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The Activist Beat with Rose Aguilar, host of Your Call on KALW in San Francisco is a weekly roundup of progressive activism that the mainstream media ignores, undercovers, or misrepresents.

Over the past two months, over 5,500 demonstrators at Occupy camps across the country have been arrested, many after being pepper sprayed, tear gassed, or hit with a billy club in the ribs and stomach area.

The Houston Chronicle reports that on Monday, 20 members of Occupy Houston were arrested as more than 100 demonstrators from as far as Austin and Dallas gathered outside the Houston Port. The action was part of the larger port shutdown along the West coast.

Cops wearing riot gear arrested 20 demonstrators for blocking traffic leading to the port entrance. Before making the arrests, they put a large red tent over the people lying in the streets. The Houston Police Department told the Chronicle that the Fire Department was called in to cut PVC pipes off of the arms of demonstrators and the tent was brought in to prevent sparks from flying. Or was it brought in to prevent people from videotaping and seeing what was happening?

We have over 5,500 arrests of demonstrators expressing their views about economic inequality and social justice. And not one bank executive has been prosecuted despite mounting evidence of fraud.

A few documentaries have been released over the years showing former bank executives revealing widespread fraud, but nothing has been done about it.

A few weeks ago, 60 Minutes aired a piece about two former bank executives turned whistleblowers. Eileen Foster is a former senior executive who investigated fraud at Countrywide Financial, the largest mortgage lender in the country at the height of the financial crisis. A third of their mortgages ended up in foreclosure or default.

Foster told 60 Minutes’ Steve Kroft that people at Countrywide belong behind bars. The fraud was systemic. It wasn’t just one individual. It was how they did business. Mortgage lenders received bonuses for forging and manipulating borrowers’ income and asset statements to help them get loans they weren’t qualified for and couldn’t afford. This is criminal activity and it’s exactly why we’re seeing so many foreclosures across the country.

Foster told Kroft that she’d give specific names to a grand jury if asked, but she’s never been asked and has never spoken to the Justice Department.

After Countrywide merged with Bank of America, Foster was promoted and asked to speak with government regulators to discuss Countrywide’s fraud reports. She said she was asked to sign a 14-page document that would buy her silence in return for a large amount of money. She refused and was fired.

Foster spent three years trying to clear her name. She recently won a federal whistleblower complaint against Bank of America for wrongful termination and was awarded nearly $1M in back pay and benefits.

So why hasn’t there been a single criminal case against Wall Street? Despite what the President says, illegal activity has clearly taken place.

Senator Dick Durbin said it best back in May 2009 when he failed to get the votes he needed for bankruptcy reform. The banks “frankly own the place.”

Not only do they give politicians millions in campaign contributions, their executives go back and forth between working for the government and working for the banks.

Every article about Occupy arrests should include this crucial question even if we know the answer: Why hasn’t one Wall Street executive been prosecuted?