Imitation and Flattery; or Stop Ripping Me Off, Stewart

Whether it's the old saw that great minds think alike or the writers for Jon Stewart's magnum opus have been reading this blog for ideas, the final show that the Daily Show did from Tampa "stole" several of the ideas we've been putting forth on this little blog.  Specifically:

1. Running the country as a for profit business

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
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2.Why there is no party for most of us

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
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3. Why the Republicans are so afraid of Obama, their stawman arguments, and especially the inscrutable Clint Eastwood performance.   [See also: A comment that your intrepid blogger made on this NPR story.  We'll save you the tedium of wading through the pages of comments and reprint it here: "The Clint Eastwood speech was symbolic of the entire RNC: a bunch of old white men making up "facts" about a guy that doesn't exist. The irony is assuredly lost on them, but I thought it was perfect." -ed.]

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
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We make the accusation of intellectual thievery mostly in jest.  It's not like our lazy skepticism is all that novel.  We mostly suspect that it's all just part of the current zeitgeist among the critical thinking set.  So, hats off to you Daily Show writers for bringing us 21 minutes of joy four nights a week.  You may be aware of our ambivalence toward the President, so we can't wait for Jon Stewart, and Co. to take aim at the Dems next week.

Posting will be light this week, so enjoy the DNC coverage.  We'll be back later in the week with a wrap up.

Why Blog?, or Paying Homage to the Greats

Now that we have built a tiny and undedicated audience for this blog we have been asked this question at least twice, "Why on earth do you write that miserable little blog of yours?"

Here are the top three reasons that we maintain a blog.

1. Self-importance: We have things to say, and it is eminently aggrandizing to spray them across the internet instead of ineffectually shouting at the TV/radio/computer/random strangers
2. Self-delusion: people want to hear what we have to say, and are clamoring for more of our trite, lazy analysis of current events, public policy, and/or science!
3. The real reason that we do this is we grew up in the age of newspaper consolidation and widespread syndication, which meant that we could read some really great writing and journalism even in our dinky hometown daily.  We particularly remember thinking for a time that syndicated columnist, Dave Barry had just about the best job we could imagine.  How fun it would be to goof around all week then write about it in a few column inches each week.  But at the time we also thought that it was nearly impossible for an average person like ourselves to become so widely read, and influential.  We imagined the years spent slogging it out in the newsroom to make it to the ranks of syndication, and we concluded that other pursuits were more attractive to us on a professional level.  Besides, we liked math and science better than literature and composition by the time we had to decide on a college major.  That was when we let our original dream of editorial fame dwindle.  Fast forward a few years, and thanks to disintermediation afforded by the internet anyone can be an amateur columnist.  So now that the barriers to entry are quite low, we daily feel the call to pick up the torch laid down by some of the past greats and tap out some thoughts that can be read by the wider public.  It's not to say that we count ourselves peers to the great and dedicated professional writers that we still enjoy reading, but we also value the ability for any citizen to put pen to paper bytes to text editor and scrawl out a some insight about the world we live in.  Professional journalists don't have a monopoly on great writing or good sense and you can find examples of insightful writing by amateurs all over this great and varied internet.

As we mentioned yesterday, go check out Dave Barry's columns on the RNC over at National Journal.  While you do so think about penning your own blog about what you see around you.  Our society will be stronger for it.

A Brief Outage, or Why It's a Good Idea to Take a Break

For those of you that were wondering where we were last Friday, it was a family day for you intrepid blogger.  No need to ratchet up the outrage level when we were enjoying such great fun with the fam.  For those of you that missed us, we say thanks.  While we were paused for a moment we also passed another milestone: 3000 page views.  Once again, thanks for stopping by and having a look-see.  Don't be shy to post a comment or two.
The rest of the week will be back to the normal posting schedule.  Here's what we have planned:

• Dave Barry is writing for the National Journal's Daily blog this week during the RNC.  We have read Dave Barry since we were knocking around primary school, and we can't endorse his work enough.  If the first article is any indication, the rest of the week's posts should be great.  Seeing Mr. Barry's byline again, reminds us why we are blogging in the first place, so we have a lengthy post coming down the pipe on that topic.
• Why there is not a political party for most of us, part 2: the Republicans
• More observations of wackiness from the RNC
• Link Hive #8

Have a great week.

What's With The Post Titles?, or Gratuitous Post That Is (Nearly) Content Free

[All of the textbook strategies for building an audience for a blog say that one should post daily. So, with that in mind here is another post* with almost no content.]

