I love what is going on in New York and across the country right now but the whole idea seems to be lacking direction. So far I have heard that the people involved are there to protest everything from the war in Afghanistan to Big Oil Lobbyists to the Federal Reserve to Wall Street to animal rights to environmental regulations.
I feel like such a vast swath of initiatives is holding the movement back. From a personal standpoint, I would love to see changes with our country’s archaic tax code and lack of Wall Street regulations. But I also see the value with the ongoing war in Afghanistan. So for that reason only, I don’t think I could join the cause. As far as I am concerned, I am happy to fund a hell-fire missile for every person who even thinks about blowing a spit-wad at the United States.
That being said, I am a staunch detractor for everything that goes on between Wall Street and Washington DC. I never was, until the “To Big to Fail” concept came about.
If you are going to operate a business in a free enterprise environment, you are just as free to go out of business for your bad decisions as you are to profit from good ones. At least that is how I was taught that it should work.
When I was in school, and my made up business was crumbling to the ground because of my decision to pump all of my fake money into fake radio based advertising and my extremely bloated payroll, I don’t remember having the option to lobby the Federal Reserve for money to get back on my feet. My only options were to report my fake losses and go into Chapter 11. This is where my business stayed in college for the majority of my two years in those classes. Each quarter; I was posting massive fake losses. Eventually, it came down to headcount and lousy marketing decisions on my part. I fired half on my fake staff, decreasing my fake output to meet the fake demand, and began advertising online and on television. By the time the second year ended, I was able to pay off my fake debt and basically break even. Two more years, and I would have been profitable, I think. Basically I was employing twice the amount of people I needed in order to service the amount of demand in my market and I had to trim the fat (I also suck at marketing). This is how the game SHOULD work and how it does for most people who run a business.
People often try to justify the Wall Street bailouts on some massive systemic, global problem that you need a doctorate in macro-economics to understand, when, in reality, it can be simplified quite easily.
Supply and Demand are absolutely everything. In the 90’s and early 2000’s, there was a massive demand for mortgage backed securities originating mostly from within the United States. You see, anyone who worked part time at Taco Bell was being approved for a 250,000 dollar house, in those days.
Next, all of the companies that had a hand in lending those mortgages and then reselling them as bundled “investments” abroad grew their staff to accommodate that demand. They built skyscrapers, hired thousands of people, inflated their operational costs and reaped massive profits for years.
Then the demand went away. People abroad realized that buying a bunch of poor people who can’t pay their bill’s mortgages was probably one of the worst investments anyone could have ever made, so they stopped buying them. Wall Street, realizing that nobody wanted their crappy mortgage backed securities anymore immediately put a stop to mortgage lending. After all, why would you want a bunch more mortgages if you can no longer trick people into repurchasing them?
At this point, we have a bunch of extraordinarily bloated multi-national corporations who were rebranded and modeled around this terrible, crooked business model.
What SHOULD have happened at this point is the CEO’s of these companies should have immediately reorganized their companies to match the new level of demand (none). This would have forced many of them out of business and cost many thousands of people to lose their jobs at the firms responsible for this calamity. It also, would have forced countless other people who supported those companies out of business. It would have been horrible for a lot of people and for the stock markets but it would have ripped the band-aid off much faster.
Instead, the companies went to Washington and somehow managed to secure billions of dollars from the Federal Reserve in order to stay afloat. So now, you have a bunch of huge, bloated, borderline worthless, multi-national corporations operating on everyone else’s dime. This is NOT how the game should work.
To put this in laymen’s terms, it would be like someone running a lemonade stand and at some point they found that if you put cocaine in the lemonade, it would taste sweeter and people would “like it” more and start demanding it every day. The next thing you know, the lemonade stand grows to a full blown juice bar with 50 employees working around the clock selling their cocaine lased lemonade. Then someone blows the whistle and overnight everyone realizes that there are illegal drugs in their lemonade and nobody wants it anymore. And instead of forcing the juice bar out of business and prosecuting the management, the government gives them millions of dollars to keep it going as long as they don’t fire their 50 employees. If this sounds insane to you, you probably don’t work on Wall Street.
