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Robert Scheer
Truthdig / Truthdig Op-Ed
Published: Friday 18 November 2011
“It is mind-boggling that Bloomberg still hypes the canard that the banks were forced to reap enormous profits from toxic securities.”

The Villain Occupy Wall Street Has Been Waiting For

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In the pantheon of billionaires without shame, Michael Bloomberg, the Wall Street banker-turned-business-press-lord-turned-mayor, is now secure at the top. What is so offensive is that someone who abetted Wall Street greed, and benefited as much as anyone from it, has no compunction about ruthlessly repressing those who dare exercise their constitutional “right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances” that he helped to create.

You would think that a former partner at the investment bank Solomon Brothers, which originated mortgage-backed securities, a man who then partnered with Merrill Lynch in the high-speed computerized trading that has led to so much financial manipulation, would have some sense of his own culpability. Or at least that someone whose Wall Street career left him with a net worth of $19.5 billion would grasp the deep irony of his being the instrument for smashing Occupy Wall Street, the internationally acknowledged symbol of opposition to corporate avarice.

But only in America is the arrogance of the superrich so perfectly concealed by the pretense of democracy that the 12th richest man in the nation can suppress dissent against corporate rapacity and expect his brutal actions to be viewed not as a means of preserving his own class privilege but as bureaucratically necessary to providing sanitary streets.

Even before he ordered the smashing of dissent by citizens peacefully assembled, Bloomberg denigrated their heartfelt message: “It’s fun and it’s cathartic,” he said of those huddled against the cold in a makeshift encampment, “... it’s entertaining to go and blame people. ... It was not the banks that created the mortgage crisis. It was, plain and simple, Congress who forced everybody to go and give mortgages to people who were on the cusp.”

It is mind-boggling that Bloomberg still hypes the canard that the banks were forced to reap enormous profits from toxic securities. It is an embarrassing, dishonest position when the record of banker fraud in creating the housing bubble is so well documented in Securities and Exchange Commission lawsuits. Is Bloomberg unaware that the major banks have agreed to pay hefty fines in a meager compensation for their schemes? That he blames the victims of the securitization swindles and then orders the arrest of those who dare speak the truth is a tribute to his belief in the enduring power of the big lie.

If the Bloomberg news service, the stock market idolizer owned by the mayor, had been anything more than an enabler this past decade of Wall Street excess, nay criminality, it’s possible we would not be experiencing the current crisis. If this leading financial news outlet had performed the minimum of journalistic due diligence on unregulated credit default swaps, collateralized debt obligations and the other swindles marketed with an abandon informed by deep deceit and the financial industry’s pervasive corruption, the world economy may not now be in such terrible shape.

This article was originally posted on Truthdig.



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ABOUT Robert Scheer
Robert Scheer, editor in chief of Truthdig, has built a reputation for strong social and political writing over his 30 years as a journalist. His columns appear in newspapers across the country, and his in-depth interviews have made headlines. He conducted the famous Playboy magazine interview in which Jimmy Carter confessed to the lust in his heart and he went on to do many interviews for the Los Angeles Times with Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and many other prominent political and cultural figures.

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20 comments on "The Villain Occupy Wall Street Has Been Waiting For"

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Is that really all there is to it because that'd be flabebragsting.

george r

November 19, 2011 10:25pm

Ha Ha This is nothing. The Vietnamese lived through bombings just like Iraq and Afghanistan. What makes you think the elite will not bomb the USA just like Viet Nam, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq. Without the army and civil authorities on our side we will have to fight them too. The question remains do they work for the 99% or the 1%?

anono

November 19, 2011 9:06am

Not only is buying an election in terms of pure progangda well with in the means of the -1%, but also buying election boards and voting laws and voting rules and above all buying the vote count itself is well with in their means.
To think that the wall street dumocraps and the wall street republiscums and the wall street yes'm massa boy in the out house and of course the wall street mayor of new jerk city would allow themselves to be ousted by unadulterated democracy seems as wishful optimism at these dark days. We are just one "national security emergency" away from the full revelation of the dictatorship we are under.

Angry and vitriolic but essentially spot on. What most people don't realize is that we lost all of our civil and constitutional rights when the patriot act was crammed down our throats. The previous comenter is also correct-the military will be key here. And if we see UN troops on US soil we are well and truly screwed.

luckylongshot

November 19, 2011 3:32am

Noone wants more corrupt Democrat and Republican puppets in the Senate, Congress and the Whitehouse, abusing the rights of the middle and lower classes. What has happened to date is that the botton up approach of protesting has been tried and is being fought by the elite.
Now is the time to launch a political party and give voters the chance to put some people in power who actually represent the peoples best interests. It is time for top down pressure to be applied as well. Democracy if used effectively is a very powerful weapon.

