The modern lords of finance look at the protesters and ask, Don’t they understand what we’ve done for the U.S. economy?
The answer is: yes, many of the protesters do understand what Wall Street and more generally the nation’s economic elite have done for us. And that’s why they’re protesting. ...Paul Krugman
Krugman reports that Wall Street's reaction to the protest has changed: from contempt to whining. What's to whine about?
Wall Street pay has rebounded even as ordinary workers continue to suffer from high unemployment and falling real wages. Yet it’s harder than ever to see what, if anything, financiers are doing to earn that money. ...
...Until a few weeks ago it seemed as if Wall Street had effectively bribed and bullied our political system into forgetting about that whole drawing lavish paychecks while destroying the world economy thing. Then, all of a sudden, some people insisted on bringing the subject up again.
And their outrage has found resonance with millions of Americans. No wonder Wall Street is whining.
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Evidently, Wall Street is having a hard time "getting it." The rest of us? Not so much. We have some smart people on our side, people Republicans -- and particularly Congressional Republicans -- detest and fear. In the background is the work of the muckraker of the financial industry, Brooksley Born. And now, in the foreground, Elizabeth Warren.
She is a remarkably eloquent and appealing Senate candidate. “Washington is well wired for big corporations that can hire armies of lobbyists,” she said last month, soon after joining the race. “But it’s not working very well for middle-class families, and that’s what I care about.”
She is both knowledgeable and accessible when she explains the destructive credit-swap and subprime mortgage games that created the financial crisis. She draws a detailed map back to the early deregulation of the 1980s that began to rip the nation’s economic fabric — the same deregulatory fervor the Republicans are preaching today.
Her larger appeal, though, comes from her ability to shred Republican arguments that rebalancing the tax burden constitutes class warfare. In a living-room speech that went viral on YouTube last month, she pointed out that people in this country don’t get rich entirely by themselves — everyone benefits from roads, public safety agencies and an education system paid for by taxes. And those who have benefited the most, she says, need to give back more.
It's not just Republicans in Congress who are afraid of her. Congressional Democrats may be beginning to realize they'll be held to account, too.
