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Says it all. But I don't expect this to dent the thick skulls of those on here who think it's all about envying the rich and wanting something for nothing. Funny thing is most of you who think that are being f@cked slower or faster by the same machine, guess you like that sort of thing though. Lot of Stockholm syndrome going on around here with the abused identifying with and helping their abusers.

Wall Street Isn't Winning – It's Cheating
Matt Taibbi
Rolling Stone Magazine
POSTED: October 25, 9:26 AM ET

A protestor's sign expresses the sentiment of the Occupy Wall Street movement at a Occupy Wall Street protest in London.BEN STANSALL/AFP/Getty ImagesI was at an event on the Upper East Side last Friday night when I got to talking with a salesman in the media business. The subject turned to Zuccotti Park and Occupy Wall Street, and he was chuckling about something he'd heard on the news.

"I hear [Occupy Wall Street] has a CFO," he said. "I think that's funny."

"Okay, I'll bite," I said. "Why is that funny?"

"Well, I heard they're trying to decide what bank to put their money in," he said, munching on hors d'oeuvres. "It's just kind of ironic."

Oh, Christ, I thought. He’s saying the protesters are hypocrites because they’re using banks. I sighed.

"Listen," I said, "where else are you going to put three hundred thousand dollars? A shopping bag?"

"Well," he said, "it's just, their protests are all about... You know..."

"Dude," I said. "These people aren't protesting money. They're not protesting banking. They're protesting corruption on Wall Street."

"Whatever," he said, shrugging.

These nutty criticisms of the protests are spreading like cancer. Earlier that same day, I'd taped a TV segment on CNN with Will Cain from the National Review, and we got into an argument on the air. Cain and I agreed about a lot of the problems on Wall Street, but when it came to the protesters, we disagreed on one big thing.

Cain said he believed that the protesters are driven by envy of the rich.

"I find the one thing [the protesters] have in common revolves around the human emotions of envy and entitlement," he said. "What you have is more than what I have, and I'm not happy with my situation."

Cain seems like a nice enough guy, but I nearly blew my stack when I heard this. When you take into consideration all the theft and fraud and market manipulation and other evil **** Wall Street bankers have been guilty of in the last ten-fifteen years, you have to have balls like church bells to trot out a propaganda line that says the protesters are just jealous of their hard-earned money.

Think about it: there have always been rich and poor people in America, so if this is about jealousy, why the protests now? The idea that masses of people suddenly discovered a deep-seated animus/envy toward the rich – after keeping it strategically hidden for decades – is crazy.

Where was all that class hatred in the Reagan years, when openly dumping on the poor became fashionable? Where was it in the last two decades, when unions disappeared and CEO pay relative to median incomes started to triple and quadruple?

The answer is, it was never there. If anything, just the opposite has been true. Americans for the most part love the rich, even the obnoxious rich. And in recent years, the harder things got, the more we've obsessed over the wealth dream. As unemployment skyrocketed, people tuned in in droves to gawk at Evrémonde-heiresses like Paris Hilton, or watch bullies like Donald Trump fire people on TV.

Moreover, the worse the economy got, the more being a millionaire or a billionaire somehow became a qualification for high office, as people flocked to voting booths to support politicians with names like Bloomberg and Rockefeller and Corzine, names that to voters symbolized success and expertise at a time when few people seemed to have answers. At last count, there were 245 millionaires in congress, including 66 in the Senate.

And we hate the rich? Come on. Success is the national religion, and almost everyone is a believer. Americans love winners. But that's just the problem. These guys on Wall Street are not winning – they're cheating. And as much as we love the self-made success story, we hate the cheater that much more.

In this country, we cheer for people who hit their own home runs – not shortcut-chasing juicers like Bonds and McGwire, Blankfein and Dimon.

That's why it's so obnoxious when people say the protesters are just sore losers who are jealous of these smart guys in suits who beat them at the game of life. This isn't disappointment at having lost. It's anger because those other guys didn't really win. And people now want the score overturned.

