Time to Make Wall Street Pay

At 75, novelist Michael Thomas has seen much. “If anyone asks me what has been the great American story of my lifetime, I have a ready answer,” he writes in Newsweek: “It is the corruption, money-based, that has settled like some all-enveloping excremental mist on the landscape of our hopes." He watched it happen first-hand in a 30-year Lehman Brothers career. “But now, I think, the game is at long last over,” because the Occupy movement has “made America aware of a sinister, usurious process” funneling wealth to the rich.

Wall Street has been deflecting criticism with the “big lie” that everything is the government’s fault. “This time, however, I don’t think the argument that ‘Washington ate my homework’ is going to work.” It’s time, he writes, “to make the bastards pay, properly, for the grief and woe they have caused.” He’s predicting a nigh-apocalyptic “great day” on which “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.” Click for the full column. (More Wall Street stories.)