#OccupyWallstreet

[Svnla]

Well not everyone is smart enough to avoid those pitfalls. With some intelligent regulation those examples you gave could be mitigated a bit.

I don't think you can regulate sheer stupidity.

Example from this AP story - http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap...Mn5YsQ?docId=1f58ca6393004886b4cc9bc587194d0f

Iris Cotto, a Resorts housekeeper for 18½ years, saw her pay cut from more than $14 an hour to $9.51. Her take-home pay is now $1,200 a month; her monthly mortgage alone is $1,300, and she has burned through her retirement savings just to keep her home.

She was making less than 30K/year and her house payment was $1,300/month or over $15K/year or over HALF of her gross income and that was before utilities and other house related bills such as repair and upkeeping. Is that a dumb thing to do or what, you tell me?

Edit: Don't let me start with almost 19 years with the same job and no moving up. Where is the desire to better yourself by education and upgrading your skill? Where is the "be the best that I can be"?

 

[dwell]

I love when people compare this movement to Arab Spring. Comparing nations of people raised under oppressive governments who are lashing out at their oppressors to some folks who made bad life decisions and are lashing out at those who made better ones is an enormous discredit to the oppressed Arabs.

 

[michal1980]

I love when people compare this movement to Arab Spring. Comparing nations of people raised under oppressive governments who are lashing out at their oppressors to some folks who made bad life decisions and are lashing out at those who made better ones is an enormous discredit to the oppressed Arabs.

Those people also had a goal in mind with their protests. These people dont want to be labeled. They dont want to give any 'offical' demands, etc etc. They are just protesting to protest.


Watch, now one of the pot head paid union protesters will come in and tell me/us, that I/we "dont get it" [the protests]. But then will fail to explain what we dont get.

 

[dwell]

Those people also had a goal in mind with their protests. These people dont want to be labeled. They dont want to give any 'offical' demands, etc etc. They are just protesting to protest.

I passed the protests a few times. Seems like this is the crowd:

1. Hipsters rabble rousing for the sake of rabble rousing.
2. Slackers looking for someone to blame for their situation.
3. Hipsters looking to hook up with other hipsters. It's practically a nightclub out there.
4. Random homeless people / hobos who look like they have nothing better to do so they joined the crowd.

There's not even a cohesive message. Something like, "We can't get a high paying job so fuck Wall Street." WTH?

 

[IGBT]

This is the natural product of the obama's class warfare strategy to hid his failed economic amateurism so he rallies the entitlement mob in a crude attempt to divert attention.

 

[werepossum]

Ok, I haven't read anything in this thread and have avoided the topic.

But I read this in National Review and to me is a great summation of what we are seeing in many of the people in the occupy movement.

In short:
Too many people in the country today want to have the freedom to make their own decisions, but don't want to have to deal with the consequences of those decisions.

This woman's failures are her own and are not the fault of the rich bankers. It was her decision to move to NYC and try to make it in the music business and it is her fault if she is failing.

Here the source piece which is written by a member of the occupy movement.

I Love My Job, But It Made Me Poorer
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jd-samson/i-love-my-job-but-it-made_b_987680.html
Should be titled: I love my job, But It Made Me Poorer and that isn't fair because other people are making more money than me.

And here is the very good NRO piece on this article:
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/279545/occupy-wall-street-and-iressentimenti-daniel-foster
In today’s G-File (sign up in the top right corner of this page), Jonah has blessed and cursed us all by sharing a HuffPo post from JD Samsom, of the “multi-media feminist electronic punk” band Le Tigre.* This is the part Jonah excerpts, but you should read the whole thing. It’s breathtaking:


First, a note on that last bit. The average landlord in Williamsburg is up to his eyeballs in “tattooed gender outlaws,” the difference is most of them work day jobs now. That neighborhood has become the Epcot Center of Scenester-dom and Samson’s arrived ten years too late to get in on the cheap rents. If she’s looking for bleeding-edge authenticity, she ought to try the South Bronx. Kevin Williamson will be glad to give her a tour.

Second, that bolded paragraph is enlightening, isn’t it? It makes me think of what Derb pointed out yesterday — the inane fantasy that “everybody [can and] will have everything” is eternally recurring, and at least as old as Aristophanes. The great, and probably terminal, flaw of the Left’s various grievance-group “isms” is that they implicitly rely on a world in which trade-offs have been abolished. It isn’t just that Samson should be free to move to New York and consecrate herself to her “art.” It’s that she should be free to do that while enjoying all the benefits of her choice and suffering none of the consequences. What she wants is not the freedom to choose but the freedom from having to choose.

