I was just chillin' and listening to NPR's weekend programming on my local station (which desperately needs cash, by the way, thanks to the hideous Rick Scott!). This American Life led into State of the Re:Union and I enjoyed myself mightily. Marketplace Money came on and I thought of turning off the radio. I'm just not that into financial news. Fortunately they began with Occupy Wall Street coverage which was informative and not awful. (I'm sure Kos readers realize that Marketplace is one of the few places to receive stories on economics from multiple perspectives.) The next piece was a "one-percenter's perspective" on the Occupy Wall Street movement. I'm glad I kept it tuned to NPR in order to hear it!
Here's how host Tess Vigeland introduced the segment:
Inequity is arguably the main rallying cry of the Occupy movement. And on that score, the primary bogeymen are the nation's bankers, brokers and traders -- the so-called "one-percenters" who control about a third of the country's wealth.
Commentator Josh Brown is one of those... If you think you know what his take on all this is going to be, here's his open letter to the banks that don't seem to get why people are mad.
Links and further excerpts below...
I had never heard of Josh Brown before, despite the fact that he has contributed to such media outlets as CNNMoney, the Wall Street Journal, Forbes and CNBC. More intriguingly, he is the founder of the Tumblr blog Things Apple is Worth More Than, which takes Apple's market value and compares it to such things as "10 Times the National Football League" or "Four American Civil Wars" or "Twice the Entire US Clothing Industry." Mildly amusing stuff, which shows the mind of the blogger to be a critical one in regards to the perspective of what something is truly worth.
His radio commentary for Marketplace (listen here | read here) is succinct and clear. It is from an insider's own voice and makes no excuses. It deserves to be spread far and wide.
Here are portions of his "Dear Wall Street, this is why the people are angry" (I'd like to share with you the whole thing because it is that simple and direct -- so please go read it all!):
In 2008, the American people were told that if they didn't bail out the banks, their way of life would never be the same... result[ing] in a depression.
It begins at the beginning of the crisis from the perspective of the average American. There is no need to dig deep into the roots of the crisis -- though all of that is relevant, believe me. It's great for DKos policy-wonk-types to talk about the decline of America since Reagan, the laissez-faire deregulation frenzy embraced by almost all politicians since then, the lack of supervision under Bush... all of that matters a great deal, of course. But I think the strength of Brown's message is its simplicity! From the point of view of a low-information American: (1) we put the experts, economists and executives in charge; (2) they told us in 2008 that our entire society could collapse if we did not save the banks (even though many of them admitted that the bankers were culpable; they said we were in triage); (3) the expected reforms were delayed or never came to pass at all; the bankers' bad behaviors only got worse; they fought rather than cooperated with the government's attempt to regulate and oversee them. In short, I think the banks' behaviors are anti-American. They took advantage of us and are destroying our country. Is that treasonous?
Back to Brown:
At our darkest hour we gave these banks every single thing they asked for. We allowed investment banks to borrow money at zero percent interest rate, directly from the Fed. We gave them taxpayer cash right onto their balance sheets. We allowed them to suspend account rules... Nobody went to jail, not a single perp walk. I can't even think of a single example of someone being fired. People resigned with full benefits and pensions, as though it were a job well done.
The American taxpayer kicked in over a trillion dollars to help make all of this happen...
Brown goes on to detail how the banks returned to their "business as usual" instead of being grateful and giving back to the nation which had just saved their butts. He describes the obscene bonuses ($40 billion, Brown says, in 2009 and 2010 combined), the increased foreclosures by robosigning of documents, the massive layoffs.
And they did this with the profits they earned from zero percent interest rates that actually acted as a tax on the rest of the economy...
Instead of coming back and working with this economy to get back on its feet, they hired lobbyists by the dozen to fight tooth and nail against any efforts whatsoever to bring common sense regulation to the financial industry...
We bailed out Wall Street to avoid Depression, but three years later, millions of Americans are in a living hell. This is why they're enraged, this why they're assembling, this is why they hate you. Why for the first time in 50 years, the people are coming out in the streets and they're saying, "Enough."
Josh Brown blogs as The Reformed Broker.