Issue #69
Last Update October 31, 2010
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National Running Against New York by David Katz October 9, 2008 Wall Street versus Main Street! That false dichotomy has been a mantra for both parties in this presidential election, with Wall Street playing the bad guy and Main Street the "just folks" who were robbed. It makes for good sound bites, and in a simplistic way, it has a truthiness that inhibits further thought. It also allows those that hate New York and its ethnic melange to feel that our problems are due to those "others", who are not really us. The reality is quite different, however.
As a banking and brokerage center, New York (aka Wall Street) is the primary focus for reactions to anything affecting those sectors of our economy, although it pays to remember that Chicago, home of major commodity exchanges and dealers in financial derivitives and currencies, and Washington D.C., home to the Treasury, the Federal Reserve Board and Congress and host to the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, play important roles in the US economic system. Still, location is not the issue. If by Wall Street we mean the financial powerhouses, then by Main Street we must mean individuals, small businesses and corporate America. It is in corporate America that we must look for the origins of our current problems, and thus it is at the door of Main Street that we must lay some of the blame. Attacking Spokane WA, or Bentonville AR, or Detroit MI or Houston TX does not have the same resonance as attacking New York NY, but it gets us closer to the truth.
The fact is that for the past 28 years, corporate America has been a steady force for exporting jobs, suppressing the distribution of the fruits of worker efficiency to the workers that achieved them, widening the executive/worker pay gap, promoting concentrations of economic power through mergers and acquisitions, and preferring short term capital gains to long term profits. Along the way, they have managed to convince Congress and all of the Presidents during this period that regulations meant to protect the public and keep the economy flowing smoothly are bad things and should be eliminated, that companies produce money, not profits, and that any manager can manage anything. The Main Street public went along with them, voting to put stumbling blocks in the way of unionization and lapping up tax cuts (most of which went to their economic betters) to restrict the funds available to government for doing its job. They voted their Bibles rather than their pocket books, and ended up with economic Armageddon to show for it.
New York is, indeed, the capital of imaginative economic greed, but Main Street beats Wall Street all hollow for unimaginative economic greed and mean-spiritedness. New Yorkers may have much to answer for, but at least we didn't vote for most of the guys that caused the most damage over the last three decades.
New York Stringer is published by NYStringer.com. For all communications, contact David Katz, Editor and Publisher, at david@nystringer.com