Opposing Viewpoints: Kristof Versus Secrest On The Occupy Wall Street Movement

October 28th, 2011

Opposing Viewpoints: Kristof Versus Secrest On The Occupy Wall Street Movement

Posted by: Barry Secrest
Published on October 28th, 2011 @ 04:02:05 pm , using 1726 words

Liberal

Crony Capitalism Comes Home

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Whenever I write about Occupy Wall Street, some readers ask me if the protesters really are half-naked Communists aiming to bring down the American economic system when they’re not doing drugs or having sex in public.

The answer is no. That alarmist view of the movement is a credit to the (prurient) imagination of its critics, and voyeurs of Occupy Wall Street will be disappointed. More important, while alarmists seem to think that the movement is a “mob” trying to overthrow capitalism, one can make a case that, on the contrary, it highlights the need to restore basic capitalist principles like accountability.

To put it another way, this is a chance to save capitalism from crony capitalists.

I’m as passionate a believer in capitalism as anyone. My Krzysztofowicz cousins (who didn’t shorten the family name) lived in Poland, and their experience with Communism taught me that the way to raise living standards is capitalism.

But, in recent years, some financiers have chosen to live in a government-backed featherbed. Their platform seems to be socialism for tycoons and capitalism for the rest of us. They’re not evil at all. But when the system allows you more than your fair share, it’s human to grab. That’s what explains featherbedding by both unions and tycoons, and both are impediments to a well-functioning market economy.

When I lived in Asia and covered the financial crisis there in the late 1990s, American government officials spoke scathingly about “crony capitalism” in the region. As Lawrence Summers, then a deputy Treasury secretary, put it in a speech in August 1998: “In Asia, the problems related to ‘crony capitalism’ are at the heart of this crisis, and that is why structural reforms must be a major part” of the International Monetary Fund’s solution.

The American critique of the Asian crisis was correct. The countries involved were nominally capitalist but needed major reforms to create accountability and competitive markets.

Something similar is true today of the United States.

So I’d like to invite the finance ministers of Thailand, South Korea and Indonesia — whom I and other Americans deemed emblems of crony capitalism in the 1990s — to stand up and denounce American crony capitalism today.

Capitalism is so successful an economic system partly because of an internal discipline that allows for loss and even bankruptcy. It’s the possibility of failure that creates the opportunity for triumph. Yet many of America’s major banks are too big to fail, so they can privatize profits while socializing risk.

The upshot is that financial institutions boost leverage in search of supersize profits and bonuses. Banks pretend that risk is eliminated because it’s securitized. Rating agencies accept money to issue an imprimatur that turns out to be meaningless. The system teeters, and then the taxpayer rushes in to bail bankers out. Where’s the accountability?

It’s not just rabble-rousers at Occupy Wall Street who are seeking to put America’s capitalists on a more capitalist footing.

“Structural change is necessary,” Paul Volcker, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, said in an important speech last month that discussed many of these themes. He called for more curbs on big banks, possibly including trimming their size, and he warned that otherwise we’re on a path of “increasingly frequent, complex and dangerous financial breakdowns.”

Likewise, Mohamed El-Erian, another pillar of the financial world who is the chief executive of Pimco, one of the world’s largest money managers, is sympathetic to aspects of the Occupy movement. He told me that the economic system needs to move toward “inclusive capitalism” and embrace broad-based job creation while curbing excessive inequality.

“You cannot be a good house in a rapidly deteriorating neighborhood,” he told me. “The credibility and the fair functioning of the neighborhood matter a great deal. Without that, the integrity of the capitalist system will weaken further.”

Lawrence Katz, a Harvard economist, adds that some inequality is necessary to create incentives in a capitalist economy but that “too much inequality can harm the efficient operation of the economy.” In particular, he says, excessive inequality can have two perverse consequences: first, the very wealthy lobby for favors, contracts and bailouts that distort markets; and, second, growing inequality undermines the ability of the poorest to invest in their own education.

“These factors mean that high inequality can generate further high inequality and eventually poor economic growth,” Professor Katz said.

Does that ring a bell?

So, yes, we face a threat to our capitalist system. But it’s not coming from half-naked anarchists manning the barricades at Occupy Wall Street protests. Rather, it comes from pinstriped apologists for a financial system that glides along without enough of the discipline of failure and that produces soaring inequality, socialist bank bailouts and unaccountable executives.

It’s time to take the crony out of capitalism, right here at home.

Kristof's blog, On the Ground, Facebook and Google+, YouTube videos ,Twitter.

Conservative

Attack Of The Clones: Occupy Wall Street and "The Me Party"

By Barry Secrest

Has anyone ever stopped to wonder how it is that the brainiacs within our government, not to mention a large number of moderates, and virtually every Democrat on the planet, cannot seem to wrap their collectively singular mindsets around one very glaringly simple truth?