The editors and I would like to briefly open the curtain, and offer a peek behind the scenes at the inner workings of this little blog.  The reason: we occasionally get mail from the readers, and almost two of the regular readers of DI have asked, "Why are all the post titles so long?"  This is why:

Look! Is moose and squirrel.

The naming convention for the titles to all of our posts is an homage to the best, most subversive cartoon ever to air on television.  Even though it originally aired almost two decades before we were unleashed onto the world, it was a regular part of our Saturday morning regimen.  If you are still unfamiliar with the awesomeness that is The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show, you must seek it out.  It will make you smile, and realize the genius of Jay Ward and his band of miscreants has influenced just about every good animated show since.  There would be no Simpsons, Ren & Stimpy, Spongebob, or South Park with out those great pioneers of animated satire.

*The real reason for this post was to commemorate racking up 2000 page views.  Hooray for us. - ed

Why There Isn't a Party for Most of Us, or It Only Pays to Like Donkeys in Tijuana (Allegedly)

In a post from a little while back I shared that the Pew Center for Research thinks I am a "Solid Liberal".  That may be true - though they are vastly oversimplifying - but I also mentioned that I'm not a member of the Democratic Party.  Why, you ask?  It's simple, and it has nothing to do with the silly stigma against the term "liberal" that the screaming morons in the far-right media have engendered.


The reason: Team Donkey is the most disappointing, frustrating political party in the long and disappointing history of disappointment.  What self-respecting, responsible citizen would sign on to board the Titanic of politics?  Por exemplo, I sight the party that was too fractious, too disorganized, too timid to take advantage of the historic opportunity presented by the 2006 and 2008 election cycles.

What opportunity was that?  Well, after the first five and a half years of the W Administration, the general opinion of the Republican Party was at it's lowest in my memory.  Years of moving farther to the right began to really piss off sensible people.  By early 2008, the Dems controlled Congress by electing center-left candidates from predominantly red states, plus then-Senator Barack Obama was beginning to explain the vision of his presidential nomination campaign.  Candidate Obama was raising gobs of money from an army of mostly middle class donors giving modest sums.  He was talking about building a government from the center majority.  He was, in short, generally doing everything possible to convince us that he was a new breed of leader.

Team Donkey's official mascot

So, the pieces were in place for the Democrats to come out of their post-Clinton cocoon and be reborn in a form that could build a permanent majority based on a coalition of moderate, centrist, middle-class voters.  They were going to fix healthcare, invest in technology and clean energy to create a future-proof economy, and set the country on a path to lead the world throughout the 21st Century.  This was all just a pipe-dream, in retrospect.  Oh, and that pesky financial crisis didn't help matters, either.

As we all now know, once in power the modern Democratic Party was destined to self-immolate.  It's not that surprising, really.  Here is a short list of the satellite factions whose internal competition ultimately unhinges the whole progressive caucus:

The Labor Movement
Poverty and social justice crusaders
Civil rights crusaders
Environmentalists
Blue Dogs
Charles Rangel

Each in turn confounds anything like a coherent message or mission from the party as a whole, thus ensuring no way to convince the public that they know how to govern themselves let alone a country. So, naturally they were routed in the 2010 midterm elections.  Now here we are left watching the Congressional Democrats, responding to the continuing swift march to the right by Team Elephant, move sharply to the left like a stubborn child shouting, "He started it!"  The middle of the electorate is left to look on in horror and disgust.


Except that the middle is not looking on politics at all.  They have largely turned away preferring to ignore the silliness and mud-slinging and vilification in the hopes that somehow Congress will fix itself in their disaffected absence.  That is what we call wishful thinking, and while sensible people turn away, the two parties are further incented to pander to the base and increasingly radicalize.

Team Elephant's official mascot: a canned ham

At this point in the discussion someone - this has sometimes been me in the past - will come along and propose that a third party can fix our politics...I'll wait while you stop laughing.  Assuming for a second that it could raise enough money AND convince voters to actually elect it to a plurality in Congress, a single party in the middle won't work.  They would be constantly bombarded from both sides with silly, but impassioned attacks from the two extremist parties.  Ask Barack Obama how that's working out for him.


What we would need is for there to be four parties.  In order to successfully marginalize the screaming morons on the far right and the far left, there would have to be two parties in the middle - a center-left caucus and a center-right caucus - to play off of one another.  Counterpoint is often necessary in properly articulating one's message to voters.  Likely, neither of the center parties could generate a majority on it's own, which would regularly force the two to work together to get things done.  Heaven forbid!


