Tim O'Reilly on OccupyWallStreet (opens in new tab)

They've managed to take over the Republican party. It's far from clear if they've had a huge impact. We won't know that for a while.

No, the Tea Party is the loose aggregation of disaffected middle class types who are tired of excessive taxation, regulation, and governmental bureaucratic meddling; having finally acquired the impromptu organizational networking via the internet, they can discuss what they're tired of, and what they can do to change things.

We're not loony. We're not the creation of any group. Anyone claiming to be a Tea Party "leader" or "creator" isn't. We're your neighbors and friends who are "mad as hell and not going to take it anymore". We're dismayed that our kids are obligated to pay six digits in government debt before they can talk. We know what happens when anyone spends $2 of every $1 that comes in. We're outraged that the Republicans agreed to allow this administration another $2.4T in spending of money we don't have and our kids won't have. We're tired of having our money taken from us to spend on wasteful cronyism, meddling, and funding idleness, while told we can't be trusted to wisely spend our own money we earned. We're tired of being dismissed as looney by people who vote for confiscating our hard earned income under threat of fines, imprisonment or death.

The Tea Party is middle Americans who, on the whole, just want to be left alone. Yes we'll fund "safety nets", build infrastructure, etc. No, we don't want people to starve and die...we also want the able to take care of themselves, and for people to cope with the obvious consequences of their own actions.

Our protests are, on the whole, spontaneous. On boards like this we express concerns, discuss under-reported news, and decide "hey, let's call Senator X and let him know we exist" or "hey, let's rally at location Y at time T" and spontaneous groups gather and act. Oh, BTW, we clean up our own trash too.

We see $1.5T in deficit spending, and know that despite our objections we're the ones saddled with paying it off. We object to getting shafted, and you dismiss us as "looney".

TARP is Exhibit A in the government's special treatment of the banking sector, and that vote helped ignite the Tea Party. Many of the politicians who voted for TARP have been replaced by the Tea Party...it was a huge factor in the 2010 election gains by the GOP, and also the purging of GOP moderates in primaries during the same cycle.

TARP will still end up losing tens of billions, but TARP was superseded by far larger (and less transparent) bailouts run through the Federal Reserve. The banks that have repaid TARP only did so because they had other forms of government support, from over a trillion in Fed lending guarantees, to bailouts of their counterparties at AIG, to the bailout of worthless bondholdings at Fannie and Freddie.

And, we aren't out of the woods. Today the banking system is more concentrated and perhaps just as fragile as it was in 2008.

The first bailout was supported by Bush and a majority of Democrats and voted down by a majority of Republicans.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/30/business/30bailout.html?pa...

Although the official "Tea Party" didn't have their first protest until Jan 2009, it was the same people pushing their congresscritters to oppose the bailout.

There are a fair number of people who hated the Bush part too. They might not have had the name, but the split was there. I get the feeling if McCain had won the Tea Party would still be here. It's not like the policy would have changed.

I would really like to know what you would cite from TARP as a solid investment.

Some more large american companies with large offices in Ireland:

Microsoft: http://maps.google.com/?ll=53.276525,-6.207876&spn=0.004...

Intel: http://maps.google.ie/maps?q=leixlip+intel&hl=en&ll=...

IBM: http://maps.google.ie/maps?ll=53.332712,-6.241581&spn=0....

Oracle (and/or Sun): http://maps.google.ie/maps?hl=en&ll=53.358473,-6.227601&...

There's nothing wrong with campaigning against companies who do things you find unethical, even if they aren't criminal. In this case perhaps the laws should be changed, but in general it's not even desirable for every unethical act to be illegal, yet that doesn't mean we should completely ignore them either. You could, for example, do a classic free-market thing: choose to only do business with companies who act in a way you consider appropriate, and avoid those who don't, perhaps actively campaigning against the ones you find particularly egregious.

The "it's just a game, these are the rules" mentality is actually deeply anti-free-market in the classic sense of intelligent individuals making free choices--- it's the view shady corporate types take, who try to stack the rules and then also promote the view that everyone has to just listen to what the government says the rules are, and not make individual decisions.

Lobbying gets the laws passed for those that enjoy them. The players help create the game, so it is perfectly appropriate to hate them.

If those were my choices, I'd pick the SNL reporter.

That's how it's supposed to work, finance as essentially the servant of productive industry, increasing liquidity and lubricating the economy. But owners of finance capital, like any capital, want to employ it in the maximally profitable ways, not "just" run a service industry, so also try to get the upper hand where they're in control of markets and the direction of businesses, with owners of productive capital essentially servicing them. Who actually is making decisions is a bit more complex than "a war", but I think there is a constant bit of power struggle, at least, with non-finance businesses wanting finance perform a service role, and finance not wanting to be boxed into one.

How hard would it be to organize a protest with a hundred $100M CEOs? I don't think it would be that hard to find 100 CEOs willing to do it.

Marx recognizes the _material_ productivity of capitalism, while claiming that its _human_ consequences are so destructive of spirit and values that the material productivity is besides the point. That's what the "alienation of labor" is all about. Any form of bourgeois wealth, no matter how benign it may seem, necessarily dehumanizes and is thus unjust. And that's before we get into its perpetuation of a system that will lead necessarily to more openly malelovent wealth. His vision of "productive capital" occurs in a set of social arrangements lacking any feature which we might recognize as economic wealth.

The viability of those economic arrangements is hard to assess, as he himself couldn't actually specify them. (They would emerge, he claimed, upon destruction of the bourgeois framework that limits our imagination of other possibilities.) But whatever his merits as an economist (he cribbed heavily from Adam Smith) or a social theorist (cribbed from Rousseau), he was a lousy historian and completely missed the inevitable distortion of high-sounding ideals in service of the accumulation of power.

