Meet the Financial Wizards Working With Occupy Wall Street

[Lost-in-FL]

A motley group of Wall Street insiders wants to help the protest movement bring real reform to America's financial system.


...Founded in early October by former British diplomat Carne Ross, the 60-person Alternative Banking Group has become a repository for OWS-friendly financial insiders. It includes current and former investment bankers, traders, and lawyers for the securities industry, but also many laymen—including housewives, people who used to sleep in Zuccotti Park, and guys with piercings who wear Che Guevara T-shirts. The group shares Occupy Wall Street's website, its nonhierarchical structure, and its distaste for partisan politics. "I'd say the one thing that everybody agrees on is that the system isn't working," O'Neil says. "And there is nothing about being a Republican or a Democrat in that statement."

The Alternative Banking Group's meetings can get contentious. At the confab on Sunday, which took place at Columbia University, members squared off over the NEED Act, a bill by Congressman Dennis Kucinich that would put the Federal Reserve under the control of the Treasury Department and allow it to print money without issuing new debt. The bill could be "a third way that I think would satisfy libertarians as well as people on the left," said Jamal Mahmood, an independent retirement planner. A group of white-haired Kucinich fans were onboard, but a Harvard-educated high-frequency trader worried that the plan "would turn America into Greece, basically."

O'Neil sees the group's diverse views as one of its biggest strengths. "It keeps us from making our own little universe of assumptions, which was one of the causes of the crisis to begin with," she says…

The Alternative Banking Group has also grown to include Occupy the SEC, another collaboration between activists and financial insiders that is trying to strengthen the Volcker rule, the anti-speculation banking measure that the Securities and Exchange Commission will implement next year. "Volcker came out with something really simple; in the legislative process it got watered down, and now in the regulation process it is being unbelievably twisted," said a middle-aged financial risk analyst who briefed the Alternative Banking Group about the Volcker rule on Sunday. (He asked that I not use his name because he still works in the banking industry.) He'd been meeting with Occupy the SEC twice a week for several hours to prepare hundreds of comments on the rule for the SEC—in a direct challenge to banking lobbyists…

http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/12/ows-alternative-banking

[sabrina 1]

1. Those 'dirty hippies' are supposedly 'fractured' and the movement is 'finished' according to

some 'pundits'! Lol!

I think this is great. The more diverse voices in the movement, the better. And it's good to know that even on Wall Street, there are people who care more this country than just making money at any cost.

This is how real Democracy works.

[AntiFascist]

2. Printing money without issuing debt...

in British terms, sounds "brilliant". The danger is always of inflation, but in this economy inflation is not currently a problem and this may be a way of countering stagflation and beefing up the economy. The money should be put directly in the hands of those who need it the most, not the 1% to be loaned out because, as we know, most won't even get loaned out to those who need it.