Occupy Wall Street

OK, fans, I know you're all dying to read what I think about Occupy Wall Street, so here it is.

The rage that I share with the protesters can be summed up this way:

Once there was a healthy economy.  Then a few things happened, in this order:

1. The financial system was deregulated to a great degree, and what regulation there was was poorly enforced. 
2. Wall Street bankers used these rules to take enormous risks using irresponsible amounts of leverage, while everyone in the industry assured us they knew what they were doing.
3. The result was a huge real estate bubble that allowed the banks to make enormous profits, far greater than the industry had ever made before.
4. In spite of these profits, the general economy didn't benefit much at all.  There was virtually no wage or job growth for the middle class during the aughts.
5. When the bubble burst, the taxpayers were forced to step in and bail out the industry.  This was necessary to save us from another Great Depression, but was structured in a way that returned banks to profitability almost immediately.  They are already back to record profits, while the general economy continues to suffer.
6. The banking industry is now firmly opposed to any regulation of any kind, and has withdrawn support from the Democratic party for suggesting it.  The industry seems to have no particular plan to avoid a repeat of 2008, since they don't want anything to change.  This apparently means that their plan is to go back to the good old days, and when the next disaster happens, we get to bail them out again.  It's "heads I win, tails you lose".

So yeah, some of us are kind of angry with Bankers.  OWS is expressing that rage.  I'm hoping it builds into a movement that throws a scare into them and moves regulation of the banking industry along with progressive tax policy in the right (or left) direction.  It's easy enough to find nut cases in the crowd (as it certainly was with the Tea Party rallies), but here's hoping it develops into something constructive.