6 mS

Been fascinated by conservative pundits who assert that the OWS movement can't possibly not be motivated by some behind-the-scenes interest group. Something like a George Soros, or maybe ACORN, or any name-your-left-wing-propaganda group and insert here.

It's easy to assert, because it's hard to understand how a group of disparate, unorganized, non-violent citizens can act like citizens instead of consumers...where true citizens participate in protests, in voicing grievances, in participating in democratic action.

I don't really like to believe that the OWSers aren't really targeting correctly. It's convenient to protest against the top 1%, yes, but I don't know that it will be particularly eventful, even though it is meaningful. Unless and until this group can express themselves through political action, I don't see how or why the software engineers on the thirteenth floor of the building next to the New York Stock Exchange would willingly halt production on that new high frequency trading algorithm that's designed to fuck the upper forty floors out of a few mils each day, and a few hundred mils from other local entities each day, and a few hundred thousand mils each day from every productive citizen who "plays" the stock market.

You see, the closer high frequency traders are to the NYSE, I mean, the physically closer they are, the faster they can access those few mils before someone else. The thirteenth floor is advantageous to servers on the sixteenth floor. Consider a new $300,000,000 trans-Atlantic cable currently being laid to connect NY with London which will shorten digital transmissions by 6 miliseconds. 0.006 seconds...but hey, this means all the difference to the new breed of high frequency trader. Every 1 mS delay represents a $100,000,000 lost opportunity to a large international hedge fund.

It's a difficult thing to pull out of the stock market altogether, as an individual schmuck investor who thinks that if you just stay in for the long haul (as every investment advisor recommends) that you'll come out ahead, even in the face of such fantastically stacked and rigged odds against you. The financial services industry long ago traded in their function as a service to production and instead opted for short-term parasitic gains against that productive base for fantastic, immediate profits. I witnessed this first hand, while watching California electric ratepayers get fucked over every hour for three straight years by the Enronization of electric markets, companies filled with people who could care less about the long term (or medium term) stake in their organizations and instead self-imploded under their own hubris and greed.

The OWSers -- they can collectively do one thing, and perhaps most have already -- they all should strive to owe Wall Street nothing. It's fantastically easy for me to now say this as I hold virtually no debt, but really, Wall Street would cease to exist if people followed my example and paid off their mortgages instead of fuckering away all their discretionary income on new Acuras ever three years, or new 4S phones everytime Apple says it's time for an upgrade.

We may all well be forced to have health care at some future point...but as far as I can see, there is no law on the books that forces each of us to carry a credit card, and to carry a perpetual $5,975 balance either. There is no law requiring us to maintain a mortgage, or to go into $68,000 in debt to get an education. Without debt, Wall Street would cease to be revelant. Instead, we choose to, I dare say we choose to, and as a consequence the interest rate we pay on a mortgage is 0.03% higher than it would have been otherwise if Goldman Sachs hadn't intervened in some way to broker CDOs that digitally moved your mortage to a suite of foreign investors, and 0.02% higher than it would have been otherwise if AIG hadn't insured it against default, and 0.001% there, and 0.001% there, and...

Being debt free, and thus a free citizen, means that I don't have to occupy Wall Street.