News & Analysis
Taibbi: Occupy Wall Street Aimed at WS Corruption NOT Money or Banking
OWS's Beef: Wall Street Isn't Winning It's Cheating ... All weekend I was thinking about this "jealousy" question, and I just kept coming back to all the different ways the game is rigged. "Dude," I said. "These people aren't protesting money. They're not protesting banking. They're protesting corruption on Wall Street." ... When you take into consideration all the theft and fraud and market manipulation and other evil s--t Wall Street bankers have been guilty of in the last ten-fifteen years, you have to have balls like church bells to trot out a propaganda line that says the protesters are just jealous of their hard-earned money. People aren't jealous and they don't want privileges. They just want a level playing field, and they want Wall Street to give up its cheat codes. – Rolling Stone/Matt Taibbi
Dominant Social Theme: Occupy Wall Street is a revolutionary force sweeping the country, tearing down whatever is unjust and replacing it with fairness.
Free-Market Analysis: Occupy Wall Street is a populist movement, not a radical one. The powers-that-be are trying their best to position it this way in our view – in opposition to the anti-government Tea Party. This has significant ramifications not only for the movement but for the US economy and for the West in general.
Matt Taibbi's perspective as explained in this post (excerpted above) at RollingStone.com provides us with this insight regarding populism, one we have mentioned numerous times before. Taibbi more than almost anyone has created an upswell of indignation against Wall Street similar to that which occurred back in the 1930s. By focusing people on retribution and envy, larger issues such as central banking and the money system itself remain unscathed. These sorts of article would seem to support that process.
We should note that OWS is a diverse movement and one increasingly factionalized. We learn from Huffington Post and other publications, for instance that today, Wednesday, OWS demands may be formulated that will actually be formal in nature. If this actually takes place, we wonder how comprehensive they may be. The populism surrounding OWS is disconcerting. It is of course, a tool, a kind of dominant social theme.
If popular anger is properly controlled and channeled then the impact of the Internet itself and the emergent clarity of its truth-telling can be mitigated, or that is the hope of the elites encouraging such populism. Change can be absorbed and the system can continue on as it is. The goal in our view is world governance, a scientific system run by a handful of good gray men reporting to the great central banking families and their enablers and associates.
The Internet, however, has put world government at risk and likely changed the plans of the Anglosphere elites behind the move. They have begun to be far more aggressive in terms of domestic policing and military activity. What cannot be gained via the elite's endless fear-based promotions is apparently to be won by force.
The elites, of course, will not give up on their memes. These tools frighten the middle class into giving up power and wealth to carefully crafted globalist solutions. They are not working nearly as well in the 21st century as the 20th.
We can see first in the Tea Party movement and now in OWS that there is genuine anger out there and skepticism about the current Western promotion of so-called civil society. Europe is suffering from the same sort of conditions, with many of Europe's tribes beginning to rebel against the inefficient and exploitative euro (as we previously predicted).
For the elites, the necessity is to control this growing anger by any means possible. In the US, this means recasting it within the mold of the right-left Hegelian dialectic. This is an old elitist trick and is carried out to ensure that radical sentiments are properly managed. First, one manipulates a popular movement in a particular direction (the Tea Party). Then one sets up a controlled opposition (Occupy Wall Street).
Now one is in position to create dissension between the two sides. The anti-government Tea Party and anti-business Wall Street will be set upon each other by the mainstream media. Angry people will be invited to take sides. They may either be anti-government or anti-business and eventually, by various means, a resolution between the two sides shall "evolve."
What will occur is inevitably a compromise whereby government shall be made more efficient (or seemingly so) and business (Wall Street) shall be increasingly regulated to ameliorate abuses. This is to be seen as a very clever trick!
How is it a trick? Because it leaves the modern capitalist system IN EXACTLY THE SAME PLACE as it is now. A massive government (reformed) is supervising a massive (mercantilist) financial industry (also reformed). The net result of the next umpteen weeks, months, years, etc. will be exactly nothing.
Of course, as we've pointed out, this Hegelian trick may be less effective this time around. People are genuinely angry and the Internet Reformation is rapidly spreading the reality of that frustration. What starts as controlled rebellion can easily spread into something far more unmanageable that gives rise to genuine change.
