- Eliot Spitzer calls on Obama to support Occupy Wall Street. Noting that the movement is amassing support day by day, Spitzer hopes this will encourage President Obama – calling him “flat” on Wall Street and the economy – to speak with “a new and progressive voice.”
- Michael Moore states, “We oppose the way our economy is structured.” Michael Moore talks about his participation in the Occupy Wall Street protests, the goals of the movement and how it’s evolving.
- Keith Olbermann reads the first collective statement of Occupy Wall Street.
- Occupy Los Angeles – We are the 99% – The Beginning & In Depth HD
Its time to start analyzing, participating and trying to channel this important movement. When we light a candle with another candle, it takes nothing away from the first but it adds to the light.
The United States Proxy Exchange (USPX), a grass roots movement that formed in 2008 in response to the same concerns that propel Occupy Wall Street—out-of-touch Washington and out-of-control corporations. The USPX started with a clear plan: organize individual shareowners to take back control of the corporations they own.
I’ve suggested we need a list and have suggested a few items:
- Reinstitution of the 1932 Glass-Steagall Act. How can we let banks gamble and then guarantee deposits?
- A financial transactions tax. In London, financiers are subject to a tiny tax on their securities and derivatives trades. We need a similar here, small enough that it doesn’t discourage long-term investment, but significant enough to make traders think twice about buying huge volumes of securities only to dump them a seconds later. According to the Center for Economic Policy and Research, a tax on trading would reap somewhere between $177 billion and $354 billion a year.
- Allow mortgages to be renegotiated in bankruptcy — like every other kind of consumer debt. This would help us dig our way out of the mortgage nightmare keeping everyone in place who hasn’t already lost a home.
- Crack down on fraud. More than 1,100 bankers went to jail in the aftermath of the savings and loan crisis, but we’ve seen almost no serious action this cycle to ensure that financial fraud does not go unpunished. We need strong action against both individuals who commit fraud and the companies that tolerate it.
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