Image by Cosmic Smudge via Flickr
While the weather gets colder, wetter, and windier, the people of Occupy Wall Street remain in place. Their goal? No one really knows for sure at this time. They have been very careful to keep from having their message and their movement co-opted by the money makers and power brokers inside and outside Washington, D.C. That was one lesson learned from the Tea Party. The second lesson was to keep at it across the globe, holding governments accountable for their actions, as well as keeping the Wall Street and like financiers accountable for theirs.
When the Tea Party started, it was a group of Americans who really were concerned about where their taxes were going. Then it got messy with people like the Koch brothers and other organizations co-0pting the message and actually arguing that entitlement programs that people paid into were a bad deal. Who ever heard of that?
Keeping their mission separate from a message has actually helped OWS. It became apparent after the Wall Street bailouts that the financial institutions had cheated. They sold what they called Triple A stocks, which turned out to be triple F stocks. They took the bailouts and paid themselves bonuses. It didn’t stop there. These same financiers are complaining in the ears of our legislators that they cannot do those things anymore, because of Dodd/Frank. Yes, financial legislation is making them be honest. Such a shame.
The federal government is not blameless in this problem. It was the federal government which reduced restrictions on banks and financial institutions so that the egregious sales of bad stocks could happen. The federal government gave out billions in bailouts…with no restrictions on how it was used.
Occupy Wall Street will probably end in a quiet little bump one night when it snows. Until then, they can take the opportunity to point out how the system was rigged by both lawmakers and the banks to keep people’s money and take back their houses. While it may seem as if nothing has been accomplished, I would disagree mightily. What has been accomplished is the holding accountable those people who crashed our economy. What has been accomplished is that we are smart enough to find a way to prevent it from happening again.
Related articles
- Occupy Wall Street: What Does It Mean For Entrepreneurs? (entrepreneurs-journey.com)
- Military vets march with Occupy Wall Street (sfgate.com)
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