What sort of worldview makes this fantasy conceivable? Well, if I had to pick just one French term of art popularized by a 19th-century German philologist to describe the Occupy Wall Street set and its attendants, it would be Nietzsche’s Ressentiment. Why does good old English “resentment” not suffice? Why is the extra ‘s’ and fancy French pronunciation required? Well, resentment is about begrudging the success of your betters as a way to avoid reflection on your own failures. The Nietzsche scholar Robert Solomon described resentment as an “impotence self-righteousness” directed at your superiors, and contrasted it with anger (directed at your equals) and contempt (directed at your inferiors). But ressentiment is what happens when you take that impotent self-righteousness and define a whole morality of good and evil in terms of it, build a whole belief system out of it, build an ideology, a political movement — an occupation.

Nietzsche’s work is highly problematic, and has of course been misappropriated and abused for a hundred years, but I think he got this much right on. He was also correct to point out that out that the leaders of men, the successful few — you might even call them the one percent — are too busy acting, doing, and accomplishing to complain about their “emotional crises.” Contrast with the likes of Samson, who in a stream of consciousness puts all her resentment on paper — writes it all down for the world to see — drawing a line — a squiggly, irrational line, but a line nonetheless — from her insecurity about not being able to make coffee or wait tables or draw a steady paycheck, to the demonization of Wall Street. Seriously, the first paragraph of her piece is all about how ill-equipped and incompetent she is (I didn’t say it, she did!) and the clarion cry at the end is that all this constitutes “Another reason to come together. Another reason to occupy Wall Street. Another reason for change.”

If this is how the other 99 percent think — or rather, don’t — we’re done for.

Excellent, excellent post.

Well not everyone is smart enough to avoid those pitfalls. With some intelligent regulation those examples you gave could be mitigated a bit.

This in my view should be the role of government - not to free people from the consequences of their own actions or to support them while they "do their thing", but to make sure that people are abiding by the law and to smooth out the natural business cycle by knocking the tops off the peaks to keep the troughs from being so steep and deep. Government needs to interfere as little as possible, but it does have a place in preventing practices which may be profitable short term, but damage the country long term.

Unfortunately government tends to worsen the problems. Want to lay off your expensive American workers and replace them with some cheap Mexican or Chinese workers? Here, have some of their tax money so it isn't so painful on you to do it.

 

[werepossum]

By the way, Chattanooga is going to have its own "Occupy Wall Street" protest. Lady on the news says they are going to have a listing of grievances, then they will "democratically determine" what things to protest.

Anyone who believes these are anything more than the typical left wing attack on America and capitalism is either very naive or fundamentally dishonest.

 

[spidey07]

By the way, Chattanooga is going to have its own "Occupy Wall Street" protest. Lady on the news says they are going to have a listing of grievances, then they will "democratically determine" what things to protest.

Anyone who believes these are anything more than the typical left wing attack on America and capitalism is either very naive or fundamentally dishonest.

No, no, no, it's obvious you don't understand what they're protesting then!

Ok, so what are you protesting then?

Hey man, like, man, we're protesting, the man...man. He's got more money than I do and that's not FAIR.

 

[Saint Nick]

I passed the protests a few times. Seems like this is the crowd:

1. Hipsters rabble rousing for the sake of rabble rousing.
2. Slackers looking for someone to blame for their situation.
3. Hipsters looking to hook up with other hipsters. It's practically a nightclub out there.
4. Random homeless people / hobos who look like they have nothing better to do so they joined the crowd.

There's not even a cohesive message. Something like, "We can't get a high paying job so fuck Wall Street." WTH?

More like, we can't get high while on the job so fuck Wall Street.

 

[IceBergSLiM]

Because you're a moron. Apple doesn't make anything here. They shipped American manufacturing jobs to China so they could increase their profit margins. This is the exact type of thing these protesters are protesting. They had Steve Jobs taking a 1 dollar salary and try to make it look like he's doing a good thing, LOL, fool was just trying to avoid taxes. Please Apple not "evil". They're no more or less evil than any other giant corporation. They patent troll, they use bullying tactics to try and shut down competition. They are an "evil" corporation.


Your problem and the problem of these protesters is your target is to narrow, you're all cogs in this giant machine pushing exactly the right buttons they want you to. You set arbitrary lines of "good" and "evil", playing into the same game they had you going with R and Ds, and before that commies, etc etc. The first person to call me an Apple basher in this thread, will just prove my point.

you don't have to lecture me, I was not writing in first person. Your point about being too narrow in their target is just a matter of how far down the rabbit hole do you really want to go with their message. Its better to probably stick to what everyone can see and relate to...what is 'tangible'. Its hard to rally people around poor sweatshop workers 10k miles away.

