[And see the related,
"Occupy: When Will It Stop? It will not stop until . . .," Oct. 14, 2011
“Why ‘Occupy”? What Do ‘Those People’ Want?,” Oct. 10, 2011
“Those Kinds of Riots Here,” Sept. 18, 2011
and
"Economic Recovery? It's Simple and Obvious; Recovery Requires Consumers, and Consumers Require Jobs," Oct. 13, 2011
"Golden Rules and Revolutions: A Series - VIII," April 19, 2008 (with links to each in series)]
Pete Seeger started singing Les Rice's "The Banks Are Made of Marble" in 1950. It's a song that might have been written 50 years earlier, or 100 -- or today.
[From YouTube.com.]
In fact, it could have been written 230 years ago. Steve Fraser, "Wall Street protests: A long American tradition; The Occupy Wall Street movement is rooted in uprisings against policies that favor the financial elite over ordinary people," Los Angeles Times, October 13, 2011 -- with excerpts below.
If you didn't listen to Pete Seeger singing the song he made famous, above, and would prefer to just read the lyrics, here they are:
I've traveled round this countryLes Rice, "The Banks are Made of Marble," Stormking Music (1950).
From shore to shining shore
It really made me wonder
The things I heard and saw.
I saw the weary farmer
Plowing sod and loam
l heard the auction hammer
A knocking down his home
But the banks are made of marble
With a guard at every door
And the vaults are stuffed with silver
That the farmer sweated for
l saw the seaman standing
Idly by the shore
l heard the bosses saying
Got no work for you no more
But the banks are made of marble
With a guard at every door
And the vaults are stuffed with silver
That the seaman sweated for
I saw the weary miner
Scrubbing coal dust from his back
I heard his children cryin
Got no coal to heat the shack
But the banks are made of marble
With a guard at every door
And the vaults are stuffed with silver
That the miner sweated for
I've seen my brothers working
Throughout this mighty land
l prayed we'd get together
And together make a stand
Final Chorus
Then we'd own those banks of marble
With a guard at every door
And we'd share those vaults of silver
That we have sweated for
Now back to the centuries-old history of these bank protests, and excerpts from Steve Fraser's article:
The only thing really surprising about the Occupy Wall Street movement is that it didn't happen sooner. The United States has a long history of friction over policies that enable an elite to thrive at the expense of ordinary people.Steve Fraser, "Wall Street protests: A long American tradition; The Occupy Wall Street movement is rooted in uprisings against policies that favor the financial elite over ordinary people," Los Angeles Times, October 13, 2011.
The earliest tensions emerged soon after the Revolutionary War, when Jeffersonian democrats raised alarms about the "moneycrats" and their counter-revolutionary intrigues. . . .
In the first half of the 19th century, followers of Andrew Jackson inveighed against the Second Bank of the United States [and] feared the bank was part of a systematic monopolizing of financial resources by a politically privileged elite.
That tradition was embraced again just after the Civil War, when the Farmer-Labor and Greenback political parties were formed out of a determination to break the stranglehold on credit exercised by the big banks back East.
Later in the 19th century, Populists decried the overweening power of the Wall Street "devil fish." The tentacles of finance, they insisted, not only reached into every part of the economy but also corrupted churches, the press and institutions of higher learning, destroying the family and suborning public officials from the president on down. . . .
William Jennings Bryan . . . during his campaign for the presidency in 1896 . . . was taking aim at Wall Street, and everyone knew it.
Around the turn of the 20th century, the antitrust movement . . . worried most about . . . "the money trust" . . . skewered in court and in print by future Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, subjected to withering congressional investigations, excoriated in the exposes of "muckraking" journalists and depicted by cartoonists as a cabal of prehensile Visigoths in death-heads.
