The new strategy: A push for us to empathize with Wall Street

[woo me with science]

"If he were alive today, I believe he would remind us that the unemployed worker can rightly challenge the excesses of Wall Street without demonizing all who work there; that the businessman can enter tough negotiations with his company’s union without vilifying the right to collectively bargain....He would call on us to assume the best in each other rather than the worst, and challenge one another in ways that ultimately heal rather than wound."



Listening to the President's speech, and to many posts on the GD: P, I am struck by the new exhortations to find common ground and empathize with the people who work on Wall Street.

We are told that we have to empathize and try to understand each other. Once again, there are two sides to every story, and the fair route must be somewhere in the middle.

The clever deceit here is the attempt to cast our opponents as the people who work on Wall Street rather than the SYSTEM that is impoverishing people across the globe. Suddenly we are being told it is mean or heartless to want fundamental change to the corporate system. We should not demonize each other. We have a commitment to each other.

But corporations are not people. They have no commitment except to their profit margins. It is precisely because they are not people, and their bottom line is profit, that they are squeezing workers in this country (and others) until they are dried husks, and then discarding them. Corporations do not have consciences. They have quarterly reports.

This has absolutely nothing to do with people on Wall Street. It has to do with the diseased, unregulated or corruptly regulated corporate structure that is in place, in which profit is the bottom line motive, above human beings and their lives. Corporations do not have empathy. They do not function to care about people. They function for the bottom line.

This is their new strategy, to claim that We are people and Wall Street is also people, and we must have empathy for each other. How ironic that the people in the "We are the 53 percent" posts are being revealed as fabricated, two-dimensional photoshop jobs, not actual people at all.

What a perfect symbol of this transparent attempt to make us empathize, and cooperate, with corporations.

[Odin2005]

1. Exactly. It's the SYSTEM that is broken.

It attracts sociopathic individuals to the top because those sociopathic individuals broke the system in order to get to the top.

Every fourth generation it seems that the sociopaths succeed in breaking the system, and then We The People have to fix it back up.

[roguevalley]

33. you know, someone needs to seriously explain how bipartisan

and empathy don't fucking work anymore. How frigging stupid do you have to be to keep going down this road? MLK would NEVER EVER try this shit with Nazis. That's why they had to shoot him. God bless a smart good man, MLK. We never needed you more than right now.

[lumberjack_jeff]

2. It's not the people who work on wall street that are the main problem.

It's the people that OWN wall street.

[LWolf]

3. I'm full to the brim with empathy for people, for living things, for the planet.

For corporations? Not so much.

[white_wolf]

4. The people aren't the problem.

It isn't that rich people are all selfish. If that was the case then Bill Gates wouldn't give so much to charity. It is the system that is broken. Capitalism encourages selfishness and greed. It concentrates power into too few hands. We can't simply replace the people, we must replace the system. However, I have no empathy for the bastards on Wall Street, I'm just trying to say we can't simply replace them and hope things get better.

[socialist_n_TN]

26. "....can't simply replace them and hope things get better."

EXACTLY wolf, exactly! As to the people who work on and the people who OWN Wall Street, there's a question to ask of them. Do you support the exploitative system that gives you your income?

A simple question that gives them a chance to decide whose side they're on.

[EFerrari]

5. .

.

[nadinbrzezinski]

6. The DLC is as terrified of this as the far right

[white_wolf]

8. Isn't the DLC far right?

[nadinbrzezinski]

11. Nope, they are just center right

[MjolnirTime]

7. I see you'd prefer just to vilify the lot of them and be done with it.

[Kaleko]

31. Take your blindfold off.

Time to wake up, Mjolnir.

[sabrina 1]

34. No need to vilify them, they are known by their works and by

statistics and by the record of criminality, corruption and immorality that crashed the economies of the World and who pockeded the money.

Feel free to present their case for our sympathy.

As for the PEOPLE who work on Wall St, many of them lost their jobs while the CEOS took multi-million dollar bonuses.

No sympathy for greed and hubris and corruption and crime. We don't have it for ordinary people, how is that there is so much 'understanding' expected for Corporate Criminals?

[lunatica]

9. The 99% have heard it all before. Which is one reason why they're out there

[Warren DeMontague]

10. As soon as the Administration empathizes with the pot smoking cancer grannies they're harassing

in CA with our tax dollars, I'll consider their plea on behalf of the oppressed folks who brought us Collateralized Debt Obligations.