(There may actually be good news on that front.  If we go back and look at some of the last votes in the House before summer recess we see a kind of de-facto four party system.  The tea-baggers rebelled against nearly everything that the Boehner-leadership team tried to get done, leaving the majority dozens of votes short of passage.  So, majority whip Kevin McCarthy would have to go make friendly with Nancy Pelosi and the House Democrats in order to find the needed votes.  This shocking example of bi-partisan cooperation actually led to a slight but real moderation in the House recently.  If only, we could count on that continuing, which we can't in the new reality of gerrymandered congressional districts.


But I digress...)


So, here we are again.  The opportunity for one party to sweep up the vast majority of voters is presenting itself once more.  We know there are huge swaths of voters ripe for the taking.  After all, something like 88 - 91% of those polled disapprove of Congress, and a little over 50% disapprove of the President.  By my math, that is an awful lot of people that really dislike both parties.  The danger is that disaffected middle is more swayed by Fiction-Based Truth of the Rove-led super PACs, than the timid reasoning and pleading from Dems, and we are plunged back into the Bush years.


Frustrating.

Listening to Smart People Again, or YOU Are a Job Creator

In the post about the healthcare decision, I mentioned in passing that if people aren't spending most of their income on healthcare they can go out and consume more stuff.  That reminded me of a notion that Nick Hanauer puts forth in his talk at last spring's TED Conference.

Actually, that's not fully accurate.  I was first reminded by simultaneous posts on Google+ by two really smart people that I follow.  First, my old pal, music critic Danny Johnson (go encircle him now, especially if you like to read about opera), posted a link to an excellent piece in GQ by one of my favorite journos, Jon Ronson.  It is a great portrait of income disparity in our country.  (Go read it now.  I'll wait.)  Hanauer is one interview subject in the piece and he essentially lays out the skeleton for his TED Talk thesis.  So, his idea was doubly on my radar when Tim O'Reilly (go encircle Tim on Google+ now, especially if you like to read about the notion of government as a platform, a.k.a. Government 2.0) posted Hanauer's TED video.

Nick nicely weaves to together some threads that have been loose in my head for a while now.  The idea that we need to keep taxes low on the rich has always seemed foolish to me.  We are a consumer driven economy now more than ever.  So, if we remove many of the impediments to consumer spending, there will be more consumption and more jobs.  One way to free up more disposable income for the middle class is to remove the burden of healthcare from the millions of uninsured Americans, and a fair way to pay for that investment in job growth is to go back to the Clinton Era tax rates.  Quit whining rich guys, you are only paying capital gains tax anyway...and that is a topic for another post.

Now, I don't think it is very wise to go back to the punitive tax rates of the 60's and 70's either, but when the top earners complain about taxes being too high I want to laugh, or cry, or puke, or all three simultaneously.  That the Elephant-based party is so enamored of the fallacy that low taxes create jobs is just another reason to question their grasp on reality. Wait, no, they have a firm grasp on the very real checkbooks in their wealthy donor's pockets.  The Grover Norquist tax-pledge is doing just as much to raise the national debt as is Medicare.

Healthcare Is Not a Marketplace, or Don't Repo My Kidneys Please

This post has been brewing in the back recesses of my gray matter for quite a while, but in light of SCOTUS's decision on the Affordable Care Act last Thursday it seems like the proper time to unleash it on you, dear reader.

Here comes a post about healthcare...

First point: the Democrats, and the Obama Administration specifically, have done an awful job of educating the public about the Affordable Care Act.  The results of this poll from Reuters and Ipsos proves how misinformed the general public is.  The Republican strategy of fiction-based truth strikes again.  The fact that a majority of Americans oppose the act on the surface, but overwhelmingly support the provisions therein shows how Republicans have successfully spread enough FUD, misinformation, and outright lies to hoodwink the country into opposing something that is ultimately in it's best interests.  That is weak, Dems.  Here, let me help you get started: How Today's Supreme Court Decision Will Help Unleash American Innovation - Technology Review

(That the Republican Party is so bent on obstructing the Obama agenda they would make it their primary mission to fight a healthcare reform structure that is both popular and identical to the one their own presidential candidate enacted in Massachusetts is a separate post entirely.  Your intrepid blogger needs to focus the outrage machine on a single target from time to time...