[T]he new century . . . included reformers in statehouses and city halls, socialists in industrial cities, strikebound workers from coast to coast, working-class feminists and antiwar activists. Financial interests were blamed for . . . pillage and labor exploitation while practicing imperial adventuring abroad. As the movements made clear, everyone but Wall Street was suffering the consequences of a system of proliferating abuses perpetrated by "the Street."
[D]uring the [1930s] Depression . . . as now, there was no question in the minds of the "99%" that Wall Street was principally to blame for the country's crisis.
In addition to rallies and marches of the unemployed, there were hundreds of sit-down strikes . . ., foreclosures forestalled by infuriated neighbors and occupations — even seizures — of private property. There was a pervasive sense that the old order needed to be buried. . . . President Franklin D. Roosevelt announced his determination to unseat "economic royalists" who were growing rich off "other people's money" while the country suffered its worst trauma since the Civil War.
Want to know the data that explains why the protesters are protesting? Would you trust what comes from a business publication? OK, take a look at what CEO and Editor-in-Chief of Business Insider, Henry Blodget, has put together for you. Henry Blodget, "Here Are the Four Charts That Explain What the Protesters Are Angry About . . .," Business Insider, October 15, 2011. I won't fill this blog entry with the charts you can see at that link (with the exception of one, below); but here are the explanatory titles on each:1. Unemployment is at the highest level since the Great Depression.
2. At the same time, corporate profits are at an all-time high, both in absolute dollars and as a share of the economy.
3. Wages as a percent of the economy are at an all-time low. In other words, corporate profits are at an all-time high, in part, because corporations are paying less of their revenue to employees than they ever have.
4. Income and wealth inequality in the US economy is near an all-time high: The owners of the country's assets (capital) are winning, everyone else (labor) is losing. Three charts illustrate this:(1) The top earners are capturing a higher share of the national income than they have anytime since the 1920s. Top decile income share in France and the United States [20th Century; roughly equal until 1980; in 2003 about 43% in U.S., 32% France]
(2) CEO pay and dcorporate profits have skyrocketed in the past 20 years, "production worker" pay has risen 4%
By now, "Occupy Wall Street" has not only spread across America, it has gone global. As the New York Times reports, "Buoyed by the longevity of the Occupy Wall Street encampment in Manhattan, a wave of protests swept across Asia, the Americas and Europe over the weekend, with hundreds and in some cases thousands of people expressing discontent with the economic tides in marches, rallies and occasional clashes with the police." Clara Buckley and Rachel Donadio, "Buoyed by Wall St. Protests, Rallies Sweep the Globe," New York Times, October 16, 2011, p. A4.(3) After adjusting for inflation, average earnings haven't increased in 50 years; Average Hourly Earnings, 1964-2008 (in 2008 dollars) [e.g., 1979: $18.76/hour; 2008: $18.52/hour]
And yet the bankers -- along with most elected officials and candidates -- still refuse to take it seriously, or understand what it's all about.
Publicly, bankers say they understand the anger at Wall Street — but believe they are misunderstood by the protesters camped on their doorstep.Nelson D. Schwartz and Eric Dash, "In Private, Wall St. Bankers Dismiss Protesters As Unsophisticated," New York Times, October 15, 2011, p. B1.
But when they speak privately, it is often a different story.
"Most people view it as a ragtag group looking for sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll," said one top hedge fund manager.
Iowa's own Senator Charles Grassley's reaction is illustrative and consistent with the Times' report: "I assume that it’s a lot of unemployed young people looking for some dates.” Quoted from KCCI-TV in Graham Gillette, "One Helping of Irony s Now Being Served," Des Moines Register, October 16, 2011, p. OP 3.
As he so often does, "Tom Tomorrow" captures the Establishment's response to the Business Insider's statistics, above:
[Credit: www.ThisModernWorld.com.]
1 comment:
Such a great article which The Occupy Wall Street movement is rooted in uprisings against policies that favor the financial elite over ordinary people. In which The United States has a long history of friction over policies that enable an elite to thrive at the expense of ordinary people.Thanks for sharing this article.
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