Where's the Outrage?

[prole]

No riots yet (from left or right).

 

This raises an important question: “Why No Outrage?” This is the title of an article by longtime gold bull James Grant, editor of Grant’s Interest Rate Observer, writing in the July 19, 2008, issue of the Wall Street Journal. Why is it, Grant asks, that “America’s 21st century financial victims,” the general public, “make no protest against the Federal Reserve’s showering dollars on the people who would seem to need them least?....Have the stewards of other people’s money not made a hash of high finance? Did they not enrich themselves in boom times, only to pass the cup to us, the taxpayers, in the bust?” Why, he asks, is there no populist outburst, in the historic tradition of U.S. society? Further, why, in the context of a 2008 presidential contest, are the candidates of the two major political parties virtually silent on the extent of the robbery taking place, and even on the financial crisis itself? “The American people,” he writes, “are famously slow to anger, but they are outdoing themselves in long suffering today.”

 

The fact that such questions are being asked in the leading U.S. financial paper by a noted financial analyst should give us reason to pause. Moreover, the answers that Grant gives to his questions are as interesting as the questions themselves: “Possibly, in this time of widespread public participation in the stock market, ‘Wall Street’ is really ‘Main Street.’ Or maybe Wall Street, its old self, owns both major political parties and their candidates. Or, possibly, the $4.50 gasoline price has absorbed every available erg of populist anger, or—yet another possibility—today’s financial failures are too complex to stick in everyman’s craw.”

 

Grant’s own preferred explanation is that the populists really won in the days of the New Deal and later, and now, due to the expansion of the state’s role, Wall Street has become so “hand-in-glove with the government” that the space for political opposition within the system has evaporated. To be sure, he writes, “government is...—in theory—by and for the people.” But even that, he suggests, is not enough to explain the lack of public angst, which remains largely a mystery.

 

Although we have long been opposed (and remain so) to views that place monetary policy at the heart of explanations of the course of modern capitalism—a perspective that Grant is identified with—we nevertheless agree with his assessment here that the state and finance are in bed with each other (or have at least closed ranks in the crisis, representing a common ruling-class viewpoint). This also extends to the two major political parties and their candidates. And it includes the media, which ought to be raising a stir. The silence in the context of a general election speaks volumes. We also find ourselves in accord with Grant’s conclusion that in the end there seems to be no completely satisfactory explanation for lack of popular protest over a series of ad hoc grants showering hundreds of billions of dollars of public money on the masters of finance, collectively the richest group of capitalists on the planet. And that raises the question: Is this outrage present nonetheless, growing underground, unheard and unseen? Will it suddenly burst forth, like some old mole, unforeseen and in ways unimagined? That too, we think, is a possibility.---from Monthly Review 9/08 Cited: WSJ 7/19/08

[rob]

why the hell aren't they using that 700 billion bailout to get lenders to refinance these rediculous mortgages to something the mortgage holder can actually pay? THAT would be something that really helps main street USA. The lender refinances, the mortgage-holder keeps his house, and uncle sam makes up the difference. Everyone is happy.

 

Is that a dumb idea or something? Instead we just buy a bunch of financial toxic waste to make sure the fat cats don't lose any weight? Fucking bullshit.

 

OF COURSE congress will approve this shit. They always bitch about Bush, but they sure never lift a finger to stand in his way.

[joblo7]

no outrage?

 

the people who control the fed res bank are the same who control the media.you cannot fight an enemy that you do not see.. the media hides everything from the public.

what is joe blo in idaho gonna do about wall st.or manhattan renovations,or baghdad or enron...the ones who profit from all those schemes are the ones who tell him what is going on.

our gov is now subserviant to those forces and in no way protecting us from them..

find the owners, find the problem.

 

shit has a face, a name, a alliance. the trick is to dig...

 

THEN, THE OUTRAGE.