[truedelphi]

17. + 1 for every Calif granny (and granpa) I know who

Are about to lose the only cheap available effective medicine that they can harvest in their own back yard.

[Blue_In_AK]

18. Completely agree.

[truedelphi]

12. We The People have "empathized with Wall Street."

We understood when the mortgage bankers let the mortgage sales people tell us that "now is the time to buy a home." They wouldn't lie to us, would they? (Even as Corporate Executives were trying to sell their shares in the same mortgage firms.)

We have empathized with Wall Street, when the poorest of us bow our heads as the cashiers patiently explain to us that over the previous month, new miscellaneous charges were created by the banks, so that our estimates of how much we had in checking were wrong, wrong, wrong. So now we need to "eat" a $ 99.00 Insufficient Check Fund, with this charge representing some 82,000 percent interest on the $ 1.99 by which we were off. Thirty eight billion bucks worth of profits to the banks, each year, on the heads of the poorest of the poor, as those with decent paying jobs and the Elite only bounce one check a year.

We empathized with Wall Street when being told that there is simply no way that our nation can provide Single Payer Universal Health Care, or even public option. Instead we go to clinics that are under staffed and are misdiagnosed. Or we go to HMO's where we are misdiagnosed, and end up losing our homes, our retirement funds et al, in order to sort it all out, and to somehow survive. With no ability to sue, as the computers at the hospital erase the visits where the misdiagnosis occurs. And very few lawyers are willing to take on major hospital chains. And hey there, guess who gets to repossess your home when the money is needed for repayment of the medical accounts?

We empathized with Wall Street when one or two of their major clients brought about companies devoted to selling the government electronic voting machines, so that even should a candidate run for office that may actually be for We the People, the results of that candidate's win can be altered and that "win for the people" be taken from us.

Last but not least, we were forced to empathize with Wall Street some three years ago, when the biggest liars and crooks in the Universe concocted their "Shock Doctrine" emergency of all financial emergencies. The calamity was so deep, and the horrors to come were so grave, (or so we were told) that a TARP worth some 700 plus billions of dollars went to the banks via the Geithner(Paulson/Bernanke give aways to the Largest of Financial Firms.

Somehow the emergency was sold to us as being so serious that no requirements would come with the money. The nation would simply trust the same people who brought about the emergency to take good care of these emergency funds, and pay us back.

Then we come to find that there were extra TARPS payments that were extra special-handshake- secret, with Bernanke creating digital accounts for the Big Banks. I have been saying these amounts total nine trillions of dollars, but Grayson corrected this number on Bill Maher's show the other night - fourteen trillion!

And although some claim that these amounts of money have been re-paid, that is a bald-faced lie. The money offered the Big Financial Firms was paid to the firms in US dollars, while the Big Financial Firms paid the government back with useless "paper investments" that were nothing but bundles of worthless exotic trading instruments, now defunct.

[Laelth]

19. Excellent post. n/t

-Laelth

[woo me with science]

36. Thank you.

This is an OP of its own.

[TreasonousBastard]

13. So, fix the fucking system...

and sitting on the street in front of some offices is NOT going to eliminate the poison of money in political campaigns or uncontrolled greed.

Stomp the streets in your OWN districts and educate people about what assholes their current congresscritters are, should that be the case, and why they should put some new assholes in there. Spend the enrgy throwing the bums out and getting some decent legislation passed.

(Geez, did anyone even bother to READ Dodd-Frank and know how difficult it is to interpret some of that stuff?)

[truedelphi]

39. And ask yourself - why is so much of our legislation impossible to figure out?

Would it have anything to do with the fact that our lobbyists like it that way?

Iceland has their entire health care system defined in under seven pages of text. We have to have someone like Rahm make back room deals and work out the two thousand page bill of our health care system, so as to keep all the people at the top enabled with tremendous profits.

[workinclasszero]

14. his is their new strategy, to claim that We are people and Wall Street is also people

Right just like corporations are people too and have rights and $$$$$ is speech.

How the hell is that working out for ya 99%?

Wall street can go straight to hell today and the world will be a far better place for oh, 99% of the people!

[truedelphi]

16. Boy do I hear you.

And the reason that the new meme of "empathy" is needed is that the Occupy Movement is now so ubiquitous that it is scaring the Be-Jesus out of them One Percent that owns those big Wall Street Firms.

