It's Not the Tea Party, Stupid

Never depend on the main stream media to do a blogger's job. Here Lynne Kiesling captures with a graphic the idea the media and politicians can't seem to fathom. No the OWS's and the Tea Party aren't kindred spirits. It's just neither groups like crony capitalism albeit the OWS's play favorites.

Then she drives home the point that Wall Street could not have done it alone. It takes a government and/or its central bank, the Federal Reserve System, to:

• Create barriers to entry for the purpose of sheltering existing banks from competition and radical innovation, then regulate for the benefit of the privileged industry.


• Issue artificially cheap, economy-distorting credit in order to, among other things, give banks incentives to make shaky but profitable mortgage loans (and also to grease the war machine through deficit spending);


• Make it lucrative for banks – and their bonus-collecting executives — to bundle thousands of shaky mortgages into securities and other derivatives with the knowledge that government-sponsored enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and other companies, all subject to powerful congressmen looking for campaign contributions, would buy them after a government-licensed rating cartel scores them AAA;


• Inflate an unsustainable housing bubble by the foregoing and other methods, enticing people to foolishly over invest in real estate.


• Work closely with lending companies to establish a variety of programs designed to lure people with few resources or bad credit into buying houses they can’t afford;


• Attract workers to the home-construction bubble, setting them up for long-term unemployment when the bubble inevitably burst;


• Implicitly guarantee big financial companies and/or their creditors that if they get into trouble they would be rescued;


• Compel the taxpayers to bail out those companies and/or creditors when the roof finally fell in.

Not to be put off by facts and good arguments to the contrary Nancy Pelosi went on record with this which we hope will be a memorable quote; "I support the message to the establishment, whether it's Wall Street or the political establishment, that things have to change."

And gee, Ohio's Democrats like the class warfare theme too. Marcy Kaptur notes the OWS "have found the right piece of geography. They have their eyes on the right subject.". I strongly support the right of Americans to speak out against economic injustice and the mass transfer of wealth that has occurred over the last few decades," adds Marcia Fudge. Dennis Kucinich has launched three videos and Akron air head Betty Sutton made a pilgrimage to Zuccotti Park to moo her solidarity with the "99 percent" These people do Ohio proud!