By Nulwee | Dailykos
Michael Thomas’ ominous reflections on 75 years of life as American, in which he worked on Wall Street and saw all of his assumptions about his country undone:
This time, I fear, the public anger will not be deflected. Confessions, not false, will be exacted. Occupy Wall Street has set the snowball rolling; you may not think much of OWS—I have my own reservations, although none are philosophical or moral—but it has made America aware of a sinister, usurious process by which wealth has systematically been funneled into fewer and fewer hands.
A process in which Washington played a useful supporting role, but no more than that.
Over the next year, I expect the “what” will give way to the “how” in the broad electorate’s comprehension of the financial situation. The 99 percent must learn to differentiate the bloodsuckers and rent-extractors from those in the 1 percent who make the world a better, more just place to live. Once people realize how Wall Street made its pile, understand how financiers get rich, what it is that they actually do, the time will become ripe for someone to gather the spreading ripples of anger and perplexity into a focused tsunami of retribution. To make the bastards pay, properly, for the grief and woe they have caused. Perhaps not to the extent proposed by H. L. Mencken, who wrote that when a bank fails, the first order of business should be to hang its board of directors, but in a manner in which the pain is proportionate to the collateral damage. Possibly an excess-profits tax retroactive to 2007, or some form of “Tobin tax” on transactions, or a wealth tax. The era of money for nothing will be over.
But it won’t just end with taxes. When the great day comes, Wall Street will pray for another Pecora, because compared with the rough beast now beginning to strain at the leash, Pecora will look like Phil Gramm. Humiliation and ridicule, even financial penalties, will be the least of the Street’s tribulations. There will be prosecutions and show trials. There will be violence, mark my words. Houses burnt, property defaced. I just hope that this time the mob targets the right people in Wall Street and in Washington. (How does a right-thinking Christian go about asking Santa for Mitch McConnell’s head under the Christmas tree?) There will be kleptocrats who threaten to take themselves elsewhere if their demands on jurisdictions and tax breaks aren’t met, and I say let ’em go!
At the end of the day, the convulsion to come won’t really be about Wall Street’s derivatives malefactions, or its subprime fun and games, or rogue trading, or the folly of banks. It will be about this society’s final opportunity to rip away the paralyzing shackles of corruption or else dwell forever in a neofeudal social order. You might say that 1384 has replaced 1984 as our worst-case scenario. I have lived what now, at 75, is starting to feel like a long life. If anyone asks me what has been the great American story of my lifetime, I have a ready answer. It is the corruption, money-based, that has settled like some all-enveloping excremental mist on the landscape of our hopes, that has permeated every nook of any institution or being that has real influence on the way we live now. Sixty years ago, if you had asked me, on the basis of all that I had been taught, whether I thought this condition of general rot was possible in this country, I would have told you that you were nuts. And I would have been very wrong. What has happened in this country has made a lie of my boyhood.
I try to avoid depressing my ohana grandmother with the news I share. She just retired, at age 77. “This country used to be sane,” was the last reply she had to something topical I shared on Facebook. All the elders I know talk about America like her and Michael Thomas.
And I think Thomas’ warning is right. It may not be Occupy Wall Street itself that will come with pitchforks. But if that’s all Wall Street fears, well, they have good reason to be afraid. Anger has a way of spiraling, to the point past which the angry can differentiate the agent and the collective. And greed has a way of blinding the complacent to the greedy’s real threats:
As 2011 slithers to its end, none of the major problems that led to the crisis point three years ago have really been solved. Bank balance sheets still reek. Europe day by day becomes a financial black hole, with matter from the periphery being sucked toward the center until the vortex itself collapses. The Street and its ministries of propaganda have fallen back on a Big Lie as old as capitalism itself: that all that has gone wrong has been government’s fault. This time, however, I don’t think the argument that “Washington ate my homework” is going to work. This time, a firestorm is going to explode about the Street’s head—and about time, too.
I think by the middle of 2012, it will become clearer to the world, already retreating back into denial and unwarranted optimism, about how bad things still are. By 2013, the worddepression (we’re already in one) will be a popular descriptor, whether there is a dramatic escalation such as a panic or a worsening of the unemployment rate, or not. (Even though Obama has presided over more job creation in one year than Bush did in eight–it’s not that simple.)
The 1% class is gambling on the hope that cheap cable, alcohol, prescription drugs, sugar and a host of other opiates of the masses are going to keep us quiet. But their observations were always made as outsiders and as such, they can’t produce the requisite empathy to imagine how we feel and think.
The 1% don’t understand desperation.
They think America will tolerate 8 more years of this.
They’re wrong, so wrong.
Mark Thomas’ article is a must-read for those who also grew up in America’s golden age and are now, in their personal golden years, watching the decline. And it’s a must-read for those who enjoy Matt Taibbi and Yves Smith, and for those who simply enjoy reading and appreciating good writing–and Thomas writes better than plenty of op/ed columnists.
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