Ventura made his comments outside the federal courthouse in St. Paul, where in January he sued to challenge the Transportation Security Administration’s (TSA) airport security procedures. The suit was thrown out because Congress set up the law so that all such challenges must be brought directly in Circuit Courts of Appeals, wrote U.S. District Judge Susan Richard Nelson.
It’s called Occupy Wall Street for a reason: it’s about the MONEY, stupid! The money that has put profits before people and left human values to be measured by price alone. The money that (with the complicity of the Supreme Court) has replaced votes (one for each of us) with dollars (one for the 99 and 99 for the one!) turning democracy into plutocracy. . . Look at the process, which is a bold attempt to embody a “horizontal” paradigm of participatory engagement as an alternative to “vertical” big league moneyball democracy.
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Wall Street banks experienced years of unprecedented growth under President Bush, at least until the crisis of 2008. But in the two-and-a-half years since President Obama took office, the largest Wall Street banks have grown even larger, and profits at banks and trading firms have risen even faster than they did under Bush, the Washington Post’s Zachary Goldfarb reports:
Wall Street firms — independent companies and the securities-trading arms of banks — are doing even better. They earned more in the first 2 1/2 years of the Obama administration than they did during the eight years of the George W. Bush administration, industry data show. […]
Always Question Authority 