Forward HQ, Class Warfare 2011: The Peasants Are Restless On Wall Street. Release The Hounds.
What the Occupy Wall Street contingent protests is primarily that downward path of the 90% Americans who have lost ground financially for more than three decades. Particularly, however, since the 2008 housing and financial market meltdown the decline of the well-being of most Americans is stark. Housing values – heretofore the staple of net worth for most Americans – are in a depression, and
mortgage and credit burdens increase relative to stagnant income (see below). To illustrate this, below are two charts I put together at the Federal Reserve of St. Louis site known as FRED, a remarkable resource:
No comment necessary . . .
In indexed terms, here’s the same chart:
The decline in home equity reminds me of Wily Coyote going off a cliff, only this isn’t a cartoon, it’s the sterile visual of the real pain suffered by most of us. Mortgage debt and credit debt has not moved downward at all, really, particularly when measured against stagnant personal income.
Income growth, by the way, is no growth, for many years. Moreover, despite the whining by the wealth class, their effective tax rates are lower than they’ve been in more than 25 years, and nearly as low as they’ve been since mid-Depression 1933. Who caused all this? The working class, Mr. Main Street, the poor, labor unions? Not even the daily mid- and low-level employees of the Street were responsible for the debacle. No, they too were the victims of a mammoth fraud based upon reckless financial instruments created by reckless and craven financial geniuses.
It’s no wonder we peasants-in-training are in a mood to march. Bravo, to those Wall Street marchers, and to those in other cities. Recall that protests against the Vietnam war were small at first, but in the end, small beginnings mobilized millions. I was there – we even tried to levitate the Pentagon – and the mood on Wall Street is reminiscent of ours then. We just kept pushing forward, day after day, march after march. And, in my experience, the present Wall Street contingent is at this writing in no way “small.”
This physical embodiment of resistance will bear fruit. Oligarchs and kleptarchs rely on complacency. You there in New York City, Boston, Portland, Maine, and elsewhere, you’ve got their attention. And they’ve already, courtesy of the NYPD, released the hounds . . . They hear you coming.
