Submitted by Gene Howington, Guest Blogger
UPDATED: Newton’s Third Law of Motion is commonly expressed by the phrase “for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction”. The action in question is the Occupy Wall Street Movement. The reaction in question is fear.
Huffington Post obtained a copy of a memo being sent by high-powered Washington lobbying firm Clark, Lytle, Geduldig, Cranford to one of its major Wall Street clients over Thanksgiving. Previously unnamed, it has been revealed that the major Wall Street client in question is the American Bankers Association. The four page memo was first revealed by MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, host of the show “Up with Chris Hayes“. The first two paragraphs of the memo are indicative of the mood and probably sets the tone for what many in the lobbying industry are having to admit as an inconvenient truth. Namely the truth that the OWS Movement is gaining traction for their cause and doing so in such a way that politicians are eventually going to be forced to put on the appearance of action in bringing the criminals on Wall Street to justice if not actually bring them to justice. The fear on behalf of the lobbyists and their Wall Street clients is palpable.
The first two paragraphs of the Thanksgiving Memo read as follows:
Leading Democratic party strategists have begun to openly discuss the benefits of embracing the growing and increasingly organized Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement to prevent Republican gains in Congress and the White House next year. We have seen this process of adopting extreme positions and movements to increase base voter turnout, including in the 2005-2006 immigration debate. This would mean more than just short-term discomfort for Wall Street firms. If vilifying the leading companies of this sector is allowed to become an unchallenged centerpiece of a coordinated Democratic campaign, it has the potential to have very long-lasting political, policy and financial impacts on the companies in the center of the bullseye.
It shouldn’t be surprising that the Democratic party or even President Obama’s re-election team would campaign against Wall Street in this cycle. However the bigger concern should be that Republicans will no longer defend Wall Street companies — and might start running against them too.
While phrased in partisan terms, the memo is possibly indicative of not just fear on behalf of Wall Street and their K Street cohorts, but rather recognizes that the problems created by not bringing to justice those who wrecked our domestic economy and nearly wrecked the global economy with their unfettered greed and massive systemic fraud is growing to ultra-partisan proportions. Consider the words of Joshua Stephens, a participant in OWS New York City, who said “The danger is not whether or not politicians will defend these institutions. My fear wouldn’t be that. My fear would be that the politicians that come to their aid will be increasingly irrelevant…That’s the real threat and that’s where things are going.” OWS is serving as a wake-up call for both Wall Street and Washington. A wake-up call that this memo acknowledges presents a real and serious problem for both the corporate bankers and the politicians that have been protecting them from prosecution and doing their political bidding in helping dismantle the regulations around the banking industry. A call for justice that transcends party affiliation and loyalty to the point that the bankers responsible may actually have to face trial with the possibility of prison sentences. A call for justice that may force politicians to take steps to break up the big banks to prevent the myth and the lie of “too big to fail” from being used in the future as an excuse by corporatists to raid our nation’s tax coffers thus making society pay for the risks of their private failures all while the banks reaping massive record private profits in the process. A call for justice that might mean the return of regulation to the banking industry and a return of regulation with teeth.
Perhaps even more telling that the 1% are starting to feel and fear the political pressure is the context of the memo as a sales pitch. What is it that CLGC is offering to sell the ABA? $850,000 worth of spin. In the new MSNBC article by Jonathan Larsen and Ken Olshansky, the deliverable of such a spin project is summarized as ” ‘opposition research’ on Occupy Wall Street in order to construct ‘negative narratives’ about the protests and allied politicians.” If you’d like to read the memo in its entirety, it can be found here in .pdf form. You may feel a bit queasy after reading it.
OWS could be, should be and might be even bigger than this one set of issues though. It should be a notice to Washington and the graft merchants of K Street that the United States Constitution says in plain language where the true political power rests in this country and who is really the boss of Washington when push comes to shove: “We the People of the United States”. Not “We the Corporations” or “We the Biggest Campaign Contributors” or “We the K Street Lobbying and Revolving Capital Hill Door Conflict of Interest Machine”, but “We the People”. Washington would be wise to take heed to call to substantively start addressing the needs and demands for justice of the 99% instead of catering to the greedy desires of the 1% and their own over-inflated egos. Our nation was founded in reaction to the tyranny of oppression and non-responsive government of King George. Just so, it can be reshaped in reaction to the tyranny of oppression and non-responsive government of as exemplified by the incestuous nexus of today’s Wall Street and Washington. We didn’t throw off the yoke of a mad, capricious and economically exploitative king in the 18th Century just to have it replaced by the yoke of venal and corrupt plutocrats and their political lackeys in the 21st.