Into this maelstrom step people like Matt Taibbi and others – those whose job it is one way or another (self-appointed or not) to give voice to mass frustration in such a way as to steer it toward the dialectic formula.
Taibbi, a brilliant writer and social commentator, is very good at this sort of thing. Also, as we are not trying to cast aspersions here, we should state it is perfectly possible he believes in the solutions he offers. That makes his arguments even more convincing. Those who believe in their own positions are more credible than those who don't.
For whatever reason, Taibbi has been helping formulate goals for Occupy Wall Street almost since the beginning. As OWS members maintain that the movement itself is a radical reshaping of society, people like Taibbi can provide whatever rationale they wish without much fear of contradiction.
Taibbi's comments, as we have covered previously, amount to suggesting that OWS is a movement calling for higher taxes and more government regulation. In the recent past we have covered announcements by various OWS-affiliated groups and leaders that OWS should seek a global transaction tax (UN-style, perhaps) and a US constitutional convention to de-personalize corporations. OWS leaders like David DeGraw are also spearheading efforts to prosecute Wall Street "banksters" using the FBI and the US justice system.
As Taibbi has now come out and stated, OWS is not really a radical movement at all from his perspective. It is surely not a libertarian one, or even anti-war. It simply wants to use the awesome, vicious and congenitally corrupt power of the US Leviathan to punish rich Wall Street types for taking advantage of a system that has essentially been set up for them over the past century. The public's perspective of OWS seems to be a good deal more radical than the reality.
Why is this important? Because people in the US and throughout the West are increasingly fed up with the economic and sociopolitical system as it is and are searching for answers. OWS seems to provide them with these answers. But what OWS actually provides, according to Taibbi himself, is populism and more populism. Here's the conclusion to his article:
We have a massive police force in America that outside of lower Manhattan prosecutes crime and imprisons citizens with record-setting, factory level efficiency, eclipsing the incarceration rates of most of history's more notorious police states and communist countries. But the bankers on Wall Street don't live in that heavily-policed country.
There are maybe 1000 SEC agents policing that sector of the economy, plus a handful of FBI agents. There are nearly that many police officers stationed around the polite crowd at Zucotti park. These inequities are what drive the OWS protests.
People don't want handouts. It's not a class uprising and they don't want civil war – they want just the opposite. They want everyone to live in the same country, and live by the same rules. It's amazing that some people think that that's asking a lot.
We can see from Matt Taibbi's statements that central banking, the corrupt US judicial system and many other facets of Leviathan including the political system itself are not the priority of OWS from his point of view. Only flagellating the banksters. As brilliant and sincere as Taibbi may be, such a narrow focus would seem to provide us with evidence that this is a manipulated "populist" movement not a genuine groundswell of indignation at the way the world currently works. In fact, it may have started that way, but it is not now.
Conclusion: Libertarians might consider leaving OWS, as we have mentioned before, to try to push for real reforms of the system in another way using another platform. There will be, eventually, significant unrest in the US, as elsewhere in the world. But if we are correct in our analysis, much of this unrest may escape the control of the elites evidently and obviously behind OWS. This is their attempt at creating controlled social upheaval. The real thing may be yet to come.
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Posted by Abu Aardvark on 10/27/11 04:39 AM
This from Bob Wenzel over at "Economic Policy Journal":
"Matt Taibbi Propaganda about 'Occupy Wall Street' - Matt Taibbi was caught giving advice to OWS protesters in a Google OWS chat group. His advice, in part, was:
If OWS could identify a few basic problems -- over-concentration of capital, regulatory capture, overweening influence of money on politics, excess financialization of the economy, tax unfairness, etc -- and propose some first-step solutions to all of those things (break up the banks, force bailout recipients to give up lobbying, end the carried interest and capital gains exemptions as Michael points out, etc), you'd have more allies, you'd be educating the public about a subject that it has a tough time getting real information about through normal media, and it would prevent the other side of the debate from being able to define the movement in their own (inevitably unflattering) terms.
The only thing preventing millions of people from going out onto the streets on their own is that they don't understand how Wall Street works or what it does. That to me is why the movement needs to be specific. It has a responsibility to explain these problems to the general public and to show that solutions do exist and that they're attainable. People I think need more than just the knowledge that they can protest -- they need to believe that they can fix things and that someone out there has the answers. And a lot of the people on this email list do have the answers and could provide that leadership that is so desperately needed."