[workinclasszero]

32. Bingo! /nt

[NashVegas]

28. People Can Be Arrested for Reckless Endangerment

corporation charters give them something to hide behind the ordinary sociopath doesn't have

[Blue_In_AK]

15. Pffttt...

I respectfully disagree with this framing.

[Hutzpa]

20. There again

poor comprehension.

[99th_Monkey]

21. That's not how I interprete that quote ...

I heard him saying that regardless of what "side" you are on, 99% or 1%, we need to remember we are opposing the
oppressive structures and institutions that have run amuck and are ruining America, and that even those working
in said institutions are still human beings, who can be appealed to as such ...rather like OWS keeps reminding the
cops that they too are part of the 99%.

[HockeyMom]

22. No, as the Granddaughter of a Wall Streeter I cannot sympathize

Wall Street is greed and gambling. My GrandMA taught me well on that one.

[meow2u3]

30. You're half right

Wall Street is the epitome of greed, but I have to disagree with you about the gambling. It isn't a casino--it's an elaborate confidence trick.

[snagglepuss]

23. Wellsaid! Talking about commitment takes the effing cake. Where the hell is

commitment when jobs are outsourced, when the top make massive salaries at the expense of workers who are lucky enough to have jobs. BigPharma. HMOs. Oil. Where is there any evidence of commitment. That statement makes me absolutley nauseous. :puke:

[OneGrassRoot]

24. K&R n/t

[truedelphi]

25. Hey woo me with science -

The folks over at tinyrevolution.com have a similar take on things there.

You might want to rad their OP's about the 53%.

I particularly liked this comment:

In the case of the 53% people, they accurately perceive that individual effort, personal responsibility, etc. absolutely do affect your life circumstances. This is a dynamic that doesn't seem to be understood very well by most leftists. An ideology that casts poor people (a category which increasingly encompasses the majority of the population) as victims with no power to change their circumstances not only flies in the face of the lived experience of the poor, but is also distastefully condescending to the same poor people whose interest it purports to represent. This paradox presents a real problem for those hoping to mobilize political will along class lines.

The most fruitful approach to resolving this paradox, it seems to me, is to expose more people to the lifestyles and business practices of the wealthy. As a boy, I had contempt for poor people who made bad decisions, and I admired the wealthy under the assumption that their positions must have been due in part to their having made better decisions. It was only after being exposed to actually wealthy people and seeing how they lived, how they thought, and how they made decisions that I came to feel real sympathy for the poor and contempt for the rich. I was appalled by how the poor were made to suffer terribly for the same bad decisions that the wealthy made every day without consequence. Having seen what both poor people and rich people are capable of, I came to regard both poverty and wealth as pathological conditions, and to regard economic inequality as one of the most significant sources of unhappiness in society because of the insecurity and anxiety it creates on both sides of the wealth divide.

In short, I think that the answer to the 53% percent conundrum lies not in encouraging solidarity with the 99 percent, but in encouraging contempt for the 1 percent. A little bit of sunlight cast on the pettiness and self-involvement of the rich would go a long way in turning their 53-percenter lackeys against them. This is, of course, why the corporate media are so careful to respect the privacy of the non-celebrity wealthy and to refrain from reporting on the day-to-day sordidness that permeates their lives.
Posted by Picador at October 12, 2011 05:52 PM

####

I have to admit that I totally relate to what Picador is saying. Often people who are upper middle class and of liberal persuasion do not understand what poor people are dealing with. I too often scorned the elite liberal and their "Drive a Prius" answer/attitude to so many of our concerns.

But when I came face to face with really rich people, whose contempt for anything but their right to have a favorable bottom line, and to hell with the environment, to hell with paying people in our nation rather than overseas, etc that I came to really realizing how much the Upper One Percent's notions need to be takento task.

[RagAss]

27. He's destined to be on the wrong side of history.

[nadinbrzezinski]

29. Not necessarily.

In the past it has taken leaders a while to get behind the popular parade.

[aikanae]

35. Very important point to remember

This was extremely well said. Not only that but not a single compromise solution has worked - or even patched the system as it is now.

[Maven]

37. Obama is a tool of that system

He has very effectively staved off the populist anger that threatened to boil over and topple the power elite in 2008. But only, to their chagrin, temporarily. (#OWS)

He was their placebo candidate and is now more or less irrelevant.

[JoeyT]

38. If someone empathizes with the oppressors instead of the oppressed,

they're doing empathy wrong. When you support the powerful, it isn't called empathy anymore, it's called being an authoritarian.