Today, over a thousand demonstrators began protests as a part of a campaign they are calling “Occupy Wall Street.” The protesters intend to engage in long-term civil disobedience to draw attention to Wall Street’s misdeeds and call for structural economic reforms. RT America covered the start of the campaign. Watch it:

As demonstrators converged on Wall Street — with police blocking them from reaching the New York Stock Exchange — much of the news media paid little attention to the protests. Meanwhile, much of the conservative punditry has taken to mocking the demonstrations, with conservative Twitter users lambasting the “hippies” in New York City. CNN contributor and RedState blogger Erick Erickson labeled the protesters as “profoundly dumb.”

Certainly, debates about the tactics and strategy behind an anti-Wall Street campaign are warranted. But in a country where much of the populist energy has been absorbed by a movement that compared expanding access to private insurance to “death panels,” it’s worth reviewing why Americans and others should be protesting against Wall Street.

While many of the conservative defenders of Wall Street may be quick to portray protests against the American financial establishment as driven by envy of its wealth or far-left ideologies, the truth is that people have a very simple reason to be angry — because Wall Street’s actions made tens of millions of people dramatically poorer through no fault of their own. In 2010, the International Monetary Fund and World Bank conducted studies of the effects of the global recession — caused largely by Wall Street financial instruments that were poorly regulated by government policies — and found that the recession threw 64 million people into extreme poverty:

The International Monetary Fund estimates that the global economy contracted by 0.6 per cent in 2009 and the implications of this have been severe for many. Economic growth in developing countries was only 1.7 per cent in 2009 compared with 8.1 per cent in 2007. However, if China and India are excluded, the economies of developing countries actually contracted by 1.8 per cent. The World Bank has estimated that an additional 64 million people will be living in extreme poverty on less than US$1.25 a day by the end of 2010 as a result of the global recession.

And nearly three years after the start of the global economic crisis — where taxpayers in multiple countries were called upon to save the financial industry — most of the banking elite’s top executives remain virtually untouched. There have been almost no high-profile convictions for fraud and related financial crimes, banking profits continue to soar, and unemployment not just in the U.S. but globally remains very high.

Given these facts, the question is not why more than a thousand people demonstrated on Wall Street yesterday. The question is, why aren’t even more people in the streets of the financial district in New York City?

Despite their recent exclamations of support for improving American infrastructure, House Republicans circulated a memo this weekend informing members that the caucus would oppose the majority of President Obama’s jobs plan, particularly the proposed infrastructure bank that would make large investments into the nation’s crumbling roads, bridges, and other forms of infrastructure.

In the memo, House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) laid out opposition to Obama’s proposed $30 billion to keep teachers and law enforcement officers in their jobs, rejected money for school construction, and again claimed Republicans supported spending on infrastructure. But Boehner wrote that the GOP opposed the way Obama’s plan would make those investments, as Republicans continue to base their opposition to new stimulus plans on the misguided, false belief that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act didn’t work, as The Hill reported:

“Rather than adding more money to a broken system,” Boehner and his deputies wrote, “Congress and the president should spend the next few months working out a multi-year transportation authorization bill that fixes these problems.”

Despite those claims, there is little evidence that Republicans actually support spending the money necessary to bring the nation’s infrastructure up to date. In fact, this is the third major infrastructure investment plan Republicans have opposed since Obama took office in 2009, after it lobbied to reduce the amount of infrastructure-centered spending in the Recovery Act and derailed Democrats’ infrastructure spending plan in 2010.

As ThinkProgress reported last week, roads and bridges in the states and districts represented by GOP leadership are rated “structurally deficient” or “fundamentally obsolete” at rates that outpace the national average. Even knowing that, Republicans continue to make their priorities clear when it comes to creating jobs by fixing America’s infrastructure, as they have again chosen to do nothing while millions of American workers remain unemployed and ready to work on the roads and bridges that are crumbling around them.

Take action and tell Congress it’s time to rebuild America.

