Showing posts with label Occupy Wall Street. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Occupy Wall Street. Show all posts

Monday, April 3, 2017

Real Clear Markets doesn't hide its libertarian bias, runs three anti-homeownership articles today

The American Dream That's Not Backed Up by History APRIL 1, 2017 10:00 AM EDT By Stephen Mihm

Is the American Dream Killing the American People? By Robert Samuelson April 03, 2017

Ilargi: Our Economies Run On Housing Bubbles Posted on April 1, 2017 by Yves Smith By Raúl Ilargi Meijer, editor of Automatic Earth

That last one is a doozy, from Occupy Wall Street friendly Naked Capitalism, showing to what depths libertarianism will stoop to advance its ideology. 

Tuesday, October 18, 2016

Like Occupy Wall Street Democrat National Committee tour bus illegally craps in the street while in Georgia

Story here. Toilet paper everywhere, they say.

The rules don't apply to Democrats, unless they get caught.

Friday, April 11, 2014

New Yorkers Rejected For Jury Trial Of Occupy Wall Street Protester

Most of the prospective jurors for a trial of an Occupy Wall Street protester accused of felony assault of a policeman are being rejected because they admit they hate what OWS stands for. Another number hates the cops. I think they just hate jury duty for this malcontent, a female, who appears to be being made an example of rather than a truly violent criminal.

The UK Guardian has the story here.

Meanwhile the crazies at Naked Capitalism still fly their OWS sash proudly if not loudly on the upper right of their page even today by the way. But the top story there when you search for "Occupy Wall Street" is dated December 2012. Yves Smith apparently doesn't feel compelled to use a post label so-named to help you find out why you should support this cause.

Sunday, February 9, 2014

Yves Smith, Stalinist Heroine Of Naked Capitalism, Comes Out For Michael Mann Never Once Mentioning His Nemesis Mark Steyn And National Review

The opponents of what is "right" do not exist, you see: If they were in the picture they'd remove them, but it is better to never have them in the picture in the first place.

She's got an Occupy Wall Street Movement sash on the right of her page, might as well put up a Joe Stalin sash on the left.


Saturday, January 11, 2014

Crony Capitalism Is A Feature, Not A Bug, Of Contemporary Liberalism

Jeffrey Snider, here:

Employment grows not on the pace of redistribution-derived consumer spending in the lower classes, but as new firms innovate and grow to replace older firms that have seen their last days. Failure and rebirth are the capitalist "secrets", and demand always follows supply in that line. Interrupt it at your peril.

Unfortunately, we see in the 21st century a different strain of imperialism that is rooted in Hobson's preferred solutions to it. By giving government more power over industry and business, Hobson suggested that government would be able to end business agitation toward external colonialism. But in doing so, governments have introduced the seeds of cronyism that take the form of internal imperialism. Big businesses have achieved regulatory leverage in a manner that may preclude the innovation and business cycles from creating that positive economic trajectory. And monetary policy, all in the name of aggregate demand, appears to be playing a large role.

... OWS [Occupy Wall Street] and its sympathizers ... are really protesting their own philosophies put into practice via a bastardized capitalism - so corrupted by devotion to aggregate demand in this era that it can hardly be referred to as such.

There will never be, and has never been, any such thing as fully free markets, nor should there be. What we are arguing is not absolutes but proportions. ... In perhaps the greatest and most tragic of ironies here, the Fed appeals directly to inflation as a means to destroy savings, an impulse to which I have to think Hobson would readily approve, but that inflation is itself a means of redistribution that further concentrates savings among the wealthy. More than an irony, it seems as if this inconsistency is a feature of this philosophy, as taken to its logical ends it produces something akin to circular reasoning. It is a place where the socialists of OWS criticize directly the tools of socialist monetary policy as if they are anything apart from each other.

