If you have any feelings about bringing Wall Street to heel, now would be a good time to get involved. The spotlight is there, but your viewpoint probably isn’t.
A week ago, this guy, David Maris, went down to the Occupy Wall Street protests and surveyed folks about what they believed. You should read the article, but here’s a sample, “93% say that student loan debt should be forgiven.”
Say what? I don’t believe that at all. My first reaction was that that is a crazy idea, especially phrased as being about forgiving existing loans. You could maybe get me to go along with free public higher education as a way of strengthening our work force. But if you take a loan, you should pay that loan, right?
If you read the rest of the beliefs, you’ll start to get a clearer picture. There is some serious unhappiness brewing because of unemployment and underemployment.
If you have $100k in college debt and get a job as soon as you graduate–you’re not going to march on the financial system claiming you got a raw deal. But if you grew up with every authority figure in your life telling you that you that you needed to get a degree to get a job and then you can’t get even an entry level job–that is tough to swallow.
But I’m not in that situation. I have a job. I paid off my college debt years ago. I have health insurance. But 2008 scarred me–I’m pretty sure Wall Street is to blame, and also that not enough has been done about it.
In the summer of 2008, my company was cooking. We had four people and were looking to hire more. Then Lehman Brothers crashed and every one of our customers went silent.
We went months without booking any new revenue, but what was worse is that none of our customers were returning our calls and emails, probably because they didn’t know what was going on either. As a company, we were on the ropes and there was no way to know if we’d get off.
I thought the self-serving move would have been to shutter the company and pocket whatever we had in the bank account. But I couldn’t stomach that so we just put our heads down and hoped for something to hit before we ran out of money. It was extremely tight–but we came through the other side.
So, what could I have done to have avoided that situation? We didn’t have any direct ties to Wall Street. We had no investors or debt. We didn’t even have customers in finance. Personally, I had no mortgage, credit card debt, car or college loans.
And yet, somehow we were still hit hard. The mess that came ouf the Lehman collapse paralyzed all corporate spending decisions. There was no way to avoid the fallout.
If an investment bank goes out of business, a bunch of bankers get thrown onto the street, and they have to start selling off their art collections in order to make ends meet. Hey, man, that’s capitalism.
If that investment bank goes out of business and that puts me out of business. Yo, I can’t have that.
So this is just me, raising my hand, saying I support this movement.
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Tony, I have been working online with the Occupy Philly group and have been on-site 4 times now. I couldn’t agree with you more that this impacts everybody. That is why we talk about the 99% and the 1%. The actions of that 1% effect all of us, and their irresponsibility has the ability to bring our economy to it’s knees.
I do not necessarily agree or disagree with the student debt forgiveness concept, I though I could shed some light on the rationale behind it. The concept is that we have, and will likely continue to, spent an absurd amount of money attempting to stimulate the economy. All of that money is going directly to corporations to try to establish a trickle-down effect. However, the corporate greed is preventing that money from trickling downwards. So, we know that in this day college grads make up a very large percentage of the working force. So, by forgiving student loans, the idea is that this would produce economic stimulus. The funds currently being diverted to lonas would allow somebody like me to consider purchasing a home. I have been out of school for 5 years and still am paying large portion of my salary towards my debt. This makes is incredibly unlikely that I will be able to purchase a home or invest my money. Additionally, the middle class will actually spend the money, which will increase the amount of jobs in the lower class and benefit the corporate entities, though in a less direct manner.
However, the groups gathering are diverse, the uniting ideal is simply that rampant corporate greed and collusion between the government and corporate America is bad for everybody who isn’t the CEO of a major corporation or a high-level politician.
@LJ:
Thanks for coming by and commenting. That made writing this post worthwhile.
Your summary is right on. What’s going on right now is bad for everybody.
I wish that the problems America faced were the result of between 1000-5000 US CEOs, and the politicians that they support. I think that would be a very solvable problem. My issue with OWS is the same as my issue with the Tea Pary – Americans fighting for their share of the pie. Everyone knows the game is rigged, (both sides rig it) and the real contest is to rig the game even further.
I was unswayed by tea party members and I don’t think much of OWS.
Greedy bankers inflated and then shorted the American dream, and made a mockery of the idea of home ownership. At the time public employee unions have robbed the next generation of decent public service in the name of gold plated pensions, so you wouldn’t want a home is most areas anyway.
My sense is that as a nation we have grown greedy and entitled, and perhaps we always were, but now the pie is shrinking everyone is just looking out for themselves and their tribe.
We’ve squandered a trillion dollars and precious lives in pointless wars. We’ve been tricked and bamboozled and robbed, but it was our greed that let it happen. Our problems are acute and getting worse, and the biggest problem is that their isn’t a bad guy. We’ve done it to ourselves, and now we look out with blame. I think people should occupy less and organize more.
@jason:
Granted the opinion poll I linked to does superficially read like a request for handouts, that’s not my interest, or what I think the interest of most startup people I know should be.
I don’t want a share of their winnings, what I want is to not have a share of their losses.
I’d probably be satisfied if commercial banks and investment banks were split again. But that’s getting into an area, the solution, which I don’t really understand.
Tony,
I believe the regulation you are referencing was the Glass-Steagal act, that later got repealed (under Clinton I think). I suspect that less than 5% of the protesters there know what it is. At the same time if you told them I’m sure at least 90% would agree that it should be brought back (I would). Still, would the 90% go home after it got changed? Would you still support them if it did?
OWS looks like a rorschach test to me. We look at it and see what we want to see.
I remember going to an anti-war protest when I was in the Marine Corps during the first gulf war. I didn’t wear my uniform or do anything to indicate that I was a member of the military. I just walked with people because I agreed with them that the war was bad idea. I wish that OWS had a similarly clear and supportable goal.
Also, thanks for the blog post. It has been great to have a semi-public space to work out what OWS means to me.