Protestors frustrated with the current financial system have been active since mid-September in the Occupy Wall Street movement. Follow the protestors on Twitter (hashtags #occupywallstreet #occupywallst #ows) or read their paper of record, The Occupied Wall Street Journal. Slate reports on the spread of this movement across the country.
Take a look at the People's Library.
ReplyDeleteHeard this great quote on the Diane Rehm Show:
ReplyDelete"So I don't know any right-thinking capitalist who can look at the mess that Wall Street created through the gambling, which they took inside of the dumbest form of socialism ever invented by man, where we socialized the risk and privatized the benefits. And look at that system and say, this is something to be proud of. You wanna be proud of capitalism, go out to the West coast, live in Silicon Valley the way I did. Talk to the people who are really inventing great, amazing products that make people stand up in awe.
Look, you could not have an occupied Silicon Valley movement. You would not have people standing in front of Apple computer and saying, yeah, Steve Jobs needs to be punished for his greatness. Nobody would do that because we recognize the genius and the brilliance in what is happening out there. When you focus on Wall Street, you're focusing on a system that took advantage of the corruption of our government to build for themselves a gambling scene where they could gamble and they could get the upside and we would pay the downside. And what's worse, you know, it's one thing to say that up until 2008, they were allowed to deregulate, because that was the (word?) .
The astonishing thing is that after 2008, where every independent economists looks at this and says, no, no, no. There's something wrong with this system where banks are so big that they cannot fail, yet they're allowed to gamble with our money. After 2008, Wall Street was able to blackmail Congress enough to block any fundamental reform of this system. This is not anything any capitalist should defend. And no capitalist -- no self-respecting capitalist whose paycheck doesn't come from that system, that I know of, does defend it."