Wall Street Riots ... A Protest Against Unlimited Greed

[Joe Fulton]

I do not know how much news our readers outside of the US are seeing about the protests on Wall Street, the home of the US Stock Exchange.  Corrupt governments and establishments around the world have undergone a lot of turmoil this year because of the reactions of citizens.

In the last month, we have the example of Anna Hazare who stood up to the forces of corruption and started a massive protest...and concessions.

The evil and corruption perpetrated on the American people by greedy Wall Street brokers and banks, essentially turning our financial markets into casinos has gone largely unpunished.  In reality, the discussion about the death penalty elsewhere seems to fit these guys as well.  The real tragedy of this is that not only have the banks been bailed out by the government, but they have been allowed to consolidate so that "too big to fail" has gotten even bigger and reap larger profits than ever, all the while finding ways to shaft their customers.

And the really sad thing is that those who were/are in power have stood by and done nothing about it.  A good number of the characters are no better than Bernie Madoff and have wreaked hundreds, if not thousands of times the carnage on their fellow citizens and they get off scott free.

Is this a spiritual problem?  Yes it is.  Not only on the part of the leaders, but also among the rest of us.  The boards of directors, the officers and all of the top management of these corporations should have been held accountable to their degree of involvement and such punishment should have been dealt out as proportional to their crime and level of awareness.  It seems that several concurrent life sentences in a standard state prison would suffice for each of the worst of the perps.  AFter all, some dumb thug robbing a liquor store gets 20 - 30 years for stealing 20 bucks. 

One concept about the caste system that I like is the (theoretical) presumption that the greater the "responsibility the greater the crime.  Reality says different.

For more, see the following article from the New York Times.

More on this later, and if anyone has new news, please feel free to respond with an update.

[Jon Fergus]

A video on OWS that some of you might like:

Occupy Wall St - The Revolution Is Love