Deep Politics Forum

Sorry, Magda, just had to add it here too!.....

The Four Companies That Control the 147 Companies That Own Everything


There may be 147 companies in the world that own everything, as colleague Bruce Upbin points out and they are dominated by investment companies as Eric Savitz rightly points out. But it's not you and I who really control those companies, even though much of our money is in them. Given the nature of how money is invested, there are four companies in the shadows that really control those companies that own everything.
Before I reveal them, some light math:
According to the 2011 annual factbook from the Investment Company Institute, there is $24.7 trillion in all the mutual funds in the world (a little less than half from the US). Based on data from the ICI, $1.24 trillion of this is directly invested in index funds, plus another $992 billion in assets beyond that $24.7 trillion in Exchange Traded Funds, which aren't mutual funds but are index funds. That means the bulk of that money is in "active" managed funds or fund of funds.
But then consider this: the chief of hedge funds at a very large asset manager told me last week (alas, I cannot identify either) that an internal study his firm recently performed found that the vast majority of mutual funds defined as actively managed see 95% of the assets they hold determined by an index.That means just 5% of actively managed funds really are driven by the active manager's judgment.
This less-than-active management is for two reasons: one is to maintain the fund in a style box (i.e. large value stock, medium value stocks) and comply with the reality all mutual funds are required to have a benchmark index they compare their relative performance to. The other reason is to adhere to risk metrics to which most of the fund industry is beholden. This second point is partly due to Modern Portfolio Theory (a complex topic we won't debate here) and to the human nature that active managers tend to build portfolios close to the indexes they benchmark against to avoid really awful downward relative performance years that ends up costing them their jobs.
So of the $25.69 trillion in worldwide assets we've identified, $2.23 trillion are directly in indexes (ETFs and index mutual funds) with another $22.3 trillion indirectly beholden to indexes (that 95% of actively managed fund holdings said to be determined by an index).
You can see where I'm headed here. That means the real power to control the world lies with four companies: McGraw-Hill, which owns Standard & Poor's, Northwestern Mutual, which owns Russell Investments, the index arm of which runs the benchmark Russell 1,000 and Russell 3,000, CME Group which owns 90% of Dow Jones Indexes, and Barclay's, which took over Lehman Brothers and its Lehman Aggregate Bond Index, the dominant world bond fund index. Together, these four firms dominate the world of indexing. And in turn, that means they hold real sway over the world's money.
While that may seem benign they are indexers after all you may say a financial index isn't cut and dried like the index of a book. It's a misperception indexers merely do some simple math like identifying the 500 largest US companies and voila! you have the S&P 500. Every indexer has a fudge factor that allows them to say one company is more "economically significant" for the index at hand than another company. To again take the S&P 500 as an example, the 502-largest company by market cap could get the nod over number 500 by size if S&P decides it wants to.
The power is even more obvious in bonds. The now-Barclays Aggregate Bond Index attempts to mirror volume of bond issuance in a region or the world, but it can't include even a sizable percentage of all the bonds issued. Essentially, there's a big judgment call in there in what bonds it adds to its index. A judgment that influences bond fund flows worldwide.
What does all this mean? Researchers at a desk in midtown Manhattan are the butterflies that cause the hurricanes in the markets. For instance, 37% of all index funds in stocks are in a S&P 500 index fund. That's $370 billion directly buying and selling stocks based on when the S&P analysts decide to drop ITT from the S&P500 and replace it with just one of three ITT spin-off, Xylem, as announced on Monday. Then add on top of that all of the so-called active mutual funds aiming to beat the S&P 500 (but still reflect 95% of the S&P in their funds) who react to the change and then all of the hedge funds who trade ahead of time trying to guess what S&P may drop or add.
I don't have a grudge against any indexer (and full disclosure, I've done work for some of them). And the folks at McGraw-HIll don't seem to spook people the way George Soros manages to. But when you discuss power in the world markets, the answer isn't what you think it is.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/brendanc...wn-everything/

WASHINGTON -- Do protests take a holiday?
Not Occupy Washington, D.C. The protest originally known as "Stop the Machine" will be holding a Christmas Eve holiday party at Freedom Plaza, where demonstrators have been camped out since early October. The program includes a concert featuring D.C. native Radio Rahim, an alternative hip-hop act called Leftist, D.C. rapper Arman Ali and blues musician Casey Lynch. The musical program will be followed by a big meal and caroling.
Meanwhile, separate protest group Occupy DC has a festive tree in McPherson Square as well as a red, yellow and green "Seasons Greetings from Occupy" sign set up near the park's statue of General McPherson. But no official Christmas activities are planned for the group, which is nearing the end of its third month in McPherson Square.
Protester Kelly Canavan told The Huffington Post that some Occupiers will be going home to see their families, while others will celebrate with local families who have opened their homes to demonstrators.
"A lot of people need a break to rejuvenate," Canavan said, explaining the halt in protest activity. "We're going to start Occupying the New Year."
Yes, that means despite the lack of Christmas activity, there will be an Occupy DC New Year's Eve celebration:
Those who care to join in can RSVP for the NYE party on Facebook.
Adrian Parsons, the lone remaining Occupy DC hunger striker, has more modest holiday plans. Parsons stopped eating on Dec. 8 to protest the District of Columbia's lack of equal voting rights in Congress. He's lost some 20 pounds since embarking on a diet of just water and vitamin pills and is generally too weak to stand anymore. For Christmas, he'll be going to see his parents in Fairfax, Va., where he'll present them with a large piece of artwork and continue to not eat.
"I'm gonna have some water appetizers, water ham, look at the water Christmas tree," he said. "Dream of a water constitutional amendment giving D.C. the right to vote."

NB - many other ongoing Occupations have NOT halted nor abandoned over the holidays. 2012 is the year of Occupy! Mark my words!

Saturday 24 December 2011
by: Anthony DiMaggio and Paul Street, Truthout

Occupy Wall Street (OWS) is spreading throughout the United States and the world.

It is captivating media attention in the United States in a way no left social movement has in recent history. Regular reporting of public anger at business elites has led some to compare OWS to the Tea Party with regard to both forces' "insurgent," "revolutionary" themes and their support for "rebellion" against the status quo.

Questions about how both the Tea Party and OWS are portrayed in the mass media are still emerging, however, considering the freshness of OWS in American politics. Better understanding how both OWS and the Tea Party are discussed in popular dialogue and media should remain a major focus of those concerned with promoting bottom-up notions of grassroots democracy.

Considering the freshness of OWS, many questions still remain with regard to whether it is a real social movement. From our limited experiences participating in OWS thus far (in New York, Illinois and Iowa), it certainly appears to have many of the basic prerequisites of a movement, in terms of participation across a wide number of demographic groups, regular protests in towns and cities across the country and the world, strong resistance from much of the political-economic establishment, and in terms of OWS's strong opposition to co-optation by national Democratic Party elites. Most starkly, OWS protesters' extended willingness to occupy public spaces in solidarity with one another suggests that OWS is solidifying into a serious social movement, likely one of the most important since the civil rights era.

