Two Years After the Eviction of OWS, Here’s 5 People Keeping the Movement Alive

[eridani]

http://www.nationofchange.org/two-years-after-eviction-ows-here-s-5-people-keeping-movement-alive-1384705711

Cathy O'Neil: Alternative Banking

Cathy O'Neil had a Ph.D. from Harvard and taught mathematics at Barnard before a segue into finance in 2007 took her to a hedge fund where she worked with former Harvard University president and World Bank chief economist Larry Summers.

But he and others "clearly didn't understand the shadow banking system—credit default swaps and collateralized debt obligations and mortgage-backed securities … the whole thing to do with the housing bubble," she says. From her position at the center of the crisis, she began to suspect that these supposedly brilliant experts had no idea what they were doing.

O'Neill also saw the "too-big-to-fail banks" had little incentive to change their way of doing business "because the taxpayers were backing them up in case they got into trouble." So about a month after Occupy started, she helped to organize an Alternative Banking group to try to improve the financial system. They've been meeting weekly ever since, dedicated to "agitating for reform" by "educating the public about the current dysfunction." The group's first big project was a deck of cards—"52 Shades of Greed"—to celebrate their one-year anniversary. The idea started when a member of the Alternative Banking group brought in a deck of cards printed by the United States military that showed the most-wanted members of Saddam Hussein's government. "Somebody said 'We should do this for bankers,'" O'Neill explains.