Occupy Wall Street

As police arrested hundreds of protesters on the Brooklyn Bridge in New York City, more demonstrations began to spring up across the U.S.

The anger against Wall Street isn’t likely to burn out anytime soon. Not all, but most, of the US economic problems can be traced to the Wall Street casino and the refusal of the Wall Street bankers to accept their losses instead of forcing them on an unwilling public. The fact that the federal government connived with the bankers to do so doesn’t make the action legal or legitimate.

Every bank that received a bailout, direct or indirect, should be shut down, its executives arrested, and their bonuses seized. Remember, in 1946, the financial institutions accounted for 0.85% of all U.S. debt. Sixty years later, that percentage had risen to 32.7 percent, nearly three times more than the 11.6% owed by the federal government.

The government is far from innocent, but for the most part, it has exacerbated the debt-deflation problem that the bankers created. Occupying Wall Street should only be the beginning of the debt cleansing process. However, what neither the Occupy Wall Street activists on the left nor the Tea Party activists on the center-right appear to understand is that BOTH Wall Street and the federal government are responsible for the present situation.

Washington can’t fix Wall Street because it is wholly owned by the bankers. And Wall Street can’t fix Washington because Washington is already doing what Wall Street wants. As long as the left supports Washington and the right supports Wall Street, absolutely nothing with long-term positive economic effect can be accomplished.

Which, of course, is why I have been saying for years that there will be no solution until the eventual and inevitable system failure takes place.