Whether the group will further develop and sustain a mass activist base in terms of regular planning meetings and mass marches, and whether it will coalesce around a specific set of demands that differ from those of the corporatist Democrats, remains to be seen. OWS appears to be in the process of fleshing out many of its demands and still overwhelmingly relies on a very general anger with the state of the economy. It is not an electoral force with a specific list of demands, and it has not sought to take over the Democratic Party or form a third party to date. These realities, however, may represent a major strength of OWS, as it enjoys the potential to remain independent of the corruptions that increasingly define the major parties. OWS's ultimate success may be in its potential to change the political-cultural values for the masses on a more general level. Such a success by OWS could force major political change without the movement being co-opted into the major party system.
According to one theme that quickly became popular in academic and mainstream media circles this fall, OWS's spread from New York City's financial district to more than 800 locations by mid-October of 2011 is the left-wing version of the Tea Party. One variant of this tale referred to OWS as the Democratic Party's version of the Tea Party. The storyline drew on a number of obvious and undeniable parallels. Like the Tea Party phenomenon, which broke out in the late winter and spring of 2009 and significantly influenced US politics on behalf of the Republican Party at the federal and state levels in the mid-term elections of November 2010, OWS:[1]
Opposes the federal government's massive bailout of the nation's leading financial institutions.
Speaks in loud and angry terms and populist, anti-establishment language on behalf of "the people" against arrogant and greedy elites.
Inveighs in stark and dramatic terms about the subversion of American democracy, freedom, and prosperity by concentrated power and tyranny, and calls for taking America back from the agents and forces of subversion.
Is disproportionately white (Caucasian) in composition.
Expresses the sense that something has gone fundamentally wrong in America and that fundamental changes are required to restore balance, decency and democracy.
Appeals to a rising mass of Americans who feel that "the system no longer works for them" and who complain that they are getting nowhere despite playing by all the rules and working hard.
Is driven by "anxiety about the economy [and] belief that big institutions favor the reckless over the hard-working" (New York Times reporter Kate Zernike).[2]
Advances grievances that seem "inchoate and contradictory" (Zernike) to many observers.
Conducts demonstrations, protests and rallies against designated tyrannical targets beyond and between candidate-centered elections.
Claims to be independent, partisan and leaderless, beyond the control of the dominant two establishment business parties (the Republicans and the Democrats).
Posts themselves as legitimate expressions of "'the people"' over and against dreaded and demonized others.
Expanded quickly thanks in large part to outside sponsorship and excited media coverage. This final point is one of the most important that we track in this essay, with regard to explaining the rapid proliferation of OWS.

Beneath and beyond these easily noticeable similarities, however, deep and fundamental differences significantly undermine the core equivalence and parallels that are commonly posited between the Tea Party and the Occupy movement. As we showed in our book, "Crashing the Tea Party: Mass Media and the Campaign to Remake American Politics" (Paradigm, 2011), the conventional, quickly entrenched and mainstreamed media description of "the Tea Party" as a refreshing, independent-nonpartisan, anti-establishment, insurgent, grassroots, populist and democratic force that constituted a leaderless and decentralized popular social and political protest movement was deeply inaccurate - every bit as false as Tea Partiers' fallacious claim that Barack Obama, the Democratic Party and the nation's dominant corporate media are part of the "radical socialist Left."

"Crashing the Tea Party" exposes an ugly, authoritarian and fake-populist pseudomovement directed from above and early on by and for elite Republican and business interests such as the right-wing billionaires Charles and David Koch and the longtime leading Republican operative Dick Armey. Its active membership and leadership are far from "grassroots" and "popular," far more affluent and reactionary than the US citizenry as a whole and even than the segment of the populace that purports (at the prompting of some pollsters) to feel "sympathy" for the Tea Party.

The real Tea Party phenomenon, we discovered, is relatively well off and Middle American (not particularly disadvantaged), very predominantly white, racist, militaristic, narcissistic, hostile to the poor, deeply undemocratic, profoundly ignorant and deluded, heavily paranoid and overly reliant on propagandistic right-wing news and commentary for basic political information. Many of its leaders and members exhibit profound philosophic contempt for collective action, a disturbing and revealing uniformity of rhetoric across groups, cities and regions, a stunning absence of real and deeply rooted local organizing, and a predominant prioritization of Republican electioneering over grassroots protest of any kind.

The Tea Party, we discovered, is not a social movement at all, in fact; rather, it is a loose conglomeration of partisan interest groups that is set on returning the Republican Party to power. It is astroturf and partisan-Republican in orientation. It is not an "uprising" against a corrupt political system or against the established social order. Rather, it is a reactionary, top-down manifestation of that system, dressed up and sold as an outsider rebellion set on changing the rules in Washington. Far from being anti-establishment, the Tea Party is a classic, right-wing, and fundamentally Republican, racist and victim-blaming epitome of what the formerly left political commentator Christopher Hitchens once called "the essence of American politics": "the manipulation of populism by elitism."

In terms of social movements, everything the Tea Party pretended to be and wasn't, OWS displays the potential to be. Unlike the Tea Party, which was launched top down from the arch-Republican heights by Republican-operative groups like FreedomWorks, Americans for Prosperity and Tea Party Express, OWS really did spring up from outside and from beneath the political establishment. It emerged from the dedicated activism of anarchist and other radically democratic activists acting on an extremely clever and powerful suggestion on the part the Canadian anticonsumerist magazine Adbusters - to occupy the belly of the world capitalist financial beast in New York City's financial district on the model of the revolutionary Egyptians who seized Cairo's Tahrir Square in early 2011.

Unlike the Tea Party, OWS really is a leaderless phenomenon, making decisions through a militantly democratic and decentralized process embodied in its nightly General Assembly process. OWS really is populist at a grassroots level, targeting the nation's leading economic institutions and modern capitalism's extreme concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the "1 percent": the unelected dictatorship of money that controls both of the nation's major political parties and so much more. OWS really does appear to be a genuine social movement, with demands, slogans, tactics, philosophies and practices regularly percolating up from the grassroots, not from the top down (that is, from the billionaire arch-reactionary Koch brothers, Armey's FreedomWorks and Fox News).

At this point in its development, OWS is far more independent of establishment partisan politics, refusing to embrace candidates of either the Democratic or Republican Party. It has seen recent significant efforts at co-optation from Democratic Party officials, although protesters at the rank-and-file level have bitterly complained about such co-optation in light of the refusal of the Democratic Party to reconsider its corporatist, pro-Wall Street orientation.