Tuesday, December 31, 2013

Middle Class In Flames: All The Fed Has Done Is Help The Banks

Naked Capitalism supports Occupy Wall Street. Heh, heh. Does Jeep know?
Yves Smith of Naked Capitalism, here:

Oh, puhleeze. Robust recovery for who? The Fed not only threw staggering amounts of firepower at salvaging bank balance sheets, while showing no interest in rescuing ordinary Americans. It was also all-in on the Administration’s program to paper over the banks’ chain of title problems and their widespread servicing abuses, and didn’t bother to obtain any meaningful concessions or reforms, the most important of which would have been principal modifications, a remedy favored by investors as well as homeowners. The Fed has been all too happy to accept mission creep rather than speak up forcefully for the need for more fiscal stimulus.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The analysis is right, but the prescriptions are left: raising the minimum wage, breaking mortgage contracts, and spending money we do not have. Oh, puhleeze. It's Naked Liberalism.

But she's great on Obama's Mussolini-style corporatism, most recently here in response to The New Republic:

I’m actually a bit miffed that Konczal treats the “corporatism” appellation as the sole property of the right wing (in the style sheet of the Vichy Left, calling them “hysterics” is redundant but necessary for the rubes), since I have a prior claim. And what is particularly rich is that Konczal apparently regards the allusion to Mussolini to be unfair . . ..

Obamacare IS corporatist. Here we have the industries that are significant contributors to why the American medical system is so overpriced – the health insurers and Big Pharma – actually playing a major role in writing the legislation. And how is it not a sop to large companies to have the government require that citizens buy your product or else pay large tax penalties? Mr. Market certainly thought so, for the price of health insurer and drug company stocks jumped the day the ACA passed. And remember, the beneficiaries of Obamacare extend beyond the insurers and pharmaceutical makers. Hospitals, who increasingly engage in oligopoly pricing (most surgeries need to be done in hospitals), also come out even stronger because new requirements imposed on doctors’ practices will make it difficult for a retiring MD who practices medicine, as opposed to servicing the rich (e.g., cosmetic surgeons) to sell their business to anyone other than a hospital.

And the label fits in the banking arena like a glove. I’ve ... called both the Bush, but far more often the Obama bank-friendly policies “Mussolini-style corporatism” since 2008, and well before what [Mike] Konczal [of The New Republic] claims is the origin of this description, Tim Carney’s book Obamanomics, published November 30, 2009.

Sunday, July 28, 2013

Dear Christopher Buckley: "Go Away" Is Not A Solution, Unless You're A WASP

Occupy Wall Street: The Mirror Image Of Congress
Reviewing "This Town" by Mark Leibovich in The New York Times, here, Christopher Buckley wishes in the end that most of the denizens of DC would just go home or, better yet, go away, citing the important fact that the lobbyists are really mostly just former elected officials:

'There’s a phrase in journalism-speak called “burying the lede,” which Leibo­vich appears to do by waiting until Page 330 to cite this arresting figure (previously reported by The Atlantic): in 1974, 3 percent of retiring members of Congress became lobbyists. “Now 50 percent of senators and 42 percent of congressmen do.” No one goes home anymore. Cincinnatus, call your office. ... By the end, one is left thinking that our country would be so much better off if, after putting in their years of “public service,” all these people would just go home. Or just away. But then what would we do for entertainment, being left with a mere Parliament of Bores?'

When the US Congress and the executive conspired way back in the 1920s to restrict representation to 435 in the US House to repress the growing political influence of the grown large immigrant population, mostly from Europe, which they also evidently wished "would just go home" or "away", it merely pushed on a string. So that today instead of worse representation we have representation of the worst sort: lobbyists whom we cannot dislodge at election time, and the 435 people who depend on them for campaign financing whom we cannot dislodge, either.

Today we should have a US House of Representatives of 10,490. Instead we had in 2012 12,411 registered lobbyists, and the 435 mopes the lobbyists, and we, routinely return to Washington, DC.

Representation is messy, but we desperately need more of it as the founders intended, not less.