...but I can't resist letting the cross-hairs wander for a second.  This begs the question: if the Republicans oppose this version of healthcare reform that is chock full of compromise and ample protection for private insurance companies, then WTF do they support?  So, we had Marco Rubio swearing up and down to Jon Stewart that Senate Republicans really aren't obstructionists, but the True Alternative Party, and it's the mean old Democrats that won't let him bring the Republican's alternative healthcare plan - the one that totally exists wink, wink - to a vote.  What?  You've never heard of their totally awesome alternative plan?  Well, according to this Forbes article, their plan is nearly identical to the Affordable Care Act.  Hey, it turns out the Republicans also noticed that eliminating discrimination based on pre-existing conditions, covering children up to age 26, etc. are popular among voters.  But, we already knew that.  Or are they just going to reprise their Medicare part D expansion routine, a.k.a. the Giant Taxpayer Funded Giveaway to Big Pharma...)

Ok, I've gone a little astray from the main goal of this post, which is to set forth this thesis:


Healthcare - or the practice of medicine by doctors to heal sick and injured people and prevent disease - is not a marketplace.


Obviously, we can be absolutely certain it is not a free market wherein transactions are unregulated.  Having worked for a sports medicine company in the recent past, I can assure you that nothing happens unless it's covered by Medicare.  Not even the private insurers will authorize something not reimbursed by the government.  We already have a de facto national health care plan.  But, every time we hear one of the Alt-Party demagogues decrying "Obamacare" on TV, he always says something like, "there is a free market solution to healthcare reform."


Yes, in healthcare services are rendered, and often goods are purchased.  However, the fundamental quantity involved in the transaction, health, is difficult to place a value on, if not utterly priceless.  For there to be a market for health both parties involved in the transaction of goods or services need to agree on the value.  That is next to impossible to do when we are talking about the state of your health.

Not convinced?  Let's look at it from this perspective.  Let's say you are the recipient of a transplanted kidney, and are unable or unwilling to pay the price demanded by the surgeon.  What happens next?  Do they come after you and repossess your new kidney?  What about if you can't pay the hospital bills for the birth of your child?  Do you have to return your little bundle of joy?  Ok, that is a bad punchline to an overwrought setup, but you get the point.

Dammit, Jim!  I'm a doctor, not a businessman.

Here's an even better example taken from experience.  The amount that the hospital invoiced my employer's insurance company when our son was born would have bankrupted just about any household.  There were a lot of unforeseen expenses due to an unpreventable emergent situation, which led to hospital stays for my wife and our son.  Our household is technically in the top 10% of income in the country - though living in coastal San Diego County takes a very large bite out of our earnings - and if not for medical insurance, this would have crippled us financially.  Like contemplating Chapter 11 crippled.  We did not choose to rack up a bunch of charges for unnecessary tests and care.  The decision to perform services was not a choice at all.  Lives were at stake.  It's not like I had the chance to go shop around at different hospitals to find the price for service that most closely matched the value I put on my wife's and son's life.  See, not a marketplace.

Besides, we already know what free-market health care looks like, and "HMO" is a dirty word as a result.  Or just go read anything by Dickens if you want to see what real Capitalism is like.  None of this modern social safety net coddling for you, young Master Twist.

The profit motive does not work in medicine.  (See also: How the U.S. Health Insurance Boondoggle Stifles Innovation - Technology Review)  The sooner we all recognize that, the better we all will be.  It's about priorities.  We can choose as a nation to keep people healthy.  You know, so they can go do things like earn a paycheck, buy stuff, not go bankrupt, and all those nice things that grow the economy and create real jobs.*  I'm quite sure there is a ton or research out there showing that it's much cheaper to keep our citizens healthy than to go kill the citizens of another country.  There are plenty of time-tested examples from around the world of what works, and what doesn't, in universal healthcare.  We are smart enough to figure it out.


*We are hatching another post about who the real job creators are.  Stay tuned...

Paying Attention to a Nobel Laureate in Economics, or A Krugman By Any Other Name is Just as Smart

In case you are not a regular viewer¹ or you just happened to miss the June 18th edition of The Colbert Report, Paul Krugman was the guest.

The Colbert Report
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Colbert outing Krugman as a member of The 1%, now can openly drive his Bentley to the yacht club²

[We think you really need to know who Paul Krugman is if you are at all interested in public affairs, but in case you don't, here's his Wikipedia page.  He won the Nobel Prize for economics in 2008.  It's kind of a big deal. -ed.]