As the 2012 campaign heats up and large majorities of voters share OWS's hostility toward concentrated wealth and power, the Democratic Party is predictably trying to position itself to draw strength and gain electoral advantage from OWS. It hopes to turn OWS to its benefit in the same way that the GOP benefited from the Tea Party in 2010. But it is not likely to succeed in that endeavor. OWS articulates a social movement and direct action orientation that rejects the candidate-centered electoral extravaganzas that big money and media masters stage for the populace every two and four years, saying, "That's politics - the only politics that matters."

A recent survey of OWS protesters in New York finds that most disapprove of Obama and are strongly disillusioned with the Democratic party in light of its establishment, pro-Wall Street politics. Ninety-seven percent say they disapprove of Congress. A plurality of OWS protesters claim to identify with no political party, while 11 percent identify themselves openly as socialists and another 11 percent identify as Green Party members. Most are significantly to the left of center in describing their ideological orientations (80 percent claim to be liberal, 40 percent very liberal), compared to the increasingly center-right Democratic Party.[3]

OWS activists get it that, as the late, great radical American historian Howard Zinn used to say, "It's not about who's sitting in the White House. It's about who's sitting in." As Arun Gupta has noted, "It is difficult to imagine a Michele Bachmann or Eric Cantor emerging as a standard-bearer of the Occupy Wall Street movement." And, Gupta adds, "given their reliance on Wall Street money, as well as radical demands from many protesters, the Democrats will find it almost impossible to channel 'the 99%' into an electoral tidal wave next year, the way the Republicans rode the Tea Party to victory in 2010."

Unlike the Tea Party, OWS is no adjunct of the dominant party system and does not focus ultimately on electoral objectives. Its targets go deeper than partisan politics, reaching down to taproot national and global capitalist financial institutions and corporations that hold leading national parties, policies and governments hostage to the profit interests of the wealthy few.

It really is an independent-nonpartisan, anti-establishment, insurgent, populist force that actively and fluidly represents longstanding majority public dissatisfaction with concentrated wealth and power. This is no small part of why it has inspired hundreds of sympathetic copycat movements and occupations not only across the United States, but also (in a significant contrast with the white nationalist Tea Party phenomenon) around the world.

As a corollary to these core differences, the Tea Party and OWS have received considerably different responses from government authorities and the dominant corporate media. As a pseudomovement that is strictly aligned with existing dominant domestic and global hierarchies of class, race and empire, Tea Party activists have faced little if anything in the way of state repression. They pose no threat whatsoever to the existing corporate, military, sexist, eco-cidal and structurally racist state, and, therefore, operate largely free of government harassment, surveillance, arrest, violence and incarceration.

Things are very different with OWS. Its genuinely radical-populist and democratic character and its basic opposition to the aforementioned hierarchies have meant that it has repeatedly been subjected to arrest, brutality and surveillance from state authorities.

Interestingly, media coverage of OWS has been quite varied, depending on the media outlet, but, generally speaking, it has been strongly sympathetic. In terms of variation, some media outlets are strongly supportive, while others are fiercely opposed. In the opposition camp are the right-wing Fox News, The Washington Times and The Wall Street Journal, among other news organizations. The Washington Times' editors dismiss OWS protesters as little more than "whiners" and "crybabies" who are "desperate to blame others for their poor life choices" - "Wall Street occupiers represent the problem, not the solution."[4]

Similarly, the editors of the reactionary Wall Street Journal lament the protests as out of step with the American public's anger, which the editors (falsely) claim resides exclusively "a few hundred miles south of Wall Street" in Washington DC.[5] That a plurality of Americans agreed with OWS protesters (over their Tea Party competitors), and that most blame both government and Wall Street for failing the American people, seems largely irrelevant in the paternalistic scolding expressed in The Wall Street Journal.

Much of the commentary in the Wall Street Journal amounts to little more than vulgar propaganda and distortion. The same editorial which criticizes OWS would have Americans (and the world) believe that the primary causes of the economic crisis today are:
Obama's mildly populist rhetoric (in early 2009) as directed against the banks and their reckless lending practices (criticisms which he quickly retracted after an outpouring of Wall Street rage);
The extremely mild government reforms as directed against Wall Street (personified in the Dodd-Frank legislation) which legally required toxic derivatives investments (which helped cause the global 2008 economic crisis) to be the subject of federal regulation; and
Talk among Democrats of a very modest increase in personal income taxes for the wealthiest 1 percent - as personified in Obama's proposal to increase the highest tax bracket to 39 percent (from the current 35 percent) for that portion of individuals' yearly income that exceeds $379,150. This mild increase translates into a return to the Clinton era's (also admittedly mild) levels of taxation. Ignoring right-wing fearmongering is the reality that even Clinton-era tax law amounted to a dramatic scaling back of previous top tax bracket rates (of 90 percent) during the 1950s, Eisenhower's golden era of capitalism.

Propaganda masquerading as informed comment does not stop with the above comments. The Wall Street Journal also lends credence to a widely discredited "study" by right-wing pollster Douglas Schoen, who argued (inaccurately) that a "large majority" of OWS protesters support "radical redistribution of wealth" and express "opposition to free-market capitalism."[6] A closer look at Schoen's own survey results finds that only very small minorities of OWS protesters express support for these views, despite Schoen's brazen misrepresentations of his data.[7]

Despite the propaganda, fearmongering and hate expressed above, much (perhaps most) of the reporting on OWS was strongly sympathetic in two ways.

First, OWS is receiving a significant amount of attention in terms of volume of coverage and salience as an issue. A study by the Pew Research Center finds that coverage in early October 2011 reached 7 percent of all media coverage, at a time when protests were picking up steam. This compared quite well to the Tea Party national protests, which also received 7 percent of all news coverage during mid-April 2009.[8]

In contrast, Tea Party coverage was even more extensive in September to November of 2011, accounting for 13 percent of all media coverage - a full 5 percentage points more attention than that directed at OWS in October 2011.[9] Our own research finds mixed evidence of favoritism in terms of volume of coverage. As the data chart immediately below suggests, five out of seven major American news outlets actually devoted more attention to the OWS (October 2011) protests than to the Tea Party (April 2010) protests, when measured in two-week increments following the beginning of each group's rallies.[10]

However, volume of coverage heavily favors the Tea Party when comparing coverage of OWS (October 2011) and the Tea Party in the two weeks prior to and after the November 2, 2010 election. Extensive coverage of and favoritism toward the Tea Party in this later period is likely due to media outlets magnifying the importance of the Tea Party as it was being embraced wholeheartedly as an integral part of Republican Party politics during a major election.

