Paul Krugman commenting on the propensity of the 1% to become hysterical about the Occupy Movement
Excerpt from New York Times (October 9, 2011)
“The Panic of the Plutocrats”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/10/opinion/panic-of-the-plutocrats.html?_r=1
What’s going on here? The answer, surely, is that Wall
Street’s Masters of the Universe realize, deep down,
how morally indefensible their position is. They’re not
John Galt; they’re not even Steve Jobs. They’re people
who got rich by peddling complex financial schemes
that, far from delivering clear benefits to the
American people, helped push us into a crisis whose
aftereffects continue to blight the lives of tens of
millions of their fellow citizens.
Yet they have paid no price. Their institutions were
bailed out by taxpayers, with few strings attached.
They continue to benefit from explicit and implicit
federal guarantees – basically, they’re still in a game
of heads they win, tails taxpayers lose. And they
benefit from tax loopholes that in many cases have
people with multimillion-dollar incomes paying lower
rates than middle-class families.
This special treatment can’t bear close scrutiny – and
therefore, as they see it, there must be no close
scrutiny. Anyone who points out the obvious, no matter
how calmly and moderately, must be demonized and driven
from the stage. In fact, the more reasonable and
moderate a critic sounds, the more urgently he or she
must be demonized, hence the frantic sliming of
Elizabeth Warren.
So who’s really being un-American here? Not the
protesters, who are simply trying to get their voices
heard. No, the real extremists here are America’s
oligarchs, who want to suppress any criticism of the
sources of their wealth.
