"PERISCOPE - ПЕРИСКОП" via Mike Nova
Wall Street protests go global; riots in Rome
via News's Facebook Wall by News on 10/15/11
Wall Street protests go global; riots in Rome
Wall Street protests go global; riots in Rome
ROME (Reuters) - Demonstrators rallied Saturday across the world to accuse bankers and politicians of wrecking economies, but only in Rome did the global "day of rage" erupt into violence.
Around the World, Protests Against Economic Policies
via News's Facebook Wall by News on 10/15/11
Around the World, Protests Against Economic Policies
Around the World, Protests Against Economic Policies
In dozens of cities around the world on Saturday, people took to the streets as part of a planned day of protests against the financial system.
Inside Obama's Populist Makeover
via stories by Howard Kurtz on 10/2/11
The president’s friends (and foes) on what prompted his lurch to the left—and whether it will work.
Britain’s Self-Inflicted Misery
via NYT > Editorials by on 10/13/11
Deficit reduction based on fiscal austerity has led to a flat-lining economy in Britain. It is the wrong strategy for Britain, and for the United States.
Occupy Wall Street tries to maintain message - video | World news | guardian.co.uk
via www.guardian.co.uk on 10/15/11
Demonstrators aim to reach those who 'freeload' at protests on day 24 of a grassroots movement that has spread through the country, now reaching 70 cities
Occupy Wall Street: legal observers give protesters advice - video | World news | guardian.co.uk
via www.guardian.co.uk on 10/15/11
Members of the National Lawyers Guild give Occupy Wall Street protesters advice on dealing with the police during their march to Foley Square in New York
Review & Outlook: What's Occupying Wall Street? - WSJ.com
via online.wsj.com on 10/15/11
- REVIEW & OUTLOOK
- OCTOBER 14, 2011
What's Occupying Wall Street?
The protestors have a point, if not the right target.
more in Opinion | Find New $LINKTEXTFIND$ »
In the matter of Occupy Wall Street, the allegedly anticapitalist movement that's been camped out in lower Manhattan for the past few weeks and has inspired copycat protests from Boston to Los Angeles, we have some sympathy. Really? Well, yeah.
OK, not for the half-naked demonstrators, the ranting anti-Semites, Kanye West or anyone else who has helped make Occupy Wall Street a target for easy ridicule. But to the extent that the mainly young demonstrators have a valid complaint, it's that they are trying to bust their way into an economy where there is one job for every five job-seekers, and where youth unemployment runs north of 18%. That is a cause for frustration, if not outrage.
The question is, outrage at whom? On Wednesday, Occupy Wall Street marched on J.P. Morgan Chase's headquarters, after having protested outside CEO Jamie Dimon's home the previous day. That's odd, seeing that J.P. Morgan didn't take on excessive mortgage risk and didn't need (although it was forced to take) TARP money. The demonstrators also picketed the home of hedge fund mogul John Paulson, who made much of his recent fortune betting against the housing bubble, not helping to inflate it.
As for Wall Street itself, on Tuesday New York state Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli issued a report predicting that the financial industry will likely lose 10,000 jobs by the end of next year. That's on top of the 4,100 jobs lost since April, and the 22,000 since the beginning of 2008. Overall New York-area employment in finance and insurance has declined by 8.9% since late 2006. Even Goldman Sachs is planning layoffs.
Peter Wallison on how reckless government policies caused the financial crisis.
The Occupy Wall Street protesters in New York appear unfocused and disorganized. WSJ's Hilke Schellmann takes a peek into the inner workings of the organization and how it is trying to manage communal living in a public space.
So much for the cliche of Wall Street versus Main Street, the greedy 1% versus the hard-done-by 99%. That may be the core conviction of Occupy Wall Street and its fellow-travelers, and it may be a slogan in nearly every Democratic campaign next year, including President Obama's. Whether or not that's smart Democratic politics, the voters will decide.
Associated Press
Occupy Wall Street protesters march around One Chase Manhattan Plaza on Wednesday in New York.
Still, if anyone in the Occupy Wall Street movement wants an intellectually honest explanation for why they can't find a job, they might start by considering what happens to an economy when the White House decides to make pinatas out of the financial-services industry (roughly 6%, or $828 billion, of U.S. GDP), the energy industry (about 7.5% of GDP, or $1 trillion), and millionaires and billionaires (who paid 20.4% of all federal income taxes in 2009). And don't forget the Administration's rhetorical volleys against individual companies like Anthem Blue Cross, AIG and Bank of America, or against Chrysler's bondholders, or various other alleged malefactors of wealth.
Now move from words to actions. Want a shovel-ready job? The Administration has spent three years sitting on the Keystone XL pipeline project that promises to create 13,000 union jobs and 118,000 "spin-off" jobs. A State Department environmental review says the project poses no threat to the environment, but the Administration's eco-friends are screaming lest it go ahead.
Dorothy Rabinowitz on the Occupy Wall Street protests.