Saturday, January 5, 2013

Obama Finally Cracks The 51% Barrier

It only took two months of diligent counting, but Obama has finally garnered 51.03% of the popular vote in Election 2012, entitling him to a tax increase on the 0.31% of Americans at the top of the income ladder, or so he says.

Mitt Romney got 47%, but not the now proverbial 47%, who are about to find out that tax increases on the rich amounting to $60 billion a year divided by 148 million Americans comes to a handout of just 405 bucks each. Don't spend it all in one place.

And the libertarians, fittingly, got the 0.99%, the actual support of Occupy Wall Street which, like all crackpots, claimed to represent nearly everybody in the 99% while crapping on your front stoop, which free expression libertarians are all for.

Data here.

Monday, December 31, 2012

Wealthy Ivy League Occupy Wall Street Extremists Captured With Explosives

Now, what would they need explosives for, hm?

Story here:


A detective discovered a plastic container with seven grams of a white chemical powder called HMTD, which is so powerful, cops evacuated several nearby buildings.

Police also found a flare launcher, which is a commercial replica of a grenade launcher; a modified 12 gauge Mossberg 500 shotgun; ammo; and nine high-capacity rifle magazines, the sources said.

Gee, remind you of anyone? You know, Obama's friends?



Thursday, November 1, 2012

It Takes One To Know One: Carl Bernstein Smells Radicalism In The Air

Carl Bernstein of Woodward-Bernstein fame thinks he's caught a whiff of radicalism in Mitt Romney and the Tea Party, here at The Daily Beast, imagining all sort of vain things about both of them.

By the end of the hysterical tirade he calms down a little and realizes his own progressivism qualifies as radicalism, too, but he'd much rather call his beloved progressivism a "transformational movement". In other words, "progressivism good, radicalism bad", sort of like how liberalism got a bad name and had to be replaced at all costs if liberalism were to continue to retain influence.

The reality is the Tea Party is a reactionary movement trying to forestall the radicalism of Barack Obama. Reactionary movements often are mistaken for radical movements because in order to succeed in their objective they have to get to the root being yanked out of the ground by others, by the revolutionaries, and replant it. As such reactionaries, the Tea Partiers are counter-revolutionaries: "Put It Back!"

This is not to say that reactionary movements cannot be hijacked by ideologues any less than true revolutionary movements are inspired by them. The American revolutionaries are a case in point. They never embraced the idealisms which turned into a class war against aristocrats in France. It is unthinkable that the history of the early American independence movement would have turned out as it did had it otherwise been a movement about liberty, equality and fraternity. Former loyalists were welcomed back. While enthusiasm for the idealism of natural rights among Tea Party activists is reminiscent of this, especially among the libertarian elements, the genesis of the movement was in reaction to Obama's proposed mortgage bailouts of deadbeat homeowners, many of whom were becoming infamous for "walking away". Like a good reactionary, Rick Santelli gave voice to his indignation at these people on national television in February but characteristically planned a Tea Party protest on the beach of Lake Michigan for months later, during his summer vacation. In the interim, he had to go to work.

The people, however, had other ideas about waiting. But unlike real radicals such as the Occupy Wall Street types, their protests were peaceful, orderly, clean, and came to an end, and then transformed themselves into the constructive activity of political action, retaking the US House in 2010 for the Republicans in order to stop Obama. As a political movement, it should be understood in those practical prophylactic terms despite the efforts of Republicans to co-opt the movement. The Tea Party is a movement of Americans who are radical only in the sense that they have rediscovered their roots in the constitution and the world which gave it birth.

The true radicals in the bad sense are those who would extirpate them.  

Sunday, September 23, 2012

"Naked Capitalism" Supports The Occupy Movement

In your heart you felt she was nuts, but now you know it.

Those occasional protestations to being a middle of the road type of person never rang true when you observed all those posts she's had from Washingtons Blog, the 911 conspiracy theorist, who shows up, by the way, also at Barry Ritholtz' The Big Picture.

