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MARK CUBAN: ‘Tax The Hell Out Of Wall Street And Give It To Main Street’

18 Oct

n a world of High Frequency Trading and black box trading that does nothing but create a platform for “financial hackers” to turn the market into their own proprietary financial playground, we need to figure out a way to revert the Stock and Bond Markets, and the derivative instruments created from these equities, back to their original purpose, a place to raise capital for growing business. Instead, today its a platform for financial engineers and hackers looking to exploit every and any opportunity. When 60pct or more of trades are from High Frequency/Algorithmic traders and the correlation for every market index rushes past .7, the market is no longer a market, its a platform.

The simplest way to change this is to place a very simple per share tax on every transaction. 10 cents a trade. Every share. Every option. Every Bond. Every currency transaction. Every trade.

The obvious response is that trading volume will plummet. So what? Let it. The next response is that traders will merely move their trades to foreign exchanges. Yes they will. Will transaction costs go up? Duh.. that is the point. The market thrived when spreads and transaction costs were much higher just a few short years ago. It will survive now.

via MARK CUBAN: ‘Tax The Hell Out Of Wall Street And Give It To Main Street’.

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Occupation and realignment – Salon.com

18 Oct

The Occupy Wall Street movement has the potential to help the center-left, even if some of its activists despise the center-left the way that the New Left in the 1960s and 1970s dismissed progressive-liberals like the Kennedys and Johnson as sinister “corporate liberals” promoting the “warfare-welfare state.” The reemergence of a radical economic left can create a fourth point on the political spectrum, changing the relative position of all other points. The Tea Party right, now the mainstream right, would become the far right. Today’s center, shared by Clinton and Obama with Reagan and the Bushes, would become the new center-right. And the new center-left would be something like New Deal liberalism — to the left of Clinton and Obama, but to the right of an anti-capitalist left. Better yet, if the public tired of Tea Party conservatism, the far right could implode and the new “far right” would be moderate economic conservatism of the Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Obama variety. What until recently has been the left — old-fashioned social democratic reformism in the New Deal tradition — might once again be the center.

via Occupation and realignment – Salon.com.

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Jesse Jackson embraces Washington occupation – Occupy Wall Street – Salon.com

18 Oct

“Our message is that this is a movement that is leader-less and leader-full,” said West, who was arrested Sunday for displaying a sign on the grounds of the Supreme Court. “We take very seriously the idea of lifting every voice and we listened very closely to the people who we met inside the racist criminal justice system.”

The emotional meeting in front of the Carl Moultrie Courthouse symbolized how divergent traditions in American protest have converged in the occupation movement.

via Jesse Jackson embraces Washington occupation – Occupy Wall Street – Salon.com.

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The progressive debate we need – Occupy Wall Street – Salon.com

18 Oct

Frankly, cutting the military budge is a no-brainer.

America’s long-term debt needs to be addressed, but not the way the President is doing it. He wants to lop $4 trillion off the budget over the next ten years. This almost certainly means sacrificing education, job training, food stamps, and everything else now listed in the so-called “non-defense discretionary” budget, as well as cuts in Medicare and Medicaid.

What about halving the military budget instead? It doubled after 9/11, and military contractors are intent on keeping it in the stratosphere. So is Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta. Result: Defense cuts this size won’t be on the table unless progressives vociferously demand it.

via The progressive debate we need – Occupy Wall Street – Salon.com.

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Come Together, Right NOW! Music on the March

18 Oct

Yeah, Dylan was cool. But today we have marchin’ music that would burn his protestin’ butt.

Last Saturday Salon published an article by Stephen Deusner on protest music: Will a new Dylan emerge from Occupy Wall Street? For better or worse it struck me as a bit of a lament for the Good Old Days when they had Good Old/New Protest songs, but, alas, kids today don’t write ‘em like they used to:

As Occupy Wall Street has gained momentum, it has been compared to the anti-war and civil rights protests of the 1960s by commentators as diverse as comedian Dick Gregory, Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain and scores of newspaper columnists. Yet, as Mangum’s performance demonstrates, they are very different in at least one regard, however minor: Music is not quite the central force today that it was 40 and 50 years ago, when a song like “We Shall Overcome” or “Fixin’ to Die Rag” could communicate certain motivating ideals and reinforce solidarity among a great throng of participants. Instead, it remains peripheral.