Click to view link
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Posted by reegje on 10/27/11 04:32 AM
I would say that in general people who visit this website are no sheeple!
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Posted by Bluebird on 10/26/11 10:54 PM
Well, Hoss, I am sure you did some good while you were there. Maybe the ones you stirred will stir a few more and so on...
I expect you did rile the leaders. How funny. Salt sneaked into the sugar bowl.
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Posted by I<3Liberty on 10/26/11 10:39 PM
Hey DB,
I just finished listening to Webster Griffin Tarpley's latest radio interview (INN World Report 10/25/11) on his site Click to view link He says nationalizing the Federal Reserve and putting it "underneath" the Treasury Deptartment would be a good solution. He also said (in the same interview) that Von Mises and Hayek were "crackpots". He goes on to say that the idea of getting rid of all and every part of government is anarchist and is heading in the wrong direction (abandonment of social safety nets, food stamps, etc.) I'm just wondering what that elves think of his Austrian School "bashing" seeing as you have quoted him at times. Thanks.
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Posted by Agent Weebley on 10/26/11 10:33 PM
Try JonDo for that double-barrelled random IP from the EU approach.
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Posted by Hoss on 10/26/11 10:05 PM
Yep, they got me firewalled. I can access through TOR. My username has been retired.
In fairness, it did occur to me that perhaps someone cracked the password for my username and began spamming the message board or the chat. The site was under very heavy attack for awhile there, and I have no doubt that people have been running password attacks on usernames continuously. But they blocked every IP I ever posted from too, heh.
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Posted by Agent Weebley on 10/26/11 09:05 PM
Hi Hoss . . . Get Off Your
Sorry, I had to say it!
Quick Drew DeGrew! Now I remember his name . . .
I just checked the "Occupy" site; it is up. The Oct 26 article has 194 comments. Here is a sample of the recent comments:
struggleforfreedom80 12 points 4 hours ago
"What you should do is exactly the kinds of things that are going to lead to hysteria among privileged and powerful people"
-Noam Chomsky
Click to view link
In other words: You're doing the right thing. Keep up the struggle for freedom and democracy!
Chomsky on where we go from here: Click to view link
(the entire Occupy Boston lecture including Q&A can be watched here: Click to view link )
reply permalink
gjarvi 2 points 56 minutes ago
I hope that tonight, as you march in solidarity with Oakland, you CONTRAST the force that wants to push you down with a force like Aikido. If there are people in assembly who know Aikido or are Aikido practitioners (Aikido is performed by blending with the motion of the attacker and redirecting the force of
Since we are on the subject of firewalls, I think Ingo has firewalled me! Maybe he doesn't like what I have to say? That takes Real Bills to not engage me when I speak the truth to him . . . maybe he is a one-way street?
I wonder if Ingo Bischoff has paid rossbcan his liability of $1000 in US fiat yet?
Click to view link
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Posted by WD on 10/26/11 07:49 PM
@ Lem on 10/26/11 01:05 PM
"Hey Matt... You're attacking the Wall Street symptom and not striking the root. Why is that?"
How about Matt wants to keep his job? Look what they did to David Horowitz. Check out his Book TV talk about his new book "A Point In Time".
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Posted by WD on 10/26/11 07:37 PM
@ Abu Aardvark on 10/26/11 10:35 AM
Has it occurred to anyone that the Israelis, who have better foreknowledge of just about everything than we do, were jubilant at the towers falling because the event would seal American support of Israel virtually forever? The idea that the Israelis would participate in such an event when they desperately need American support just to survive increasing American kissing of Saudi backsides strains the bounds of credibility. Sure they're crafty, but they're not stupid.
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Posted by DGFREEMAN on 10/26/11 05:53 PM
THIS IS A MUST HEAR. REVOLUTIONS IN ORDER Go buy a SHOTGUN!
Stand up america and educate and protect yourselves.
I have stepped forward to share this cause I believe in this message. If your with me could you help me share it and get it out there. FREAKIN" AWESOME... ..