All weekend I was thinking about this “jealousy” question, and I just kept coming back to all the different ways the game is rigged. People aren't jealous and they don’t want privileges. They just want a level playing field, and they want Wall Street to give up its cheat codes, things like:

FREE MONEY. Ordinary people have to borrow their money at market rates. Lloyd Blankfein and Jamie Dimon get billions of dollars for free, from the Federal Reserve. They borrow at zero and lend the same money back to the government at two or three percent, a valuable public service otherwise known as "standing in the middle and taking a gigantic cut when the government decides to lend money to itself."

Or the banks borrow billions at zero and lend mortgages to us at four percent, or credit cards at twenty or twenty-five percent. This is essentially an official government license to be rich, handed out at the expense of prudent ordinary citizens, who now no longer receive much interest on their CDs or other saved income. It is virtually impossible to not make money in banking when you have unlimited access to free money, especially when the government keeps buying its own cash back from you at market rates.

Your average chimpanzee couldn't **** up that business plan, which makes it all the more incredible that most of the too-big-to-fail banks are nonetheless still functionally insolvent, and dependent upon bailouts and phony accounting to stay above water. Where do the protesters go to sign up for their interest-free billion-dollar loans?

CREDIT AMNESTY. If you or I miss a $7 payment on a Gap card or, heaven forbid, a mortgage payment, you can forget about the great computer in the sky ever overlooking your mistake. But serial financial fuckups like Citigroup and Bank of America overextended themselves by the hundreds of billions and pumped trillions of dollars of deadly leverage into the system -- and got rewarded with things like the Temporary Liquidity Guarantee Program, an FDIC plan that allowed irresponsible banks to borrow against the government's credit rating.

This is equivalent to a trust fund teenager who trashes six consecutive off-campus apartments and gets rewarded by having Daddy co-sign his next lease. The banks needed programs like TLGP because without them, the market rightly would have started charging more to lend to these idiots. Apparently, though, we can’t trust the free market when it comes to Bank of America, Goldman, Sachs, Citigroup, etc.

In a larger sense, the TBTF banks all have the implicit guarantee of the federal government, so investors know it's relatively safe to lend to them -- which means it's now cheaper for them to borrow money than it is for, say, a responsible regional bank that didn't jack its debt-to-equity levels above 35-1 before the crash and didn't dabble in toxic mortgages. In other words, the TBTF banks got better credit for being less responsible. Click on freecreditscore.com to see if you got the same deal.

STUPIDITY INSURANCE. Defenders of the banks like to talk a lot about how we shouldn't feel sorry for people who've been foreclosed upon, because it's their own fault for borrowing more than they can pay back, buying more house than they can afford, etc. And critics of OWS have assailed protesters for complaining about things like foreclosure by claiming these folks want “something for nothing.”

This is ironic because, as one of the Rolling Stone editors put it last week, “something for nothing is Wall Street’s official policy." In fact, getting bailed out for bad investment decisions has been de rigeur on Wall Street not just since 2008, but for decades.

Time after time, when big banks screw up and make irresponsible bets that blow up in their faces, they've scored bailouts. It doesn't matter whether it was the Mexican currency bailout of 1994 (when the state bailed out speculators who gambled on the peso) or the IMF/World Bank bailout of Russia in 1998 (a bailout of speculators in the "emerging markets") or the Long-Term Capital Management Bailout of the same year (in which the rescue of investors in a harebrained hedge-fund trading scheme was deemed a matter of international urgency by the Federal Reserve), Wall Street has long grown accustomed to getting bailed out for its mistakes.

The 2008 crash, of course, birthed a whole generation of new bailout schemes. Banks placed billions in bets with AIG and should have lost their shirts when the firm went under -- AIG went under, after all, in large part because of all the huge mortgage bets the banks laid with the firm -- but instead got the state to pony up $180 billion or so to rescue the banks from their own bad decisions.

