How amusing it must be for a corporate lackey to sneer down on the little people below, demanding they get a job in an economy where 14 million Americans are unemployed. So what if Wall Street’s criminal schemes caused this nation to lose 30 percent of its wealth, resulting in countless cases of divorce, suicide and lost homes? Let them eat cake!

If Smith would ask protesters what they want, he might discover they are also working to make a “better future for ourselves, our families and our community” by ending Wall Street’s crime spree and throwing the perps in jail.

U.S. Sen. Tom Coburn was the co-chair of the Levin-Coburn report, of which an April 14, 2010, Reuters headline read, “In the most damning official U.S. report yet produced on Wall Street’s role in the financial crisis, a Senate panel accused powerhouse Goldman Sachs of misleading clients and manipulating markets, while also condemning greed, weak regulation and conflicts of interest throughout the financial system.”

The 2000 law that produced the economic disaster was engineered by Bill Clinton’s secretary of the treasury, Robert Rubin, who spent 26 years at Goldman; the bank bailout was plotted by Bush’s treasury secretary, Henry Paulson, the ex-CEO of Goldman who put former Goldman director Ed Liddy in charge of failed insurance giant AIG, and made sure Goldman received the taxpayerfunded $13 billion to pay $16.7 billion in bonuses, the largest in the history of the firm (Rolling Stone, April 10, 2010).

Smith obviously relishes living in the United Sachs of America; the rest of us don’t. The endgame is a constitutional amendment prohibiting all private campaign donations, which are nothing more than bribes for undue influence.

—D.W. Tiffee
Norman

Tiffee ran as an independent for U.S. Congress in 1994.

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