No one goes from being a moderate directly to anarchist communism unless they were something more extreme all along.

The first principle of all ideology is to lie in order to gain the confidence of the people, and if not the confidence, an opening.

Wednesday, August 15, 2012

The New York Times Uncorks The Wildest Slur Yet Against The Tea Party

Suddenly the Tea Party is the most selfish, arrogant and yet servile lot on the planet, according to one Jennifer Burns, an assistant professor at Stanford, for The New York Times, here:

". . . the Tea Party, whose members believe they are the only ones who deserve government aid."


Wow. Haven't heard that one yet. Is that what it takes to get tenure at Stanford these days? The intimate connection she divines between the Randians and the Tea Party is, quite simply, the sort of fantasy one might expect of someone trying to find something new to say. Not that the Shruggers wouldn't like to co-opt the Tea Party. They would, and they are trying, as is the Republican Party's Dick Armey, which is enough to give anyone who has watched them from the beginning the staggers. The spontaneous revulsion of common, everyday folk in America to the designs of their elected leaders provoked the reaction which is the Tea Party, most of which is as non-ideological as a hamburger. 


I dunno, maybe she's confusing the Tea Party with Occupy Wall Street, some of whose members are infamous for demanding student loan forgiveness, and the right to poop on your stoop.

Just two years ago in Slate Mark Gimein could reasonably characterize the Tea Party as "the responsibles" who rose up against "the deadbeats", homeowners who had stopped paying on their mortgages and wanted bailouts from the Obama regime even as millions of underwater homeowners continued to pay on theirs.

I guess Jennifer is fairly new to the planet.

Sunday, August 12, 2012

Obama's Enthusiasm For Bailouts Becomes National Socialism in Colorado Remarks

Obama views the GM auto bailout as an example of a successful government investment in the private sector, never mentioning, of course, that the success is at the expense of the former private investors in GM, its non-union elements, and of the tax-paying public. Without those, GM is still a failure, and should be again.

That Obama now says in Colorado that he wants to similarly rescue more companies, however, indicates that the bailout model was more to him than a one-off which he fortuitously inherited from the Republican establishment, an intellectually lazy cohort of Baby Boomers which long ago had betrayed free market principles. Obama's commitment to a model of government superintendence of private industry marks a new public face for an old familiar mixture of State and industry, the inspiration for which Herbert Hoover noted in his memoirs FDR had derived from Mussolini and the other strong men of Europe.

We all know what is the result of this type of thinking because we've already experienced it, not just in FDR's long failure, and not just in the recent auto company bailouts, but also in the rescue of the financial industry:

  • more moral hazard which has allowed so-called private banking players like the five or ten biggest banks to take even more unwarranted risks and grow ever larger and more too big to fail than ever, knowing the public purse is backing them up;
  • taxpayer-funded bailouts whose pain is never really felt by the taxpayers because, like most public spending, the bailouts are simply financed by more borrowing, which in their turn have only worsened the fiscal health of the nation and contributed to the loss of its once vaunted AAA rating;
  • corruption of elected public officials and bureaucrats whose crimes destroy the public's consent to be governed, as witnessed by the rise of protest movements like the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street, and by the capital strike by individual investors;
  • picking winners like multinational GE and Wall Street firms who reaped huge rewards in the form of tax breaks and bonuses because of their close relationship with government, and therefore by definition also picking losers on Main Street like small banks and entrepreneurs who can't beat the system because it is rigged against them, crushing confidence in "capitalism";
  • a complete repudiation of free market principles in which failure and bankruptcy become as unacceptable as saying "No" to the kids or as marking an "F" on a report card, unless for unrelated political reasons your industry happens to become a target for elimination, you know, like Chick-Fil-A, or the Roman Catholic Church in America.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about Obama's remarks in Colorado is the way he is now touting his commitment to this model in explicitly nationalistic terms, emphasizing his as a patriotic concern for the American people to bring their jobs home, and Romney's as an unpatriotic intent to export those jobs.