This sort of thing seems to happen every time the banks do something dumb with their money. Just recently, the French and Belgian authorities cooked up a massive bailout of the French bank Dexia, whose biggest trading partners included, surprise, surprise, Goldman, Sachs and Morgan Stanley. Here's how the New York Times explained the bailout:

To limit damage from Dexia’s collapse, the bailout fashioned by the French and Belgian governments may make these banks and other creditors whole — that is, paid in full for potentially tens of billions of euros they are owed. This would enable Dexia’s creditors and trading partners to avoid losses they might otherwise suffer...

When was the last time the government stepped into help you "avoid losses you might otherwise suffer?" But that's the reality we live in. When Joe Homeowner bought too much house, essentially betting that home prices would go up, and losing his bet when they dropped, he was an irresponsible putz who shouldn’t whine about being put on the street.

But when banks bet billions on a firm like AIG that was heavily invested in mortgages, they were making the same bet that Joe Homeowner made, leaving themselves hugely exposed to a sudden drop in home prices. But instead of being asked to "suck it in and cope" when that bet failed, the banks instead went straight to Washington for a bailout -- and got it.

UNGRADUATED TAXES. I've already gone off on this more than once, but it bears repeating. Bankers on Wall Street pay lower tax rates than most car mechanics. When Warren Buffet released his tax information, we learned that with taxable income of $39 million, he paid $6.9 million in taxes last year, a tax rate of about 17.4%.

Most of Buffet’s income, it seems, was taxed as either "carried interest" (i.e. hedge-fund income) or long-term capital gains, both of which carry 15% tax rates, half of what many of the Zucotti park protesters will pay.

As for the banks, as companies, we've all heard the stories. Goldman, Sachs in 2008 – this was the same year the bank reported $2.9 billion in profits, and paid out over $10 billion in compensation -- paid just $14 million in taxes, a 1% tax rate.

Bank of America last year paid not a single dollar in taxes -- in fact, it received a "tax credit" of $1 billion. There are a slew of troubled companies that will not be paying taxes for years, including Citigroup and CIT.

When GM bought the finance company AmeriCredit, it was able to marry its long-term losses to AmeriCredit's revenue stream, creating a tax windfall worth as much as $5 billion. So even though AmeriCredit is expected to post earnings of $8-$12 billion in the next decade or so, it likely won't pay any taxes during that time, because its revenue will be offset by GM's losses.

Thank God our government decided to pledge $50 billion of your tax dollars to a rescue of General Motors! You just paid for one of the world's biggest tax breaks.

And last but not least, there is:

GET OUT OF JAIL FREE. One thing we can still be proud of is that America hasn't yet managed to achieve the highest incarceration rate in history -- that honor still goes to the Soviets in the Stalin/Gulag era. But we do still have about 2.3 million people in jail in America.

Virtually all 2.3 million of those prisoners come from "the 99%." Here is the number of bankers who have gone to jail for crimes related to the financial crisis: 0.

Millions of people have been foreclosed upon in the last three years. In most all of those foreclosures, a regional law enforcement office -- typically a sheriff's office -- was awarded fees by the court as part of the foreclosure settlement, settlements which of course were often rubber-stamped by a judge despite mountains of perjurious robosigned evidence.

That means that every single time a bank kicked someone out of his home, a local police department got a cut. Local sheriff's offices also get cuts of almost all credit card judgments, and other bank settlements. If you're wondering how it is that so many regional police departments have the money for fancy new vehicles and SWAT teams and other accoutrements, this is one of your answers.

What this amounts to is the banks having, as allies, a massive armed police force who are always on call, ready to help them evict homeowners and safeguard the repossession of property. But just see what happens when you try to call the police to prevent an improper foreclosure. Then, suddenly, the police will not get involved. It will be a "civil matter" and they won't intervene.

The point being: if you miss a few home payments, you have a very high likelihood of colliding with a police officer in the near future. But if you defraud a pair of European banks out of a billion dollars -- that's a billion, with a b -- you will never be arrested, never see a policeman, never see the inside of a jail cell.

