In this round-up, why we need economics, why China is a growing power for reaction in the world, the corruption of the UK banking industry, the obscene wealth of the tax-evading fatcats, and the bizarre fashionable anti-capitalist backlash on Wall Street. First, some satire from the Daily Mash.
Trader may have been acting in own self-interest
The trader, who does not get invited to a huge number of parties, also left millions of viewers traumatised with the revelation that financial markets do not care about them.
Julian Cook, chief economist at Donnelly-McPartlin, said: “Rastani has obviously built up significant positions in panic, paranoia and Mad Max futures, but the emerging Eurozone deal could have knocked at least 12% off their value.
“Therefore he had no choice but to go on television and tell you that you were going to die. I’m only surprised he didn’t put an unloaded pistol to his head and pull the trigger.”
Martin Bishop, fear analyst at Madeley Finnegan, said: “Rastani has already driven fear prices up 6%. “And this is top quality, long-term fear because it comes from an expert who everyone knows is a total shark but also has no idea whether or not to believe him and so will inevitably just do exactly what he says.”
Meanwhile Rastani also claimed that ‘Goldman Sachs, not governments, rule the world’ leading to an explosion in online I-told-you-sos from amateur experts who have been saying this sort of thing in pubs for years.
But Roy Hobbs, professor of simplification at Roehampton University, said: “With all due respect to Goldman Sachs, it’s actually run by a complex network of bastards.
“Or do Goldman Sachs pay me to say that? You’ll never know.”
Irish Left Review · Has the Left given up on Economics?
irishleftreview.org – Though provoking post here from Nick Srnicek of Disorder of Things: The leftist response to the economic crisis has instead been mostly been to focus on piecemeal reactions against government policies. The student movement arose as a response to tuition fee and EMA changes; the right to protest movement arose as a response to heavy-handed police treatment; and leftist parties have suggested a mere moderation of existing government policies. The project to bring about a fully different economic system has been shirked in favour of smaller-scale protests. There is widespread critique, but little construction.[…]
Russia, China veto UN resolution on Syria crackdown
google.com – Russia, China veto UN resolution on Syria crackdown By Tim Witcher (AFP) – 3 hours ago UNITED NATIONS — A senior aide to Syria’s embattled President Bashar al-Assad on Wednesday hailed as “historic” Russian and Chinese vetoes of a UN resolution against his regime’s deadly crackdown on protests. But Syria’s newly united opposition said that by voting against the European-proposed resolution at the UN Security Council, Russia and China risked provoking opponents of Assad’s regime to resort to violence. […]
Osborne admits UK banks ran ‘ponzi schemes’
liberalconspiracy.org – by Sunny Hundal October 5, 2011 at 10:20 amI missed this key passage from George Osborne’s speech to Tory conference: The banks and those regulating them believed that the bubble would never stop growing, that markets were always self- correcting, that greed was always good, thattheir Ponzi schemes would never collapse, and that none of the debts would ever turn bad.[…]
Billionaire Bet: Warren Buffett Challenges Rupert Murdoch To Release His Tax Returns
thinkprogress.org – NEWS FLASH Billionaire Bet: Last week, News Corp’s Wall Street Journal editorial board told the billionaire behind the president’s “Buffett Rule” that, instead of calling for America’s wealthy to pay their fair share in taxes, Warren Buffett should “educate the public” by allowing “everyone else in on his secrets of tax avoidance by releasing his tax returns.” Today at Fortune’s Most Powerful Women Summit, Buffett wholeheartedly agreed to release his tax returns to the public. He just has one condition: “I think it might be a terrific idea if [the Wall Street Journal] would just ask their boss, Rupert Murdoch, and he and I will meet at Fortune, and we’ll both give you our tax returns and you can publish them.” Buffett noted, “I’m ready tomorrow morning.” Murdoch has yet to respond.
Isca Stieglitz – Insider trading? It’s not Alessio Rastani or Goldman-Sachs I’m worried about!
GREENS ENGAGE – Funny isn’t it? Greens – we’re predominantly ‘anti’ capitalist, are deeply suspicious of anything remotely ‘businessy’ (unless it passes ‘green’ muster), and certainly question the motives of those involved in it…or at least until ‘someone’ says exactly what we want to hear. How quickly the leap is made, how quickly the scrutiny stops and how quickly we latch onto people who wouldn’t ordinarily get our time of day. However, with a whiff of ‘conspiracy’, a sniff of ‘rule the world’ and a large helping of ‘we told you so’, (when all that’s been stated is the bleedin’ obvious), and we’re there posting and hosting like we’ve just discovered something ground breaking – no checking, no research, no search for provenance – the complete suspension of scrutiny and the hanging on the every word of bloke no one knows. Ah, but he’s a ‘trader’ so he must know stuff and now he’s gone on telly and shared seemingly (not!) big secrets, well, we can obviously trust him. I’m not saying I trust Rastani or not, I don’t know enough at this stage to make that decision and that’s the point, neither does anyone else. I wonder about the mind of someone who jumps so quickly. […]
Who are the 99 percent?