 

[dwell]

Like so many teenagers, I believed in the “American Dream,” that I could move to New York from the Midwest and become an artist. I would achieve both fame and success, and I would never have to think about money. The first half was true. I made art and lived activism, and I achieved amazing amounts of success that I feel incredibly proud of. The second half, not so much. I have been able to live well, eat well, invest in my arts and make my own schedule, but I forgot to save money and think about my future.

What part of "starving artist" did she not understand when signing up? Plus, the music industry? Really? The industry that has imploded over the last decade?

 

[IceBergSLiM]

What part of "starving artist" did she not understand when signing up? Plus, the music industry? Really? The industry that has imploded over the last decade?

Seriously what an idiot. I wanted to play first base for the Yankees when I was 10. That didn't work out so I work a normal job and I'm not trying to find someone to pay me to play baseball, instead I settle for an adult kickball league on Sundays. Lol.

 

[senseamp]

It's hilarious watching the oligarchy pit Occupy Wall St and Tea Party against each other. Divide and conquer, keep the plebeians in check.

 

[Krioni]

I really can't dedicate the time to read through all of these responses (have a job to do and kids to raise), so I want to ask one simple question....

Will you please distinctly describe for/against what are the people protesting?

Thanks.

 

[Nintendesert]

I really can't dedicate the time to read through all of these responses (have a job to do and kids to raise), so I want to ask one simple question....

Will you please distinctly describe for/against what are the people protesting?

Thanks.

Who the fuck knows. I've been asking that question numerous times and have yet to get a straight concise answer.

 

[IceBergSLiM]

Who the fuck knows. I've been asking that question numerous times and have yet to get a straight concise answer.

This is the best most focused rant I've heard:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQow0Fhua1A

Topics covered:

monetary policy
foreign policy
manufacturing policy
Smaller govt. - States rights

 

[werepossum]

It's hilarious watching the oligarchy pit Occupy Wall St and Tea Party against each other. Divide and conquer, keep the plebeians in check.

Occupy Wall St and Tea Party are natural opponents. The latter is fighting the growth of government and government spending, while the former wants to end capitalism and put government over literally everything.

I really can't dedicate the time to read through all of these responses (have a job to do and kids to raise), so I want to ask one simple question....

Will you please distinctly describe for/against what are the people protesting?

Thanks.

No one can do that. If they once had a unifying theme, it's long ago been swamped under the weight of every far left cause. Spidey's joke response to me is funny because of its truth - ask a dozen different little subgroups and you'll likely get a dozen different grievances and demands, with the only underlying factors being they are all far left, they all demand money from someone else via the government, and they all complain about things/Wall Street/capitalism/life being unfair. Personally I'd say a performance artist or sucky musician or "freelance lesbian journalist" being unable to afford a nice apartment is extremely fair, but they all seem to think that if things were only fair, then they would all be filthy rich and not washing dishes to afford a rathole shared with three roomies just to express themselves with their art.

 

[Genx87]

I love when people compare this movement to Arab Spring. Comparing nations of people raised under oppressive governments who are lashing out at their oppressors to some folks who made bad life decisions and are lashing out at those who made better ones is an enormous discredit to the oppressed Arabs.

The idiots in Madison did the same thing last Spring when they compared their struggle to the Arab Spring. Yeah, these are equal problems. One a population lives under the boot of dictators or monarchs. The other struggles on 105K in total benefits for working 9 months a year. Hard to imagine why the rest of the world views us with contempt.

 

[senseamp]

Occupy Wall St and Tea Party are natural opponents. The latter is fighting the growth of government and government spending, while the former wants to end capitalism and put government over literally everything.

On paper. In reality, they are natural allies, because both are against cronyist government in bed with Wall Street oligarchs.

 

[Krioni]

My take... yeah, I know, it's worth less than $0.02....
I came from a VERY poor family; we were once literally homeless. As a child, my family lived beside train tracks for a while and begged for help from acquaintances

I decided at a young age that I wanted a different life for myself...
I worked from age 11 in various jobs to make sure I had decent clothes to wear to school and supplies available so that I could take notes and make decent grades.

In college, I worked 3 jobs at a time to pay my way through school. I graduated with good grades, not the best in the school, but good.

After leaving school, I got a good job that paid decently. I have worked at the same company for the past 12 years, busting my tail to make sure that NOBODY ever had a complaint about my performance on the job.

Now, I've moved up and lead a team of 11 talented people. I make a great salary and I am valued by those with which I work.

To me, this is exactly how it should be.... those who work hard get rewarded/compensated for their hard work.

It seems that the people "protesting" are fighting against this same work ethic.

