This weekend there was quite a bit of coverage on the growing Occupy Wall Street demonstrations. Conservative commentators, upset by Joe Biden comparing them to the Tea Party, went to great lengths to disprove that.
Often they mocked the demonstrators for how they looked, that they were trying to divide America and that they had no clear objectives. The real reason did filter through that demonstrations are not okay if the politics of the demonstrators is different then the commentators.
Occupy Wall Street has very legitimate reasons for the demonstrations.
After systematically looting investors by taking excessive salaries and bankrupting their companies with unsound business practices, Wall Street executives were not punished but given billions of dollars in taxpayer money meant to be injected back into the economy to jump start it. Instead they used the money to buy other banks and pay themselves huge bonuses.
The claim that they won”t invest in the economy because of regulatory uncertain is ridiculous, it is deregulation that got us here in the first place.
In 2010 S&P”s 500 index company”s executive received an average of $11.4 million, an in increase of 23 percent in one year. In the mean time, the median household income shrunk to $46,000 and because of inflation its buying power has gone down by 10 percent.
It would take somebody making the median income 250 years to make what these executives make in a year. It is Wall Street and its supporters in Congress that are dividing this country.
The demonstrators may not have solutions for all of these problems, but it”s not their job to do so. It is the job of the demonstrators to shine a light on a crime scene that has not been correctly addressed. It is the job of Congress to address these problems and they would if they weren”t beholden to the big money on Wall Street.
Vern Ware
Lakeport
