The “Occupy” movement attacks only the superficial side of the problem. It’s like blaming the gardener, instead of the weather, when the flowers die.
Times are hard and our first impulse is to indict what is right in front of us, namely, banks, corporations, the people who have made money by merely observing and accurately interpreting the idiocy around them — people who have taken advantage of the economic distortions to make money.
Banks, corporations, and wealthy people happily obeyed the Community Reinvestment Act, passed by Congress, and used the cheap money created by the Fed to make obscene profits in the five years or so before 2007. Since that time, they have made even more profits by borrowing short-term money at almost zero interest rates, forced into the economy by the Fed, and investing in long-term Treasuries at 3%, the so-called carry trade. If there is a trough, there will be pigs.
The government is the ultimate source of the misallocations that have and probably will continue to impoverish “the 99%.” “Occupy” and its supporters who “believe,” in their government-school-induced darkness, that the government can “save” them from evil “capitalists” seem to be screwing their heads into a socket that produces very little light.
