Forum Post: David Harvey: The Party of Wall Street Meets its Nemesis
Posted 13 years ago on Oct. 28, 2011, 10:48 p.m. EST by GarciaLorca
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http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/777-david-harvey-the-party-of-wall-street-meets-its-nemesis
"Many decent people are locked into the embrace of a system that is rotten to the core. If they are to earn even a reasonable living they have no other job option except to give the devil his due: they are only 'following orders,' as Adolf Eichmann famously claimed, or 'doing what the system demands' as others now put it, acceding to the barbarous and immoral principles and practices of the Party of Wall Street. The coercive laws of competition force us all, to some degree or other, to obey the rules of this ruthless and uncaring system. The problem is systemic, not individual.
[...]
"Whose side will each of us as individuals come down on? Which street will we occupy? Only time will tell. But what we do know is that the time is now. The system is not only broken and exposed but incapable of any response other than repression. So we, the people, have no option but to struggle for the collective right to decide how that system shall be reconstructed and in what image. The Party of Wall Street has had its day and failed miserably. How to construct an alternative on its ruins is both an inescapable opportunity and an obligation that none of us can or would ever want to avoid."
http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/777-david-harvey-the-party-of-wall-street-meets-its-nemesis
Great piece. Must read.
"Once in control of the state apparatus, the Party of Wall Street typically privatizes all the juicy morsels at below market value to open new terrains for their capital accumulation. They arrange subcontracting (the military-industrial complex being a prime example) and taxation practices (subsidies to agro-business and low capital gains taxes) that permit them freely to ransack the public coffers. They deliberately foster such complicated regulatory systems and such astonishing administrative incompetence within the rest of the state apparatus (remember the EPA under Reagan, and FEMA and “heck-of-a job” Brown under Bush) as to convince an inherently skeptical public that the state can never ever play a constructive or supportive role in improving the daily life or the future prospects of anyone. And, finally, they use the monopoly of violence that all sovereign states claim, to exclude the public from much of what passes for public space and to harass, put under surveillance and, if necessary, criminalize and incarcerate all those who do not broadly accede to its dictates. It excels in practices of repressive tolerance that perpetuate the illusion of freedom of expression as long as that expression does not ruthlessly expose the true nature of their project and the repressive apparatus upon which it rests."
This is chilling stuff right here, and relates to Harvey's comment about how public space is regulated by the state:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/29/nyregion/officers-unleash-anger-at-ticket-fixing-arraignments-in-the-bronx.html
The idea of the banks recovering the loss thru selling the property is, at this time, ludicrous
Idea: Banks should be required to ' Suspend' payments and interest accumulation if a person loses their job during an 'economic downturn' until that person finds a comparable paying job or until the national unemployment rate is less than 5%.
From Doug Henwood:
"The Congressional Budget Office is out with some new stats on Trends in the Distribution of Income over the last three decades. Between 1979 and 2007, here’s how various slices of the population did in real (inflation-adjusted) income growth after federal taxes:
http://lbo-news.com/2011/10/26/it-really-is-about-that-1/