willing to lend to fund research and development."
The Public Option in Banking: Another Look at the German Model | Truthout
North Dakota's current unemployment rate is about half that of Germany.
There are numerous economic models that could be tried here; however, elected Republicans AND Democrats will send their own children to Afghanistan (Mexico?) before giving options like public banking a chance in the USA.
My guess is that "the park" has some public access agreements added to the deed. So that the City has access to utilities, traffic control ect. I'll bet a bundle it's NOT "totally private" property. Maybe even serviced by the City in some regards.
