(Lucas Jackson/Reuters)
Me:
People are angry, and they see a government willing to bail out rich investors on Wall Street while ignoring the plight of regular Americans — the other 99 percent. They see Republicans on Capitol Hill demanding that the nation’s meager social net get torn to shreds, while protecting their wealthiest friends from feeling any of the “shared sacrifice” the rest of us are supposed to endure. They see Democrats unable or unwilling to stand up to GOP bullying, refusing time and time again to pursue a populist agenda despite strong public support. They see the Obama administration infested with Goldman Sachs alumni from top to bottom.
People are angry at an economic system that has seen average annual household income flat-line for the last 20 years while the income of the top 1 percent has quadrupled to nearly $2 million a year.
So what are those protesters fighting for? The same thing Elizabeth Warren will fight for when elected to the Senate.
If you still don’t understand, then you’re probably part of the problem.
Henry Blodget (really a must-read):
Matt Taibbi has a list of solutions OWS can promote:
1. Break up the monopolies. The so-called "Too Big to Fail" financial companies – now sometimes called by the more accurate term "Systemically Dangerous Institutions" – are a direct threat to national security. They are above the law and above market consequence, making them more dangerous and unaccountable than a thousand mafias combined. There are about 20 such firms in America, and they need to be dismantled [...]
2. Pay for your own bailouts. A tax of 0.1 percent on all trades of stocks and bonds and a 0.01 percent tax on all trades of derivatives would generate enough revenue to pay us back for the bailouts, and still have plenty left over to fight the deficits the banks claim to be so worried about [...]
3. No public money for private lobbying. A company that receives a public bailout should not be allowed to use the taxpayer's own money to lobby against him. You can either suck on the public teat or influence the next presidential race, but you can't do both [...]
4. Tax hedge-fund gamblers. For starters, we need an immediate repeal of the preposterous and indefensible carried-interest tax break, which allows hedge-fund titans like Stevie Cohen and John Paulson to pay taxes of only 15 percent on their billions in gambling income, while ordinary Americans pay twice that for teaching kids and putting out fires [...]
5. Change the way bankers get paid. We need new laws preventing Wall Street executives from getting bonuses upfront for deals that might blow up in all of our faces later. It should be: You make a deal today, you get company stock you can redeem two or three years from now. That forces everyone to be invested in his own company's long-term health – no more Joe Cassanos pocketing multimillion-dollar bonuses for destroying the AIGs of the world.