Help me help #occupywallstreet

October 3, 2011 12:27 PM

What are the best ways to educate myself about the financial crisis (and its ramifications) and do something about it?

The #occupywallstreet movement has made me realize I need to both know and do more.

How to become educated on the subject: What are the best books, articles, blogs, etc. that can give me both background knowledge and potential solutions? (There's this thread, but it's a year and a half old)

How to support the movement: Because of my location it's not easy to physically be there, how else can I help the protesters?

How to make personal changes to help: Joining a credit union, changing purchasing habits, changing 401k, ...?

posted by gwint to law & government (8 answers total)

Honestly, the causes of the crisis haven't changed since that old thread. One newer book that isn't there is Griftopia, but Econned and 13 Bankers and many of the other books in the old thread are excellent.
posted by procrastination at 1:06 PM on October 3, 2011

Consider subscribing to The Economist, which covers far more than the economy. Read Michael Lewis, and watch Robert Reich's videos.

One of the drivers of the economic crisis in the US is the monetary cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The wars have had an enormous impact on the US budget deficit. I think this has been seriously under-reported. At this point, I'd say that the human cost has been under-reported, but I don't want to thread-derail.
posted by theora55 at 2:47 PM on October 3, 2011

The Crisis of Credit, Visualized, an 11 minutes minutes video describing the mechanism of the crash.

The Meltdown, PBS's Frontline's investigative journalist documentary of the politics of the bail out.

The Quiet Coup, IMF's head economist Simon Johnson describes the corruption of the American financial system, compared to countries they usually bail out.

Then read three long-form, investigative journalist articles about criminality on Wall St:

Why Isn't Wall Street in Jail? Financial crooks brought down the world's economy — but the feds are doing more to protect them than to prosecute them

Is the SEC Covering Up Wall Street Crimes? A whistle blower says the agency has illegally destroyed thousands of documents, letting financial crooks off the hook.

Wall Street's War Congress looked serious about finance reform – until America's biggest banks unleashed an army of 2,000 paid lobbyists.

It's the Inequality, Stupid | Mother Jones On how the 1% recently got the upper hand in the ever present class war.

And then about the basis of class wars, in the abstract:

Golden Rule: The Investment Theory of Politics "Documentary featuring Tom Ferguson, Noam Chomsky and other prominent thinkers, on how money rules politics."
posted by gmarceau at 2:58 PM on October 3, 2011 [7 favorites]

Extreme Money by Satyajit Das explains what the boys on Wall Street have been up to and how they make the big money, while taking big risks. Very clear, very readable, very thorough. The Economist is a good source but you would have to look for articles over the years. Their explanations of derivatives and the alphabet soup of financial products is quite good but I would suggest you search their site. Some of the alarm bells go back to 2003 so you might need to go back further than you think.
posted by PickeringPete at 4:09 PM on October 3, 2011

Listen to Planet Money! The specials they did with This American Life were really good
posted by kat518 at 5:28 PM on October 3, 2011

Al Jazeera also did a great four-hour doc titled Meltdown. Just released the other day.

Highly recommended, links to all four episodes are here.
posted by zenpop at 5:51 PM on October 3, 2011 [1 favorite]

One of the reasons why people didn't see the financial crisis coming is because they didn't know about, or didn't remember all the other episodes of finanical euphoria in history.

John Kenneth Galbraith's The Great Crash is a well-written history of the crash of 1929 and how it lead to the Great Depression. And when you read it, you'll see that our recent crisis is just a replay of that older episode. The same blind speculation by the man on the street, the same reckless use of borrowed funds, the same abuses by financial companies.

But the book is more than just a history. It's a theory of financial bubbles. Galbraith takes you through the stages of how every once in a while the world goes money-mad and how inevitably everyone pays dearly for the trip.
posted by storybored at 8:48 PM on October 3, 2011

To follow up on kat518's comment, the This American Life collaborations with Planet Money were fantastic and I, for one, learned quite a bit from them. For me at least, they were vastly more entertaining than a book on the subject could possibly be (Matt Taibbi's Griftopia being the sole exception, YMMV), although maybe not as thorough.

They can be purchased as a group of four CD's here, or listened to one by one for free on TAL's website (one, two, three, and four). They've since gone on to produce two additional episodes related to the financial crisis, but investigating more specific aspects of it. One is about Magnetar, a hedge fund that, well... I won't get into it here. The other centers around a "toxic asset" that was actually purchased by the Planet Money team and what happened to it.
posted by aheckler at 3:21 AM on October 5, 2011