Hippies and Scraggly Facial Hair: A Love Story

Panic of the Plutocrats

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: October 9, 2011

It remains to be seen whether the Occupy Wall Street protests will change America’s direction.

It will. The American people are seeing hippies crapping on cop cars. They’re seeing throngs of privileged nitwits blocking the Brooklyn Bridge and being arrested en masse. They’re seeing whatever the hell this creepiness is (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3QZlp3eGMNI). After hearing about the anti-intellectualism of conservatism, they’re seeing aspiring intellectuals paralyzed into perpetual indecision by their own lack of mental dexterity and a natural timidity.  After hearing about [heretofore unseen] bigotry and racism at Tea Party rallies, they’re seeing the influence of anti-Semitism in Occupy Wall Street. After hearing about the [heretofore unseen] rage of the right, they’re seeing left-wing mobs on the brink of riot. After chiding conservatives for using socialist as an ad hominem epithet, they’re seeing the rise of a movement that is proudly anticapitalist. If that doesn’t give the country a violent shove to the right, then it might be too late for America.

Yet the protests have already elicited a remarkably hysterical reaction from Wall Street,

Namely, laughing hysterically at the poor little dullards. In fact, I haven’t seen anything resembling a reaction from Wall Street.

the super-rich in general, and politicians and pundits who reliably serve the interests of the wealthiest hundredth of a percent.

Paul Krugman’s already got the verbiage down! Accuse the rich and the superlatively rich of ill-defined nefariousness. Imply a moral superiority to the tyranny of the majority, and stay short on specifics.

And this reaction tells you something important —

The laughing? Yeah, it tells us that we, thankfully, still have a sense of humor.

namely, that the extremists threatening American values are what F.D.R. called “economic royalists,” not the people camping in Zuccotti Park.

First, Wall Street is not extreme in any sense of the word (in fact, it is usually a moderating force.) Second, I don’t think Paul Krugman could name an “American” value if he tried. Third, the assertion here is that the wealthy (and those that protect their interests) are anti-American simply by virtue of having wealth.

If Krugman believes wealth to be anti-American, is it any surprise that his vision for our nation’s future is steeped in poverty?

Consider first how Republican politicians have portrayed the modest-sized if growing demonstrations,

Non-sequitur Number One: That Republicans are the party of Wall Street. Of course, the exact opposite is actually true. Wall Street lies in the heart of a big blue city in a big blue state in a big blue region and Democrats take more money—by a wide margin—from the financial institutions than Republicans.

which have involved some

[many]

confrontations with the police — confrontations that seem to have involved a lot of police overreaction —

I guess the statute of limitations on criticizing the NYPD from the 9/11 attacks has finally lapsed for liberals. Krugman’s got ten years of pent-up rage against the police built up.

but nothing one could call a riot. And there has in fact been nothing so far to match the behavior of Tea Party crowds in the summer of 2009.

The Tea Party was and is clean, civil, and purposeful. Occupy Wall Street is none of the above. Virtually every rancorous allegation against the Tea Party has been disproved; virtually every hyperbolic allegation against Occupy Wall Street has been corroborated on video.

Nonetheless, Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, has denounced “mobs” and “the pitting of Americans against Americans.”

He happens to be completely right.

The G.O.P. presidential candidates have weighed in, with Mitt Romney accusing the protesters of waging “class warfare,”

You just said that wealth was anti-American. One would think that “class warfare” is something that you would want to own up to.

while Herman Cain calls them “anti-American.”

Which is obviously beyond the pale to someone who believes that the wealthy are “extremists [that are] threatening American values.”

My favorite, however, is Senator Rand Paul, who for some reason worries that the protesters will start seizing iPads, because they believe rich people don’t deserve to have them.

There are four components to Paul’s comments: 1) The protesters don’t believe the rich deserve their wealth. 2) The lack of deserving empowers the protesters, in their own minds, to seize and redistribute those assets. 3) They may do so by force. 4) That wealth is roughly represented in the primiative mind of the mob by iPads.

None of these items is contested by those at the protests or anyone who ascribes to the progressive agenda. Plus, they’re all big Apple users, because, frankly, Apple users generally suck. The sole point if differentiation is that they usually want the government to function as a redistributionist mob by proxy.

Michael Bloomberg, New York’s mayor and a financial-industry titan in his own right, was a bit more moderate, but still accused the protesters of trying to “take the jobs away from people working in this city,” a statement that bears no resemblance to the movement’s actual goals.

