So the Occupiers are radicals, crazed anarchists, terrorists, rapists, or whatever Drunk Breitbart said at CPAC?
Yeahhhhh, this happened:
A crowd of some 60 people were milling outside the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in the Financial District Monday afternoon. They listened to Alexis Goldstein, a small woman with a voice that bounced off the buildings.
"We are here today to send a message to the Fed, to the SEC," Goldstein announced, the crowd echoing her words in a call-and-response pattern made familiar by the Occupy Wall Street movement. "Protect the public, not the banks."
"Yes to Volcker, not the vultures!" someone called back.
They were part of one of the latest and most sophisticated attempts yet by OWS protesters to influence the political dialogue. Goldstein is one of the core members of a group known as Occupy the SEC, a collective that includes lawyers and people with years of financial industry experience -- such as Goldstein herself, who has worked in technology at a number of Wall Street firms. The group, which takes its name from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, had organized this rally in lower Manhattan to focus attention on a key piece of financial regulation.
But but OWS doesn't have any solutions, they are just nihilists and wahhhhhh wahhhhhh.
Anyway. Occupy The SEC is one of the many offshoots of the Occupy Wall Street movement that proposes and endorses specific, reasonable, and actually quite popular proposals.
For those who don't know, Paul Volcker is the former Chairman of the Federal Reserve System, an economist who worked on Wall Street before becoming the nation's (to some degree world's) central banker. As Fed Chairman Volcker instituted a policy of tight credit which caused a recession which considerably contributed to President Carter losing re-election. So while Volcker is a Democrat, he is surely not so partisan having helped bring Reagan to power - who reappointed him in 1983, though Reagan would later fire Volcker in favor of Greenspan for not favoring financial deregulation enough.
In other words, Paul Volcker is no radical, in fact he could be considered very much part of the establishment and was an advisor to President Obama which is where the Volker Rule was first articulated and almost became a decent law until - you can guess what happened. From the New York Times:
Wall Street firms have spent countless millions of dollars trying to water down the original Volcker proposal and have succeeded in inserting numerous exemptions. Now they’re claiming it’s too complex to understand and too costly to adopt
Oh Wall Street you band of parasitic pirates, what won't you do?
So now Occupy is fighting back for the 99% by endorsing a sensible policy proposed by an establishment figure.
Got pragmatism?