Things get moderated toward the end:

The lesson of the 2000s seems to be to approach politics obliquely instead of head-on, to make it one concern among many. If protest songs are largely absent from Occupy Wall Street, it’s not that they aren’t being written. It’s that they no longer serve the same purpose they once did — and are so spread out across genres and audiences that they don’t register as broadly as they once did. …

On the other hand, protests inspire music, not vice versa. Perhaps the artists participating in or even just witnessing the Occupy Wall Street gatherings will be moved to write about their experiences. Perhaps the next great wave of radicalized pop is just a few months or years away.

Well, maybe.

People’s Music

But I have a somewhat different take on the whole business. Back in the day the most important music was the music sung in black churches, mostly traditional hymns and gospel. That’s the music that summoned, organized and energized the civil rights movement. The anti-war movement was a different group of people and, of course, a different issue, but it emerged in a public arena that had been activated by the civil rights movement. Continue reading →

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Bloomberg Says Occupy Wall Street Tent City Is Not Covered By Freedom Of Speech

18 Oct

Bloomberg is 100% in favor of CYA.

“I’m 100 percent in favor of protecting — 1,000 percent in favor — of giving people rights to say things, but also we have to protect those who don’t want to say anything,” he said according to Bloomberg News. “There are places where I think it’s appropriate to express yourself and then there are other places that are appropriate to set up a tent city, and they don’t necessarily have to be one and the same.”…

Two-in-three New Yorkers back the protests, with an even larger majority supporting the continuation of the protests, according to a Quinnipiac Poll released Monday.

via Bloomberg Says Occupy Wall Street Tent City Is Not Covered By Freedom Of Speech.

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He Made It on Wall St. and Used It to Help Start Protests – NYTimes.com

17 Oct

But Mr. Halper, a 52-year-old Brooklyn native, never reveals two facts about himself: he is a former vice chairman of the New York Mercantile Exchange and the largest single donor to the nonprofit magazine that ignited the Occupy Wall Street movement.

“The whole thing is very surreal to me — the fact that I spent my whole career right across the street,” he said in an interview last week on a marble bench near the park. “It makes me a little anxious, to tell you the truth. It could go anywhere. I just pray that it ends peaceful.”

via He Made It on Wall St. and Used It to Help Start Protests – NYTimes.com.

Wall Street Protest Shows Power of Place – NYTimes.com

16 Oct

We tend to underestimate the political power of physical places. Then Tahrir Square comes along. Now it’s Zuccotti Park, until four weeks ago an utterly obscure city-block-size downtown plaza with a few trees and concrete benches, around the corner from ground zero and two blocks north of Wall Street on Broadway. A few hundred people with ponchos and sleeping bags have put it on the map.

Kent State, Tiananmen Square, the Berlin Wall: we clearly use locales, edifices, architecture to house our memories and political energy. Politics troubles our consciences. But places haunt our imaginations.

So we check in on Facebook and Twitter, but make pilgrimages to Antietam, Auschwitz and to the Acropolis, to gaze at rubble from the days of Pericles and Aristotle.

via Wall Street Protest Shows Power of Place – NYTimes.com.

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‘How to Occupy an Abstraction’

15 Oct

How can you occupy an abstraction? Perhaps only with another abstraction. Occupy Wall Street took over a more or less public park nestled in the downtown landscape of tower blocks, not too far from the old World Trade Center site, and set up camp. It is an occupation which, almost uniquely, does not have demands. It has at its core a suggestion: what if people came together and found a way to structure a conversation which might come up with a better way to run the world? Could they do any worse than the way it is run by the combined efforts of Wall Street as rentier class and Wall Street as computerized vectors trading intangible assets?

via VersoBooks.com.

Around the World, Protests Against Economic Policies – NYTimes.com

15 Oct

In Rome, a protest thick with tension spread over several miles. Protesters set fire to at least one building and clashed violently with the police, who responded with water cannons and tear gas.

In other European cities, including Berlin and London, the demonstrations were largely peaceful, with thousands of people marching past ancient monuments and many gathering in front of capitalist symbols like the European Central Bank in Frankfurt. Elsewhere, the turnout was more modest, but rallies of a few hundred people were held in several cities, including Sydney, Australia, Tokyo and Hong Kong. Protests were also held in New York and several other cities in the United States and Canada.

via Around the World, Protests Against Economic Policies – NYTimes.com.

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