This is the kind of content I have been looking for from our website. To me this provides a narrative of why we are here. The narrative is very important to any group of people. In the absence of *demands* we clearly need that narrative. Who went where.. who did what. If we do not have a narrative then many might feel like individuals with excluded voices. That larger narrative allows for people to belong to the larger cause, even though it is not clearly defined yet.

There are a million stories told everyday. We as a movement need to tell ours. Don't try to engineer any outcome.... just tell the story.

BTW... I believe I have had comments deleted.

Demand this?  Sure, though it requires refinement.  Although it might fire up those so inclined to hang every (guilty) banker by the innards of every FRB bureaucrat, and although it does assault a basic sense of justice that these kleptocrats have largely gotten away scot-free, raking in bonuses both causing the crisis and processing the aftermath, spending all that much time and energy on this mitigates the plight of the 99% very little.  It might increase our ranks, because many people want to see that criminal class pay, but that would likely be the most it could do for us, and comes at the price of spending that energy on anything that serves our aims better.

I've advocated claw-backs in the past, but a basic point on the economics:  Even if we recover every last cent from every last banker who even thought about bending the slightest rule, it would backfill only a tiny portion of what the meltdown cost the country.  Why?  Loosely speaking, leverage.  Backwards.  These people were slicing and dicing billions in dodgy loans to collect tens of millions in bonuses.  The billions were OPM, mostly with the FHA/Fanny/Freddie on the hook when the dodginess comes to fruition.  The bonuses...theirs to keep.  But the losses are many times larger than the bonuses.  Further leverage (in this loose sense) derives from the fact that the impact on the economy is by now much larger than the sub-prime sector because of the falling dominoes that followed (employment, previously solid borrowers defaulting...and on, and on....)  

But we already got the Obama administration answer, unfortunately, when Justice declined to pursue criminal charges against Angello Mozilo after he settled with the SEC, with bail-out recipient BofA reimbursing him more than two-thirds of the settlement fine, meaning that the prime mover of the mortgage meltdown retains both his freedom and 97% (instead on only 90%) of his net worth.  (I was about to refer to him as the author, but authorship is at least shared with the Congress through repeal of Glass-Steagall [among other players and factors] which may well be why criminal charges were not pursued: it was in general if not in detail legal under the standing laws.  If anyone knows of anything he could be nailed for under any specific provision of law then obtaining, PLEASE correct me...and, much more importantly, Eric Holder.)

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Angelo_Mozilo#Settlement_...

Other than perhaps as a recruiting tool, this strikes me as more of a diversion and perhaps a fool's errand.  (I don't at all mean to imply that it is intended as such, or to call anyone a fool; I know that there's plenty I don't know.)  Although there would be the argument that stiff and well-deserved punishment will deter future malfeasance, keeping our eyes on the ball means first and foremost changing the system so that these "financial innovators" can't hire Congress to write laws to suit them.  In terms of modifying future behavior, that's far more important.  But beyond that, fundamental restructuring of the financial sector would be worth serious thought as well.  For those who don't already know this, a likely indicator of an economic bubble in the making is (faster-than-exponential) accelerating growth of the financial sector, i.e. when making money off of money displaces actual productive activity faster than any genuine economic growth naturally occurs and the financial sector in fact soaks up investment in itself.  Wag the dog, writ large.