I have seen many letters written to the Record-Bee that object to various aspects of the OWS movement. Some don”t like the people themselves doing the demonstrating. I call those critics the kill-the-messenger types. They don”t understand the message so they find it easiest to denigrate the messenger rather than the message.
I think of these people as intellectually lazy because they haven”t yet put in the effort to understand the message and thus take this cowardly tack.
Other critics understand the OWS message better but don”t like the OWS movement because it conflicts with their ideology. Usually the criticism here is that they think business should be completely unfettered and unregulated. But since when has any economy operated well when the only law is the law of the jungle? But it is worse than that by a long shot. After the large banks and brokerage firms put together tranches of almost worthless mortgage securities after the repeal of Glass-Steagal they told all the big three ratings agencies that those tranches should be rated triple A or they would no longer get their business.
Our unregulated financial system provides for the rating agencies to be paid by the issuer of the security. A fox in a chicken house never had it so good. Naturally the ratings agencies provided the required ratings for the issuers of these securities all through the previous decade.
If this was the end of the failure of financial regulation it would be bad enough, but this is far from the end. Once these rotten chickens came home to roost (in the foxes digestive system) these mega banks recorded huge financial losses.
These losses were so big that the government then decided to socialize the losses. Normally shareholders are expected to bear the brunt of any losses in a publicly held company.
Instead of making the shareholders in these banks take the losses for their incompetence and dishonesty, they made each and every one of us citizens take the loss.
These esteemed robber barons were just too valuable to their campaign coffers of both political parties to have them take the hit. So the most basic rule of capitalism went out the window.
Going back to the enumeration of the critics of OWS we get to the most dangerous critic of all: the one who says it is impractical to make changes to the compensation of these large wall street firms. These critics say it is their own business what companies pay their executives in salaries and bonuses. If these executives were playing on a level playing field that would be true, but they are not.
They were bailed out from their own incompetence and greed with tax payer money. We, the people, are now their employer because each one of us bailed them out with our own money. And if you haven”t noticed yet, or looked around you, we are all poorer for having done it.
Next time you hear some right-wing person complaining about socialism tell them you agree. Tell them they are absolutely right and that it is high-time Wall Street carried its own weight just like everyone else.
Eric Habegger
Kelseyville
