A surprising moment of revelation has taken place within this year's bizarre Republican presidential primary contest. It began after journalists investigated candidate Mitt Romney's claim that he created over a hundred thousand jobs as chief of Bain Capital, a very successful private equity firm. They discovered instead that during Romney's tenure at Bain Capital the firm was just as likely to profit by investing in struggling companies and stripping them for parts, allowing the businesses to die and selling off their assets (all the while charging the companies high management fees), as it was to profit by enabling jobs.

Rick Perry (of all people) made a strong point when he called Bain's practices "vulture capitalism", and it was brave of Perry, an otherwise plodding pro-business Reaganite, to make this statement. Newt Gingrich cleverly baited Romney for a full week with questions about Bain and about his own finances, forcing Romney to reveal that as a venture capital investor he has continued to have a luxurious income every year, but has been paying only 15% in taxes, less than half what a typical American pays. The outrage over this has allowed Gingrich to vault himself over Romney in South Carolina's primary this weekend, a stunning upset victory.

It's gratifying to hear conservatives finally join liberals in criticizing the predatory and hyperactive forms of "extreme capitalism" that Bain represents, which are rooted in the same syndrome of reckless misuse of honest finance that caused the crash of 2007/2008. It has been a conservative basic principle to avoid any criticism of free market capitalism, to blame the crash instead on home ownership initiatives, and to characterize even the slightest critique of economic inequity in the USA as "class warfare". The accusation that critics of Wall Street or tax breaks for the wealthy engage in "class warfare" is intoned repeatedly these days by conservative commentators like Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity. This tends to be a real conversation-killer, since the term carries such ominous historic undertones. It reminds us of the guillotine, the gulag, Mao's terrible starvation farms.

Cool the engines
red line's getting near
cool the engines
better take it out of gear
-- Boston, 'Cool The Engines'

I'd better take a break, let this Philosophy Weekend thing cool off ... let myself cool off a little bit too.

I've been writing a lot of high-pitched stuff lately, and getting into plenty of debates with friends and relatives everywhere from Thanksgiving dinner to Facebook. It's time for me to step back, review my progress, find my balance, and prepare for a new round of Philosophy Weekend next year.

I began this series sixteen months ago, first with a halting introduction followed a week later by the presentation of my main thesis, which amounts to a defense of the political and personal philosophy known as pacifism. I have gradually come to realize -- this wasn't apparent even to me at first -- that every article I write in this series is related in some way to the argument for pacifism. The connections may be hard to trace, but they are always there.

I'm giving this intense series a Christmas/Hanukkah/Kwanzaa break, and will kick off the new year with a new thread in January. Till then, here are a few philosophical links you might like:

The Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street -- two serious protest movements with urgent messages about the condition of the economy and the purpose of government -- do not currently communicate or collaborate with each other. What a wasted opportunity! Even worse, Tea Partiers and Occupiers often look at each other as opponents -- a ridiculous idea, since we are all protesting the same injustices and mistakes, and we all seek the same basic goals: an honest economy, a smaller government, greater freedom and greater opportunity.

It's time for the Tea Party and Occupy movements to begin working together. Throughout history, protest movements with common goals have benefited from collaboration even when they've disagreed on specific issues. The Tea Party and Occupy movements have a few major differences on principles, but we should not let this obscure the fact that our goals converge more often than they diverge. So why are we at each other's throats? Why isn't there a combined Occupy Wall Street/Tea Party gathering going on in every city in the United States of America right now?

I like to develop and improve my political ideas by talking to as many different people as I can, and I've already tested today's argument on a wide range of friends, co-workers and relatives. I discovered a surprising and encouraging thing: people who do not have much interest in either the Tea Party or Occupy movements are the ones most likely to dismiss the idea that they can work together, to declare that the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street are opposites.

People who support or participate in either protest movement, though, are more sympathetic to the idea. Because they are serious about their goals, they are willing to accept that the other protest group is serious as well. They sometimes have derogatory things to say about the other protest group, but once the insults are out of the way they have little trouble seeing the common ground, and are open to working together. Here are three major points of agreement between the two protest groups, along with a brief reality-check regarding the barriers to cooperation on each of the three points:

Last weekend we searched for common ground on economic ideology between the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street by examining the separate narratives each movement has developed to explain the banking system crash of 2007/2008, and the emotional contexts each narrative brings. Let's spend this weekend looking at the intellectual roots of each protest movement's economic ideology.

The most explosively influential economist of the modern era was Karl Marx, though his dramatic prescriptions for a better society had at least one gigantic problem: they were too stark to result in peaceful change, and instead fed into an atmosphere of global war, counter-reaction and suspicion that has plagued the planet for the last 150 years. Though Marxism turned monstrous in the 20th century, the practical question Karl Marx asked remains vital, and it has been the primary work of 20th century and 21st century economists to formulate better answers to the same question: how should a government manage its economy? Two famous economists, Ludwig von Mises and John Maynard Keynes, have led schools of thought that roughly define the positions of economic protest movements such as the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street, though not always in simple ways.

The Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises has been cited by Ron Paul, Michelle Bachmann, Glenn Beck and others as a powerful influence on current libertarian thought, and is widely celebrated among the intellectual branches of the Tea Party movement. Born in 1881 in the center of a turbulent continent, Mises soaked up the fervent political debates swirling around the University of Vienna as a student and then as a professor, and produced a unique defense of free market capitalism that would please any analytic philosopher. A socially progressive (broadly, socialist) government must fail, he argued, because only free market capitalism can provide the basic language with which we can discuss the value of goods and services. The free market does not only serve producers and consumers, but also provides a self-improving mechanism that a centrally-managed economy can never replicate. The success or failure of any commercial venture provides information about what individuals want to buy, and this information will always be accurate and relevant. No matter how well-intentioned a socialist government might be towards its citizens, it will be struck dumb once its citizens lose their freedom to evaluate goods and services in an open market; under socialism, economic progress "would involve operations the value of which could neither be predicted beforehand nor ascertained after they had taken place. Everything would be a leap in the dark."

A hilarious video of a self-proclaimed Tea Party Congressman from Illinois yelling at his constituents during a campaign appearance made the rounds this week. Representative Joe Walsh (no relation to the talented rocker, whose best song is right here) makes himself ridiculous, though to his credit he seems to realize by the end of this two-minute video how badly he's lost his cool (the woman he's yelling at easily wins the fight with the simple power of a patient smile). Here's what he's saying:

CONGRESSMAN: I don't want government meddling in the marketplace. Yeah, they move from Goldman Sachs to the White House. I understand all that. But you've got to be consistent.

And it's not the private marketplace that's created this mess. What created this mess is your government, which has demanded for years that everybody be in a home, and we have made it as easy as possible for people to be in homes. All the marketplace does is respond to what the government does. The government sets the rules. Don't blame banks and don't blame the marketplace for the mess we're in right now. I am tired of hearing that crap.

WOMAN: Don't you think --

CONGRESSMAN: I am tired of hearing that crap.

WOMAN: -- exploiting the situation? Taking and doing out money to people they know couldn't afford --

CONGRESSMAN: They're are already mechanisms in place --

WOMAN: You don't have to scream at me, I can hear you.

CONGRESSMAN: This pisses me off. Too many people don't listen. There are already mechanisms in place to do that. Are they doing their job? No. But what do you want to do? You want to bombard them with more regulations, more government?

WOMAN: No, I want smart reform.

CONGRESSMAN: Government screwed this problem up. You know what you got? You got Dodd-Frank. You got Dodd-Frank now, that's tying everybody's hands. You want more reform, more regulation? That's what you got. Do you want more regulation? Is that what you want? Do you want Dodd-Frank?

1. Isn't this a great book cover? Woolgathering is not a new Patti Smith book, and it shouldn't be mistaken for a sequel to her great Just Kids. In fact, I first bought this when it was a great little Hanuman book that looked like this:

The Hanuman book looked cool, but I think the newly republished New Directions version's cover art may be even better. Shepherd, tend thy flock.

2. Occupy St. Petersburg? Bill Ectric draws some connections between Nikolai Gogol's financial satire Dead Souls and more recent high finance scams.

3. Steve Silberman asks: What kind of Buddhist was Steve Jobs, really?

It's a strange and delightful fact that the Occupy movement which began last month on Wall Street was not born on Twitter or Facebook or a blog. Rather, the idea emerged from a dusty print-based medium that almost nobody cares about anymore (or so we thought), a format that dates back to the days of Husker Du and Pagan Kennedy. Occupy Wall Street was born in a zine.

Adbusters was founded in Vancouver, Canada in 1989 by Kalle Lasn, an Estonian-born filmmaker outraged by the insidious and deceptively "warm" television commercials the timber industry was running in the Pacific Northwest to cover its destruction of vast areas of forest. Adbusters began using humor and parody to highlight and combat corporate and consumerist groupthink, and over the past two decades has staged many events and campaigns: TV commercials that mock other commercials, "open source" sneakers resembling existing sneaker brands, a "Buy Nothing Day" to combat holiday shopping mania, fake tickets to place on the windshields of SUVs. The zine became a staple of bookstore magazine shelves in the 1990s, sharing space with other worthy indie publications like Bitch, Giant Robot, Bust, Maximum Rock 'N' Roll, Craphound and Factsheet Five.

Like many other media jammers such as Julian Assange, Kalle Lasn is stronger on vision than on charisma, and likes to keep a low public profile. He occasionally appears on TV, and wrote a book, Culture Jam: The Uncooling of America, in 1999. Unlike other media organizations with less political conviction, Adbusters appears to be truly opposed to mainstream success, and has resisted the temptaion to dilute its message in search of greater popularity. But the organization's intrinsic hostility to media respectability has sometimes left curious newcomers confused about its program, and has given its opponents an easy opportunity to dismiss the (clearly honest) organization as extremist, Marxist, sympathetic to foreign influences.

