I couldn’t have explained it better.

Just to make sure that you know the Republicans in Congress can keep us occupied with other stuff besides the economy, I found the article Franken rebukes marriage inequality: Straight people won’t suddenly ‘become gay’.

The catch phrase doesn’t really play that important a part of the video below:

The Washington Post has published the opinion piece What caused the financial crisis? The Big Lie goes viral.

Wall Street has its own version: Its Big Lie is that banks and investment houses are merely victims of the crash. You see, the entire boom and bust was caused by misguided government policies. It was not irresponsible lending or derivative or excess leverage or misguided compensation packages, but rather long-standing housing policies that were at fault.

Indeed, the arguments these folks make fail to withstand even casual scrutiny. But that has not stopped people who should know better from repeating them.

Here are just a few of the eleven causes mentioned in the article:

Derivatives had become a uniquely unregulated financial instrument. They are exempt from all oversight, counter-party disclosure, exchange listing requirements, state insurance supervision and, most important, reserve requirements. This allowed AIG to write $3 trillion in derivatives while reserving precisely zero dollars against future claims.

The Securities and Exchange Commission changed the leverage rules for just five Wall Street banks in 2004. The “Bear Stearns exemption” replaced the 1977 net capitalization rule’s 12-to-1 leverage limit. In its place, it allowed unlimited leverage for Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns. These banks ramped leverage to 20-, 30-, even 40-to-1. Extreme leverage leaves very little room for error.

Many states had anti-predatory lending laws on their books (along with lower defaults and foreclosure rates). In 2004, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency federally preempted state laws regulating mortgage credit and national banks. Following this change, national lenders sold increasingly risky loan products in those states. Shortly after, their default and foreclosure rates skyrocketed.

“Yes We Can Make Wall Street Pay” by Julie Matthaeu & Michael Hughes

Here are the links mentioned in the video above.

• www.MakeWallStreetPay.org
• Petition: Yes we can make Wall Street Pay at Change.org
• The U.S. Solidarity Economy Network (SEN) | Supporting & connecting the emerging U.S. solidarity economy movement at www.ussen.org
• Transformation Central at www.transformationcentral.org – This is a space for all dreamers who are working on economic, social, and environmental changes.

Here is the version for Occupy Wall Street

I suppose this is an example of what the top 1% consider to be student violence against the police. You watch the video and see if you can detect who is being violent and who is just asking the police to “Stop hitting students.”

Here is the ad that Karl Rove has created.

Since I urged Elizabeth Warren to acknowledge the Occupy movement (see previous post Elizabeth Warren: Markets Need to Be Regulated), I felt I needed to contribute to her effort to combat this inevitable type of ad.

I had warned her that giving any support to the Occupy movement would bring on these kinds of attacks. Now that she has committed herself, I can hardly wait to see how she counters this kind of attack.

One tack I might take in response, is to repeat the parts of the attack ad that showed the agreement with Warren’s claim that I created much of the intellectual foundation for what they do… and the ending question Intellectual foundation for what? She could step in and say, Well, I am so glad you asked. I did the basic research and wrote books and made speeches documenting how the ultra-rich rewrote the rules of economic activity over the last 30 years to create a radical redistribution of wealth to the top 1% of the wealthy. Armed with that knowledge, the Occupy movement is asking for their money back.