Cornel's first answer is fucking worthless. He didn't address the question at all come on dammit. This had better get better.

West's point: The government weakened its control of financial institutions because wall street pressured it to, then shit hit the fan.
Schiff's counterpoint: Gov't shouldn't have that power, so business wouldn't be lobbying it.

...

...sooooo let's try and follow that logic.

Government shouldn't have the authority to regulate financial markets
AND
If it did have that power, then business is blameless for pursuing it to give up that power
BECAUSE
Financial markets don't need regulating
?

How can anyone (other than those who profit directly and in eye-wateringly high sums) think that the federal government shouldn't be able to regulate the financial markets? After what the fuck just happened, like 6 seconds ago... do we collectively have the memory of a fucking fruit fly?

God it makes me so sick to think about how many people actually buy into to this shit that Schiff is spewing.

He actually takes it further than I've ever heard anyone do before. Saying labor movements never accomplished anything good and to basically place the Free Market on a religious-type pedestal. It's beyond ridiculous. It denies any need whatsoever for any kind of checks and balances. Why have any government at all? Oh yeah, to make sure nobody steals anything from the rich.

So I assume he works 12 hour days and never takes the weekend off, and has been doing so since working by candle light in a match-dipping factory at age 7

Exactly. His comments in this interview/debate are absolutely ludicrous.

i like to believe that they don't believe what they say, it helps me sleep better at night.

In a lot of cases I don't think they do.

Kyle, I think you're on the "OWS and Tea Party" stem from the same root cause level, as am I.

I have really been ignoring a lot of this stuff, because I think that once the economy improves all of this stuff will dissolve.

Remember these people have been nibbling at the margins for years, and they are no thrust into the forefront because even people who are "comfortable" or, like I said above, in the say 5-10% feel like the game is fixed and they no longer have any real control over their lives. (whether they ever did was debatable, but when times are "good" we don't tend to care about that.)

My reasoning isn't coming across as well as I want it to hear, but I hope you get my drift.

is there any reasonable defense of why capital gains should be taxed less than money made from labor?

I think this is significance of OW... it's a mistake to think "these people" are just the regular suspects of the Seige of Seattle/WTO protests trustafarian Manu Chao dope smokers. If you walk through some of the Occupy camps there is a new demographic.... and YOUNG people who were in elementary school after 9/11. It's possible (though far from certain) something new could be happening.

Same root as Tea Party? A reasonable argument could be made... although the authenticity of the Tea Party after 2009 is problematic at best. That being said I am on the board of a group that just hired a lobbyist who also works with Koch Bros. All money is bloody. We are Scott Olsen. We are the Koch Brothers. We are Madoff. We are Paul Ryan jerking off silently in the bathroom because he's argued with his wife and he likes those dom pics on the web. Human frailty. Generosity. But still gut the palaces and start over.

Don't forget Soros, Bubba--he's behind all of this. And the unions. And the Arabs. etc. etc.

Fu and I grabbed some beer last night and agreed that publicly funded elections (as in mandatory, with no outside funding) would solve a big chunk of the root causes of the problems being voiced by the OWS crowd.

Not all of it, but a lot of it.

My antecedents are not clear. The thought process behind this stuff has been nibbling at the edges (Chomsky et al) but the reason you are seeing it take hold with MORE PEOPLE and not just "outsiders" is economic insecurity. Same as the Tea Party. This anti-collective-bargaining rights and other draconian right wing legislation being pushed has been out there for years, and they have been waiting to pounce. By using people's feelings that the world as they know it is collapsing around them and they are pawns in the game, they have been able to build Tea Party (and others of their ilk) support.

If there is any return to normalcy, you'll see both fade.

I don't disagree, but there's a time element to it. Ie, if things return to normalcy [by some finite amount of time] then this would all go back in the closet again for another day. If, however, things do not get rosey again soon enough, then the question of the day still has all its teeth... what do these people want and what are they willing to do to get it?

You and I don't know what that amount of time is, but if we don't get some seriously good economic news before that time, we will. And when / if that happens, and things continue to spiral upwards, I maintain that something tangible will change. Hopefully for the better (ie, serious campaign finance overhaul, and I mean like a witch hunt on that shit. I'd love a 2 month cap on all campaigns and related activities, and a preset amount of money, period. Fuck free speech I guess, or put some reasonable limits on it to stop this bullshit we've worked our way into. Election For Sale isn't sustainable.)

from a purely humanitarian point of view it's depressing how expensive campaigns are. I guess some of it helps sustain certain industries, but for the most part it's just pissing money down the drain that could be used in about a billion better ways.

I'm not fucking complaining about that.

But it is pretty funny/amazing sometimes the sheer amounts of money people pony up to get nothing from it.

How 'bout LooGAR's Upstate NY homeboy Stephen J. Baum?

Normalcy? A questionable concept. Great economic upheavals have certainly predicated seismic political shifts... the French Revolution, the Paris Commune of 1871, the Russian Revolution, the New Deal and the international labor movement... all directly connected to economic upheaval (and, sound familiar?, depletion of resources as a result of wars...). Not to claim the people sleeping in North Face gear and sleeping bags equate to the Third Estate morphing into the National Assembly... I'm just sayin'...

They should just pass out Taibbi's latest as their agenda - I think it would get the much further than 2 months at Zucotti has so far

Harry - stop parsing my words, old bean. I think the biggest problem we have in America is that no one leading can effectively legislate the things like those mentioned in the above article, and none being lead really know how to do anything about it.

Or when they do something about it, they take their anger out in such a way that effectively hands the people they're railing against the keys to the castle. (see Walker, Gov. Scott, Kasich, Gov. John and and that arch criminal they elected Governor of Florida)

I honestly am at a loss for words and thoughts most of the time these days over politics, and just try to focus on what I'm getting paid blood money to achieve - the rest be damned.

Not parsing, just saying that this really is an exceptional time, and this isn't a usual "recession" with a bubble to follow. And in such exceptional times new political orders, values, alignments can emerge.

I think they have to get any type of economic normalcy, or widespread prosperity, right?