Last October, according to CBS News, President Barack Obama described the Occupy Wall Street movement as a reflection of a “broad-based frustration about how our financial system work”’ and pledged to continue fighting to protect American consumers.
CBS News went on to report that “the president, speaking at a press conference, said he had heard about and seen television reports on the recent protests on Wall Street, and noted that “I think it expresses the frustrations that the American people feel.”
He continued with this statement: “We had the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression – huge collateral damage throughout the country, all across Main Street. And yet, you are still seeing some of the same folks who acted irresponsibly trying to crack down on abusive practices that got us in the situation in the first place,” Obama told reporters. “I think people are frustrated.”
Occupy Wall Street? Tax the 1 percent? A quick review.
Obama’s first chief of staff Rham Emanuel, who became a millionaire in a few short years after leaving the Clinton White House, once sat “on the board of troubled federal mortgage giant Freddie Mac.” (Source: The Weekly Standard)
Second chief of staff: Bill Daley. In an article The New York Times wrote” “He is a top executive at JPMorgan Chase, where he is paid as much as $5 million a year and supervises the Washington lobbying efforts of the nation’s second-largest bank”.
Newly appointed and third chief of staff – Jack Lew. Here’s what the Huffington Post reported: “He holds more than $7.6 million worth of stock in JPMorgan Chase, according to a regulatory filing.”
The piece also reported: “Lew made millions at Citi, including a bonus of nearly $950,000 in 2009 just a few months after the bank received billions of dollars in a taxpayer rescue, according to disclosure forms filed with the federal government. The bank is still partly owned by taxpayers.”
Next time you hear a liberal Democrat criticize the 1 percent and sympathize with the Occupy movement confront them with these facts, as one of our founding fathers, John Adams, once wrote, “facts are a stubborn thing.”
Joe Novak
Polebridge