washingtonpost.com – (Ramin Talaie – BLOOMBERG) “I did everything I was supposed to and I have nothing to show for it.” t’s not the arrests that convinced me that “Occupy Wall Street” was worth covering seriously. Nor was it their press strategy, which largely consisted of tweeting journalists to cover a small protest that couldn’t say what, exactly, it hoped to achieve. It was a Tumblr called, “We Are The 99 Percent,” and all it’s doing is posting grainy pictures of people holding handwritten signs telling their stories, one after the other.[…]
Joined Protest on the Brooklyn Bridge, Got Trapped, But Didn’t Get Arrested / And some thoughts about all this
NEVER GOT USED TO IT – I’ve been a pretty active activist the past few days, though I’ve been going on my own, with a downbeat attitude that repeatedly gets turned around. I went on a protest to the NYPD yesterday. Well, that was not so great, except for a few minutes, when the bulk of the protest first arrived at the police headquarters. That was fun. Also, I like a chant that developed briefly that went, “Students, labor, shut the city down.” At least I think that’s what they were saying – and if it is, I am all for that! I go along with “Banks got bailed out, we got sold out,” even if it isn’t that inspiring politically, because it is very true and lots of people can relate to that. I’m not that crazy about “We are the 99%,” because the implicit class analysis is a bit limited. “This is what democracy looks like” is getting kind of tired, too (remember, I heard that dozens of times a dozen years ago, while running around in clouds of tear gas). […]
Jodi Dean on phases of struggle
Ideological notes
Henwood on October 3, 2011 –
I know this will prompt more rebukes for trying to impose an anachronistic old left on the spontaneously new, but someone’s got to do it.
I read this quote in the New York Times the other day. I know that that may not be the go-to medium for reports on Occupy Wall Street, but it’s not unrepresentative of some of the things I’ve seen and heard first hand from that quarter:
“This is not about left versus right,” said the photographer, Christopher Walsh, 25, from Bushwick, Brooklyn. “It’s about hierarchy versus autonomy.”
Autonomy in this context sounds like a hipster version of bourgeois individualism. I’ve also seen a bit of Ron Paul-ish “end the Fed” stuff around OWS, which is a topic in itself, something I’ll take up in the near future. But I don’t want to get that wonky just now. I just want to make a simple point. Occupy Wall Street is hardly about autonomy. It’s about living out solidarity and about attracting people to a movement. They’re living a collectivity, even if they’re not articulating it that way.
I suspect the problem is that three decades of neoliberalism have destroyed any available vocabulary for solidarity. My guess is that most of the people in Zuccotti Park were born after Thatcher and Reagan took office. There’s no such thing as society, as the Lady said. But there is, and we need more of it.
Maybe 99% is a bit much, but…
Doug Henwood on October 1, 2011 –
The last day or two I’ve been seeing some complaints that the chant of the Occupy Wall Street protesters that “We are the 99%” casts the net too widely, effacing all kinds of class, race, and gender distinctions. Well, yes, probably so. But I still find it cheering.
It is a fact that over the last couple of decades, much of the growth in total income in the U.S. has gone to the upper reaches of society. For example, based on Census data, between 1982 and 2010, the richest fifth of society have claimed a little over half of the increase in total personal income; the top 5%, nearly a quarter the gain. The bottom 60% of society, though, has gotten less than a quarter. And, for a number of reasons, the Census figures seriously underestimate the action at the very top. (For more, see the forthcoming LBO, now in prep.) Using data compiled by the economistsEmmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty from IRS records, we can estimate that the top 1% took in a quarter of the income gain between 1982 and 2008. The bottom 90%, though, only took in 40% of the gain. (1982, by the way, is when the great bull market in stocks took off, corporate profitability began a long upsurge, and the Roaring Eighties really began.) And the further you go down the ladder within the bottom 90%, the smaller the gains.
Looked at another way, here are two graphs of average incomes, adjusted for inflation, the first from the Census data:
[…]
The teenage moralism of the Occupy Wall Street hipsters almost makes me ashamed to be Left-wing
Brendan O’Neill – Occupy Wall Street, the gathering of angry actors, graphic designers and various other hipsters in the financial districts of New York City, might just be the most degenerate Left-wing movement of recent times. Its weird demands, plastered across tongue-in-cheek placards and on super-cool, self-pressed t- shirts, capture the descent of the modern Left into the cesspool of victimology, conspiracy-mongering and disdain for mass society and its allegedly dumb inhabitants. Far from representing anything that I, a Leftie, would recognise as progressive and humane, this gaggle of rich kids spouts little more than snobbery and fear, seemingly incapable of deciding whom they loathe the most: greedy fat bankers or the dumb fat public. […]
With some thanks to Engage