What is really going on is that people are asking the big questions that those in a position to do so have failed to ask.
The smartest people in the world have shown themselves capable of making the dumbest decisions ever, and these have caused heartbreaking tragedy for everyone else. This can not be tolerated.
One of the biggest questions is: What is Wall Street?
Maybe this is not so obvious.
All the money being talked about in association with the ultimate calculation of the Federal debt is about 14 trillion dollars. Between all the multinational banks and all the corporate conglomerates there have to be investments out there in the world in the hundreds of trillions.
An individual loan by a big bank can be in the hundreds of millions or billions and the payback can be over two hundred years.
Where do the graduating classes from prestigious business schools at Harvard, The Sorbonne, UCLA, etc. go? They populate the upper floors of the big buildings in New York, San Francisco, Tokyo, London and every other big city downtown. Up there, it is like Graduate School Heaven. People on the streets below look like ants.
At Christmas time, if you have ever seen the movie, "It's a Wonderful Life," this is an allegory about local small banks threatened by takeover from Wall Street in the period after WWI. A lot of people watch this movie and never figure that out. Banking is really something most of us pretty much prefer to ignore.
After WWII, the US had a challenge. With the guns now silent there was no demand for bullets, artillery shells or bombs.
A strategy was hatched by Wall Streeters to keep the economy from sliding back into Depression. TV sets and washing machines instead of guns, tanks and planes.
Advertising became crucially important to the effort to get penny pinching Americans to become big spenders, so as to shift wartime mobilization into a consumer economy.
This is the whole purpose of the media. Don't look to anything the media does for any criticism of the connection between advertising and the goose that lays the golden eggs. That is the achilles heel of the entire media. The invisibility with which Wall Street operates is also the achilles heel for our society.
The American economy is pretty much a one trick pony if you look at its basis in consumption. We make stuff. We market stuff. We sell stuff. We transport stuff. We store stuff. We resell stuff. A lot of service is about managing or accounting for stuff. Investments are tied to this system.
Wall Street is a focal point, but there are hundreds of thousands of people involved, many of whom are anywhere else in the world. Many investors are people sitting in their dens obsessively studying computer screens.
Investore newsletters provide some clues as to what is going on inside this culture. These are full of full throated "Don't Tread on Me" editorializing about how regulations promulgated by liberals are the thing most to be feared. They want to be free and unfettered. They don't want to be burdened with social concern or environmental issues. They see those as impositions on what they do that are unbearable and insufferable. There are just simply selfish.
It is a culture. What is being addressed on Wall Street is this culture.
The places where this is located are as widely varied as penthouse boardrooms in high rise buildings that really are on Wall Street, or in some suburban home in Kansas or Oregon, Arizona or Washington State.
It really deserves to be called a paradigm.
Getting Washington D.C. or state level leaders to address what is going on will require getting a whole lot of reluctant students to do their homework.
The way banks, international finance and investments at the trillion dollar level works has been the exclusive preserve of specialists who speak in terms guaranteed to make anyone's eyes glaze over.
Most of us, truthfully, have not cared to pay attention as this situation has developed over the decades.
What protests do is generally to ask for someone to come up with a solution. After a while, attention moves to the next sensation. Today's focus will shift.
But what protests on Wall Street have begun to do is to tie into the vital center of what has become a rot of complacency in the structure of our entire civilization.
Fundamental shifts do not occur because they should. Like an earthquake, stress builds up until tectonic plates are forced to realign.
A culture of absolute selfishness cannot be sustained. To think so ignores reality. Regulations will have to come into being which mitigate against widespread harm by unscrupulous people who don't care who they hurt in their own selfish pursuit of success.
Externalities, such as the environmental costs of pollution, will have to be accounted for honestly.
Selfish people will always resent having to share in common responsibility. But there has to be a balance.
What I hope the Wall Street protests will accomplish during the time the spotlight is on, is the need for a speeded up evolution of culture, of consciousness, or regulation, of the classes in graduate schools of business and in the whole of the human population. Leaders will follow everyone else. They aren't geniuses. And look at the mess the geniuses have caused anyway!
If there are really 200,000 people here, this represents a sizeable force to exert in promoting evolution. If everyone increases their awareness of how even the local credit union is part of what Wall Street is and figures out how all this works, a lot could change.
Each of us is really Wall Street if you consider that the trillions of bucks begin with our hard earned money. It's our money that these people are playing with. We need to be aware of that, and take seriously the power in it.