Donna M Crane

November 20, 2011 9:20pm

Pragmatically speaking, voting for a third party candidate is like throwing your vote down the toilet...and it will land with the crap that's down there, meaning the Republicancer. Even if by some miracle a third party candidate won, their support would be so diluted that they would get even less cooperation than our President gets now. The President may not be perfect and I've been furious a time or two about stuff he's done, or not done that I considered imperative. However, I watch Congress and Senate on CSPAN a lot and have watched the Republicans time after time stop everything he has tried to get done. I care too much about my country to not realize that as bad as it is now, if we don't vote in a strong progressive House and filibuster-proof Senate, so that we can fix the things we need fixed we are seriously in danger of becoming a serfdom to the Oligarchy. Obama is not a king, he can't just wave his sceptre and save us; the phrase was "yes WE can. He got a lot done in the first 2 years of his presidency, but people didn't get everything they wanted so they threw a temper tantrum and either sat on their butts and didn't vote, or figured they'd "show him" and let the Tea Party take over the conversation with their vitriol. We have a constitution and when we vote for what we want, we can get things done with it. Occupy the ballot box and vote for people who care about others and want our country to work for all of us, not just the rich. We can fix this, it will be hard work, but we are a people who rise to a challenge when we put our minds to it.

American Muse

November 19, 2011 8:01am

Wonderful idea!

Now is the time to start a new political party - the Independent Party.

American Muse

November 19, 2011 1:59am

Bloomberg lavished $217 million of his own ill-gotten plunder to get elected mayor of New York City. After running for a second term, Bloomberg had his minions rewrite the city constitution (that limited incumbents to two terms) to allow him to run for office a third time.

What scum!

RobertMStahl

November 18, 2011 5:51pm

The issue is one with contemporary psychology, one that fosters the notion of hierarchy as a plausible explanation for theft, hit and run really, vis a vis work-as-religion. That is, growth comes before productivity, even before considering contemplation, and where productivity sometimes needs a good look in the rear view mirror. The hand would be a good idea as a model, but the notion of an opposing thumb where fingers consist of symmetrically originated and asymmetrical, thumbs and forefingers respectively, coming from Gregory Bateson's Steps to an Ecology of Mind, where this notion attempts to cope with the onslaught of machinery in politics defending their asymmetric criminality instead of any political footing as a holarchical notion of management, it needs deeper consideration.

Even more to the point, the following example, but first let me quote the late Saul Bellow, "They asked the politician why do you lie and cheat and steal? And, he said, That's easy, I do it for my children." So, the largess of the problem is of biblical proportion and with regard to Job or the Riddle of the Sphinx, or the fact of what Dodgeson says about the bread-and-butterfly, "It always dies," such light brings about the need for a true understanding of natural selection amid a rapidly changing and, likely, convoluted cultural landscape.

If symmetrical contributions to productivity are real, there should be evidence. When I worked for an oil company between 7/97 and 8/06, EGN on the stock exchange, I introduced the means by which their DOS environment was transformed into a, integrated networked Windows environment, first through the intranet, then into the internet. Hindsight should prove by any accurate accounting standards applied, that this transformation of engineering and land data into the economic reporting data was symmetrical in nature, thus separate and distinct from asymmetric productive capacities so representative of the styles of old, a construction of an Old Guard mentality even, or a western legal system essentially. A long study far and wide could prove this from many angles, but my point is that, ignorant of the notion of reward for productivity, hindsight should be 20/20, regardless. Look at the stock of EGN from that period of installation of an evolutionary change in the cultural landscape of the oil company putting them from last place into first as a midsized defined, or acquisition based company during that period. Note the 500% increase in the price of the stock. Notice then, afterward, from 06/08 until the present, that the net growth is 0%. Say that a fish is independent of the fishbowl and you will be missing the point, but say there is not a distinction, a difference that made a difference, and you will see why our species is likely to become extinct with little hope for a second chance if we don't see there should be a relationship between productivity and reward.

The CEO retired from EGN, but not without outing me, only to become the CEO of construction of a fantastic new Children's Hospital in Birmingham, here at UAB. I am broke, but he is fantastically wealthy. I could go on and on about the facts of this case, but what is really the problem is that the laws of attraction don't work when you talk to anyone, much less those in charge of money.

Seer Clearly

November 18, 2011 3:48pm

The 1%/99% meme (idea) is taking hold. This will be his last term. Everyone will see him for the greedy nepotistic manipulator that he is. In the past, we looked up to business leaders as having something we wanted in a political leader; now we see that the majority of them have exactly what we DON'T want: a callous disregard and contempt for those who made them successful.

marcadrian

November 18, 2011 2:38pm

Bloomberg is part of the criminal class that has swindled america through fraud. He is a coward and a hypocrite. If it was up to him, he would place the people makiing trouble for his buddies in a concentration camp and gas them. Do not doubt the depth of his callousness, he is a very dangerous man.

