An Occupier returns to Dewey Square

We should use the angered peasants function?
if(corporate malfeasance)
then(pitchforks and fire);

Hedge funds, CDS, Derivatives, Options, futures, ect.

You want me to go down the full list of relatively new finical instruments that lack proper regulations and were used to leverage client money improperly?

The problem wasn't regulatory capture, but lack of regulatory oversight from the beginning. Much of the junk being traded are new financial vehicles that government did not have oversight on due to lack of law.

Plus, your solution appears to be let them do whatever they want, and let them fail when they inevitably screw up. That moral hazard will keep them in line.

I agree, but what does that mean for the US Economy? Are you suggesting we should just let free market Capitalism bomb us to the stone age?

Ultimately, moral hazard didn't. Because nations can not (and should not) let their economy go into a death spiral. That means there is no moral hazard for corporations if they can get to big to fail.

Ultimately the government is the counter wight, and the government should nationalize, stabilize, and break up these behemoths. especially when they need a government bailout.

But, but , but socialism!

I'm not pro- or anti- regulation for regulation's sake alone. It is there to prevent bank failures from dragging down the rest of us. Glass-Steagall may have been a blunt instrument, but it had worked for a long time. Whether you choose to reinstate that law, regulate leverage ratios, institute a financial insurance mechanism, or something else, the important part is to protect the rest of the economy from the inevitable failures of these firms.

You can see what happens when the regulation says you can only invest in triple A grade debt -- all of a sudden lots of new stuff gets rated triple A.

And on Corzine, the question for me is not the billion dollars that disappeared. It's that he bet on government action when he was intimately connected to the government. It couldn't be clearer that big money will influence the government to take certain actions in order to make private investments pay off.

About these "disenfranchised Democrats" that moved to the Tea Party.

There have been quite a few polls to determine the composition of the support of Tea Party related groups around the country. Most of them find that the majority of "Tea Partiers" are in fact, people who vote and support Republicans, and the conservative agenda.

CBS News poll
Article in The Guardian
Analysis by Pew Forum on Religion

is really a left wing movement, right?

I would defend you, but then you told us all you're taking "enlighten" marching orders from a dope fiend. Between you and the guy above, this is why we can't have nice things.

...it's the fault of the poor. I mean there has to be fault assigned somewhere, so natch, the poor. They are the disease.
...
riiiight.

Rather than beating the 1% we need to find a way to

a) put the bottom quarter to work in better paying jobs
b) get the two middle quarters to stop spending everything they make

I'd argue that returning to sane fiscal and economic policy is the best way to "not beat up" on the 1% and further, to increase their wealth. That path includes new revenues on top of balancing the budget, and cutting what isn't working or working well.

The problem is the ratio, not the limits. Are the wealthy better off in a 15 trillion dollar economy holding 40% of the wealth or a 25 trillion dollar economy holding 30%?

I know which I'd rather take. Plutocracy is an unsustainable form of Capitalism.

I always seem to come back to that question whenever you post on this topic, Stevil. You are either disingenuous to act as if "17% of the income" is okay for the top 1%...when (as pointed out before to you) it's not "income" that's the problem, it's the money-making-money aspects (or as you call it "investing") which get taxed at extremely lower rates (if at all) as well as the fact that the top 1% includes the top 0.1% when it comes to income...and you've used 90% of the 1% to mute the effect that the 0.1% are making even the lion's share of that 17%. It's the exponential shape to the income curve that is the danger indicator, not whatever muddled math you want to throw at it!

Furthermore, talking about the fluctuations in income (or wealth) between now and 5 years ago is like talking about how the ocean must be receding from the beach because you happened to look at it while the tide was out. Compare 2007 to 1957 and get back to me on how not-so-inequal our income is in this country.

Or you're just stupid and you're just spouting what you read without knowing or caring what's behind the numbers, but still want to use it to blindly crucify the other 99% of us. Like I say, it's either disingenuous or stupid but you're hardly the only one like you either.

why is it the fault of the wealthy that they accumulate their wealth and invest it in a tax efficient way?

It's their fault because in order to accumulate their wealth, they've acted in ways (or hired people to do so) that are unethical. Albeit these were often not illegal because they operate in areas of finance that aren't understood by anyone but them and Congress benefited from that activity so they had no interest in regulating the activity...and were even financially swayed to act oppositely. These are also activities that NOBODY ELSE has access to because they don't have enough money to put any skin in those games (like hedge funds). And if they finally run into a regulation that stops them from behaving even further unethically or possibly illegally, they pay to have the regulation removed (often even having their lobbyists draft the actual legislation that was used because Congress didn't understand well enough to write it themselves). Finally, they get people of the same mindset into the regulatory and federal financing roles (again, buying the representation they want) who make policy decisions that have nothing to do with Congress that give them access to a safety net that none of the rest of us have. So when they make bad bets, they still get paid off in the end. And finally, they do all of this while increasing their profit margins by axing their employees to outsourced labor in other countries while shipping is cheaper than their employment costs here...causing more Americans below them to stop making money just so they can accumulate more wealth.

Now, who faults them for "investing" in tax efficient ways? Well, since that "investing" is to abuse one of the banks with an exemption as a speculator on the futures exchange...thus artificially driving up costs on all of those people who aren't able to "invest" in this way. But, really, what I think Occupy is arguing more for is not that they are at fault for all this "investing" that keeps leveraging the little guys, but that the taxes should make it so it is far MORE efficient to "invest" in new business rather than just money-making-money ventures the way the current tax schemes have been bought-and-paid-for by these very same rich people who hire others to "invest" in these tax efficient ways.