Occupy-Wall Street Movement

Occupy Wall Street Movement

January 27, 2013

Occupy Wall Street (OWS) began their movement September 17, 2011 in Zuccotti Park (formerly known as Liberty Park) in lower Manhattan, NY and has been adopted in other states as well as other countries. The primary issues the movement is concerned about are the following: social and economic corruption expanding through inequality, greed, and influence throughout corporations and government officials. This comes on the heels of the great bail out of banks, mortgagers, insurance companies and many other financial institutions to a tune of $1.6 trillion in 2008 and $142.2 billion in 2009 (Nankin, 2009). OWS activist perceive the rich or the 1% have obtained their wealth dishonestly at the expense…show more content…
What happened that we needed to have the bailouts? Mortgagers and bankers were making high-risk loans that they could not cover in case of default to increase their own profits, the U.S. government was forced to buy the bank loans since lenders would not lend to each other because financers were taking their money out of the money market as well as credit swapping, trigging a recession crisis. (Stout, 2008) This fueled the OWS anger penalizing taxpayers to pay for the corruption within our financial institutions and sending our economy into a recession, causing citizens to lose their houses, jobs, and insurance.
President Obama signed the DODD-FRANK Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act in July of 2010. This act within its 2500 pages requires certain financial derivatives traded in markets under the subject to government regulation and oversight. This law was created to protect taxpayers from future bailouts from financial abuses through financial firms assessed “too big to fail” allowing our financial system to become transparent and accountable in its actions. (Central Intelligence Agency,…show more content…
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