1. Financial issues are treated as exotic, beyond our comprehension and best left in back of the paper in the business pages where obscurantist language makes it so dense that most readers turn away.
2. The upper classes, now referred to as the 1%, and the people who identify with them or uncritically, rely on them for financial guidance cannot comprehend any critique that challenges their prerogatives and power. They use terms like "unsophisticated" to deligitimize protesters who challenge their pretensions and priorities.
3. Some don't and won't "get it" because it is not in their interest to do so. They shamelessly use their power to impose their will on the legislative process with an eye on loosening or abandoning any financial reforms that force higher standards of transparency.
Example: even as Occupy Wall Street wins public support for its campaign against inequality and challenge big banks and corporations, The Obama Administration is about to strip mine laws to insure corporate accountability.
Mike Taibbi explains the latest way Washington is aligned with Wall Street in Rolling Stone: (Amazing isn't it that a music magazine does a better job of covering these issues than our financial media,)
He writes, "Barack Obama is apparently expressing willingness to junk big chunks of Sarbanes-Oxley in exchange for support for his jobs program . Business leaders are balking at creating new jobs unless Obama makes compliance with S-O voluntary for all firms valued at under $1 billion
Here's how to translate this move: companies are saying they can't attract investment unless they can hide their financials from investors. So the CEOs and gazillionaires on Obama's Jobs Council want the politically-vulnerable president to give them license to cook the books in exchange for support for his jobs program. From the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:
"All you're going to do is have more fraud. The ultimate losers are going to be investors," said Jeff Klink, a former federal prosecutor whose Gateway Center firm helps clients prevent and detect fraud."
Unfortunately, the Occupy Wall Street activists have, like the rest of the country, not been widely exposed to the considerable documentation around massive fraud by the financial industry.
When former bank regulator and the country's leading critic of corporate fraud, William Black, now of the University of Missouri Law School in Kansas City, visited Occupy Wall Street on October 25th, he was not recognized by most of those in the encampment or by many in the press who are also unfamiliar with the depth of the crimes of Wall Street.
Those crimes just don't impact investors but have hit ordinary Americans hard. They include the subprime mortgages as well as usurious credit cards. Black takes a systematic look at the problem.
He spoke at a teach-in at Occupy Wall Street Tuesday evening to an attentive crowd. It was one of the first lectures about aspects of the Financial crisis that many don't really know about. Its important to have more talks like this with critics taking the protesters to task about being "unsophisticated.
More experts like Black will be speaking in the Park in the near future.
Perhaps that's why Elisabeth Warren, the Harvard Professor who proposed a consumer protection agency is claiming she put for the intellectual ideas that led to the Occupy Movement, The Daily Beast's Samuel P. Jacobs reports she created "much of the intellectual foundation" for the Occupy Wall Street movement. She also talks about her past life as a Republican and the challenges of being a woman on the campaign trail--and say she's no "guileless Marxist."
Ironically that's also true of many in Zuccotti Park who seem to favor Anarchism, but at least they have a deeper critique of the posturing of both parties and seem to want far deeper reforms than those proposed by Warren.
Perhaps that's why self-styled "liberals" like The Washington Posts Richard Cohen can't find an ounce of sympathy for protester who are being skewered by the Israel Lobby AIPAC as Anti-Semitic based on an incident involving two people.
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