pammartens

Pam Martens retired from Wall Street after 21 years in 2006. She managed the life savings of regular people, she wasn’t a so called mover and shaker. She spent the last decade of her career protesting in the streets of Manhattan or testifying over various Wall Street abuses, including its private justice system. In April of 2001, she was thrown in jail by the NYPD while peacefully protesting on a public sidewalk in front of Citigroup’s shareholders’ meeting being held at taxpayer financed Carnegie Hall. That is what alerted her to the cronyism between the NYPD, Citigroup and other big Wall Street firms. Pam Martens had started to write for about Wall Street corruption for Counterpunch almost immediately after retiring.

By 2011, Pam realized that Wall Street corruption was getting worse and that she needed to do more to get the word out. Next, she and her husband Russ Martens had built the site WallStreetOnParade.com, and those past Counterpunch articles and more can be found at the site. On the “about” page of their site reads – Wall Street is a jungle of devices to effect an institutionalized wealth transfer system. The goal of this web site is to provide the jungle guide to the 99 percent in the hope of bringing about citizen-inspired change.” I had been requesting interviews with Pam for a couple years and she had graciously declined. Pam had agreed to answer some written questions that I sent to her and I’m going to go through them right now.