What Do the Wall Street Occupiers Want (or Want You to Know)?

[David Yarrow]

Mainly economic justice!
Stephen Zarlenga, American Monetary Institute

Does anyone really not know the basic message is of this protest: that Wall Street is oozing corruption and criminality and its unrestrained political power--in the form of crony capitalism and ownership of political institutions--is destroying financial security for everyone else?
Glenn Greenwald, Columnist for Slate

When I visited the Occupy Wall Street site on Wednesday, it was clear that the disgust with the political system went so deep that there is no single set of demands that can fix a system so fundamentally broken and dysfunctional. One can't paste-up a regime that is impoverishing the economy, accelerating foreclosures, pushing state and city budgets further into deficit and forcing cuts in social spending.
Michael Hudson, Economist

I have some heartier suggestions [than the establishment press]: bring the full weight of the RICO act and the federal anti-fraud statutes down on Lloyd Blankfein, Jamie Dimon, Brian Moynihan, Angelo Mozilo, and a host of other impudent schmekels still at large in their world of Escalade limos and Gulfstream vistas.
James Howard Kunstler, Author of The Long Emergency

My youngest son is three years old and his favorite book is Out of the Blue, which are these huge pictures of narwhals and dolphins. He will sit on the floor of his room and flip through these pages. When I see him do that it breaks my heart, because I know if there is not a radical change in human behavior, all of those great sea creatures will be dead in his lifetime.
Chris Hedges, Journalist and Author of The World As It Is: Dispatches on the Myth of Human Progress

Go back to pre-school and learn to share.
Sign at the Occupy Wall Street encampment, Liberty Plaza, NY

What you need to know is the big picture: If America is circling the drain, Goldman Sachs has found a way to be that drain - an extremely unfortunate loophole in the system of Western democratic capitalism, which never foresaw that in a society governed passively by free markets and free elections, organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy.
Matt Taibbi, Columnist for Rolling Stone

The people on Wall Street broke this country, and they did it one lousy mortgage at a time. It happened more than three years ago, and there has been no real accountability, and there has been no real effort to fix it.
Elizabeth Warren, Professor at Harvard Law School and Candidate for U.S. Senate

I think there is a very real sense in this country, and there has been for a long time, that things are not working. Right now 80% of the country thinks we're on the wrong track. We have only a 15% approval rating of Congress. Those numbers aren't acceptable. People are coming out here to voice their disapproval with the system.
Patrick Byrne, Press Relations Working Group, Occupy Wall Street.

This is one of the contradictions of capitalism, that it is so destructive that it destroys its own base, whether its base of consumers able to buy its own products, which is why you have to feed them cheap credit, which then becomes a bubble that pops and destroys the economy, or whether it's the destruction of the ecosphere.
Naomi Klein, Author of The Shock Doctrine

Policy-makers may be killing their golden goose, in this case, the American worker, whose household income at $49,000, is the lowest in more than a decade. And to the extent that jobs go to China and overseas as opposed to stay in the United States, then that affects employment, it affects levels for unemployment, and it affects economic growth going forward. Without consumer, without the wage earner, you have very little in terms of the potential for consumer growth and for economic growth going forward.
William Gross, co-founder of PIMCO, a major global investment firm

The American people have said by large majorities: tax the rich, end the wars, protect the social safety net. And the opposite is happening. So the breakdown is not with the public. The breakdown is between the public and Washington.
Jeffrey Sachs, Economist, Columbia University and Author of The Price of Civilization

Christopher H. Reed
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