Three years ago this week, the financial crisis began in earnest with the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers and the $85 billion bailout of mega-insurer American International Group. However, during Monday night’s GOP presidential primary debate, the candidates proved that they have no interest in learning the lessons of that crisis, as they called for the repeal of the Dodd-Frank financial reform law in order to “free up” Wall Street.

Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) bragged that night about being the lead author of the Dodd-Frank repeal legislation. And during a campaign stop in southern California yesterday, Bachmann explained her rationale:

And not only repealing Obamacare, also repealing Dodd-Frank, which is killing the banking industry. I’ve got the bill to repeal both of them.

Watch it:

Some banks would be surprised to learn that they are on the verge of death, as they keep on reporting record profits. As ThinkProgress’ Alex Seitz-Wald noted when Newt Gingrich claimed that the banking industry was being killed by Dodd-Frank, “‘bank profits rose substantially‘ in the first quarter of the year, with banks showing the biggest profits since before the recession. Things were sunny in the second quarter as well”:

– Profits at JPMorgan Chase, the nation’s second largest bank, were up 13 percent.

– Third-largest Citigroup’s profits soared 23 percent.

– Fourth-largest Wells Fargo’s profits shot up 29 percent.

– Fifth-largest Goldman Sachs, meanwhile, “disappointed investors” when it merely “more than doubled its profits.”

–Sixth-largest Morgan Stanley’s profits were up an impressive 17 percent.

JP Morgan Chase, in fact, is posting record profits. But three years after Wall Street caused the financial crisis, and with banks back to reaping profits, Bachmann and the GOP feel that its financial reform that merits doing away with.

Tea Party Rep. Steve King (R-IA) took to the House floor yesterday to give a diatribe against large swaths of of the social safety net, from food stamps to heating fuel subsidies, but reserved particular disdain for unemployment insurance, which he dismissed as “welfare for people that won’t work.” Via Political Correction:

KING: The United States of America borrows money and hands it to people and tells them, you don’t have to work for this. You don’t have to produce anything for this. We just want you to spend it. [...]

The former speaker of the House, Speaker Pelosi, has consistently said that unemployment checks are one of those reliable and immediate forms of economy recovery. [...] The 80 million Americans that are of working age but are simply not in the workforce need to be put to work. We can’t have a nation of slackers and then have me have to sit in the Judiciary Committee listening to them argue that there’s work that Americans won’t do, so we have to import people to do the work that Americans won’t do, and borrow money to pay the welfare for people that won’t work. That is a foolish thing for a nation to do. We’ve gotta get this country back to work and get those people out of the slacker rolls and onto the employed rolls.

Watch it:

King’s belief that people collecting unemployment checks are merely lazy is startingly common among conservatives, but it is as wrong as it is offensive to the million of Americans who are out of work by no choice of their own. In reality, there are 4.32 unemployed people for every job opening in the country, so even if every opening was filled, there would still be millions of people lacking employment.

Moreover, unemployment benefits are hardly generous, require beneficiaries to be actively searching for work, and run out after a certain period of time, so it’s unlikely someone would chose to remain unemployed. In fact, research by the San Francisco Federal Reserve has found that workers who qualify for unemployment benefits stay unemployed just 1.6 weeks longer than those who do not qualify for such benefits.

King calling unemployed Americans “slackers” is almost as bad as Rep. Blake Farenthold (R-TX) compared the jobless to alcoholics and drug addicts.

As part of his critique of President Obama’s policies, Gov. Rick Perry (R) has been saying that the administration is not doing enough to “free up” Wall Street. During a campaign stop today, Perry said that one of the “first things we need to do” is repeal the Dodd-Frank financial reform law, because new laws aren’t needed to rein in the “few bad actors” on Wall Street:

So freeing up the industry, whether you’re a bank or whether you’re a credit union, freeing them up from overregulation. I think overregulation of all of those industries is obviously a part of the problem. And repealing that Dodd-Frank act is one of the first things that we need to do…Do we need to have protections in place? Of course we do. But I would suggest to you that we have those protections in place today for the few bad actors that might be out there in the world. But the overregulation from Washington D.C., this one-size-fits-all, has to end.