Click to view link
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Posted by Charlie on 10/26/11 05:40 PM
If Taibbi is all that brilliant then surely he can see HOW any "cheating" occurs on "Wall St.", how things are rigged and who rigs them. "Wall St." isn't twisting the arms of the poor politicians and Fed, yet they get a free pass. Because he is a commie. And he is welcome to that. Commies simply have no right to drag us all into their dialectic. He seems to be pretty much an MSM dialogue framer.
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Posted by Ted Newsom on 10/26/11 04:56 PM
" IMHO the movie was very good, and the other 3 people in the theater did too."
Hee hee hee hee hee.
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Posted by KyfhoMyoba on 10/26/11 03:30 PM
Libertarians should most definitely NOT abandon the OWS movement. These people are passionate and motivated. They actually DO something about what they believe. They are social. And ... many of them will agree with us when presented with the facts in a way that resonates with their experience. There are many, many avenues into their minds. Be experimental.
As a former right winger, I find that those on the left are much more fun to talk to than the people I used to agree with, the moral morons known as neoconservatives.
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Posted by Nightcrawler on 10/26/11 02:41 PM
True Iaceja, "Atlas Shrugged, Part 1" was vilified before it hit the theaters. Having read the book a couple years ago, it was fresh in my memory and wanted to see the production. IMHO the movie was very good, and the other 3 people in the theater did too.
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Posted by antiwar99 on 10/26/11 02:05 PM
[I]"911 seems to be a good litmus test for all writers and/or thinkers"[/I]
This is why I find it so hard to discuss 911 with many people. I am told at the outset that if I don't accept their ideas, I am either stupid, ignorant, or have a hidden agenda.
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Posted by josejoe on 10/26/11 01:32 PM
we have to remember that although most contributors to the DB are erudite, honest,self-policing, not prone to greed or most of the other 7 sins like regular sheeples-everyone has a price. let's quit kidding one another here!
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Posted by Lem on 10/26/11 01:05 PM
Left this comment for Matt Taibbi last week:
Hey Matt... no mention of the moral hazard of central banking and PRIVATE issuance of currency? The issuance of debt money with government promissory notes (bonds) in private banker hands? Could you look into who owns the stock in the Federal Reserve? Bet you'll see Goldman and JP. The housing market got overpriced due to easy credit and commodities are just getting started. The ultimate arbiter and bailout master of your nemeses is the Fed. All that paper is what built the casino. You're attacking the Wall Street symptom and not striking the root. Why is that?
"My Advice to the Occupy Wall Street Protesters | Politics News | Rolling Stone"
Click to view link
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Posted by Hoss on 10/26/11 12:47 PM
If I get time later tonight, I'll try it with TOR. That should settle it from a technical standpoint.
The fact that I can ping the server says a lot already.
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Posted by Hoss on 10/26/11 12:43 PM
"Interesting ... We just checked it and it seems fairly static. No movement on the front page for several days, though the "All News" segment seems to have been updated. Hope all is well with David DeGraw et. al. "
I can't even get any response at all from the website, from multiple locations using different machines and browsers.
I can ping their site, but zero response from the web server.
They must have logged the IP addresses I was posting from and blocked them.
And if they did that, there is only one possible reason for it. They didn't like what I was saying. People were waking up about the paper money issue. I don't know how else to interpret this (and I know a thing or two about networking).
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Posted by GWBramhall on 10/26/11 12:12 PM
Matt Taibbi will never be described as a member or sympathetic to the Tea Party or anything that relates to supporting our country's underlining principals given to us by our founding fathers. If he is not an admitted communist, he is certainly a far out leftist.
His humor disarms the true meaning of his agenda. The fact that there is some agreement with him that the wrong doers in the banking industry deserve punishment in line with the catastrophic damage that they have brought on us also gives him cover. However, it is clear that he, as with many progressives, that the economy and all that may bother us from time to time can be rectified from Washington by those like him that are so much smarter than us.
He would give no recogniotion that it was the Barney Franks of DC that caused our problems every bit as much as the bankers, by demanding sub-prime mortgages be given to people who could not afford them out of some sense of social justice and entitlement. The blind eye to the behavior of Wall Street and Fannie Mae etc. was clearly given due to the large cash donations from same and for the ready entry to candy land for any retiring liberal who wanted to feast at the trough after their political career was over.
I suspect that you are right that they want to encourage the OWS crowd to cause enough trouble to deflect from the failures of the Obama administration and to pave the way for the government to step in and grab even more power over us.
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