People complain that the Occupy Wall Street movement has no goals, even though the General Assembly has posted a clear statement of principles. I consider myself a part of this movement, and I'd like to state what I think this important protest needs to achieve.

I know a little bit about finance. No, actually, I know a whole lot about finance. I worked two years directly on Wall Street, and another two years before that for a banking research boutique, Loan Pricing Corporation (now known as Thompson Reuters LPC). In 1999 I made a personal profit of over $100,000 on a dot-com IPO (as I wrote about in my memoir of the Silicon Alley boom). I have gained and lost money on other stock market investments as well, and I've read many books about high finance, from The House of Morgan by Ron Chernow to Too Big to Fail by Andrew Ross Sorkin.

The American banking industry crashed in 2007 and 2008. Unfortunately, the dishonest practices that led to this crash have not been changed. Neither, largely, has the cast of characters siphoning money from the financial marketplace. Some people think we need a revolution, and they may be right -- but before that, we need five concrete changes to take place before the American people can believe in the integrity of the banking industry again. Here are the five changes:

I hung around the Occupy Wall Street protests in downtown Manhattan last week for a couple of days. Here are a few things I saw that I liked:

• a quiet meditation circle, just a few steps from noisy Broadway, where about 60 people sat in peaceful contemplation
• a great march that proceeded west on Wall Street, north on Broad Street, up to the Federal Reserve Bank, and back to Wall
• cops that were mostly friendly
• cheerful rapport between protesters and Wall Streeters at work ("join us!" "yeah, whatever")
• well-organized free food for those living in Zuccotti Park
• a vast do-it-yourself protest sign-painting operation
• a few highly active drum/dance circles and horn jams
• various informal information stations where tourists could ask questions
• an open performance spot, where a young girl sang a song and a poet read a poem
• a small group earnestly discussing techniques of non-violent resistance

The best moment for me came Friday night just after dusk, when I began hearing that a general assembly was about to take place somewhere nearby. Curious as to what exactly an #occupywallstreet general assembly would consist of, I asked around and got pointed to a spot in the middle of Zuccotti Park. There seemed to be nothing going on at this exact place, so I hopped up to sit on a wall and wait. A few minutes later a group of people who turned out to be the regular facilitators of each evening's general assembly began to gather around me. I had picked the right place to sit, and was now in the center of the action.

Soon somebody right next to me yelled "Mic check!", and a group of people milling around us yelled back "Mic check!". At this call, others began to melt into the group, and people began to sit down on the park's paved floor. Soon there were about 250 people gathered around. Four of the facilitators sitting next to me stood up and introduced themselves, and one of them explained how the communication in this large group was going to work.

Watching protesters occupy Wall Street for the past several days, I've been thinking back to the two years in the early 1990s when I worked at the headquarters of the JP Morgan Bank at 60 Wall.

I did not find myself on Wall Street by accident; I had graduated from a state university with a computer science degree six years earlier, and had taken a series of jobs that each brought me closer to the top of my field. I wasn't particularly interested in high finance, but I was ambitious for an exciting career, and the financial industry was considered the most prestigious place for a techie to work in New York City at this time. I did not find what I hoped for there. My two year adventure at JP Morgan left me deeply disappointed on many levels, and I consider myself lucky that I was able to leave the financial software marketplace for better work elsewhere (I never looked back, except sometimes in anger).

Like the blessed protesters who are causing trouble there today, I always felt like an outsider on Wall Street, even though I knew what I was there to do. I was part of a consulting team managed by a brilliant Oxford-educated Nigerian named Tayo Ibigundi, a boss I respected very much. We were both employees of Sybase Professional Services, the consulting arm of an innovative database software firm with a big presence on Wall Street, along with two other members of our project team: Carmela Balasso, an Italian-Israeli who lived with her parents in Brooklyn, who was about six years my senior and never stopped mentioning how sorry she was that a nice Jewish boy like me was already married, and Mike Toole, a taciturn database administrator with the brawny physique of a Staten Island brawler (because that's what he was). My team worked together very well, but we didn't really fit in with the regular employees at JP Morgan.

Many consultants from many different companies worked at JP Morgan, and it was always easy to tell the consultants from the employees. We wore $300 suits and had accents from England, China, Pakistan, India, Egypt, Cote D'Ivorie, Nigeria, Ghana, France, Denmark, Germany, Russia, Belgium, Brooklyn or Queens. They wore $800 suits and usually came from either uptown Manhattan or small-town America, by way of colleges with one-word names. The consultants and employees worked together on various trading system projects, but we didn't often mix much. It would be an unfair generalization to say that we consultants had made it to Wall Street because we were highly skilled and they were there because they had an uncle in Global Markets. Well, I don't know how some of my employee co-workers had gotten there ... but I don't think they got there because of their tech skills.