CHART

Quality of content was also quite mixed in terms of reporting, although media outlets were visibly biased in favor of the Tea Party. Editorially speaking, there was quite a bit of support for OWS in the elite liberal press. The New York Times, for example, sympathized with the OWS message:

At this point, protest is the message: income inequality is grinding down that middle class, increasing the ranks of the poor, and threatening to create a permanent underclass of able, willing but jobless people. On one level, the protesters, most of them young, are giving voice to a generation of lost opportunity.... The protesters' own problems are only one illustration of the ways in which the economy is not working for most Americans. They are exactly right when they say that the financial sector, with regulators and elected officials in collusion, inflated and profited from a credit bubble that burst, costing millions of Americans their jobs, incomes, savings and home equity. As the bad times have endured, Americans have also lost their belief in redress and recovery."[11]

Columnists at The New York Times such as Paul Krugman agreed, as he remarked that, "we may, at long last, be seeing the rise of a popular movement that, unlike the Tea Party, is angry at the right people [Wall Street]."[12]

Other elite outlets such as The Washington Post followed suit. For example, op-ed writer Greg Sargent appeared quite sympathetic to OWS when he asked "whether the energy unleashed by the movement can be leveraged behind a concrete political agenda and a push for change that will constitute a meaningful challenge to the inequality and excessive Wall Street influence highlighted by the protests."[13] In another piece, Sargent argued in the Post that "a plurality of Americans agree with Occupy Wall Street's diagnosis of what's wrong. Despite a relentless effort from the right to portray the movement as radical and extreme, a plurality says it reflects the views of mainstream America."[14]

Counted under such agreements were opinions (revealed in national polling) suggesting that a majority of Americans agree with progressive proposals such as increasing federal aid to states in order to avoid public-worker layoffs, payroll tax cuts for the working class in the name of stimulating the economy, increased government spending on improving the nation's infrastructure and increased taxation on the wealthiest one percent in the name of reducing the budget deficit.

Systematic analysis finds that OWS receives quite sympathetic coverage in general, although the Tea Party receives even more sympathetic coverage. The data in the table below suggest that, examining the two-week periods following both the April 2010 Tea Party protests and the October 2011 OWS demonstrations, in six out of seven news outfits, reporters were more likely to classify the Tea Party (as compared to OWS) as a genuine, grassroots movement. In our comparison of reporting on the October 2011OWS rallies to Tea Party reporting in the two weeks prior to and following the November 2010 election, stories were also more likely to favor the Tea Party .

CHART

The relative favoritism directed toward the Tea Party represents a sort of double bias, considering that our findings already suggested that the Tea Party is not a genuine social movement, while OWS (at least in its early stages) appears to exhibit many of the classical characteristics of a movement. Still, OWS does quite well for itself (at least standing on its own) in reporting, considering the strong support it received in elite papers such as The New York Times and The Washington Post, and in light of the fact that a majority of news stories in five of the seven outlets examined refer to OWS as a genuine social movement.

The above findings should be of no surprise to critical media scholars. Movements (and even false movements) traditionally receive significant attention and sympathetic coverage when they are embraced (or at least rhetorically supported) by major political parties. Conversely, movements that go against the establishment-political grain are typically ignored and vilified (on the rare occasions when they are reported). The above findings (in terms of sympathetic OWS coverage, but even-more-sympathetic Tea Party coverage) could have been predicted considering that the Democratic Party is at least rhetorically embracing and attempting to co-opt OWS, while the Tea Party has long been courted, celebrated and thoroughly absorbed into Republican establishment politics.

In other words, the Tea Party's relatively greater partisan support accounts for its relatively more favorable coverage. Tea Party supporters may challenge the depiction of their group as "establishment-oriented," although a mountain of empirical evidence - documented in our forthcoming book, "The Rise of the Tea Party: Political Discontent and Corporate Media in the Age of Obama" - suggests otherwise.

Supporters of OWS should look to sympathetic media reporting as an opportunity to expand the movement to new segments of the American public. As with the Tea Party, favorable media reporting appears to be creating positive impressions of OWS among the public. Recent data from the Pew Research Center suggests as much. Pew's October 2011 survey finds that increased public attentiveness to the political debate and media reporting on OWS is correlated with increased public approval of the group. Those following OWS "fairly closely" or "very closely" are more than 2.5 times more likely to support the group, compared to those following OWS "not too closely" or "not at all closely."[15]

The American left has long been distrustful of the mass media, which regularly ignore progressive social movements due to their lack of usefulness to those who hold political power. OWS represents one of those rare opportunities where the Democratic Party and the state-reliant mass media claim to be sympathetic toward its rhetoric and demands. This, no doubt, is due to the electoral value that OWS retains for Democrats seeking to get re-elected next year. The challenge for the left will be to continue to garner sympathetic media coverage and attention, while also finding ways to challenge Obama's corporatist, pro-Wall Street agenda.

Walking this tightrope is no easy task, but it may be the only path toward building a movement that is able to reach out to the masses while also offering serious progressive and democratic change.


Notes

1. In thinking about these parallels, we have consulted (among other sources) Arun Gupta, "Where OWS and the Tea Party are coming from," Salon (October 21, 2011); John Avlon, "Tea Party for the Left?" Daily Beast, 10 October, 2011.

2. Kate Zernike, "Wall St. Protest Isn't Like Ours, Tea Party Says," New York Times, 21 October 2011.

3. Douglas Schoen, "Polling the Occupy Wall Street Crowd," Wall Street Journal, 18 October 2011; Marjorie Connelly, "Occupy Protesters Down on Obama, Survey Finds," New York Times, 28 October 2011.

4. Editorial, "The Wall Street Whiners," Washington Times, 18 October 2011.

5. Editorial, "What's Occupying Wall Street?" Wall Street Journal, 17 October 2011.

6. Schoen, "Polling the Occupy Wall Street Crowd," 2011.

7. Judd Legum, "Douglas Schoen Grossly Misrepresents His Own Poll Results to Smear Occupy Wall Street," ThinkProgress, 18 October 2011.

8. Project for Excellence in Journalism, "Coverage of Wall Street Protests Keeps Growing, Gets More Political," Pew Research Center, 10-16 October 2011.

9. Project for Excellence in Journalism, "The 2010 Midterms: A Tea Party Tale," Pew Research Center, 11 January 2011.

10. Our data is drawn from an analysis of Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street print stories and television transcripts, as made available via the LexisNexis academic database.

11. Editorial, "Protesters Against Wall Street," New York Times, 8 October 2011.

12. Paul Krugman, "Confronting the Malefactors," New York Times, 6 October 2011.

13. Greg Sargent, "Next Up: 'Occupy Congress'," Washington Post, 19 November 2011, 25(A).

14. Greg Sargent, "The Morning Plum," Washington Post, 26 October 2011.

15. Pew Research Center, "Public Divided Over Occupy Wall Street Movement," Pew Research Center, 24 October 2011.

NEW YORKOccupy Wall Street may still be working to shake the notion it represents a passing outburst of rage, but some establishment institutions have already decided the movement's artifacts are worthy of historic preservation.

