I know people who are skipping payments just to be in solidarity with people who can't pay. They see it as an act of protest not only of inequality generally but of the fact that no matter what happens the financial industry will get a limitless bailout at the expense of everything else. Not paying is a way of getting a piece of that bailout.
I agree with the latter point. We've seen in the past 10 years or so that the regular economy will be sacrificed to save the financial industry. This has resulted in a complete decoupling of the two. The regular economy can be in a state of total collapse and the stock market goes up.
(By "the financial industry" I mean top politically well connected banks, not necessarily smaller private equity or smaller financial institutions. Those will crash and burn and be sold off in fire sale prices to larger banks that get bailed out, just like 2008.)
If we ever have real leadership again, one of the tasks before that real leadership is going to be undoing the loss of integrity and trust created by the 2008 bailouts. Like the second Iraq war, people have yet to even grasp how much damage was done in those years.
Exactly. They're thinking of it as an act of simultaneous self-preservation and civil disobedience to the fact that bailouts are only for huge banks and corporations. The perception, which is at least somewhat true, is that Wall St. and DC will be saved and the rest of the country can burn.
From what I've seen, the 1% vs the 99% is catchy but wrong. The reality is more like the 0.01% vs the 99.99%.
We are probably nearing the point where we will see actual change, since we're approaching a place where the wealth distribution hockey stick is so steep the upper middle class and "merely rich" will start seeing themselves as "the 99%." You'll see working class and hippies marching with lawyers, doctors, and owners of businesses that make "only" a few hundred million a year (and don't have lobbyists).
Wish it didn't have to get that bad, but that appears to be the case. We'll probably do something about CO2 when NYC is underwater.
I agree with the latter point. We've seen in the past 10 years or so that the regular economy will be sacrificed to save the financial industry. This has resulted in a complete decoupling of the two. The regular economy can be in a state of total collapse and the stock market goes up.
(By "the financial industry" I mean top politically well connected banks, not necessarily smaller private equity or smaller financial institutions. Those will crash and burn and be sold off in fire sale prices to larger banks that get bailed out, just like 2008.)
If we ever have real leadership again, one of the tasks before that real leadership is going to be undoing the loss of integrity and trust created by the 2008 bailouts. Like the second Iraq war, people have yet to even grasp how much damage was done in those years.