”

I think Brooks thinks – and people like Brooks think – that somebody who bought a subprime mortgage and thought he could get rich quick, or somebody who is involved in flipping houses in the suburbs somewhere, is as much to blame as the lobbyists who overthrew Glass-Steagall, as the big banks that were merrily creating pyramid schemes of derivative bundles and credit-debt swaps and obligations and so on. Just as one hears over and over and over again from those that defend bankers – investment bankers, particularly, or hedge-fund operators – one hears over and over again how hard they work. There’s a banker quoted in the New York Times today to this effect.

This particular self-flattery drives me wild, because the implication is that the nurses, janitors, teachers, firemen, ironworkers, farm workers and others who are hurting don’t work hard. Underneath this falsely egalitarian distribution of blame, there is an abdication of responsibility that is the ideological accompaniment of the impunity with which those who actually made these decisions have gotten away with it. And when I say ‘made these decisions,’ I mean the game in which the ratings agencies were paid by the same people they were rating. I mean the lobbyists who either undermined regulation or inhibited the enforcement of regulation—and when I say ‘the lobbyists’ here, I’m also including those figures who were administering agencies like the SEC while all this stuff was piling high, the pyramid of debt, rising like the Tower of Babel, and the would-be sophisticates were crooning about how all the rules had changed.

“Desperation and Wild Inspired Hope”: Todd Gitlin on Why the Occupy Movement is Different From All Other Social Movements, How Initial Media Coverage Was Like a Pre-Programmed Computer Algorithm, and How Not to Judge the Movement’s Success