Excerpt on Wall Street Protests
JEFFREY BROWN (Newshour): Another thing that got a lot of attention -- and Judy asked Gov. Romney about it at the end -- is these Wall Street protests.
How big a deal do you think it is?
DAVID BROOKS, New York Times columnist: I'm skeptical. There are a couple of hundred people here and there. So I'm skeptical that they will have mass rallies to the extent, say, the Tea Party is on the right.
I think they do tap into a couple real issues. Student loans is talked about a lot. And you be able to declare bankruptcy from student loans. You should be able to get out of them under -- and the second thing is Wall Street.
I think you don't have to be a left-winger to be really angry at Wall Street. You don't have to be a left-winger to think the Obama administration should have broken up those banks. They're too big to manage, too big to understand, too big to fail, and they're self-contradictory in the way they have to deal with themselves.
And so there's a lot of legitimate hostility, which I think they do represent. The one part of the theme of many of the motifs of the protests which bug me is the motif that it's 99 percent pure, 1 percent evil.
That's not the problem with America. You can't solve the fiscal -- the debt problem by just taxing the 1 percent. You can't fix Medicare by just taxing the 1 percent. You can't fix any of our problems by saying, oh, it's just that 1 percent.
The problem in problem after problem is a lot of us. It's all of us. And so just saying, oh, it's we're pure and we're virtuous, that evil 1 percent, that's -- it's silly. It's scapegoating. And that's just a motif of theirs which is -- it's just a sideshow.
JEFFREY BROWN: But does it have the potential to grow into a larger movement that actually impacts politics?
MARK SHIELDS, syndicated columnist: Since the crisis of 2008, every major -- every reporting trip tells you two things. There are two targets of rage that American voters feel: Washington, D.C., and Wall Street.
The Tea Party addressed Washington, D.C. It didn't lay a hand on Wall Street, and nor has either party. Certainly, the Republicans haven't. The Democrats have taken limited measures. But that is sitting there. These are the people who were the architects and the engineers of the financial crisis, with their exotic, erotic, whatever they were, self-financing, and self-prospering instruments that nobody else understood.
They have made nothing. They have contributed nothing to the country. They made deals for themselves. And once they got in trouble, they turned to firefighters and nurses and waitresses and small business people to bail them out.
So is it legit? You better believe it's legit. Is it for real? Is there a tradition in this country of protests and citizen outrage leading to real changes, whether it's abolition, whether it's prohibition, whether it's civil rights, whether it's anti-war? There sure is.
I think they have touched something. I really do. And I think it's real. Whether a leader will emerge, I don't know. The Tea Party did pretty well without a leader.
Tom Gallagher, the analyst, made a very, I thought, great point. He said, if the Democrats lose in 2012, and this group is sustained, it will have an enormous influence in the Democratic Party, because they are providing -- just as the Tea Party provided energy for the Republicans who were dispirited after 2008, they are providing an energy charge to -- organized labor is trying to hook up to them.
The Democrats are trying to hook up to them at this point.
JEFFREY BROWN: You get the last word here. There's been many calls about, where is the Tea Party of the left, right?
DAVID BROOKS: Yes. I would be careful. I think the radicalism may scare away more people than it would attract.
To be fair to the Tea Party, they made the crucial point. It's not Wall Street and Washington. The two are so intermingled. That's the problem. And that was Wall Street -- that was the Tea Party's central theme, that these two people are in bed with each other, which is why we haven't really seen fundamental banking reform.
I totally agree with Mark's comments I highlighted in blue. Also, these banks should have been broken up as part of the bail-out. The new banking regulations are good, but the fundamental problems with to-big-to-fail financial institutions is still with us.
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