Obama's socialism has been deemed a distraction by establishment Republicans, who find all the purported links between Obama and the communist left made by conservatives just a little too disturbing for polite conversation. It reminds them too much of the McCarthy era. But now explicitly linked to nationalism, Obama's remarks become an opportunity to refocus the conversation on the coincidence of these elements in fascism, which the left has hitherto succeeded in attacking and marginalizing as a phenomenon of the right, of conservatism.

Locating Obama in fascism actually makes better sense of his presidency to date. It explains the disillusionment of the left with him as a sell-out who has had the temerity to spend so much of his time enjoying himself instead of pushing their agenda, crafting policy to maximize campaign contributions from favored industries, and throwing his weight around as Commander In Chief. After one year progressives were already ridiculing his administration as a squandered presidency. And fascism also coheres with the interpretation of his experience in Chicago where he allied himself with financial, insurance and real estate interests and the Democrat Party to take over the property of the South Loop,  enrich themselves, and further their political careers. The president's friendship with Jeffrey Immelt is not a bug. It's a feature. 

The historical reality is that the fight between the communists and the fascists was always a fight on the common ground of socialism, rather like the fight between Democrats and Republicans has been a fight on the common ground of liberalism. The radicalization which occurred in the arguments between socialists culminating in the Second World War occurred because the conservatism of a prior monarchical age had completely lost its tempering force in society. The civilization of Europe was completely overcome from within by a capitulation to eschaton-immanentizing ideologies before it destroyed itself from without in war. In that process, liberalism was the vanguard softening up the enemy for the totalitarianism to come. Conservatism was beside the point then, but not here, not now.

In the arguments between Democrats and Republicans in our time, matters have not yet degenerated into such violence because the unique contributions of conservatism from the American Founding still inform much of the body politic. And the most important of those contributions, derived from human and religious experience both, has been the self-limiting conviction that human nature is not perfectible and always remains a mixture of good and evil which no rearrangement of human affairs can alter.  In the person of Barack Obama, however, we have met with someone who explicitly asserts otherwise, as an ideologue, that the union is perfectible. He deliberately goes out of his way to attack those individuals and institutions who know, believe and say otherwise. And armed with the imperial accoutrements gathered by his predecessors in the presidency, one might say that the people actually face for the first time a real and foreign threat in charge of the executive, a foreigner in his heart, mind, and affections who keeps his past sealed precisely because the revelation that he once presented himself as a foreigner for his own advantage even though he was born in Hawaii would offend more than actually being a foreigner.

Liberalism is defenseless against this because it drinks from the same cup of idealism. This is why it keeps quiet and doesn't look too deeply into President Obama. It is afraid it might see its own reflection. And this is also why a liberal like Mitt Romney can't bring himself to entertain Obama's socialism, let alone his national socialism. If it worked, he'd actually agree with it.

ABC News has the most recent formulations of Obama's national socialist vision here:

"When the American auto industry was on the brink of collapse, more than 1 million jobs at stake, Gov. Romney said, let’s ‘let Detroit go bankrupt.’ I said I believe in American workers, I believe in this American industry, and now the American auto industry has come roaring back and GM is number one again. So now, I want to do the same thing with manufacturing jobs, not just in the auto industry, but in every industry. I don’t want those jobs taking root in places like China. I want them taking root in places like Pueblo.  Gov. Romney brags about his private sector experience, but it was mostly investing in companies, some of which were called “pioneers” of outsourcing.  I don’t want to be a pioneer of outsourcing.  I want to in-source.  I want to stop giving tax breaks to companies that are shipping jobs overseas.” ...

