The Grit: Occupy’s Unlikely Allies
"Shock therapy" free-market economist Jeffrey Sachs thinks 'the Occupy movement is amazing.' (Photo: Nicholas Roberts/Reuters)
It’s a sign a protest is on to something when even its natural enemies are forced to concede it might have a point.
With the Occupy movement, some one per centers are saying things that might have gotten them laughed out of their marble-floored boardrooms a few months ago.
BlackRock is an American multinational investment management corporation and the world’s largest asset manager. It’s CEO is Larry Fink. Rather than deride Occupiers as hippies who need to get jobs, Larry has come to a different conclusion:
“These are not lazy people sitting around looking for something to do. We have people losing hope and they’re going into the street, whether it’s justified or not.”
Bill Gross, a registered Republican who manages the world’s largest mutual fund (assets: +$200 billion), isn’t even sitting on the fence, telling Bloomberg TV:
“For a long time, for 20 or 30 years, capital has benefited at the expense of labor...How can one not sympathize with their predicament?...To not have sympathy with Main Street as opposed to Wall Street is to have blinders.”
It seems the best way to make a banker question everything he stands for is for a few people to camp on his doorstep. Take the CEO of Citigroup, Vikram Pandit, who has suddenly realized:
“Trust has been broken between financial institutions and the citizens of the U.S.”
He thinks Occupiers are on to something, inviting them to “hold Citi and the financial institutions accountable for practicing responsible finance.”
Well, hey Larry, Bill, Vikram: you’re the ones in a position to do something about it. Time to walk the walk.
It seems the best way to make a banker question everything he stands for is for a few people to camp on his doorstep.
Some one per centers haven’t just acknowledged that the Occupiers have a point; they’ve gone native.
Ken Costa is a senior figure in the world of investment banking and former chairman of Lazard International. In the light of the Occupy protests in America and London, Mr Costa has come to the conclusion that the market economy has lost “its moral foundations with disastrous consequences.”
In fact, Mr Costa, who has been based in London for a number of years, organised a meeting earlier this month between protestors camped outside St. Paul’s Cathedral and the chief of the Financial Services Authority so that the protest organisers could communicate their ideas for reform to the man who regulates Britain’s financial district in person. Costa says of the Occupy movement:
“I cannot recall when public feeling worldwide has run so high, and even if only a minority takes its anger on to the streets, no one should imagine that the majority is indifferent to their cause.”
Jeffrey Sachs is a U.S. economist with an impressive cv. He was a leading proponent of “shock therapy” free-market capitalism, and spent the ’90s helping convert collapsing Soviet bloc countries into functioning economies. Yet his critique of America’s own brand of free-market capitalism is damning.
“Money has driven American politics to the right.” he says. “We have one far right party, which is the Republican party, and we have one center-right party, which is the Democratic party...There is no competition, and the American people are not represented right now.”
Sachs went to meet protestors before they got cleared out of Zucotti Park and told them they were making history. His assessment of the situation now?
“I think the Occupy movement is amazing, in that in 11 weeks, a relatively small number of young people have changed the discourse in the United States. Americans are talking about inequality of wealth, income and power more in the last few weeks than they have for the last 30 years.”
So if anyone tells you the Occupy movement is just a bunch of jobless hippie socialists, or professional troublemakers, beg to differ.
Of course, point to the polls, which suggest the Occupiers still have substantial support across vast swathes of the country, but also quote the support from the more intelligent and successful elements of the one per cent themselves. The enemy?
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