Occupy Wall Street has plenty of reasons

This is the kind of thing the "Occupy Wallstreet" protestors have in mind.
The SEC announced that Citigroup agreed to pay $285 million to settle charges that it misled investors in a $1 billion derivatives deal tied to the United States housing market, then bet against investors as the housing market began to show signs of distress.

Farm Subsidies

A new farm subsidy is being proposed by Senators Brown, Ohio, and Thune, S. Dakota, in spite of record high farm income. Current subsidies like many government programs go mostly to the rich. The top 10 percent of direct-payment recipients in 2010 received 59 percent of the money under the program. Those 88,000 people, including farmers, their spouses and absentee landowners, got an average of $29,598.
Here’s why this folly endures. Mr. Thune, a leading voice in favor of deficit reduction, received at least $80,000 in campaign contributions since 2007 from political action committees associated with commodity agriculture, according to data compiled by the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks campaign spending. Mr. Brown has received $5,500 in PAC contributions from such groups in that period.

Wall Street Protest

Maye the revolution has begun. The Occupy Wall Street demonstration started last week and is growing. 700 people were arrested on Sunday. "The event has drawn protesters of diverse ages and occupations who are speaking out against corporate greed, social inequality, global climate change, etc." A protestor said, "The bottom line is the feeling that the financial industries here on Wall Street have caused the economic problems, and they're not contributing their fair share to solving them."

Detroit Can't Read

Detroit football and baseball teams are doing very well. Probably even those who can't read at the sixth grade level know this. But that is about as far as it goes. An estimated 300,000 Detroit residents 16 and older read below the sixth grade level. Michigan has 1.8 million residents who read below that level. Rochelle Riley writing in the Free Press of Oct. 2, points out that this even makes them ineligible for federal job training programs.
The good news is that the Rotary Club has pledged 3,000 volunteers to tutor adults. Bless them.

Monetary Stimulus

Adam Posen, a member of the the Bank of England's monetary policy committee, wants central banks to print more money, a lot more. He suggests that the Bank of England and the British Treasury form a government backed bank to make small-business loans. He does not say specificially how this would be financed.
The Euro Zone is in crisis and needs some new ideas. The Bank of England has a program of purchasing the bonds of weak euro zone economies, but it is expected to stop. The European Central Bank may be forced to adopt the policy I have been advocating, namely to directly make loans to Greece, et. al. The EU countries have abdicated the right to do this, leaving only the European Central Bank.
It is unfortunate that Posen uses the term "print money" since this diverts thinking about the central bank creating money by making loans. If the central bank can create a loan to a bank on its balance sheet in order to buy bonds, it could surely make a direct loan to the Treasury who could use the money to invest in infrastructure and create jobs whose income could increase consumer demand. This is of course the method that should be used to finance Obama's new stimulus instead of more government borrowing and slashing entitlements. (Slashing military budgets is the right idea.)
Source: New York Times, Sept. 17, 2011

Class Warfare

Republicans such as Paul Ryan scream "class warfare" everytime Obama proposes to remove some of the tax breaks enjoyed by the rich. But, class warfare is exactly what we have had for years as the rich get richer and the middleclass shrinks.

Cash Reserves

American corporations have a record $2 trillion in cash reserves. What does this mean? It means that you can give them all the tax breaks you wnat and they will still not invest and hire more workers. Their problem is not cash, but lack of consumer demand. That means that the critical part of Obama's jobs proposal is to increase incomes of workers via public spending on infrastructure, etc., not tax breaks, including the social security tax paid by employers.