"When the American auto industry was on the brink of collapse, 1 million jobs at stake, Mr. Romney said, ‘Let Detroit go bankrupt.’  I said, let’s bet on America’s workers.  And we got management and workers to come together, making better cars than ever. And now, GM is number one again and the American auto industry has come roaring back.   So now, I want to say what we did with the auto industry, we can do it in manufacturing across America.  Let’s make sure advanced, high-tech manufacturing jobs take root here, not in China.  Let’s have them here in Colorado.  And that means supporting investment here.”


Wednesday, February 29, 2012

Occupy Portland Vandalizes Two Banks and a Starbucks

Anti-capitalists, they call themselves:

Police said they received an e-mail that said it was from "Some Of Those Responsible" and read in part, "about an hour and a half ago (around ten pm, Tuesday night) a group of anticapitalists rolled up on the US Bank at SE 39th and Main and smashed out its windows and ATMs." ...

Police said a second e-mail was received after the Key Bank branch and Starbucks locations were vandalized, which read in part, "wherever capital chooses for its bunker, we will be there to attack it in the night." It was signed "For freedom, for equality, for anarchy".

Story, here.

A Chase branch and a Wells Fargo branch were vandalized last November (story here).

Wednesday, February 1, 2012

Instead of 10,267 US Representatives We Had 12,592 Lobbyists in 2011

If we followed the US Constitution our House of Representatives would have 10,267 elected representatives today.

Republicans and Democrats put the kibosh on that in 1929 to concentrate power in themselves, which is why today we have only 435 elected to the House. They don't much give a damn what we think about anything, and the approval rating of Congress is now so low it's almost within the margin of polling error.

Instead of the founders' idea of adequate representation we had 12,592 active lobbyists in 2011, spending over $3 billion to influence the 435 petty tyrants. Isn't it odd how closely the natural lobbying market today approximates what the authors of the constitution deemed to be a suitable level of representation?

Does anyone really think Occupy Wall Street, The Tea Party, The Heritage Foundation, The National Association of Realtors, The American Bankers' Association or any of the other myriad interest groups would exist in their current form if Congress were more representative of the individual American? Congressmen must sit in their offices and laugh at all the wasted, disorganized and therefore impotent effort spent influencing their votes.

When a representative's constituency is only 30,000 strong instead of 700,000, however, the prospects of his reelection are more sensitive to a narrower range of interests: Yours. Blow it with a few thousand of us and out he would go.

No wonder they got rid of the idea when they could.

Isn't it time to right this wrong?

Monday, January 16, 2012

Thursday, January 5, 2012

Occupy Wall Street Doesn't Know How Good They've Got It

Occupy Wall Street doesn't know how good they've got it.

A new study using data up through 2005 puts the world's top 1 percent of earners starting at $34,000 of after tax income per person per year.

The world's median income is just $1,225 per person per year.

Half of the world's one percenters live in the USA, and "even the poorest 5 percent of Americans are better off financially than two thirds of the entire world."

Story here.

Tuesday, December 27, 2011

Why Do We March? Why Do We Protest? Why Do We Hate Congress?

Surely the answer is because we believe that our government does not represent us.

And it doesn't. In fact, the current Speaker of the House doesn't even believe that it should, and never has believed it. He went on the record early in the current legislative session saying that the president should set the Congress' agenda, as here:

“While our new majority will serve as your voice in the people’s House, we must remember it is the president who sets the agenda for our government.”

Rep. Boehner is seriously mistaken if he thinks the Tea Party would agree with that. It's the president's agenda which created the Tea Party, and the Tea Party doesn't like the president's agenda one bit.

Whether from the right with the Tea Party or the left with Occupy Wall Street, there is massive discontent in the American people with government.

That is why Gallup can report in December here that Congress has the lowest approval rating ever, since the polling organization began tracking the issue in 1974:

From a broad, long-term perspective, Congress has never been popular. The average annual congressional job approval rating since 1974 is 34%. Still, this year's 17% annual average is by one point the lowest yearly average Gallup has recorded.

The actual number approving of Congress has also reached a record low: 11 percent.