Have you seen the movement’s actual goals? http://occupywallst.org/forum/proposed-list-of-demands-for-occupy-wall-st-moveme/ All but two of those items will immediately reduce employment. If New York had a mayor that didn’t sprain his vagina in a freak knitting accident, this disruptive bacchanalia of collegiate ennui would be broken up by dusk.

And if you were listening to talking heads on CNBC, you learned that the protesters “let their freak flags fly,” and are “aligned with Lenin.”

That’s being generous. Reports are that Occupy Wall Street is becoming a mass drug den.

The way to understand all of this

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is to realize

This is already the second infinitive verb of the sentence.

that it’s

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part of a broader syndrome,

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in which wealthy Americans who benefit hugely

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from a system rigged in their favor

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react with hysteria

Maybe Krugman’s got a different idea of hysteria than the rest of us. The evidence that he presented in support of the claim of hysteria are:

a) Cantor’s statements that Occupy Wall Street is a “mob” that “pit[s] Americans against one another.” This, of course, is both true, and decidedly un-hysterical.

b) Mitt Romney calling Occupy Wall Street “class warfare.” Personally, I wasn’t aware that this charge was either insulting or contested.

c) Herman Cain calling Occupy Wall Street “un-American,” which is referenced mere moments after Krugman asserts that the wealthy are “extremists [that are] threatening American values.”

d) Rand Paul asserting that these riots have the potential to turn into riots (which still pales in comparison to Nancy Pelosi claiming that the Tea Party was going to re-kill Harvey Milk) is also completely true.

e) Michael Bloomberg thinks that these protests could cost the city jobs, which is also folly to argue against.

These all seem like well-founded assertions of fact or predictions based on observed behavior.

to anyone who points out just how rigged the system is.

The only things that Occupy Wall Street has pointed out are the merits of internal plumbing.

Last year, you may recall, a number of financial-industry barons went wild over very mild criticism from President Obama.

I don’t recall, but go on.

They denounced Mr. Obama as being almost a socialist for endorsing the so-called Volcker rule, which would simply prohibit banks backed by federal guarantees from engaging in risky speculation.

Considering that banks entire means of making a profit is their ability to assess, manage, and valuate risk, that proposal is roughly akin to telling General Motors that its cars couldn’t have wheels.

And as for their reaction to proposals to close a loophole that lets some of them pay remarkably low taxes —

The capital gains tax rate is not a loophole. Those funds have already been subjected to corporate tax.

well, Stephen Schwarzman, chairman of the Blackstone Group, compared it to Hitler’s invasion of Poland.

None of us were aghast because no one except his mother and a handful of industry insiders knows who Stephen Schwarzman is.

And then there’s the campaign of character assassination against Elizabeth Warren,

She’s a senatorial candidate. If you want to start talking “character assassination,” the conversation begins with me saying “Christine O’Donnell,” continues with you immediately conceding, and ends with some light trash talk and a few minutes of victory dancing with my mad pop-and-lock skillz.

the financial reformer

Uh…she was a presidential advisor and the candidate to run an organization established by a bill that will be repealed in 15 months. She didn’t actually reform much of anything.

now running for the Senate in Massachusetts. Not long ago a YouTube video of Ms. Warren making an eloquent, down-to-earth case for taxes on the rich

Paul, if I weren’t completely convinced that the male erection was unachievable within eyeshot of Elizabeth Warren, I’d say you flirting.

(Author’s note: this comment originally implied various sexual fetishes and alluded to Pulp Fiction. Be glad I toned it down.)

went viral. Nothing about what she said was radical — it was no more than a modern riff on Oliver Wendell Holmes’s famous dictum that “Taxes are what we pay for civilized society.”

Not a single conservative or Tea Party member—not even the furthest right member of Ron Paul’s cadre of cultists—believes that taxes should not exist. Not one. Warren’s implications were as inane as their premise was flawed. The comments were seized upon both because it underscored just how silly the left is about economics, and because it gives cover to the notion that the wealthy, who already pay exorbitant taxes, are somehow mooching from the rest of us. That is precisely ass-backwards.

But listening to the reliable defenders of the wealthy, you’d think that Ms. Warren was the second coming of Leon Trotsky.

Why not? One White House insider already openly lavishes praise on Mao.

