75 Yr old Wall Streeter: "There will be prosecutions & show trials & violence-mark my words"
Michael Thomas' ominous reflections on 75 years of life as American, in which he worked on Wall Street and saw all of his assumptions about his country undone:
This time, I fear, the public anger will not be deflected. Confessions, not false, will be exacted. Occupy Wall Street has set the snowball rolling; you may not think much of OWS—I have my own reservations, although none are philosophical or moral—but it has made America aware of a sinister, usurious process by which wealth has systematically been funneled into fewer and fewer hands. A process in which Washington played a useful supporting role, but no more than that.
Over the next year, I expect the “what” will give way to the “how” in the broad electorate’s comprehension of the financial situation. The 99 percent must learn to differentiate the bloodsuckers and rent-extractors from those in the 1 percent who make the world a better, more just place to live. Once people realize how Wall Street made its pile, understand how financiers get rich, what it is that they actually do, the time will become ripe for someone to gather the spreading ripples of anger and perplexity into a focused tsunami of retribution. To make the bastards pay, properly, for the grief and woe they have caused. Perhaps not to the extent proposed by H. L. Mencken, who wrote that when a bank fails, the first order of business should be to hang its board of directors, but in a manner in which the pain is proportionate to the collateral damage. Possibly an excess-profits tax retroactive to 2007, or some form of “Tobin tax” on transactions, or a wealth tax. The era of money for nothing will be over.
But it won’t just end with taxes. When the great day comes, Wall Street will pray for another Pecora, because compared with the rough beast now beginning to strain at the leash, Pecora will look like Phil Gramm. Humiliation and ridicule, even financial penalties, will be the least of the Street’s tribulations. There will be prosecutions and show trials. There will be violence, mark my words. Houses burnt, property defaced. I just hope that this time the mob targets the right people in Wall Street and in Washington. (How does a right-thinking Christian go about asking Santa for Mitch McConnell’s head under the Christmas tree?) There will be kleptocrats who threaten to take themselves elsewhere if their demands on jurisdictions and tax breaks aren’t met, and I say let ’em go!
At the end of the day, the convulsion to come won’t really be about Wall Street’s derivatives malefactions, or its subprime fun and games, or rogue trading, or the folly of banks. It will be about this society’s final opportunity to rip away the paralyzing shackles of corruption or else dwell forever in a neofeudal social order. You might say that 1384 has replaced 1984 as our worst-case scenario. I have lived what now, at 75, is starting to feel like a long life. If anyone asks me what has been the great American story of my lifetime, I have a ready answer. It is the corruption, money-based, that has settled like some all-enveloping excremental mist on the landscape of our hopes, that has permeated every nook of any institution or being that has real influence on the way we live now. Sixty years ago, if you had asked me, on the basis of all that I had been taught, whether I thought this condition of general rot was possible in this country, I would have told you that you were nuts. And I would have been very wrong. What has happened in this country has made a lie of my boyhood.
THE REST:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2011/12/25/wall-street-has-destroyed-the-wonder-that-was-america.html
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/12/27/1049179/-Elder-on-Wall-Street:-There-will-be-violence,-mark-my-words?via=siderec
= new reply since forum marked as read
You 'can't wait' for violence. And if 'a few one percenters have to suffer,' then so be it.
Got it 
Surely you know it almost never works that way. 'A few' often turns into quite a bit more than a few and 'one percenter' could be interpreted rather loosely, such as 'somebody who sympathizes with the one percent.' Repression is a slippery slope and feeds on itself. The more you repress, the more enemies you make and thus the more tempting it is to justify further repression. And so on and so forth.
Even if you managed to restrict the violence to 'a few one percenters,' you're still endorsing violence, which once upon a time was not tolerated on DU. I guess those days are over . . .
heartily recced and shared!
I personally have no moral aversion to asking santa for a wall streeter's or congresscritter's head on a platter ! 
Let's not conflate violence with action-- they are two wholly different things-- unless of course one needs the self-serving confusion between the two terms. 
I want my bandwidth back. 
