If it’s true that the Occupy Wall Street protesters don’t have a single, consistent message, it’s certainly also true of the Tea Party. Both groups want to “take back the country,” and in the case of the Tea Party I don’t really know what that means, other than they don’t want a half-black President who had a free-spirited mother and who lived outside of the United States for a significant portion of his childhood. In contrast, I think it’s pretty clear what Occupy Wall Street is demanding.
Occupy Wall Street includes some Anarchist types and Socialist wannabes, but there are a lot of young people who borrowed a lot of money to get a college degree, only to find there were no jobs to pay off those loans. They’re right to blame the Wall Street traders who took the financial markets down to their figurative knees in 2008. At the very least there needs to be accountability, prosecution, and regulation of the men and markets who got us into this mess. We don’t have that, and Bernie Madoff doesn’t count.
The latest example is Jon Corzine, an Obama ally, and what he did at MF Global. Yesterday, WBUR’s On Point with Tom Ashbrook had an excellent discussion about this latest example of the ego-driven crimes of greed committed by the guys at the top of the financial heap — a heap of you-know-what.
[audio:http://audio.wbur.org/storage/2011/12/onpoint_1212_the-lessons-of-mf-global.mp3|titles=On Point with Tom Ashbrook: Jon Corzine and MF Global]So I would say that, yes, Occupy Wall Street does indeed have a valid complaint and a clear message. Jon Corzine shouldn’t just be sorry, and he shouldn’t just be subpoenaed. He should be prosecuted.