Your settlement will be worked out not with armed police, but with regulators in suits who used to work for your company or one like it. And you'll have, defending you, a former head of that regulator's agency. In the end, a fine will be paid to the government, but it won't come out of your pocket personally; it will be paid by your company's shareholders. And there will be no admission of criminal wrongdoing.

The Abacus case, in which Goldman helped a hedge fund guy named John Paulson beat a pair of European banks for a billion dollars, tells you everything you need to know about the difference between our two criminal justice systems. The settlement was $550 million -- just over half of the damage.

Can anyone imagine a common thief being caught by police and sentenced to pay back half of what he took? Just one low-ranking individual in that case was charged (case pending), and no individual had to reach into his pocket to help cover the fine. The settlement Goldman paid to to the government was about 1/24th of what Goldman received from the government just in the AIG bailout. And that was the toughest "punishment" the government dished out to a bank in the wake of 2008.

The point being: we have a massive police force in America that outside of lower Manhattan prosecutes crime and imprisons citizens with record-setting, factory-level efficiency, eclipsing the incarceration rates of most of history's more notorious police states and communist countries.

But the bankers on Wall Street don't live in that heavily-policed country. There are maybe 1000 SEC agents policing that sector of the economy, plus a handful of FBI agents. There are nearly that many police officers stationed around the polite crowd at Zucotti park.

These inequities are what drive the OWS protests. People don't want handouts. It's not a class uprising and they don't want civil war -- they want just the opposite. They want everyone to live in the same country, and live by the same rules. It's amazing that some people think that that's asking a lot.



Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/owss-beef-wall-street-isnt-winning-its-cheating-20111025#ixzz1cfYua9uY

thats great and most reasonable people would not disagree that coprorations have engineered an advantage over decades.

However thats not the message that everyone in OWS is putting out. Last week a manifesto of demands came out that included everything from members of Congress and the Senate should be minimum wage and a 75% income tax on millionaires.

The issue isn't with the people who agree with the above; its with the lunatic fringe they surround themselves with.

One of my companies clients is a Wall St firm and I have actually walked by the park. If it was only people with the above message they would get some respect. If they got rid of the criminals and the drug addicts they would get some respect. If they would use some of the 500k that has been donated for facilites they would get some respect.

and before you tell me how wrong I am - walk by the park. Its a disgusting mess and a joke.

I'm sure rigging the system and cheating the mass of people in this country into poverty or ever diminishing standards of living is just the manifestation of superior natural ability on the part of those few select individuals who are in the position to give the 99% a long, hard F#cking.

I'm sure that those benefit from the system of granting themselves free money at our expense are to be admired and not reviled. I'm sure pure capitalism that allows those placing bets above a certain minimum to walk away with other people's money is so much better than a system that requires accountability for financial accountability only for those who aren't engaged in a socialist transfer of wealth to the rich as part of an organized enterprise that should be criminally prosecutable but isn't because it's bought and paid for lax laws and relief from prosecution even where they've broken laws.

I'm sure all those people complaining about this are just lazy f@cking whiners with no legitimate points or grievances.

and they should change their slogan to we are the 98%. Not only are they protesting the top 1% but they are trying to get the police to remove the crazy and professional homeless people. Which is of course the very defintion of irony.

http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/occupy-wall-street-central-a-rift-growing-east-west-sides-plaza-article-1.969320

Those are the people that you guys on the right are always quoting and saying they are part of the protest when they are just there for food, support and warmth. Like the anti-semite dude down there. He's actually been there all year long with his crappy signs and didn't show up for the protest.

There is also a difference between charity and justice. Fighting for justice for all people does not mean one needs to give up everything they own for charity. You are thinking of what jesus told christians to do, "If you wish to be complete, go and sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow Me."

There it is. Boiled down to the essence of it all for OWS. Whatever.

Whatever message you wanted to convey was drowned by the sea of whirling dervish plastic pail beaters.

Whatever demands they wanted aired were stained by pooing on private property.

Whatever change they effectively railed for were guffawed by the Twinkles & the Zombiespeak Show.