Are Wall Street and their lobbyists starting to fear Main Street? Is the government? Is this a sign of the beginning of the end of OWS? Or is this a sign of the beginning of the beginning of OWS and the effort to reclaim the government for “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity”?
What do you think?
Source: Huffington Post, MSNBC, CLGC Memo
~Submitted by Gene Howington, Guest Blogger
Bron,
“for one thing, not all of wall st. needed to be bailed out. for another you dont need any more than a broker to purchase stock. online trades for as little as $7.00 or didnt you know?
So which is it, gbk? more freedom or less freedom for people?”
My argument isn’t freedom, it’s your hypocrisy of argument and morphing of statements to suit your most current position. I see no solid nor consistent foundation of thought as exhibited in this thread by yourself.
That is my argument, Bron.
Otteray,
Obama Gets A Note From The 99 Percent Movement: ‘We Got Sold Out’ | President Obama received a note from a protester after his jobs speech in Manchester, New Hampshire this afternoon. The note tells the president to “stop the assault on our 1st amendment rights,” and “Banks got bailed out. We got sold out.” Obama addressed the movement directly after he was mic checked during his speech, saying, “You’re the reason that I ran for office in the first place.”
http://thinkprogress.org/special/2011/11/22/374904/obama-gets-a-note-from-the-99-percent-movement-we-got-sold-out/
Bron, I have invested for decades, went through the crash of ’87, and I can tell you with the introduction of high speed computer trading that the current market is rigged. No doubt in my mind about that.
We need to put a tax on high speed trading and we should tax third party derivative trading out of existence.
Bron: I can think of one very important resource base that has been destroyed, Industrial Hemp. The founding fathers required people to plant this crop everywhere they could.
For the last 50 years, because of pressure from the cotton-tree pulp- and plastics Multinationals, it has been illegal to grow in the US. Illegal to grow for no good reason other than corporations buying our politicians. We have been trying to reverse this law for decades now. This is why the power base of Multinationals must be taken away.
Industrial hemp would solve many of our pollution problems, it would improve our soils in crop rotation and thus improve the health of other crops. It can be used as a green building material, as a base for single use plastics, as food and cooking oil, as fabric and paper, as fuel…. It would create whole new industries that would then create jobs for Americans.
Tell me, why cant we grow this plant?
gbk:
for one thing, not all of wall st. needed to be bailed out. for another you dont need any more than a broker to purchase stock. online trades for as little as $7.00 or didnt you know?
So which is it, gbk? more freedom or less freedom for people?
Shano,
“Be aware, that is the major way they keep the citizens of the US from attacking the real culprits in our oligarchy and our government.”
It’s been discussed many times in many other threads, Shano. Thanks for keeping it fresh though with your posts, it’s something I appreciate.
“Didn’t you say earlier in this thread that we would all be better off if we invested in the markets instead of Social Security?”
GBK,
Good catch. Perhaps Bron thinks that smart investors choose morons. Maybe,
he believes that people should be intelligent enough to know who on Wall Street to invest with, like he does Some stable firm like Citibank, or Goldman Sachs perhaps. However, I think the truth is that Bron just uses a schematic of political and economic talking points that he throws into given situations when it furthers his argument, even if they don’t coincide with his previous points. The bottom line for Bron is that in all situations government is wrong, except in those rare instances he deems that it is right. Therefore the American people’s belief that the government should be representative of their wishes, is a mistake. While it’s true that government often doesn’t act in the people’s best interests, those actions have been guided by the same people Bron would want free of regulation. It is far easier to blame government than the elite that has and will corrupt it.
Mike S.,
Well, if I’m included in a group with you and Swarthmore mom, I consider myself to be in good company.
Elaine,
Shame on you for victimizing Jill. Last week it was SwM and last year it was me. Why oh why can’t we stop making her into a victim? Oh yeah….I get it. She is always purely right, so when we disagree with her it’s like disagreeing with the final authority on being politically pure. So presumptuous of us shallow, impure political thinkers.
Here is a young man who was living at Zuccotti and who has done the best coverage of events :
Gene:
what resource base have been destroyed by growth in the last hundred years? And what disequilibrium has been caused from proper growth, not growth caused by artificially low interest rates?
How does a mansion take away from someone having a house? There is plenty of wood, steel, glass and concrete to provide houses.
