Forum Post: Lead and Focus

Occupy Wall Street describes itself as a “leaderless resistance movement;” that is all too obvious. And without leadership, you lack focus. Your litany of those things to agree-to as one of you, is admirable, and naïve. Society, any society needs structure in the form of government, or chaos ensues, just like your leaderless, unfocused effort seems to be getting larger indeed, but more chaotic. We also need some form of commerce, and until the recent financial meltdown, our middle class was the strongest in the world, but weakened over recent years by the affects of decades of financial deregulation. Focus on the three big things:

1. CAMPAIGN REFORM, including severe campaign spending limits, increased campaign debates as the primary candidate exposure, elimination of special interest campaign spending under the guise of freedom of speech, and finally time limits on campaigning. Once we have true public servants in office we will greatly reduce special interest lobbying, payoffs, kickbacks, favors, etc.

2. STRICT REGULATIONS on banking, investment banking and Wall Street in general, much like those enacted following the Great Depression can protect against the money changers stealing our lives again. Manufacturing and general service corporations, and certainly the small business person DID NOT get us into this mess, the MONEY CHANGERS in the world of finance did! Ask yourself, where are the neighborhood, small banks of a few years back? Answer: sucked up by deregulation and Wall Street.

   Weakened regulations started in the Reagan administration and continued through every one that followed, including the Clinton administration. Weakened regulations allowed for the new derivatives that promoted bundled mortgages being traded like casino chips, which encouraged high risk loans requiring no money down and little income. The MONEY CHANGERS crashed our economy and led to our current unemployment!

3. JOBS won’t be created by Wall Street, but they will be created by small business, many of which were started by people like us who finally decided to look to build something for themselves. Incentivize small business to invest and hire. And give tax breaks to those corporations (some of them large) that bring manufacturing (and jobs) back to the U.S.; we get virtually no tax revenue from their offshore manufacturing, services and jobs as it currently stands, so why not?

Find a leader… focus your movement… and win.