You're Occupying The Wrong Place

I'm disappointed by the Occupy Wall Street movement. My feeling is that rather than a vague and amorphous anger toward "the 1%" and a desire to defecate on police cars, these guys might want to pick some actual villains and annoy *them*. Just a thought. Here are some possibilities:

1. "Wall Street" Wall Street consists of a bunch of big investment banks plus the hedge funds. All of the investment banks have now converted to commercial banking (accepting deposits) or have been swallowed by actual commercial banks. The hedge funds, while certainly part of the 1%, didn't take bailouts. Some of the hedge funds did make money on the crisis, and some lost.

Is it fair to be pissed at the investment banks? Depends on what you're pissed for. Some of them were definitely misbehaving, as in Lehman's Repo 105 scheme and Goldman's dodgy CDO schemes. All of them were definitely involved in repackaging mortgages into securities that disguised risk, but that had been going on since the 1980s and it's not clear that it was evil rather than merely stupid. All of them took bailouts, but they were implicitly threatened with PMITA prison if they refused.

Most importantly, however, most of them aren't on Wall Street anymore, or at least the big decisions don't get made there. Lehman is gone. Bear belongs to Chase (Chicago). Merrill belongs to Bank of America (Charlotte). Citi and Morgan are in Manhattan, but midtown, nowhere near Wall Street. Only Goldman seems to actually be downtown. We'll come back to them.

2. George W. Bush's house. Preston Hollow, Dallas. Please don't occupy Preston Hollow, you'll interfere with my commute. But it's definitely a 1% zone, and the buck for the original bailouts definitely stops there.

3. The commercial banks. The guys who ignored all the risk criteria and produced all the crap subprime paper to begin with. Not to mention robo-signing, foreclosing on the wrong houses, and unrelated but powerfully annoying behavior like $5 debit card fees. We already mentioned where BofA, Citi and Chase are. BofA owns Countrywide these days. Wells Fargo is in San Fran, and ate Wachovia, which used to be in Charlotte. WAMU used to be in Seattle, but now belongs to Chase. Capital One is in Richmond. SunTrust is in Atlanta.

4. The Federal Reserve. Branches near you, but the important building is in the District of Columbia.

5. The White House. Most of you are hippies and think the man in it is God, but it's not like he's never taken a dollar from or given a dollar to your hated 1%.

Did I miss anybody important? To sum up: you guys in downtown Manhattan appear to have one legit target, Goldman. I won't cry if you blockade the entrance. The rest of you, though, need to worry less about free love in the park and vague class envy and more about where the people who are actually guilty are hanging out. Do that and maybe those of us who have to work for a living will quit making fun of your signs about how hard your lives are with womens' studies degrees and $100,000 of student loans. And isn't that really what this is about?