More than a half-dozen major museums and organizations from the Smithsonian Institution to the New-York Historical Society have been avidly collecting materials produced by the Occupy movement.

Staffers have been sent to occupied parks to rummage for buttons, signs, posters and documents. Websites and tweets have been archived for digital eternity. And museums have approached individual protesters directly to obtain posters and other ephemera.

The Museum of the City of New York is planning an exhibition on Occupy for next month.

"Occupy is sexy," said Ben Alexander, who is head of special collections and archives at Queens College in New York, which has been collecting Occupy materials. "It sounds hip. A lot of people want to be associated with it."

To keep established institutions from shaping the movement's short history, protesters have formed their own archive group, stashing away hundreds of cardboard signs, posters, fliers, buttons, periodicals, documents and banners in temporary storage while they seek a permanent home for the materials.

"We want to make sure we collect it from our perspective so that it can be represented as best as possible," said Amy Roberts, a library and information studies graduate student at Queens College who helped create the archives working group.

The archives group has been approached by institutions seeking to borrow or acquire Occupy materials. Roberts said they are discussing donating the entire collection to the Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives at New York University. Tamiment declined to comment.

The library's collection is among the country's oldest of materials on socialism, communism and social protest movements in the U.S.

A handful of protesters began camping out in September in a lower Manhattan plaza called Zuccotti Park, outraged at Wall Street excess and income inequality; they were soon joined by others who set up tents and promised to occupy "all day, all night." Similar camps sprouted in dozens of cities nationwide and around the world. Many were forcibly cleared.

Much of the frenzied collection by institutions began in the early weeks of the protests. In part, they were seeking to collect and preserve as insurance against the possibility history might be lost -- not an unusual stance by archivists.

What appears to be different is the level of interest from mainstream institutions across a wide geographic spectrum and the new digital-only ventures that have sprung up to preserve the movement's online history.

The lavish attention poured on the liberal-leaning movement has not gone unnoticed by conservatives.

Judicial Watch, a conservative watchdog group, blogged sarcastically under its "Corruption Chronicles" about the choice by the Smithsonian to document Occupy.

"It looks like it's taxpayer-funded hoarding, as opposed to rigorous historical collecting," said Tom Fitton, president of the organization.

The Smithsonian said its American history collection also now includes materials related to the massive tea party rally against health care reform in March 2010 and materials from the American Conservative Union's Washington, D.C., conference in February.

The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University launched OccupyArchive.org in mid-October on a hunch that it could become historically important. So far, it has about 2,500 items in its online database, including compressed files of entire Occupy websites from around the country and hundreds of images scraped from photo-sharing site Flickr.

"This kind of social movement is probably more interesting to me, to be honest about it. And also so much of it is happening digitally. On webpages. On Twitter," said Sheila Brennan, the associate director of public projects. "I guess I didn't see as much of that with the tea party."

Curators and those in charge of collections at institutions said it was not too soon to think about preserving elements of the Occupy movement.

"We like to collect things as they are happening before the artifacts go away," said Esther Brumberg, senior curator of collections for the Museum of Jewish Heritage in lower Manhattan.

Brumberg said the museum had approached "Occupy Judaism" co-organizer Daniel Sieradski about a poster he had done for a Yom Kippur prayer service for protesters at Zuccotti Park that drew hundreds of people. The poster shows the silhouetted fiddler image from the Jewish musical "Fiddler on the Roof" astride the Wall Street bull.

Sieradski said it made sense that his poster should end up in the museum's permanent collection.

"What I think is great is that they are actually looking to build their collection around contemporary American Jewish history and maybe broaden what their offerings are to the public so that they can tell a more complete story," he said.

While there are no immediate plans to use the poster in an exhibition, Brumberg called it "just one of a number of instances of Jewish activism" that they are interested in and are trying to collect.

The Smithsonian's National Museum of American History gave a similar explanation for sending staff to Zuccotti Square during the encampment, where they were spotted picking up materials. The museum said it was part of its tradition of documenting how Americans participate in a democracy. It declined to allow staff to be interviewed.

"Historians like to take the long view and see how things play out," said spokeswoman Valeska Hilbig in an email, adding that staff wouldn't feel "comfortable" discussing the protests until some time had passed.

Staff at the Robert W. Woodruff Library at Emory University set up a system to download and archive tweets about Occupy. So far, they have harvested more than 5 million tweets from more than 600,000 unique Twitter users. Ultimately the database will be made available to scholars, said Stewart Varner, the digital scholarship coordinator at the library.

The New York Public Library has added Occupy periodicals to its collection and is considering obtaining some protest ephemera.

And the Internet Archive, a massive online library of free digital books, audio and texts, has opened a mostly user-generated collection about the movement. As of Friday, the Occupy collection included more than 2,000 items, while its "Tea Party Movement" collection had fewer than 50.

Unlike other institutions focused only on collecting, the Museum of the City of New York is planning a photography exhibition on Occupy at its South Street Seaport Museum offshoot when it reopens in January.

Chief curator Sarah Henry said the museum will also include materials on the movement in a new gallery opening in the spring that focuses on social activism in New York City.

The New-York Historical Society has collected between 300 and 400 items from the movement, said Jean Ashton, the library director. Ashton recognized the contradiction inherent in an establishment institution collecting Occupy materials.

"There are probably people in Occupy Wall Street who the last thing they want is to have their materials in a library or museum somewhere," she said.

Roberts, the OWS member who is on the archives working group, said it was good that such institutions want to document the movement. However, she said they would prefer the institutions collaborate with the participants. "We know more about the movement and the stories behind the materials that have been collected," she said.

This article by Professor McMurtry had been commissioned by an academic journal called New Politics.

Upon receiving Professor McMurtry's text, the editorial board decided to reject it: "We are sorry to inform you that the Editorial Board finds it inappropriate".

Review of Andrew Kolin, State Power and Democracy (2011), New York: St. Martin's Press/Palgrave Macmillan, 248 pp.

Many readers may have thought the U.S. is "like a police state" - - think of the security dress down of everyone boarding a flight within the U.S. sphere of control. Political scientist Andrew Kolin goes far beyond hasty analogue. He argues with rich factual substantiation that the U.S is a police state all the way down not only since the stolen elections and war state of George Bush Jr., but before and since in a cumulative throughline of bureaucratized despotism across borders.

