While I am not an official member of Occupy Wall Street, using basic principles of commonsense and decency it's not hard to come up with a relatively immutable set of reforms that need to be considered.
And as you can guess from the title it's not just Wall Street that will be "a-Changin'":
And as you can guess from the title it's not just Wall Street that will be "a-Changin'":
1) Reinstate the Glass-Steagall law which was implemented during the 1930s and strictly separated banking from speculation. It worked just fine for over 60 years.
2) Implement a Flat Tax of 30% on income above $150k. Honest people already pay that amount anyway
3) End the IRS Offshore Tax Amnesty Program. All offshore bank account holders should be given 90 days to move the money back to the U.S. paying all past due taxes and penalties, or lose citizenship.
4) Fire Ben Bernanke. Central Banksters need to learn that the money supply is not Wall Street's candy store. Given that we just came through the worst financial crisis in 60 years, one would have thought that they would realize that inventing clever new ways to give speculators more leverage, is a bad idea.
5) Implement true campaign finance reform and eliminate the SuperPac idiocy. This may require a constitutional amendment, since the Supreme Court just proved that it's now part of the (political) problem as well.
6) Force the Government to adopt the findings of its own bipartisan deficit commission (which it hasn't).
7) No more bailouts. If speculators and banksters take risk then they need to deal with the consequences.
8) Impose a 30% immediate tariff on China and other export mercantilist countries e.g. those countries that have no environmental or labor protections. As I have said before, a nation that trades openly with other nations which have no environmental or labor protections, will itself end up with no protections i.e. through industrial arbitrage.
Those are just a few basic common sense policies, which if adopted would start moving the U.S. back to being a real country again, rather than the latent special-interest-group controlled clusterfuck that it has become.
I have no doubt that all of the above policies will eventually be implemented, because they make too much obvious sense. It's just a question of how long it takes and how bad things have to become before we get there...
