I found Ron Reynold’s letter about Occupy Wall Street very interesting. He stated every reason but the correct one as to why this group formed.
If he had read something beside the Republican talking points for the week or watched something beside Fox News he would have learned that they have not claimed to want to destroy Wall Street. In fact, as of this date, they have not set any adgenda, other than to demand economic justice.
The protesters are there to bring attention of what Wall Street has done to the economy and to the American people. The bankers and speculators sliced and diced mortages, packaged them as being valuable investments, and sold them to an unsuspecting world. They destroyed the life savings of people approaching retirement, caused the value of homes to drop across the nation, and caused the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression.
When their house of cards collapsed, the wealthy elite wanted “We the People” to bail them out. Then, instead of using the money we gave them to fix the economic mess they created, the bankers and speculators immediately rewarded themselves with obscene bonuses. How do multi-million dollar bonuses for the wealthy help create jobs for the millions of unemployed Americans?
It is not the protesters on Wall Street who are trying to destroy capitalism, but the Wall Street bankers and speculators. They wheedled and whined to polititicans to repeal the Glass Steagall Act that regulated their behavior and made our faboulous ecomonic growth after World War II possible.
Thanks to Glass-Steagall and other banking regulations, as well as less inequality in incomes, the vast majority of Americans in the 1950s through 1970s had affordable homes, decent health care, college education for their children and a decent retirement. But with the deregulation of Wall Street this all came to a grinding halt. Greed became the byword on Wall Street.
The people involed in the Occupy Wall Street movement are just asking that the wealthy be held accountable for their actions and pay their fair share of the country’s taxes.
Many of the protesters are college graduates who find themselves with large student loans and no job. It is time for us to go back to where we can afford to educate our kids, buy a home and still have money for food and medicine. The Occupy Wall Street movement has generated protests, some big and some small, in hundreds of cities in the U.S. and overseas.
As for this summer’s successful recall of two Republican senators – one of them, Randy Hopper, was picked up for drunken driving this weekend. Like it or not, Wisconsin has become the gold standard in this nation for “We the People” who want to change the status quo.