Documented examples are reported in detail from 1950 on to disclose a record that is as systematic in suppressing public dissent as its client dictatorships elsewhere albeit far more successfully kept out of public and scholarly attention. Since the electoral contests of, by and for the rich in America are proclaimed as "the leader of the Free World" in the ad-vehicle media many still watch and read, an example helps to clarify the reality not reported. When three nuns protested before the war-criminal bombing of Iraq in 2002 where no war crime was left undone, "they were arrested, handcuffed, left on the ground for three hours and then jailed for seven months before trial - - [for] sabotage and obstruction of justice" (p. 153).

Every step of their police repression was within the laws that had been concocted before and after 9-11, in particular by the provisions of "the Patriot Act" with here as elsewhere the legislative title as integral to the Orwellian language of rule. The symbolic action of the nuns - painting blood on a missile silo was in fact backed by international law against the "supreme crime" of non-defensive armed invasion of another country. Indeed their protest occurred just before the saturation bombing of civilian Baghdad which ended in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children. But mass-murderous facts, citizen responsibility, moral courage and peaceful expression of the law of nations do not detain U.S. legal machinery. It is this legal machinery that Kolin focuses on to make his case that the U.S. is a police state.

What is a police state? Kolin states no criterion, but it can be deduced as unlimited state power of armed force freely discharged without citizen right to stop it. Anyone who has lived in the U.S. or its client dictatorships may recognize the concrete phenomena, but what is featured in this account are the laws and directives which empower the police state norms. While the men at the top always proclaim their devotion to the defence of freedom as armed force assaults on domestic dissent and dissident countries increase, none have been found guilty of breaking the law or repressing freedom of speech or assembly. It is U.S. laws and policies which form the U.S. police state, the argument is, and they are continuously made to enable an endless litany of crimes against human life.

The sustaining concern of this work, however, is not to define ordering principles, but to track the bureaucratic trails of legally terrorist offices, directives, and channels. The result is a detailed history of the inner workings of the U.S. state which exposes the legal suppression of democratic speech and action (omitting the use of laws against harmless non-pharmaceuticals as lettres de cachet to imprison the poor and the rebellious by the millions). Beneath continuous corporate-state and media proclamation of America's freedoms and simultaneous academic fear to expose the lines of despotism, this work largely succeeds in providing the procedural workings of the U.S. police state building both before, and dramatically after, the turning point of 9-11.

The manufacture of pretext imprinted in the very timing and naming of the high-tech destruction of the World Trade Center as "9-11", and the fact that the Bush Jr. presidency needed a war or two to distract from its illegitimacy and to empower its program of "full spectrum dominance" are not, however, raised in this book. They remain unspeakable facts within the official conspiracy theory now normalized as fact. Yet this canonical theory of the 9-11 tragedy assumes the collapse of the fireproof steel-cored buildings into their footsteps near the the speed of gravity - an impossibility within the laws of physics and the first legal question of any homicidal crime cui bono, who benefits?- is erased from its record. So although this official story allowed all the post-9-11 police state legislation and unlimited powers Kolin focuses on, he avoids the pretext itself.

Critical attention is instead confined to the silencing of questions, alternatives and dissent by the legal machinery of repression justified by it. Such "institutional analysis" is favoured by America's lead critics, and positivist social science rules out what is not so corroborated. The clear exception to this methodological silencing here is attachment of the descriptor "police state" to the U.S., and the legally well informed record of demonstration. The maze-like bureaucratization of operations of repression is not ultimately covert, Kolin shows, but sanctified by official policies and laws.

Kolin's attention to dated laws, directives, offices, and machinations behind the spotlight and personalization of politics is a welcome re-grounding amidst the daily media kaleidoscope of ever-changing images and personalities. In contrast to the usual academic fear of ideological non-conformity, Kolin clearly summarizes at the outset: "In the latter part of the twentieth century, when mass movements for all intents and purposes were eliminated, what remained was for the most part was procedural democracy, which in a short period, would also be eliminated, to be replaced by a form of absolute power in which government had been made into a permanent police state. Much of this took place after the attacks of 9-11, during which the administration of George Bush in a very short time, was able to put in place many of the essential features of what is now an American police state" (p.2).

U.S. Police State in Formation from the Revolution through Reagan to Bush-Obama

Kolin goes back to the U.S. state's foundation to find the dictatorial impulse. "The truth of the matter", he says, "is that after the American Revolution there was thinking among economic and democratic elites that America had become too democratic, especially as mass democracy was expressing itself on the state level"(p. 3) a view better known since a Rockefeller-founded Trilateral Commission Report made it famous centuries later. The Founding Fathers' anti-democratic politics have been explored before by Michael Parenti, who blurbs for the book. For Kolin, it is "mass democracy" that frightens the dominant ownership class from the start because it threatens their ruling proprietary control. But this economic diagnosis is not pursued by Kolin. He conceives the motor force as "control over people and territory by the state in itself. This non-Marxian thesis is historically associated with theoretical anarchism, but is here conjoined to the idea of "mass democracy", a motivating idea behind this work which is not given further definition.

Yet we may surmise that mass democracy entails popular assemblies - the traditional "town hall meeting" of classical American democracy - in place of representation by professional politicians controlled by corporate and financial lobbies. The meta-argument is that the nature of the U.S. state itself is disposed towards power after power "over people and territory" and is thus structured against mass democracy from the beginning. It is implied that mass democracy could not itself lead to a police state. This implied argument is not secure.

Desires of popular masses can be as overwhelmingly compelled to control people's thought, action and dissent by force as state elites are, and they can be as driven to seize the territories of other people and to lord it over them via great majorities as in the popular witch-hunts through American history and as, more broadly, age-old ethnic warfare and killing and enslavement of losing societies. Something deeper than the will of the demos to which it is accountable is required - rules to live by which protect and enable life itself. This may be the most fundamental gap in democratic theory.

Annihilating Not Only Democracy, But Countless Lives and Life Supports

For perhaps the majority in the U.S., loathing of government is a national pastime except for "our men in uniform" that is, arms-laden American enforcers chasing, shooting and bombing designated enemies of America at home and abroad. Wars seem in fact very popular with the majority if they are not being lost, and public pillories and prisons for deviators from the American Way seldom lack similar support. Police state laws, the invasion of Iraq and so on seem to have been popular if they are successful. Yet Kolin's work is more concerned to expose the state which is represented as the world leader in democracy while it rules by armed force, secrecy and terror and especially since 9-11 - violently suppresses dissent in its own society. The inside mechanisms of legalist-bureaucratic rule not discussed or connected in the dominant media or political science are uniquely laid bare. There were many designated "enemies" from the beginning from American Indians and genocidal laws against them to the FBI, Sedition, Alien and Espionage Acts of 1917-18, the CIA founding in 1947, followed by the Internal Security Act of 1950, McCarthy's House UnAmerican Activities Committee from 1957, and the Patriot and Homeland Security Acts of today. All of these legal mechanisms, he shows, have been structured to silence alternative thoughts and voices in the public sphere. When to be merely unAmerican brings life ruin to U.S. citizens and designation as "the enemy" can justify the saturation bombing of weaker societies, the derangement becomes clear amidst a sustained train of such abuses over generations.