Instead of trying to make the Congress we have more responsive to us, why don't we just get a new one, a bigger and a better one than the one we've got?

Say, with tail fins.

Your congressman and my congressman now represent on average 707,999 people other than you or me. Which is to say, each and every voice he or she hears is next to meaningless. Once elected, your congressman treats you more like a serf than an equal because he doesn't need you to get re-elected. He needs money to do that, big money for television and other forms of advertising to get his name out there. He needs movers and shakers, not you.

If your congressman represented only 30,000 people instead of 708,000, however, do you think that he would need less money to get elected, work harder for your vote, and have an incentive to vote in Congress the way you want him to instead of the way he does? I do. And so did the authors of the constitution.

Since 1929 America has not had a Congress of the size required under Article 1, Section 1. The Congress voted to fix the size by law at the 435 level, by-passing the constitutional requirement to expand the size of the House as population grows. The consequences for the American people have been negative ever since.

This was a neat little trick designed for the benefit of only one group, the Congress. As a consequence money, influence and power have been concentrated in their few hands instead of distributed and divided broadly in order to contain it as the founders intended.

It is no wonder that Congress has become the rich, corrupt, arrogant and vile body it is today.

The best way to repair this situation, however, is not to "throw all the bums out," or work to hand control to a different political party than the one that has it now, or throw out the electoral college, or amend the constitution in some way.

No, the best way is simply to follow it. What we need to do is dilute the power the Congress presently has as the constitution requires: with a population of 308 million Americans, we should have 10,267 members in the US House, not 435.

If you want to give business as usual the boot, just hand Nancy Pelosi or John Boehner the task of trying to herd 10,000 cats for a vote on the debt ceiling, or the Patriot Act, or any other measure.

Just the thought of it should appall them.

And make no mistake about it: this sounds like a revolutionary act, but it's anything but. The real revolution occurred when Congress voted to usurp your right to the founders' vision of adequate representation.

To restore matters to the status quo ante is only counter-revolutionary.

Wednesday, December 14, 2011

The Increase in the Wealth Gap is Due to the Housing Collapse

The latest figures from the Federal Reserve (link: compare lines 4 and 42) show that enormous wealth destruction in housing is the overwhelming cause of the dramatic decline in household net worth between 2006 and 2011.

Of the $7.8 trillion decline in net worth over that period, $6.6 trillion of that is all from the bursting of the housing bubble . . . nearly 85 percent.

Hurt most by this are the millions of middle class Americans whose primary asset is their home. Desperately trying to hold on to what they have, by scrimping, saving and working, they don't have the luxury of time to occupy much of anything to protest what is happening to them.

It is impolitic to say so, but their plight is the frequent one of the undiversified investor: too many eggs in one basket.

But that's not a bug, it's a feature of entering the middle class, whose goal is owning a home and raising a family in it, not sophisticated money management and investing. Such people who can scrape together the income of $40,000 to $50,000 necessary to support home ownership typically aren't going to have significant financial assets to manage. Of the 150 million wage earners in America, after all, fully 99 million make $40,000 a year or less.

Neither Obama nor the Republican candidates for president, nor Occupy Wall Street or the Tea Party for that matter, seem to talk much about any of this, yet the collapse of housing better explains the growing gap between rich and poor in America than do the supposed crimes of the one percent. The rich may be getting richer, but it's inspite of the fact that their own homes have declined in value, too. The middle class is being squeezed downward because its primary asset continues to lose value.

The deep frustration of so many of the American people with their elected leaders is that the leaders really don't represent them in this matter, in the same sense that sympathizing with, understanding, or trying to fix this problem doesn't have the urgency for them anymore than it does for the rich. The reason is that virtually none of them has personal experience of it. From our president to our senators and all the way on down to our representatives, we have leaders whose own high net worth and the insulation from our vulnerabilities that that affords make them remote, unfeeling, and unmotivated.