It is, in fact, quite elementary:

Blaming Wall Street and the wealthy for America's severe economic downturn would be no different than trying to blame America's breadbasket and its Farmers for a severe national drought.

And yet, here we have a raucous gaggle of mostly leftist freaks, lugubriously huddling together in the streets of America's largest cities, in order to provide their own personal exclamation point to this commonly held mistruth of class warfare, if not envy, which our President commiserates with, not surprisingly.

Obama seems to continually be making both vague and outright references to the anti-capitalist movement going on in a city near you , once even stating that, MLK, a devout Republican, would have somehow backed this left-leaning zeitgeist movement, which, by a series of cultural connections, seems to complete the burgeoning Star Wars plotlines. You see, the Dark Lord of The Sloth, indeed, must have his Army, and who better to serve than this grouping of resolutely ill-dedicated Clones within the Occupy Protests.

Granted, when we speak of Obama's new army of lounging Leftist clones, we are referring to a decidedly un-diverse grouping of extreme left-wing, non-independent thinking, organizations and individuals who have made their presence and their support known at these Occupy demonstrations. From the Nazi Party (National Socialists Party) to the Communist Party USA, the Workers Party, the Working Family Party, the New Party, Left-Wing Labor Unions-- all have come out in support and have, even more remarkably, evidenced little if any irritation towards the truly culpable in our government, but rather, the reverse. That being even more power to the government to magnitudinally intensify the bankrupting of America under the auspices of redistribution, while vilifying the only ones who can actually aid in extricating America from its hyper-leftist economic disaster.

A Curiously Fawning Media

These Occupy protests, which began on Wall Street and spread throughout the larger US cities, have for a time even intensified internationally, but have largely transformed into what could only be termed as a vast social anarchy movement geared largely against banks, the wealthy, and free market capitalism itself, for the most part--as violence has become an either threatened or active component of virtually each larger demonstration. The media, in stark but predicable contrast to its past coverage of the Tea Party, has been curiously fawning in its attention to this latest iteration of the materially-offended, along with, of course, the President and the Democrats in charge. In fact the Axis Press' coverage of the Occupy protests, in nine days, exceeded almost an entire of year of Tea Party stories.

It has become quite obvious in what, at present, seems to be a rapidly devolving world, that the dark forces of the Left have finally emerged into the light, and with a considerable vengeance, one might add. It's not just the Occupy protests alone, either. In fact, what we appear to be witnessing is a self-absorbed tantrum of epic proportions being acted out by an entire bongo-banging generation of the erroneously enabled and the perpetually confused.

However, the one truly astonishing element to all of this, which would have been unthinkable even one decade ago, is that we now have proud cadres of Socialists, Marxists, Communists and even Anarchists marching and lounging throughout our streets, bearing hammer and sickle signs, often even proudly garbed in Oktober Red, in both America and Europe, while seeking to rub our patriotic right-wing noses in it to boot. In addition, the common thread which seems to run through this scraggly patchwork quilt of Leftist hegemonials is the Unions of America, the Left-Wing Capitalists and even radical Islamists of the world, all sauteed in antisemitic-think, piously merging and engaging their contrived and ever-present vitriolic disenchantment to bear.

Interestingly, this particular apocalyptic condition was prophetically foretold when Obama, as the consummate Socialist pre-emergent, burst onto the scene back in 2004 at the Democratic National Convention. On that warm day in July of 2004, Obama's speech held neither the noteworthy nor the remarkable, at the time-- for a garden variety, albeit uncharacteristically, patriotic Liberal. However, when we look back at his words in this present-day, one particular quote stands out.

Obama stated quite eloquently, to an adulating mass of guiltily hyper-ventilating Leftists, the following words:

Yet even as we speak, there are those who are preparing to divide us, the spin-masters and negative ad Peddlers who embrace the politics of anything goes.

Indeed, little could we have possibly known that Obama was rather incipiently referring to he himself at the time.

So where is all of this going?

Difficult to say at this point. Rush Limbaugh calls these Occupy protests a "boot camp" for the upheaval that's coming. Glenn Beck and this website, among others, have been dreading the day that these mobs would find their left-wing voice, but we have also predicted that this movement would spread from the Mideast and Europe to the US, as conditions worsened. Well, they're here, so now what happens?

Difficult to say.

The simple truth is that this movement is now teetering on either getting bigger or fizzling out, but the one thing that is not happening, so far, is the lack of a true Black involvement, which could put this movement into overdrive, should Blacks care to get involved.

Or perhaps they have had enough of "Change We Can Believe In." We'll see....

Barry's blog Conservative Refocus, Facebook, Twitter