When these systematic attacks simultaneously annihilate life-serving advocacy and institutions at home and elsewhere, a more sinister and unidentified pattern emerges. Not only non-conforming speech and thought are repressed, but standing up for other people's lives and life means becomes criminalized. An invisible war is waged on social conscience and defence of life itself. Indeed this is the unrecognized selector of what the U.S. police state invariably attacks inside and outside its borders social movements and orders to enable the lives of citizens opposed to transnational private money sequencing to more. Consider here for immediate example what the police protected in New York in the Wall Street protests until world attention no longer allowed the savage beating to continue with the dominant media cheering it on. Government armed force did not protect the lives of citizens or their cause of life justice or real market businesses on the street. Armed protective attention was directed instead to Wall Street operations by barricades, long swinging truncheons, continuous special vehicles of service to the money-men, and moving lines of trap and assault of the citizens standing for "the 99%". In the wider world, the seven-month U.S.-NATO bombing of Libya not to defend citizens as pretended, but to bomb main cities and government capacities, seize control of the country's wealthy financial assets and sub-soil oil fields went on with hardly a voice of dissent. That it destroyed Libya's social state of free healthcare, higher education and guaranteed subsistence in food, housing and fuel was never reported even by public broadcasters.

The U.S. state is in these ways structured not only towards total force and control. It is, more deeply, programmed to liquidate what serves the lives of people so as to grow transnational corporate profit for the few. Always however, there is a pretext of a demonic enemy that people are being protected from "communism", "subversives", "Islamic militants", "terrorists", "violence-threatening protestors", all with no criteria. Most warred upon by the U.S. state are societies' social life support systems including public water, electricity, health and living subsidies. Consider here the bombed former Yugoslavia, Iraq and Libya - not to mention trillions of dollars of defunding of U.S. social security itself to pay for private bank bailouts by public dollars. This is the deeper shadow side of the U.S. state and its global allies.

On the other hand, the non-police state dimension of America - the relative but important freedom of people to say what they want in private is an anomaly not engaged by this text. The strength of its analysis is its encyclopaedic report of the U.S. record through successive repressive laws, witchhunts and official policies, from cancelling the passports and rights of alleged communists to run for office to ever more "outlawing of dissident thought. For Kolin, this propulsion towards "absolute control" where citizen security is usurped not protected is a silent telos of the police state. Some of the revelations are hair-raising (although published errors like "Senglarb" for "Singlaub" and "Chili" for "Chile" do not assist disclosure of what most are reluctant to face). President Ronald Reagan supported El Salvador's death-squad leaders, remained complicitly silent in the murder of Archbishop Romero and Jesuit priests calling for social justice, and backed Guatemala's bible-fundamentalist Rioss Montt who mass-murdered Mayan peasant villagers in the tens of thousands , saying "beans for the obedient; bullets for the rest"(p. 117). His administration also secretly funded war crimes against Nicaragua by drug sales into the U.S. and arms to Iran, repudiated guilt and damages awarded by the World Court, and mounted endless attacks on "any individual or organization that voiced discontent toward the military or government", including a 1992 CIA training manual for torture, false imprisonment and extortion including of Americans. Effective impunity - the primary marker of a police state ruled. The Bush Jr. presidency then outdid Reagan in criminal impunity, war crimes and direction of mass murder, while the Obama presidency sustained all the mechanisms, added a third war and further stripped the social security system.

Command over ever more external territory and peoples is always the direction. Permanent war is the omnibus vehicle of its advance, and mass mind control including by torture is a standard method, along now with serial murders across borders by drones. While seldom penetrating these generic principles of the global police state, Kolin follows the specifica of the inside workings of the legal-bureaucratic machine through many phases, acronyms and abhorrence of real democracy built into policies and laws. One better knows why the U.S. becomes a failed state when one sees the absolutist overriding of every attempt to bring it back into line with life-respecting values during the last half century. The Fulbright and Church Committees, the mass progressive movements of the 1960's and 70's, all come to nought until post-9-11 laws, terror and surveillance make the police state a formal affair, and what is not mentioned here, Congress increasingly degenerates into the best frontmen the banking, oil, weapons, med-insurance and pharma corporations can buy. The apogee of police state method follows - military tribunals in place of due process to deal with endless arrests for an open-ended charge of terrorism against people in their own countries, systematic rendition and torture against international laws, abolition of habeus corpus and all procedures protecting against false charge, simultaneous denial of legal standing as prisoners of war, and evidence kept secret without possibility of disproof. The legal limbo of the Guatanomo prison has helped to permit evasion of any accountability to the rule of law. After promising to eliminate it, President Obama did not.

If one ignores the blinkering out of the private transnational corporate-financial system behind ever more people and territory for natural resource, market, labor, and strategic exploitation without limit, the book is a treasure-trove of the U.S. state-machinery for undemocratic world rule. The despotic compulsion to intimidate, control and terrorize innocent and conscientious citizens across the world including within the U.S. is hard to deny in face of such organized evidence. Just about every horror story one has heard of U.S. state rule finds a reference here. Even Franklin Roosevelt (internment of Japanese citizens) and Robert Kennedy (greenlights to FBI spying and bugging without cause, including of M.L. King) are flagged. As for Bill Clinton, he led genocide of Iraqi's social state, attack on social security at home, and refused to ratify the International War Crimes Court.

"Abstract wording" of laws against "terrorism" from the 1960's on is the means whereby progressive non-violent organizations and people have been criminalized for standing against mass-murderous U.S. state policies from Latin America to the Middle East to Indonesia to Vietnam. "Empire rolling back democracy" is the stated theme across decades and continents, but it might be more disquietingly understood as an ecogenocidal program of money-party rule across borders. People are replaced, but the mechanism rules on. With the presidential brand change of Obama, for example, no law, directive and policy of disemployment, union-busting, social security elimination, or foreign war was stopped, whatever the promises to do so. All have in fact increased, including by new bombing of a defenceless oil country. Least of all is the Wall Street license to print debt-money and siphon trillions of dollars more of taxpayers' money reversed. Rather taxpayers at home and abroad are increasingly ruined to pay for the bankers' fraud while ever more lose their homes, jobs, social security supports, and futures of their children.

Yet the economic level of the U.S. police state remains in the shadows. From the start, the founding of the U.S. was on the basis of protecting private wealth and its accumulation with no common life interest defined. It allowed the limitless seizure of Indian people's lands and territories West of the Appalachians which George III had forbidden, and extended the unregulated rights of the private money power so fast and far that Thomas Jefferson himself warned that "banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. Already they have raised up a monied aristocracy that has set the government at defiance. The [money and credit] issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people to whom it belongs". Over 230 years later, the problem is clearer as U.S. state rule by force and dictate becomes a visible dead-end. But as to whether the Wall-Street money power behind the state that predates the world is brought under control is a question not posed in this study. So far the first step solution of public-bank utilities and non-profit loans to government has been silenced wherever it is raised.