Watch it:

But Perry didn’t always feel this way. In fact, in 2008, with the financial system cratering, Perry criticized the banking industry, saying that it “has too often been run on greed“:

“My concern is that Washington is so inept at addressing these issues that are important to Americans, whether it’s securing our borders or whether it’s securing our financial future,” Perry said. “Washington has been absolutely abject failures at this.”

Perry stopped short of endorsing any particular approach to the U.S. financial meltdown and warned against any measures that would allow shady business practices to continue.

“We’re sick and tired of watching Washington bicker with each other while financial markets are roiled,” he said. “The other side of that is we’re certainly not interested in Washington bailing out a bunch of irresponsible mortgage brokers in an industry that has too often been run on greed.”

Despite this stated opposition to bailouts, shortly after the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) failed to pass the House on its initial vote, Perry sent a letter to Congress in his capacity as head of the Republican Governors Association that read “We strongly urge Congress to leave partisanship at the door and pass an economic recovery package. It is time for Washington, D.C. to step up, be responsible, an do what’s in the best interest of American taxpayers and our economy.”

Perry now denies that the letter expressed support of TARP, but its hard to read it otherwise. At a campaign stop today, Perry replied “no, maam,” to a woman who asked if he supported TARP.

Gov. Bob McDonnell (R-VA), Rick Perry's translator

Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX) has been taking a lot of well-deserved flak for deriding Social Security as a “Ponzi scheme.” But during Monday night’s GOP presidential primary debate, Perry doubled down on his position, saying, “this is a broken system. It has been called a Ponzi scheme by many people long before me.”

Even Perry’s supporters are clearly uncomfortable with this characterization. Gov. Bobby Jindal (R-LA) endorsed Perry this week, but when asked repeatedly, refused to agree with Perry that Social Security is a Ponzi scheme. “It doesn’t matter what you call it, what’s most important is the substantive point he was making,” Jindal claimed.

Yesterday, Gov. Bob McDonnell (R-VA) — who succeeded Perry as head of the Republican Governors’ Association and has been floated as a potential Republican vice presidential candidate — told a local reporter that, when Perry says “Ponzi scheme,” what he is “actually trying to say” is that we should “preserve this valuable safety program for our senior citizens for our future generations”:

Q: What do you think about him calling Social Security a Ponzi scheme?

MCDONNELL: I think what he was trying to say and what all the Republicans were trying to say is to be honest with the people and say if you want to preserve this valuable safety program for our senior citizens for our future generations, we’ve go to reform it.

Watch it:

Social Security is indeed a valuable program. Last year alone, it kept 14 million seniors out of poverty.

Earlier this week, Perry wrote an op-ed on Social Security without using his favorite terms for the program: “Ponzi scheme” and “monstrous lie.” And evidently, he needs to start bringing McDonnell to his campaign events in order to translate his words into something that the American public doesn’t find terrifying.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) was on the campaign trail in Newton, Iowa today, reviving his stump speech promise to make government “as inconsequential in your life as I can.” At one point, Perry bragged about the Texas tax system and its light burden on “job creators”:

We had a tax policy in place that allowed for our job creators to not be burdened, still delivering the services that the people desire in the state of Texas. So have a tax policy that is as light on the job creators as we can.

Watch it:

As Matt Yglesias has noted, in reality Perry’s tax system “has done a great job of soaking the poor.” In fact, according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, someone in the poorest 20 percent of Texans can expect to face a tax rate four times as high as a Texan in the richest 1 percent:

This isn’t really surprising, considering that Perry believes that the poor and seniors don’t pay enough in taxes. At the same time, Perry has admitted that higher taxes on millionaires and billionaires “isn’t going to affect anything” in terms of economic growth.