In his column “OWS, meet the Tea Party”, Associate Editor Gil Smart searches for a common theme between “Occupied Wall Street” demonstrations now across the country and in other parts of the world and the “Tea Party”:
“For it’s a message about power and elitism. In this case it’s economic power, but that leads to political power, and to pretend there is some huge gulf between the economic elite and the political elite is simply ludicrous. The latter exists to enact the policies favored by the former. Too much power in the hands of any one group — be it a governing, cultural or economic elite — is inimical to democracy.”
About their common concern of bank ‘bailouts’, he cites what “the writer “Ilargi” noted at The Automatic Earth blog last week”.
“So ‘if a bank wants to sit on its debt, since revealing it would cause it great stress, that’s fine,’ writes Ilargi. ‘But a bank should never ever be allowed to sit on its debt and mark it to fantasy and then also receive funding from our governments, whether in bailouts, handouts, loans, special facilities’ windows at our central banks, or any other sort of funding, nothing of the kind.’
“’We must demand this in order to prevent our money from being wasted on those banks that have no chance of recovery with the money we might give them. … Yes, this would send certain banks over the cliff. But if a bank can survive only with repeated infusions of public money, what good does it do to keep it alive?’”
WATCHDOG: For “Too much power in the hands of any one group — be it a governing, cultural or economic elite — is inimical to democracy…”, three wags of the tail!
As for having the banks write down their real estate and other holdings to market value, we fear that the impact on the entire financial system would be so great as to make the Great Depression appear as good times in comparison.
Part of the cause of the current economic malaise is the waiting game for the banks over four or five years to unwind their holdings, largely at the indirect expense of the American tax payers through the provision of money from the Federal Reserve lent without cost to be rechanneled to bank customers at relatively high interest rates.