Tried to compare it to Ghandi and MLK. Whatever.

Couldn't see that they were being co-opted and their message prostituted because they couldn't unify it to the snippet thinking Americans desire now for information and entertainment. Whatever.

Now we're seeing the cities one by one abort the Occupoopers like the non-viable entity that they are. The media has already turned their collective backs on them. The only platform that holds them in any regard is the Kenyan King. Boiled down, it's his base. These tatted up filthy drugged hazed trust funded spoiled 20somethings is what he has left as a major bloc.

No, this is being shut down. Let them quibble over how and were to park their 500K in "donations". This should be fun to watch. I'd love it if in the spirit of their grand "movement" if they gave it to the park owners to pay for cleaning the place they defiled or to the city to pay for the police overtime they inflicted upon the city coffers but they'll most likely cash it all in on $1's and $5's and throw it all down on the pavement. A virtual cash grab free-for-all just like the institution they wanted to demonize.

Whatever.

Atlas Shrugged.


One more time for the slow people that can't keep up with original posts here.

This kind of societal discontent is never manifested in a nice, clean, clear organized way to begin with. The good thing is the real issues are getting more attention as a result, now if the elements involved, that can articulate the political and financial legal reforms that need to be driven, can de distilled from the overall messiness, that would be the desirable evolution that could gain some traction.

nope. not the only points I made. see above

Firebombing a port
ridiculous demands
sexual assaults
drugs
trying to remove the bottom 1%

thats a little more than lack of leadership

pdx begins with:
"Says it all. But I don't expect this to dent the thick skulls of those on here who think it's all about envying the rich and wanting something for nothing. Funny thing is most of you who think that are being f@cked slower or faster by the same machine, guess you like that sort of thing though. Lot of Stockholm syndrome going on around here with the abused identifying with and helping their abusers."


Based on this opening statement, does the OP want to:

A. have the reader review the information and offer up unbiased opinions for discussion.
B. try to force his own views onto others by belittling those who think differently.


It's truly sad.

Firebombing? Yeah, not a great thing but the anarchists show up to these things all the time and they tend to do that. Been happening for decades, perhaps you've heard about it?

Demands? Your own post showed that those 'ridiculous' demands were from some people that didn't speak for the movement. So? There was a tea party guy who had a sign that called Obama a 'n*ggar', and yes, he mispelled it. So once again, should I then paint the entire tea party movement as being racist a-holes?

Assaults. Not good at all and should and will be looked into. One guy was on a sexual predator list and in the camp. Not good at all. These things are no more worse or better depending on where they happen, they are wrong everywhere, including churches.

Drugs? oooh, look out. Someone may be smoking pot. Sure I can see how there might be drugs down there, especially in NYC. Since you are walking by stuff in NYC all the time, I'm sure it's not something new for you. Lot's of people hanging out, yay, blend in, strength in numbers plus food. What more could a drug addict want? Perhaps a failure in the entire occupy concept though. Someone didn't think ahead.

I discussed the last issue a few posts back.

Oh, the horror. They should be eliminated.

Dude, where the f*ck are your priorities? You say there is a lot you agree with the OWS movement on yet you keep coming out with this crap. I no longer believe you at all.

When you are looking at trillions of our country's dollars going to policies that benefit the few instead of the entire country, the rip off of our 401k's, lack of healthcare, etc etc etc and compare it to pail banging and dancing and think the latter is more of a problem, you hace one f*cked up sense of morality and priorities.

you are truly funny.

In order for your criticism to be valid one must believe that those on the right DON't "try to force his own views onto others by belittling those who think differently".

And if he posted without comment you would say, 'well, what's your opinion? You just cut and paste and not say anything so you are a troll.'

truly funny

guess how many f*cks I give if you believe me or what you think of my morals or priorities?

if you guessed zero f*cks - you would be correct.
Because I don't give a single f*ck.


I agree with virtually everything the Tiabbi article states. Look up other articles Tiabbi has done for RS and find the one where he shows how GS has made a profit from every single bubble and every single collapse since WWII. Its a fascinating read.