In point of fact, since it was Democrats and Republicans who conspired in the very policies which have misled Americans to drain $10 trillion in home equity over three decades (for example, dramatic changes to tax and banking policy in 1997 and 1999 under Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich and Phil Gramm), it shouldn't be surprising that none of them really wants to talk about this gorilla in the living room. They helped make and sell the bed we're now sleeping in. And we bought it.

Of about 132 million total dwellings in 2010 of all types (table 3), just 61 million occupied dwellings are single family homes occupied by their owners, with an additional 11 million occupied by renters, according to the latest Census data here (link). That means something substantially less than 46 percent of total dwellings in the country could plausibly represent the American dream of the traditional middle class. The richest quintile, those households making over $100,000 per year, let it be remembered, lives in houses, too.

The Economic Policy Institute, whose president is a socialist, here (link) provides a useful summary of how wealthier individuals avoided the severity of the housing decline precisely because more of their assets were diversified and were not all riding on real estate (emphases added):

In 2007—prior to the Great Recession—median net worth was $106,000 (consisting primarily of home equity, as discussed later). ... Net worth for the top 1% was $19.2 million in 2007 . . ..

The updated figures for 2009 reflect the enormous destruction of wealth due to the bursting of the housing bubble. As a general rule, households with less wealth have a greater share of their wealth embedded in their homes. Thus, it is not surprising that the fallout from the deflating housing bubble disproportionally affected them. On average, the top 20% lost 16.0% and the bottom 80% lost 25.1% of their total wealth in 2008 and 2009. Average wealth of the bottom 80% was just $62,900 in 2009—a dropoff of $40,900 from 2007 and slightly less, in inflation-adjusted terms, than it was more than a quarter-century ago in 1983. Those at the top also lost ground but not nearly as much, percentage-wise. Average wealth of the top 1% was close to $14 million in 2009, down $5.2 million from 2007. ...

[H]ousing equity is a far more important form of wealth for most households. ... In 2007, the middle 20% of households held $196,700 in non-stock assets, and only $10,200 in stocks. In other words, non-stock assets—which are over-whelmingly housing equity—made up about 95% of this group’s wealth.

In the United States homeownership has long been associated with solid footing on the economic ladder, and yet the housing crash has meant that for a broad swath of people homeownership is no longer a reality.

The stepping stone from the lower and working classes to the upper classes, obviously, is the middle class. Very few skip that step, on the way up or on the way down. Rags to riches and back to rags again is interesting, but not common. Rich liberals from both parties, however, have a vested interest in minimizing the middle class to polarize the country. Rich Republicans and Democrats alike don't want the competition entrepreneurial Americans threaten them with, and leftist Democrats need a servile, manipulable constituency they can feed table scraps to in order to keep themselves in power. Some so-called conservative Republicans also, it must be said, seek their own fiefdoms of influence and power at the expense of impulses to limited government. George W. Bush's play for senior votes with Medicare Part D comes to mind.

What middle Americans should demand is a bigger House of Representatives to co-opt these entrenched interests by de-concentrating the power which the 435 now enjoy. Tea Partiers in particular should be advocating a return to the constitutional principle of one representative for every thirty-thousand of population, if their protestations to originalism mean anything. Instead of the bloated, rich and corrupt 435 politicians we've been stuck with for a hundred years, we should have 10,000 lean citizen legislators.

When we get them, things will begin to change for the better because our representatives will have far less power and far more reason to listen to the people. Special interests will have much less influence over them, campaigns will be far less costly, and Congressional staffs could be reduced dramatically, saving us money and getting some actual work out of our politicians for a change. The move would also take away the enthusiasm for radical proposals such as the elimination of the electoral college by dramatically expanding the pool of electors in presidential elections.

We might even persuade such a House to overturn the 17th Amendment, another blow for originalism, which would help improve the US Senate almost overnight. By returning the corrupting influences of campaign cash to state houses where senators would be appointed, we might actually be able to do something about corruption more often because it would be closer to home and we'd be more aware of it.