Then there are the jobs the Administration and its allies in Congress are actively killing. In June, American Electric Power announced it would have to shutter five coal-fired power plants, at a cost of 600 jobs, in order to comply with new EPA rules. Those same rules may soon force the utility to shutter another 25 plants. Bank of America's decision last month to lay off 30,000 employees is a direct consequence of various Congressional edicts limiting how much the bank can charge merchants or how it can handle delinquent borrowers.
These visible crags of the Obama jobs iceberg are nothing next to the damage done below the waterline by the D.C. regulations factory, which last year added 81,405 pages of new rules to the Federal Register, bringing the total cost to the U.S. economy of regulatory compliance to an estimated $1.7 trillion a year.
Less easy to quantify, but no less harmful, are the long-term uncertainties employers face in trying to price in the costs of ObamaCare, Dodd-Frank, the potential expiration next year of the Bush tax cuts, the possible millionaire surcharge, the value of the dollar and so on. No wonder businesses are so reluctant to hire: When you don't know how steep the trail ahead of you is, it's usually better to travel light.
This probably won't do much to persuade the Occupiers of Wall Street that their cause would be better served in Washington, D.C., where a sister sit-in this week seems to have fizzled. Then again, most of America's jobless also won't recognize their values or interests in the warmed-over anticapitalism being served up in lower Manhattan. Three years into the current Administration, most Americans are getting wise to the source of their economic woes. It's a couple hundred miles south of Wall Street
Thomas Fleming: Wall Street Protesters Channel Thomas Jefferson - WSJ.com
via online.wsj.com on 10/15/11
- OPINION
- OCTOBER 13, 2011, 7:25 P.M. ET
Wall Street Protesters Channel Thomas Jefferson
The sage of Monticello thought highly of forgiving all debts. James Madison set him straight.
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By THOMAS FLEMING
'We demand the forgiveness of all debts." After several days of listening to the Occupy Wall Street protesters, I had begun to lose all hope of grasping exactly what they wanted, beyond some sort of "change." I was almost relieved to hear this endorsement of a solution to a specific problem, especially pertinent to protesters in their age group who owe millions of dollars to the federal government for the money they borrowed to go to college.
Many of the protesters who demand relief from college loans, of course, want to divert attention from their personal benefit—so they've escalated it to an overall cancellation of every debt in the country, from home mortgages to the red ink on credit cards.
Did they know, on this point, they were echoing Thomas Jefferson? If so, these protesters and their sympathizers might want to think twice.
Associated Press
Do protesters know that they're echoing Thomas Jefferson?
Debt forgiveness was not original with Jefferson, who enunciated it in a letter to his favorite correspondent, James Madison, on Sept. 6, 1789, when the French Revolution was picking up steam in Paris. Since 1784, Jefferson had been America's ambassador to France. There he had an on-the-ground view of the emergence of the historic upheaval, which he totally endorsed. The forgiveness of all debts was one of the early demands of the rebels, who declared, as Jefferson wrote in his letter, that "The earth belongs to the living."
This struck Jefferson, who was already in considerable debt back in America, as a brilliant idea. (He would die owing the equivalent of a million modern dollars.) He rushed to communicate the idea to his favorite political disciple.
Madison already had pushed through the Virginia legislature a bill by Jefferson to end the Anglican (Episcopal) Church's status as the state's established religion. Perhaps Tom thought another year of dexterous politicking by the canny Madison could turn Monticello's ledgers from red to black.
Jefferson's letter was enthusiastic, even giddy. Not only should debts be forfeited by every generation, he wrote Madison, but all the acts of government, from a constitution to the most trivial laws. By his calculations, a generation completed its career every 19 years. Thereafter, a new debtless generation would take charge, ruled by a new majority, ready and eager to create its own laws.
In a masterpiece of understatement, James Morton Smith, the editor of "The Republic of Letters," a three-volume collection of their correspondence, says Madison's reply to Jefferson's proposal was "a severe test of their friendship." Point by point, the younger man demolished Jefferson's silliness with polite but irrefutable logic.
Every generation should write its own constitution? Having just emerged from a bruising, exhausting two-year struggle to write and ratify the American charter, Madison thought repeating this task would create "pernicious factions" that would repeatedly deadlock, leaving the nation with no government at all during such "interregnums."
The earth belongs to the living? This, Madison remarked, referred to the earth "in its natural state only." It omitted the crucial importance of the improvements made by the dead, from which the living benefit. The same was true for debts, many of which were contracted by governments and individuals to "benefit posterity as well as the living generation." There was, Madison thought, "a foundation in the nature of things" for the descent of obligations from one generation to another. "Mutual good is promoted by it."
Madison closed by diplomatically suggesting that the United States, just beginning its career under the new Constitution, was not ready for such "philosophical legislation." It would take a long time for the "sublime truths" of philosophy to become visible "to the naked eye of the ordinary politician." Although I am sure Madison did not intend it, those closing words come close to sarcasm.
Jefferson never mentioned the idea again to Madison or anyone else.
Mr. Fleming, a former president of the Society of American Historians, is the author, most recently, of "The Intimate Lives of the Founding Fathers" (Smithsonian, 2009).
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