But it doesnt change the fact that that the OWS is corrupted by the lunatics that they do nothing to stop or even renounce. Was there a statement today from the "real" OWS about the violence in Oakland? If there was I missed it.

there are enough people that beleive the things in the article that if an actual candidate had a platform of reform that people would vote for him. Even if he didnt win it would show that real tax paying americans are behind the movement.

My contempt comes from the fact that I actually feel that some of the points in the article are worth more respect than a bunch of dancing unwashed 21 yo hippies can bring it.

Wow, I didn't think I'd acquired the power to inhibit your expression of "unbiased opinions" here through the mere use of words. I don't know of anyone here who is susceptible to having views forced on them. In this case I'm belittling others who think differently because that's a pervasive art form practiced at a high level by 98.2% of frequent posters on this message board. Now you're trying to act like you've got some problem with it?

That's truly sad.

Party on Garth.

Shocking, really, I'm shocked beyond words here. How can I continue?

I would hope it would be obvious to everyone that from my posts and opinions alone that those sentiments apply to me as well without having to be said. It's kind of what these discussions are all about you know, different perspectives and opinions.



Oh, I see. Your continuous misrepresentation of the movement comes from a feeling of mutual agreement and the hope that the movement looks more like you? Message Yay? Presentation Nay? So this is all constructive criticism meant to help the movement. Well then if anyone should be down there protesting it should be you. If you think it needs a leader and a facelift go for it! Clean it up with all your big ideas. I would support you if you could get things moving more quickly. I'd come have a cigar with you down at the park.

If you burn you're a witch.

If you don't burn you're a witch.

Now we're getting somewhere. I think you're absolutely correct about such a candidate, but how, at a practical and pragmatic level given the present rigged money driven campaign system, do we find a candidate who will ACTUALLY champion reform instead of making backroom deals to look like he's reforming while letting the bastards off the hook to financially rape again, who would ACTUALLY not be beholden to those same people, and how do you raise enough money to get that message out against the tide of money and invective and fear that those who are threatened by such a development would sow. How do we remove all the bull****, smoke screen socio/religious moral values red herrings that the bastages in power use to divide us and keep themselves elected such that people who are like minded on the need for reforms in the financial and electoral sector can effectively unite.

Fuzz you refuse to accept the fact that it's not just the message it's the messenger. If it was just about the message then Perot would have won that election. He had the best message but during the debate he made a fatal mistake. They were bad on television. Based on what I have seen from OWS both in the media and in person they are worse.

Yup. You are the perfect idea man to lead OWS. Way to go.

Hard stuff to accomplish isn't it? There are no easy answers or solutions that you can just say 1, 2, 3 boom we're done.

We're talking about it, the media is and politicians are paying attention even if it is to call the OWS'rs idiots. Looks like they are doing the job they set out to do, get the country thinking about these issues. More to come hopefully.

The media is only marginally paying attention. The politicians are not. The "Declare victory through raising awareness" trick is not going to work.

Now you're just being bitchy again.

Remember all the rhetoric.....the game is rigged. Wall Street is cheating. Upward redistribution of wealth.

Wall Street and the politicians are all in league with the evil 1%ers.

You'll settle for people talking about it.

Damn, I can't get anything right huh? I'm so depressed. I guess you are saying I should want what then, revolution? Do I have to be for violent revolution to be serious enough? Wait, that's not good enough, I need to actually lead the violent revolution and kill the rich to think the issues are serious for you to approve of me having an opinion.

Ok, that I agree with. Not sure what that has to do with your position though. People are complacent. That complacency has lead to this wretched situation. Now we have people who are trying to bring attention to these issues and they are shaking people out of complacency and the only thing you see is dancing hippies.

Wrong. Not where I was headed. it's interesting that there's no acknowledgement of the fact that I've made posts critical of Obama and expressed discontent with the single ownership model of the two parties in the last several months. I think the direction needs to be an independent party in the context of campaign financing reform legislation.