Instead of ripping the band aid off quickly, we decide it would be better to enjoy a long, gradual, downturn that lasts for years. Eventually the band aid has to come off. But it is easier for Wall Street if it comes off over years of recession and lending freezes and countless corporate reorganization when they should have just forced them into bankruptcy in 2008 and been done with it.
All that this arduous downturn has done is passed the headache from Wall Street to Main Street who was already dealing with Trillions in government debt, the inability to secure loans for the things they need, wages that don’t match inflation, retirement money disappearing, bear markets, record oil prices and an absolutely stagnant jobs market.
Now things like loans that were difficult to get have become borderline impossible to secure for years on end. Small businesses that had run honestly for decades are forced out of business or have to trim their staffs as their demand decreases on account of nobody having money for what they are selling anymore. So these problems along with the debt and deficits that were created on Wall Street are effectively diluted back onto the consuming public (Main Street).
This would be why I am pissed off. You can’t make this shit up. This is something I feel strongly enough about to protest. This, to me, is a complete disgrace worthy of occupying Wall Street and or Washington for giving them our money on account of running corrupt enterprises into the ground. If I had to make up a word to describe it, it would be “Shammockery”.
This is why these folks should be occupying Wall Street. Not to protest a war or the environment. If you want to protest those things, Wall Street is not the venue. If you ask someone who is at a protest “What are you protesting?” and you get a different answer from everyone you ask, it starts to just sound like a group of whiney people who are just there to bitch about everything. One, united cause is much more effective.
Draft a mission statement that everyone can agree upon and rally around that. Here is one I have come up with…
“We gather here in Wall Street in protest of Washington’s continued coddling of crooked business owners on our dime who, through their dubious, panicked financial decisions have created an unsustainable economy for the vast majority of American’s to live in.”
I find the idea of this protest to be particularly scary in that it encompasses so many large issues. The fact that there are these many people who feel this strongly about so many different things demonstrates a complete failure of our leadership.
People have begun comparing the protesters to the “Hippies” from the 60’s and 70’s. Well all they were protesting was Vietnam and for good reason. While they were against the war at the time, they still had a livelihood to return to at the end of the day. Most of these people don’t, and at that point, is where it becomes dangerous. You can’t have one systemic failure stacked on top of another and expect people to keep calm for very long.
The youth of the movement is also particularly concerning. Massive amounts of young people, who have taken out loans to complete college and still can’t get jobs, is a recipe for disaster. And when your government’s only idea of job creation is to put people to work fixing bridges, it quickly becomes apparent that this problem isn’t going away anytime soon. These kids, should be priority one, before they figure out how they were essentially duped into financing a college education that would essentially amount to them competing with tens of thousands of other kids with the same education for a handful of available jobs.
While, I don’t believe it should be the government’s responsibility to create specific jobs, I do believe it should be the role of the government to ensure the environment available to the private sector to create jobs is serviceable. They are not doing this. Instead, they are fostering an elitist environment which only works for people in the upper classes. You see people on the news networks use the term “class warfare” and immediately dismiss the notion and smile and then move onto some story about a pig that can ride a wake board. Well, I think “class warfare” pretty much sums it up at this point, no? What would you call the idea of passing the pain of corporate millionaire fuck ups onto the lower class? Eventually that reality will set in. As soon as they can all get over the “How could this happen in America” way of thinking.
I have spent days of my life contemplating how you fix a screw up like what we witnessed in 2008 which is a level of concentration, on my part, that is rarely put forth. And I have no idea. All that I seem to be able to land on are impossible to accomplish scenarios that overhaul everything from checking account interest rates to the laws outlining the proximity with which investment banks are allowed to operate near one another, to forgiving all private sector debt and starting over. Whatever is done to fix this, is going to have to be a huge paradigm shift in how a lot of different things work at a fundamental level. And there is no way to fix it without severely pissing some large group of people off. And with our current collection of blue hairs who hate one another in DC, I don’t see any of it happening anytime soon. So buckle your seat belts America, this is setting up to be a long and dangerous ride. I have a feeling we are all about to find out how just hard the American populous can make the hammer fall.
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