While Krugman's appearance on Colbert was nominally to pimp his new book, End This Depression Now!, the by-proxy focus of the interview was on the Presidential race and how it pertains to the world economy.  Colbert takes his usual satiric, arch-conservative stance to draw an analogy between Obama and the European Union, but Krugman astutely points out how the ruined nations in the Euro Zone are more akin to the Romney economic platform.  And, he also notes that one of the most socially generous nation in Europe, Sweden, is doing just fine, thankyouverymuch.  The punchline here happens at the 5:45 mark where he explains how Republican pet policies line up best with one of the biggest disasters in Europe: Ireland. 

As should surprise no one, the Democrats are failing to fully utilize someone like Paul Krugman to hammer the Modern Republican Economic Message.  You see, Paul is highly educated with a Ph.D. from MIT, and a professor at a prestigious Ivy League University, and a columnist with The New York Times, and the author of a book and blog entitled The Conscience of a Liberal.  Heaven forfend.  So, naturally he is pushed to the periphery of election-year discourse.

The shame of it is Paul Krugman is just the type of person that best disarms the Republican's misinformation machine piloted by Karl Rove and his band of neck-less-old-white-men.  The failure of the Democrats to effectively counteract the Fiction-Based Truth from the far right has been their biggest weakness of late.  The Dems have to be the most frustrating, self-destructive political parties in history, but that is a different blog post entirely...


¹We can assure you, dear reader, that your intrepid blogger is a regular viewer


²We can assure you, dear reader, that Paul Krugman doesn't drive a Bentley and probably doesn't belong to a yacht club

Summer Reading List, Part 1; or Books, Check 'em Out

The first part in an occasional series of book recommendations:

Does anyone remember this PSA from circa 1991 featuring those claymation darlings, The California Raisins?

"Check out" those sweet dance moves and killer graphic design.  Totally rad.

This is the textbook example of well-intentioned, earnest adults trying to connect with youth on their level, and then utterly failing.  Remember that basic theme for later on in this post.  And by the way, how does this clip still exist?  Did someone save it on Betamax and then digitize it 20 years later?  Hilarious!

In that spirit, here is a book that I recommend "checking out": Do Not Ask What Good We Do: Inside the U.S. House of Representatives.

Labels? Who Needs 'Em?; or Stop Shouting, I'm Standing Right Next To You

After yesterday's post about the partisan divide I started thinking about my own viewpoints, and whether my personal experience matched what the Pew Research Center's report claimed.  Now, I will be the first to admit that my political mindset and view of society has evolved in my maturation from teen to thirtysomething, but I am certain that I am just as independent-minded as the day I first registered to vote, a disaffect suburban teen rejecting the Big Two and "declining to state."  Right?

The reason that notion has been thrown into some doubt was my rediscovery of another excellent Pew Research study, the American Political Typology survey.  I recall back in the heady days of 1999 when I was a collegian - hopeful, innocent, long-haired, and tolerant of low-quality keg beer - and the third installment of the Typology survey was pointed out to me by one of my more politically-active friends.  So, we fired up Netscape and www'ed our way over to the Pew website and took the survey.  It turned out that, based on my responses to a series of either/or questions I was a "New Prosperity Independent".  I "supported Clinton", was "cyber savvy", "young", believed in "prosperity" and "the status quo."  Apparently, that was bad new for Al Gore.  Who knew?  All we cared about were tasty waves, cool bud and we were fine.

1999: The Year of Living Spicoli-ly

Remember, this was 1999 and we were partying like it was, because the stock market was skyrocketing, the internet was spitting out new millionaires by the gross, and Bill Clinton looked like he might actually solve the Israeli-Palestinian problem.  I actually had friends who traded stocks on E-Trade between classes.  No Doubt and the young, skinny Ms. Spears had replaced the dour, brooding, nihilistic Kobains and Vedders on heavy rotation on MTV.  (Yes, dear reader, they used to play music videos on Music Television.)  Who wouldn't be optimistic that good times would keep on rolling?  Well, we all know how that ended.

Fast forward to the present, when I was poking around the Pew Research Center's website and stumbled across the current iteration of the Political Typology survey.  So, again with the pointing and the clicking and the compiling of responses, and presto¹:

Huh!?!