#OccupyWallStreet likely aren't Marxist, if only because they don't strike me as the sort to buckle down to "The German Ideology" never mind "Das Kapital". (And I don't conflate them with "the left", which comprises great variety, some of it considerably more thoughtful.) But phrases like "unjust creation of wealth" show an uncomfortable similarity to the Marxist technique. Such phrases are written to be undeniable -- geez, who is in favor of unjust creation of anything? But the power lies in adopting the vocabulary beneath them, the definitions of justice which turn out to reflect a particular agenda that is considerably more controversial than our common disgust at the unjust. It turns out that these organizational procedures create considerable power for those determining the language by which "just" and "unjust" shall be determined. The organized, having accepted the adoption of language as an organizational tool necessary for the correction of "injustice", lose the use of language for independent analysis -- and perhaps so deeply they don't even notice the loss. At that point, it becomes impossible for the organized to challenge the determinations of justice made by those controlling the organizational language.

The Tea Party types are necessarily unsophisticated. But they've noticed that they've gone along with a lot of fine-sounding language, only to find themselves with the short end of the stick. It's hardly to be wondered that they prefer to keep it simple, or that they find the #OccupyWallStreet types all too recognizable.

Just to note that you can have "left" leaning views without having any relationship to the ideas of Marx. The co-operative movement arguably demonstrates that you can have very succesful businesses that have a social component:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_cooperative_move...

Doh, you're right. I really didn't compare apples to apples ther.

Still:

1967 - 59,236k households, GDP 3.9T ~= 65k / household (2005 dollars).

2010 - 117,538k households, GDP 13T ~= 111k / household (2005 dollars).

That's something like 1.2% GDP growth per household, while median household income is going up at 0.5%.

On one hand, there might be less dependents per household, but on the other hand, there's a lot more women working. Despite all the housewives burning their bras, forgoing large families, putting their kids in childcare and getting a job, household income still hasn't risen.

Maybe there's a lot of low-payed single women, dragging the median down. That doesn't convince me that everything is OK though.

Let's look at incomes of income-earning over 15s:

Between 1960 and 2004, the salaries of white males went up 0.068% a year. White women's salaries grew at 2%, probably because they were working much greater hours. Black men did well, and black women did even better. But overall, it was a 0.74% per year increase. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_S...

People are better off, but mostly because the women are working longer hours, they don't have kids. Soon, they will also be working more years, as the boomer realize they can't retire. It's a lot better if you're black, but not because of productivity growth trickling down to median workers.

I could track down the numbers, to find how many workers over 15 there are (or maybe how many people there are over 15, or between 15 and 65), but I just don't think productivity growth is <1%, like median income growth. If productivity growth is <1%, then we have another problem altogether.

OK, here we go, real growth by percentile (1960 to 2007):

95th: 1.86% / year. 80th: 1.58% / year. 60th: 1.4% / year. 40th: 1.1% / year. 20th: 1.05% / year.

Arguably (as pg says), this is a good thing, because risk-takers and innovators are being rewarded, driving growth. But it's not as simple as high inequality = high growth, and that doesn't explain why inequality is growing. pg says it's because corporate structures are becoming more efficient, cutting out deadwood managers. Whatever. If this is the case, why isn't GDP growing at a higher rate than the 60s? Has our society simply reached the point where technology no longer drives growth? That's scarier than greedy executives, compliant governments, self-serving boards of directors looting society; but I don't think it's happened yet.

China had huge inequality in the from 1750 to 1950, and stagnent growth, low inequality and moderate growth from 1950 to 1990 (with a few hiccups, notably the Great Leap Forward, and Cultural Revolution, but communism worked a lot better than their previous system of capitalism + corrupt feudalism), then high inequality and high growth from 1990. While inequality might be a requirement for high growth, it's not always a good sign. It can just mean that the rich and powerful are screwing the poor, which makes it harder for a poor innovator to take their idea from rags to riches.

>> per capita.

As I already replied (to another poster), my bad.

>> You get what you agree to in exchange for your efforts. If you work the same menial job year after year, don't expect much income growth.

This just isn't true. A menial worker makes a little more than they would have in 1960, and a lot more than they would have in 1920. Innovation trickles down. Rich bankers riding a bubble on the way up, and bailouts on the way down does not.

"The system" isn't totally broken, but it's a little rigged. It always has been. The more corrupt the system is, the more certain people get paid for not innovating, taking risks, and working hard; which doesn't create a lot of real growth.

I'd say a lot of the corrupt growth is the result of bubbles at the moment - making short term gains at the cost of long-term gains. Tactics include dodgy financialization, creative accounting, ripping off customers at the cost of goodwill, mistreating employees then being screwed when talented staff abandon the company, outsourcing cost centers then getting hit by bait-and-switch prices (Chinese and Indian wages will rise), and so on.

People who are already rich benefit (due to good dividends, higher stock prices, and performance bonuses), but will lose in the long run (unless they get bailed out). Nobody complained when the rich were making money, because they though the benefits would trickle down; but now that a lot of the benefits have proved to be illusionary, people are pissed.

Name one person (not a left-wing nut-job) who bagged the Enron execs when everyone thought they were actually making money ;)

My point is, I don't see any good reason for relative difference between the rich and poor to change over time (past a certain point, say, what it was in the 60s). If it does, it might be because something is broken.

Oh I agree, probably should've stated as such in my post.

Certainly. But the hope is that if the core keeps some sort of energy going that other people can join in when they can. We'll have to see if it can gain any momentum at all.