The Occupy Movement may have been driven from New York’s Zuccotti Park months ago, but its advocates are still engaged in efforts to promote economic justice.
Occupy the SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission), “a group of concerned citizens, activists and financial professionals with decades of collective experience working at many of the largest financial firms in the industry,” as the group’s website (OccupyTheSEC.org) reads, recently filed a lawsuit against financial regulators over the delay in issuing a final rulemaking in accordance with the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.
The suit names officials at several federal agencies, including the SEC, the Federal Reserve, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the U.S. Treasury Department.
“Almost three years since the passage of the Dodd-Frank Act, these agencies have yet to finalize regulations implementing the Volcker Rule,” the group’s press release reads.
“Not only are they out of compliance,” career financier Yves Smith, author of ECONned: How Unenlightened Self-Interest Undermined Democracy and Corrupted Capitalism, blogs at Naked Capitalism, “they appear to have no intent of finalizing the Volcker Rule.”
It may be “easy to dismiss this sort of undertaking as quixotic or agitprop,” Smith acknowledges, but Occupy the SEC’s complaint “puts another chink in the official defenses of cronyism.”•