Okay, so I probably have modified my stance on some macro-economic and societal issues since 1999, but a Solid Liberal?  Hmm.  Here's how Pew breaks down this voting block²:

What They Believe

• Strongly pro-government and very liberal on a broad range of issues

• Very supportive of regulation, environmental protection and government assistance to the poor

• One of the most secular groups; 59% say that religion is not that important to them

• Supportive of the country's growing racial and ethnic diversity

• Two-thirds disagree with the Tea Party

Who They Are

• Highly politically engaged

• 75% are Democrats

• Concentrated in the Northeast and West

• 57% are female

• Best educated of the groups: 49% hold at least a bachelor's degree and 27% have post-graduate experience

• A third regularly listen to NPR, about two-in-ten regularly watch The Daily Show and read The New York Times

• 59% have a passport

• 42% regularly buy organic foods

• 21% are first or second generation Americans

Shit, that is me.  I do listen to NPR, watch Jon Stewart, support diversity and tolerance, support an effective regulatory regime and social safety net, buy organic, have a passport, have a post-graduate degree, and am concentrated in the West.

But, here is where I depart from this categorization.  I am not a Democrat, nor female, nor a recent immigrant, and while I do think the Tea Party is a group of ignorant ass-hats that are dangerous to the body politic, I can't say that I wholly disagree with keeping the federal budget in reasonable check. (We still need to raise revenue, especially on the upper tax brackets.)  In fact, I even think that government is too complex and internecine to effectively carry out it's mission.  (What is the mission?  Well, that's another, even longer post.)  Now what do you think of this Solid Liberal?

I think the real source of the growing political divide is the onslaught of bad journalism (Roger Ailes, GFY!.  You too MSNBC.) on cable, people pigeon-holing themselves and others into falsely discrete categories.  Let's do a little gedanken experiment.  In the continuum of opinion, picture the two people exactly abutting the centerline.  They should be in agreement on nearly everything.  Let's assume then, that the person immediately to the right of the exact center of politics only watches Fox News and listens to fat, blowhards on the radio.  Now, the converse to his nearest left-hand neighbor.  She only watches MSNBC (and surprisingly hasn't committed hari kari) and listens to Air America.  Do you think they could have a civil public policy conversation?  I suspect they would be at each other's throats in ten minutes flat.

If we don't like the current state of politics, it's our fault.  We should rebel against the false tyranny of labels, stop patronizing toxic infotainment sources, and start talking to each other.  We will find out that most of us have way more in common with each other than Sean Hannity and Kieth Olbermann would let you believe.

¹Source: http://www.people-press.org/typology/quiz/?result

²IBID

Earnest, But Ultimately Misguided

I too was taken up in the Occupy Wall Street phenomenon when it was a nascent movement. Yes, they had - and still do have - a solid point that needed making and they largely made it well. The financial sector had become a cancer on our society with a bunch of empty suits pushing zeroes around on a balance sheet and extracting fees. There is no value to the economy being created by CDO's, CDS's, and synthetic versions of same. The public should be outraged at what transpired in the financial collapse. It's the old axiom, "If you are not outraged, you are not paying attention."

(Moreover, the criticism of Occupiers not having a coherent message was off base. OWS was a true mass popular movement organized around a single guiding principle, so there was bound to be a lot of different voices speaking up for the group.)

Despite my general agreement...

...I think the OWS movement is largely misguided. While we need to reign in the reckless gambling and exclusionary tactics on Wall Street, but there is a growing mistrust and vilification of finance and capitalism (with a small "c") that is troubling. Historically, a big reason the United States has been such a successful nation by many measures, has been the ease by which we can raise capital to start new ventures, enhance our national welfare, and grow our wealth.

(An aside: If you think it's just a coincidence that the US has dropped from first to tenth in per capita wealth since Wall Street drove our economy off the cliff, then I have some land in Florida I can sell you.) 

Finance, especially as "regular people" are more entrenched in the system through credit purchasing and retirement saving, needs strong, fair, sensible regulation to ensure a level playing field for all comers. But, in demonizing all financial institutions with a broad brush the general public is creating an atmosphere that is more distrusting of the very economic engine that makes us great.

I look at my own life's status, and I can clearly see where the (smart) use of finance has greatly raised my and my family's standard of living. There is no conceivable way that I would posses the education, assets, and piece-of-mind without the application of financial leverage at key times.

We can see this dangerous game playing out in the Presidential campaign, as well as in other less obvious, but ultimately more harmful ways. Exhibit A would be the median age of the typical OWS member.