George Will declared that she has a “collectivist agenda,”

She doesn’t?

that she believes that “individualism is a chimera.”

Definition of chimera: “A vain or idle fancy”

Warren’s comments: “There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody.” She was, of course, implying that the idea of individual wealth was a vain or idle fancy.

Is the connection really that hard to make?

And Rush Limbaugh called her “a parasite who hates her host. Willing to destroy the host while she sucks the life out of it.”

Neither is this particularly specific to Warren nor is it particularly barbed. Outside of getting your rocks off on being her white knight, what the hell is the point of this aside, Paul?

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.

Wait…what?  The world-beaters that chant “What do we want? We’re not really sure!” have slyly unmasked the impenetrable veneer of capitalism and forced its adherents to admit it was all just a crazy sham?

They’re not John Galt;

If you want to go with the Atlas Shrugged reference, Midas Mulligan was the banker amongst the heroes. Not coincidentally, he was also the first character to join Galt’s strike. Just saying.

they’re not even Steve Jobs.

But I’m guessing that Steve Jobs needed a banker or venture capitalist for Apple’s early financing.

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

How is it possible that risk bundling and derivative securities are responsible for the inherent lack of value to their underlying assets? This might have been too complex an argument for one sentence, but suffice it to say that this argument is about as well thought-out as Mel Gibson’s position vis-à-vis the Jews.

whose aftereffects continue to blight the lives of tens of millions of their fellow citizens.

I bet life is much simpler when you can just blame bankers.

Yet they have paid no price.

Financial companies hit the recession just as hard as everyone else. Often worse. Tell stockowners in Lehman Brothers that they didn’t pay a price.

Their institutions were bailed out by taxpayers, with few strings attached.

Considering that a) the banks were forced by the Treasury Department to take TARP fundshttp://articles.businessinsider.com/2009-05-13/wall_street/29994241_1_scribd-bank-documents and b) they have repaid these sums with interest, http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/apr/27/treasury-has-profited-from-big-bank-bailouts/?page=all one could effectively argue that the taxpayers have been the ones to pay no price.

They continue to benefit from explicit and implicit federal guarantees — basically, they’re still in a game of heads they win, tails taxpayers lose.

So…the beef is with the government, not the banks, yes?

And they benefit from tax loopholes that in many cases have people with multimillion-dollar incomes paying lower rates than middle-class families.

You already mentioned this, and I already told you that the capital gains tax is not a loophole you doddering old fool!

This special treatment can’t bear close scrutiny — and therefore, as they see it, there must be no close scrutiny.

Most banks didn’t even want TARP. They were forced to take it. As for capital gains taxes, I welcome that argument.

Anyone who points out the obvious, no matter how calmly and moderately,

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must be demonized and driven from the stage. In fact, the more reasonable and moderate a critic sounds, the more urgently he or she must be demonized, hence the frantic sliming of Elizabeth Warren.

Elizabeth Warren sounded neither moderate nor reasonable. The problem was that she used the language of radicalism to support a truism. We don’t actually object to her overt argument. We object to the next logical step off the cliff into socialism: because people didn’t earn their wealth individually that they should not be empowered to spend it individually.

So who’s really being un-American here?

The Occupy Wall Street protesters. Elizabeth Warren. To a lesser extent, Michael Bloomberg, but that mostly has to do with him being a huge bitch. But in reality, you can’t set up a conclusion like this—as though he’s actually resolved what Americanism means at its core—without having tried to articulate the defining characteristics of Americanism or un-Americanism. It just feels like sloppy writing, and that offends me more than any of this sloppy reasoning.

Not the protesters, who are simply trying to get their voices heard.

By shitting on cop cars, doing drugs, and generally indulging in society’s leniency for misbehavior from leftist protest. Is this a protest or a temper tantraum?

No, the real extremists here are America’s oligarchs, who want to suppress any criticism of the sources of their wealth.

If you want to argue against government involvement in banking, great. You’ll find a lot of allies on the right. But if you want to argue that government should stay involved in banking, but that bankers should be vilified, lamented and ultimately pilfered, well then fuck you, Krugman. The simple truth of the matter is that these protests are about replacing capitalism with a player to be named later because these buffoons haven’t really thought it through. They want to reshape America without any real understanding of what’s wrong, why, or what they want. The result is always going to be statist, whether it’s fascist or socialist or despotism. And, like these protests, it’s always going to be un-American.