How can you have unlimited supply? Where does unlimited supply exist in reality? Why would someone produce to the point where there is no profit? Unless of course govt subsidized it.
Scarcity of what resources? We have more oil reserves than we did 100 years ago. How is that possible? You think maybe new technology might have helped with that?
What is wrong with marketing?
Bron,
“. . . the morons on wall street who made all those stupid deals.”
Didn’t you say earlier in this thread that we would all be better off if we invested in the markets instead of Social Security? And now, when it suits you, Wall Street has morons that made stupid deals?
Which is it, Bron.
Bron,
“The jobs government creates are at the expense of jobs in the private sector, government produces nothing it is a consumer. To consume you must first produce.”
Some “jobs” should not be trusted to the private sector: clean water, clean air, and oversight of industrial processes come to mind, and of course our war machine. There are many more if one dwells on the subject.
Your fallacy of production first then consumption is just that. Most wealth generation, even today, is reliant on natural resources which were not “produced” by anyone, it the consumption of said that produces wealth.
oh jeeze, the thread degenerated into the old left vs right distraction that our MSM has promoted for decades?
Be aware, that is the major way they keep the citizens of the US from attacking the real culprits in our oligarchy and our government.
Face it, all our politicians are these days are salesmen and women for giant Multinational Corporations. The Korean Free Trade agreement was passed today in S. Korea, and the opposition was so pissed off they threw tear gas around the chamber.
We are the mighty mighty wold elite and we force any nation to allow entry of our mega corporations, whether they want them operating there or not. We forced Korea to LOWER their air standards for automobiles. We forced them to take our contaminated meat that I would never eat and other nations have banned because it is so toxic.
All of our politicians are guilty in this. All of them. And it has to end. Michael Moore has some interesting things to say about this:
http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/mike-friends-blog/where-does-occupy-wall-street-go-here
You do not have to agree with his politics in order to see that he has compiled some very good solutions to the problems we have as a nation.
Again, with the false equivalence.
What Bush did was fascism, not socialism.
You should not use terms you do not understand.
gbk:
The object of my scorn is government and to a lessor degree the morons on wall street who made all those stupid deals.
Government transferred the money, they did not have to. The case was made by wall st types that the economy would melt down and so Bush believed it. Now maybe that is true and maybe it isnt, none of us knows for sure. I think a lot had to do with the wall st types melting down and losing their fortunes, call me cynical, and since Bush is the product of wealth and privilege he figured he better lend a brother a helping hand since it wasnt coming out of his pocket.
Whatever you think about capitalism, that was not capitalism. there are so many of us (free market types) who are really mad about what Bush did, people on Wall St.; traders, financial planners, anybody with any intelligence at all was against that bail out at a visceral level.
If we do end up becoming a socialist country, historians will look back and say that was the catalyst. That bail out gave the socialists the impetus to go ahead and finish the collective societal rape which Bush started.
The jobs government creates are at the expense of jobs in the private sector, government produces nothing it is a consumer. To consume you must first produce.
“why do you think we cant grow anymore?”
Argument from ignorance that fails to acknowledge the reality of scarcity and the nature of markets. Growth, sustainable growth and unlimited growth are different issues. Your form of capitalism relies on the fallacy of unlimited growth. Unlimited growth is a fallacy because scarcity of resources is a naturally occurring limit to growth and both supply and demand are actually finite as a market function. Unlimited supply drives down prices and unlimited demand is constrained by both necessity and the perception of necessity. A stupendous amount of the sales transactions in our global economy have no basis in actual necessity but rather are rooted in perceived necessity (created by marketing). People need food, clothing, water, shelter and transportation. Some would add information to that list. The rest of it is actually conspicuous consumption once the fundamentals of those needs are met. For example, everyone needs adequate shelter. No one needs a mansion unless they have 30 children and/or a large extended family that lives with them.
“Isnt growth good?”
Sustainable growth and growth in general are good. Growth without constraint is a recipe for disequilibrium and/or destroying a resource base.
“Doesnt technological improvement lead to better lives for all people?”
False equivalence. Growth and technological advancement are not synonymous.
http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2011/11/just-in-time-for-the-holidays-faa-fight-heats-up-in-wake-of-super-committee-fail.php?ref=fpnewsfeed Republicans want to make it difficult for transportation members to unionize.
Bron,
“Doesnt technological improvement lead to better lives for all people?”
You mean like the people in Nigeria and Brazil fighting oil production pollution, or do you mean the people of the Fukushima Prefecture in Japan, or maybe the people of the Gulf Coast?