Iqbal Halani

November 18, 2011 1:35pm

Will it be the dude Diebold or the lovely Shariah Lawley that will enable this 911 concealer to take up a fourth term. If they could kill the God of the goyim, sorry the 99% will just be chomped up like cream cheese bagels !!

Madam Defarge

November 18, 2011 1:15pm

Mayor Bloomberg was reportedly seen near pier 54 in Manhattan last night with several of his aids and a well known hedge fund manager. They were also accompanied by a team of NYPD technicians who, under cover of darkness, assembled a huge spotlight. After over 90 minutes of technical difficulties, witnesses reported that the light was beamed skyward where it projected "the image of a bat”. One of the aids was overheard saying, “Batman, he’ll save us.” The mayor’s office was unavailable for comment. Meanwhile, the protests continue........

jjflash007

November 18, 2011 1:14pm

Where is the surprise? Bloomberg is just doing his job... trying to protect himself and his criminal cronies from demands for justice by the 99%.
Let's not forget our history.
John D. Rockefeller Jr. showed how far the 1% will go to stop the 99% from getting a fair deal. April 20, 1914: The Ludlow massacre. At least twenty-four miners die, among them two women and eleven children, in a 14-hour confrontation between miners and the National Guard.
Everyone in the Occupy Movement should read Howard Zinn's "A Peoples History of the United States" so they know what kind of people we are dealing with.

Madam Defarge

November 18, 2011 1:14pm

He should be recalled.

bionicknight

November 18, 2011 11:39am

HEY BLOOMBERG!
NEW DIALOG FROM YOUR REPUBLICAN AND 1% BUDDIES.

Did you ever wonder what Republican / Wall Street big shots say in their ivory towers?
Here you go.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

“ I ran the numbers J.B., and it’s cheaper to pay out for a few dead people than build safety controls into our food processing equipment.”

“We use Walgreen’s for our women’s healthcare. They have drive-up breast exams now.”

“So J.B., is bringing back slavery still off the table, or…..?”

“The Koch brothers new how-to book, “Fun with World Domination” is a must read.”

“Cantor, Ryan, Walker, Bachman, are all actually Cybernetic Robots. Wow, you really gotta hand it to those Koch brothers!”

“These grapes from Argenovia are dirt cheap. Of course I don’t eat ‘em, are you crazy? They use their own urine as a pesticide.”

“A classroom size of 85 gives kids the “tools” to understand a kill-or-be-killed work environment.” said Governor Walker.

“What oil spill? People will love these self-igniting shrimp.”

“Get your fresh dolphin filets here!”

“Let’s cut more Firemen. People have garden hoses don’t they?”

“Let’s cut more Policemen. People can run can’t they? Hey, remember that Seinfeld episode where that fat guy got mugged? Now that…was funny!”

“So J.B., you never answered me about that slavery thing…”

“Global warming, pollution, deteriorated o-zone, blah, blah, blah. What can happen?”

“Get your fresh polar bear burgers here!”

“Nice job killing off Planned Parenthood. Sweet! Now we’ll have enough new product coming in to launch our “Buy a Baby at Wal-Mart” program.”

“We made billions each time we moved our off-shore manufacturing from America to Japan, to China, to India, and now…to Africa. Ha, ha, ha! Sure, it’s great sticking it to the Germans, British, and Italians…but we really love screwing the French!”

“Air safety, nuclear safety, food safety…blah, blah, blah. What can happen?”

“Hey boss, that’s a great idea, putting nicotine in baby pacifiers. “Start ‘em young” we always say right? Haw, hawww!”

“FEMA was too costly, but now we’ll give you earthquake victims the “tools” to be self-sufficient. Here’s a shovel. Oh, and we’ll want that back later.”

“Get your fresh snow leopard fritters here!

President (!?) Walker said today, “As a cost cutting measure, every state will only be allowed ONE air traffic control tower…but it should be really, really tall.”

“Uh, Mr. Cantor, did you say…Michael Moore is a hit, or…put out a hit on Michael Moore?” …Ohhhh…right…we’re Republicans.

“Hmm…you know J.B., I’m really warming up to this slavery thing….”

“We’re cloning chickens for KFC, making mystery meat for McDonald’s…hey, so why not Soylent Green in school lunches?

“Hey kids, get your fresh Soylent Green meat-balls here! Mmmmm…yummy…”

11/18/2011 By V

Jeffrey Woodruff
London
November 18, 2011 9:44am

exactly ... ruthlessly repressing those who dare exercise their constitutional “right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances”