"We Need A New System"

If they cannot address [the sovereign debt crisis in Europe] in a credible way, I believe within perhaps two to three weeks, we will have a meltdown in sovereign debt which will produce a meltdown across the European banking system.

We're not just talking about a relatively small Belgian bank, we're talking about the largest banks in the world. The largest banks in Germany, the largest banks in France that will spread to the UK in part through the sovereign debt problems in Ireland.

It will spread everywhere because the global financial system is so interconnected, all those banks are counterparties to every significant bank in the US and in Britain, and in Japan and around the world. This would be a crisis, in my view, more serious than the crisis in 2008.

-- Dr. Robert Shapiro, economic advisor to Presidents Clinton and Obama, now the IMF; on the BBC's 'Newsnight', October 5, 2011

At Media Matters, Ari Rabin-Havt recently posted an article entitled , "We Need A New System", which began with recounting a friend's arrival in Washington, D.C., eleven years ago, at the height of protests at a scheduled meeting of the World Bank.

From the back seat of a taxi, Rabin-Havt's friend saw one of the protestors, a woman, wearing a T-Shirt with the slogan We Need A New System! -- and the friend just happened to attend a dinner party that night, with " 'ambassadors, politicians, esteemed professors and what seemed like the entire combined senior economist staff of the IMF, World Bank and Treasury' ", including Larry Summers.

The friend recounted seeing the woman protesting the World Bank meeting; it turned out Summers had seen her, too -- he'd even spoken with her.

And so I asked the girl [Summers recounted to the other guests]: 'What is this new system that you want? Tell me about it!' And the girl had nothing. Nothing! She had no fucking clue what this magical new system was supposed to be. No one is saying that there aren't problems with the world economy the way it is today. But these kids out there -- they don't know what they want!

Rabin-Havt's friend then said to Summers, "You've got 50 economics PhDs in this room who pretty much run the world economy. And you're asking that girl for a better system? Aren't the solutions your job? You admit billions are living in hell, but it's up to that girl to fix it?"

Summers, working on getting a third set of jowls, chuckled and moved on.

Rabin-Havt continued:

Over the last twenty five days across the media -- with several notable exceptions -- we've seen elites point fingers, chuckle and play punch the hippy while covering the Occupy Wall Street protests. Whether it's reporters at CNN mocking protesters while sympathizing with Wall Street traders; Rush Limbaugh referring to protestors as a "parade of human debris"; or a conservative reporter acting as an agent provocateur at a protest in Washington, DC, at best many in the media seem desperate not to face the fundamental issues at the heart of the demonstrations, at worst they place blame for our failed economy at the feet of the protestors -- mocking them as unemployed drains on the country.

It also comes as no surprise that Fox, which actively worked to build the Tea Party movement, has attacked these grassroots uprisings as "astroturf," and "petulant little children," and compared protestors to the "Unabomber." The Tea Party and Fox News fight to protect our system's fundamental inequalities while Occupy Wall Street is a fundamental challenge to it.

In 2000, Larry Summers tried to outsource fixing a global economic system he bore responsibility for to a girl in dreadlocks. Elites in the media and our political system are now attempting to foist the same responsibility to those camping in Zuccotti Park.

As the New York Times astutely pointed out: "It is not the job of the protesters to draft legislation. That's the job of the nation's leaders, and if they had been doing it all along there might not be a need for these marches and rallies."

If those in the media casting aspersions on the protestors had spent a decade covering the underlying problems with our economy, instead of cheerleading the housing bubble; worked to expose the lies that led our country to war, instead of taking an administration at its word; and not allow themselves to be manipulated by political and media figures whose goal was simply to distort our political processes, there might not be a need to Occupy Wall Street. Instead the dreadlocked girl is still right -- we need a new system.

I believe that everyone in 'mainstream' politics and the media has gotten #OccupyWallStreet wrong. In an attempt to categorize what's happening (and so control it with a label), they've forgotten what can happen when the difference between a lie and the Truth becomes so obvious.

At it's most fundamental, I believe #OWS is a statement -- something like The current system is based on inequality; it is more nakedly apparent now than ever before. It manufactures inequality, suffering, violence and penury in favor of a minority over the majority; profit over persons; and it has to change.

An economic and markets website, ranting and raving in favor of austerity the other day, noted that for #OWS to have happened in America (whose population he described as being the most politically apathetic on earth) is a sign of exactly how serious things are. I disagreed with almost everything else in his post, but not that observation.

...Boston Consulting Group confirms, the "muddle through" is dead. And now it is time to face the facts. What facts? The facts which state that between household, corporate and government debt, the developed world has $20 trillion in debt over and above the sustainable threshold by the definition of "stable" debt to GDP of 180%.

The facts according to which all attempts to eliminate the excess debt have failed, and for now even the Fed's relentless pursuit of inflating our way out this insurmountable debt load have been for nothing. The facts which state that the only way to resolve the massive debt load is through a global coordinated debt restructuring (which would, among other things, push all global banks into bankruptcy) which, when all is said and done, will have to be funded by the world's financial asset holders: the middle-and upper-class, which, if BCS is right, have a ~30% one-time tax on all their assets to look forward to as the great mean reversion finally arrives and the world is set back on a viable path. But not before the biggest episode of "transitory" pain, misery and suffering in the history of mankind.

Good luck, politicians and holders of financial assets, you will need it because after Denial comes Anger, and only long after does Acceptance finally arrive.

As Rabin-Havt pointed out, Lard Boy and the Little Rupert Goebbels Happy Channel, along with Rethugs in Congress, are working overtime to demonize the #OWS protestors as unemployed radical hippie scum. They're defending the Banksters and the right of one per cent of the population to amass even more wealth.

What's clear is that the present crisis has been created by a relatively small group of people. When the economy failed because of what they'd done, they were given essentially free money -- our money -- to bail them out. They've kept most of it. And, as it turns out, the situation is worse than anyone admits or even wants to know, and that things will simply continue getting worse.

Those who have will just manage to squeak through comfortably. The rest of us... well; ... are there not prisons and work houses? ...let them die then, and decrease the surplus population.

The knowledge that we are screwed beyond measure -- that there's no escape, no matter what we do, as if we were about to collectively be hit by a mile-wide asteroid -- is putting people into the streets, to Occupy, to raise their voice. And the battle lines in what is in fact class warfare -- waged by the defenders of a minority against the rest of the country -- are being drawn. They're clearer all the time.

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