We are entering the tenth day of the peaceful occupation of Wall Street by as many as two thousand protesters yet few of us even know it is going on. Keith Olbermann has covered it on Countdown at Current TV and Democracy Now has covered it but the mainstream media have been silent. Media silence in the past has been deemed complicity and so is the charge regarding the high crimes committed by Wall Street bankers leading up to 2008.

The media failed us on the most crucial story of our era. Our newspapers and TV sources contributed to an economic disaster so cynically engineered even billionaire investor Jim Chanos was prompted to ask, “So where are the perp walks? How long does it take before we see any investigations? It boggles the mind that $150 billion is vaporised… there haven’t been any arrests, any indictments, nor any convictions at any major bank or at any of the government-owned financial institutions Fannie, Freddie and AIG.”

Matt Taibbi asked in Rolling Stone, “Why Isn’t Wall Street in Jail?”

Nobody goes to jail. This is the mantra of the financial-crisis era, one that saw virtually every major bank and financial company on Wall Street embroiled in obscene criminal scandals that impoverished millions and collectively destroyed hundreds of billions, in fact, trillions of dollars of the world’s wealth — and nobody went to jail. Nobody, that is, except Bernie Madoff, a flamboyant and pathological celebrity con artist, whose victims happened to be other rich and famous people.

The rest of them, all of them, got off. Not a single executive who ran the companies that cooked up and cashed in on the phony financial boom — an industrywide scam that involved the mass sale of mismarked, fraudulent mortgage-backed securities — has ever been convicted. Their names by now are familiar to even the most casual Middle American news consumer: companies like AIG, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America and Morgan Stanley. Most of these firms were directly involved in elaborate fraud and theft. Lehman Brothers hid billions in loans from its investors. Bank of America lied about billions in bonuses. Goldman Sachs failed to tell clients how it put together the born-to-lose toxic mortgage deals it was selling. What’s more, many of these companies had corporate chieftains whose actions cost investors billions — from AIG derivatives chief Joe Cassano, who assured investors they would not lose even “one dollar” just months before his unit imploded, to the $263 million in compensation that former Lehman chief Dick “The Gorilla” Fuld conveniently failed to disclose. Yet not one of them has faced time behind bars.

Showing Wall Street what Democracy looks like

Eighty protesters were arrested this weekend and there are claims of physical force being used by the NYPD including using pepper spray at close range. Police retirement funds have also been decimated by Wall Street bankers but that hasn’t changed the perception that young college graduates unable to get a job and pay their student loans and attending the protest are not somehow criminals for exercising their civil liberties.

The protesters are camping out, night after night, in an effort to launch our own Tahrir Square in the heart of the US financial district. Similar protests are organizing in Los Angeles, Chicago and Denver. You can track the protest on Twitter with the hashtag #OccupyWallStreet