By MAX ABELSON / Bloomberg News | Posted: Saturday, December 24, 2011 11:00 pm

NEW YORK Jamie Dimon, the highest-paid chief executive officer among the heads of the six biggest U.S. banks, turned a question at an investors' conference in New York this month into an occasion to defend wealth.

"Acting like everyone who's been successful is bad and because you're rich you're bad, I don't understand it," the JPMorgan Chase CEO told an audience member who asked about hostility toward bankers. "Sometimes there's a bad apple, yet we denigrate the whole."

Dimon, 55, whose 2010 compensation was $23 million, joined billionaires including hedge-fund manager John Paulson and Home Depot co-founder Bernard Marcus in using speeches, open letters and television appearances to defend themselves and the richest 1 percent of the population targeted by Occupy Wall Street demonstrators.

If successful businesspeople don't go public to share their stories and talk about their troubles, "they deserve what they're going to get," said Marcus, 82, a founding member of Job Creators Alliance, a Dallas-based nonprofit that develops talking points and op-ed pieces aimed at "shaping the national agenda," according to the group's website. He said he isn't worried that speaking out might make him a target of protesters.

"Who gives a crap about some imbecile?" Marcus said. "Are you kidding me?"

The organization assisted John A. Allison IV, a director of BB&T Corp., the ninth-largest U.S. bank, and Staples co- founder Thomas Stemberg with media appearances this month.

"It still feels lonely, but the chorus is definitely increased," Allison, 63, a former CEO of the Winston-Salem, N.C.-based bank and now a professor at Wake Forest University's business school, said in an interview.

At a lunch in New York, Stemberg and Allison shared their disdain for Section 953(b) of the Dodd-Frank Act, which requires public companies to disclose the ratio between the compensation of their CEOs and employee medians, according to Allison. The rule, still being fine-tuned by the Securities and Exchange Commission, is "incredibly wasteful" because it takes up time and resources, he said. Stemberg called the rule "insane" in an email to Bloomberg News.

"Instead of an attack on the 1 percent, let's call it an attack on the very productive," Allison said. "This attack is destructive."

The top 1 percent of taxpayers made at least $343,927 in 2009, the last year data is available, according to the Internal Revenue Service. While average household income increased 62 percent from 1979 through 2007, the top 1 percent's more than tripled, an October Congressional Budget Office report showed. As a result, the United States had greater income inequality in 2007 than China or Iran, according to the Central Intelligence Agency's World Factbook.

Not all affluent Americans are on the defensive. Billionaire Warren Buffett, 81, chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway Inc., has called for increasing taxes on the wealthy, as has Patriotic Millionaires, a group whose supporters include Ask.com co-founder Garrett Gruener and Peter Norvig, director of research at Google, according to its website.

"Rich businesspeople like me don't create jobs," Nick Hanauer, co-founder of aQuantive Inc., an online advertising company he sold to Microsoft for about $6 billion, wrote in a Dec. 1 Bloomberg View article. "Let's tax the rich like we once did and use that money to spur growth."

Two out of three Americans support raising taxes on households with incomes of at least $250,000, according to a Bloomberg-Washington Post national poll conducted in October.

Asked if he were willing to pay more taxes in a Nov. 30 interview with Bloomberg Television, Blackstone Group LP CEO Stephen Schwarzman spoke about lower-income families who pay no income tax.

"You have to have skin in the game," said Schwarzman, 64. "I'm not saying how much people should do. But we should all be part of the system."

Some of Schwarzman's capital gains at Blackstone, the world's largest private-equity firm, are taxed at 15 percent, not the 35 percent top marginal income-tax rate. Attacking the banking system is a mistake because it contributes to "a healthier economy," he said in the interview.

Paulson, the New York hedge-fund manager who became a billionaire by betting against the U.S. housing market, has also said the rich benefit society.

"The top 1 percent of New Yorkers pay over 40 percent of all income taxes," Paulson & Co. said in an emailed statement on Oct. 11, the day Occupy Wall Street protesters left a mock tax-refund check at its president's Upper East Side townhouse.

Tom Golisano, billionaire founder of payroll processer Paychex Inc. and a former New York gubernatorial candidate, said in an interview this month that while there are examples of excess, it's "ridiculous" to blame everyone who is rich.

"If I hear a politician use the term 'paying your fair share' one more time, I'm going to vomit," said Golisano, who turned 70 last month, celebrating the birthday with girlfriend Monica Seles, the former tennis star who won nine Grand Slam singles titles.

Ken Langone, 76, another Home Depot co-founder and chairman of the NYU Langone Medical Center, said he isn't embarrassed by his success.

"I am a fat cat, I'm not ashamed," he said last week in a telephone interview from a dressing room in his Upper East Side home. "If you mean by fat cat that I've succeeded, yeah, then I'm a fat cat. I stand guilty of being a fat cat."

Peter Schiff, CEO of Westport, Conn.-based broker-dealer Euro Pacific Capital Inc., is delivering the message directly. He went in October to Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan, where Occupy Wall Street protesters had camped out, with a sign that said "I Am the 1%" and a video camera.

"Somebody needs to do it," Schiff said in an interview.

Schiff, 48, disclosed assets of at least $64.7 million before losing the 2010 Republican primary for a Connecticut U.S. Senate seat, according to filings. He's wealthier now, even though his taxes are "more than a medieval lord would have taken from a serf," he said.

A clip from Schiff's video was used in a Nov. 1 segment of Comedy Central's "The Daily Show," in which comedian John Hodgman, wearing a cravat, called the wealthy a "persecuted minority." He asked that the phrase "moneyed Americans" replace "the 1 percent."

Neither term appeared in a Nov. 28 open letter to President Barack Obama from hedge-fund manager Leon Cooperman, the Omega Advisors Inc. chairman and former CEO of Goldman Sachs's money-management unit. Capitalists "are not the scourge that they are too often made out to be" and the wealthy aren't "a monolithic, selfish and unfeeling lot," Cooperman wrote. They make products that "fill store shelves at Christmas" and provide health care to millions.

Cooperman, 68, said in an interview that he can't walk through the dining room of St. Andrews Country Club in Boca Raton, Fla., without being thanked for speaking up. At least four people expressed their gratitude on Dec. 5 while he was eating an egg-white omelet, he said.

"You'll get more out of me," the billionaire said, "if you treat me with respect."

My heart breaks for the wee things. And all they want is a little respect...If only they weren't so full of it....:fullofit: