Many of the Robber Barrons of the industrial era were of the opinion that money should be earned, not inherited. They gave away most of their fortunes. Bill Gates and Warren Buffet are following that example now, putting 10’s of billions into the Bill and Melinda Gates fund. But the Koch brothers, whose combined fortune is second only to Gates and bigger than Buffet in America, along with most billionaires and also most millionaires do not do that. The Koch brothers give money to PBS, but mostly they give “charity” to groups like Americans for Prosperity (which they almost entirely fund) whose sole purpose is to advocate for political policies that are designed to increase their own wealth. That is the state of the majority of the money held by the top 1%. Carnegie and Rockefeller of old, like Gates and Buffet today are an exception.

There were vigorous debates in my law school between Clinton and Obama supporters. I was vehemently in the former camp, being of the opinion that Obama lacked the experience necessary to stand up to Republicans in Congress and effectively do the job. Unfortunately, it appears I was correct. I am not compromising my principals by voting for Obama. I would be compromising my principals if I acted in a way that would make it more likely that someone worse than him would be elected. I will do the same thing for Obama I did for Kerry, argue why voting for him is worth doing even though he’s less than inspiring. I will also work with OWS and any other organization capable of putting pressure on him to act more like the progressive he campaigns as. He seems to be susceptible enough to political pressure to make that feasible.

Your questions on social justice and equal justice are filled with platitudes and calls for over-generalizations that make little sense. Nobody wants to bring down Wall Street, just to limit their undue influence on government. Airlines can use oil futures to stabilize their costs, but when hedge fund managers trade them, it adds 75 cents to the cost of each gallon of gas. There are legitimate purposes to Wall Street, but when they act like casinos, not investors they create bubbles that burst and bring the rest of us down with them. It is that system that needs to end, not the legitimate activities that go on there.

Obviously lynch mobs and vigilante justice are wrong and cops, by and large, are good. Cops are people, like anyone else and, like anyone else, there are always a few bad apples that give them a bad name. Tony Bologna appears to be one of them (allegedly), but hopefully a judge and jury or at least an internal review will sort that out. Most of them are great hard-working people who would probably rather be in the protest than fighting it. They are suffering in exactly the same ways as teachers, with massive layoffs and villainization of such dedicated public servants. They suffer as much as anyone when bankers are hired to invest their pension funds and instead sell them credit default swaps from the bank’s own account which they know are bad investments, as J.P. Morgan Chase allegedly did to many of its investors.