More from Taibbi:
Wall Street Isn't Winning – It's Cheating. (Via
Evanier)
I 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 Zucotti 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, they're 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.
Back in college I went to a Winona LaDuke rally, and an acquaintance of mine said afterward that she's a hypocrite for criticizing environmental waste via a powered sound system at a lighted, temperature-controlled auditorium that she had arrived at via (presumably gas-powered) automobile.
I told her that no, living in a cave is not in fact a good way to get the message out that people should be less wasteful, and that it is possible to use products and services while simultaneously suggesting they should be improved.
Anyhow, Taibbi goes on to respond to the "Poor people are just jealous" argument by pointing out, over a half-dozen clearly-defined examples, that no, poor people just think rich people should play by the same rules.
Which was my takeaway from his last article, too: that what OWS and the Tea Party have in common is that they both want a fair shake. Both sides are completely fucking livid that the banks got bailed out and experienced no negative consequences for wrecking the economy, with those consequences being shifted onto the 99% instead. The rest, as I said, is details.
Both sides agree that the government has removed the free-market mechanism that is supposed to punish companies that do bad business.
The Tea Party response is the simple, gut reaction: let companies fail.
The liberal view is more nuanced: if those companies go down, they take their employees with them; the bailout was justified (at least in this instance) in order to save those lower-level employees, but there should have been more strings attached.
And I think if you ask most people in the Tea Party -- not all, but most -- if it's right for an entry- or mid-level employee to lose everything because of malfeasance at the top, he'll say no. There ARE folks who take laissez-faire capitalism to its absurd "Let him die!" conclusion, but they're a loud minority.
So we start with the obvious stuff: the bailout should have denied golden parachutes and capped CEO/bonuses for any company that took the money. I think there are people in the Tea Party who can agree with that, even if they do so grudgingly. And some high-ranking people probably should have been prosecuted for fraud.
From there, at a minimum, I think both sides can agree there should be increased oversight.
We start talking increased regulation, again, that's going to get Tea Partiers to balk, because to them it's a dirty word. Indeed, at this point in the conversation they will inevitably blame it all on Fannie and Freddy. Well, point out that Wall Street made a litany of bad investments that had fuck-all to do with Fannie or Freddy, and start asking why that's allowed.
Ultimately I'm firmly of the mind that these banks need to be broken up; if they're too big to fail they should be smaller. That's another sacred cow to Tea Partiers, but it might be a good idea to mention at this point that even Adam Smith favored government intervention to break up monopolies. And ask if it's really a good idea for banks' successes and failures to rely on high-risk investments.
At this point you'll likely find yourself talking in circles and back to the "Yes but the free market would correct that if the banks were allowed to fail" point. But I still think this conversation is the way to find common ground and seek reform.
Not that the Tea Partiers in Congress are worth two shits, but they're replaceable.