I'll admit, I have a small-ish view of the world (my own life), but I think it's probably more well rounded than that of some others. But, it seems if these people would spend less time bitching about their situation(s) and more time doing what it takes to change their situation(s) they would be far better off.

Again, I'm just a simple guy, and I know this is worth far less than $0.02.

Thanks for reading

 

[the DRIZZLE]

On paper. In reality, they are natural allies, because both are against cronyist government in bed with Wall Street oligarchs.

In many ways you are right. The issue is that they have vastly different solutions to the problem.

 

[Phokus]

Occupy Chicago has their shit together:

http://occupychi.org/2011/10/07/our-proposed-demands/#more-879

1.PASS HR 1489 REINSTATING GLASS-STEAGALL. – A depression era safeguard that separated the commercial lending and investment banking portions of banks. Its repeal in 1999 is considered the major cause of the global financial meltdown of 2008-2009.

2. REPEAL BUSH TAX CUTS FOR THE WEALTHY

3. FULLY INVESTIGATE AND PROSECUTE THE WALL STREET CRIMINALS who clearly broke the law and helped cause the 2008 financial crisis.

4.OVERTURN CITIZENS UNITED v. US. – A 2010 Supreme Court Decision which ruled that money is speech. Corporations, as legal persons, are now allowed to contribute unlimited amounts of money to campaigns in the exercise of free “speech.”

5. PASS THE BUFFET RULE ON FAIR TAXATION, CLOSE CORPORATE TAX LOOPHOLES, PROHIBIT HIDING FUNDS OFFSHORE.

6. GIVE THE SEC STRICTER REGULATORY POWER, STRENGTHEN THE CONSUMER PROTECTION BUREAU, AND PROVIDE ASSISTANCE FOR OWNERS OF FORECLOSED MORTGAGES WHO WERE VICTIMS OF PREDATORY LENDING.

7.TAKE STEPS TO LIMIT THE INFLUENCE OF LOBBYISTS AND ELIMINATE THE PRACTICE OF LOBBYISTS WRITING LEGISLATION.

8. ELIMINATE RIGHT OF FORMER GOVERNMENT REGULATORS TO WORK FOR CORPORATIONS OR INDUSTRIES THEY ONCE REGULATED.

9. ELIMINATE CORPORATE PERSONHOOD.

10. INSIST THE FEC STAND UP FOR THE PUBLIC INTEREST IN REGULATING PRIVATE USE OF PUBLIC AIRWAVES to help ensure that political candidates ARE GIVEN EQUAL TIME for free at reasonable intervals during campaign season.

11. REFORM CAMPAIGN FINANCE WITH THE PASSAGE OF THE FAIR ELECTIONS NOW ACT (S.750, H.R. 1404).

12. FORGIVE STUDENT DEBT – The same institutions that gave almost $2T in bailouts and then extended $16T of loans at little to no interest for banks can surely afford to forgive the $946B of student debt currently held. Not only does this favor the 99% over the 1%, it has the practical effect of more citizens spending money on actual goods, not paying down interest.

 

[Phokus]

I love when people compare this movement to Arab Spring. Comparing nations of people raised under oppressive governments who are lashing out at their oppressors to some folks who made bad life decisions and are lashing out at those who made better ones is an enormous discredit to the oppressed Arabs.

I'll remember this post the next time some rightwing idiot cries about how 'oppressive' the government is for raising their taxes, taking away their guns, letting the ACLU destroy Christianity, letting 'activist' judges murder millions of unborn babies, etc. etc. etc.

 

[Fern]

Occupy Chicago has their shit together:

-snip-

4.OVERTURN CITIZENS UNITED v. US. – A 2010 Supreme Court Decision which ruled that money is speech. Corporations, as legal persons, are now allowed to contribute unlimited amounts of money to campaigns in the exercise of free “speech.”

Citizens United does NOT allow corporations "to contribute unlimited amounts of money to campaigns". That's a false statement.

5. PASS THE BUFFET RULE ON FAIR TAXATION, CLOSE CORPORATE TAX LOOPHOLES, PROHIBIT HIDING FUNDS OFFSHORE.

There is no "HIDING FUNDS OFFSHORE" allowed. That is already prohibited, and a high priority, in fact I believe the highest priority, of the IRS at this time.

But I'll give them credit for at least articulating some more-or-less cogent stuff. Much better than what I've generally seen so far.

Fern

 

[Phokus]

Excellent, excellent post.

Shit post by shit poster. Notice he picks out what he thinks is the 'worst' example of the OWS movement to make a point. Not everyone has the same life experience. There was a point in time in this country when you didn't even need a college degree to get a decent middle class job. The older workers at my workplace always marveled at how pretty much anyone in a white collar job has a college degree these days. Back in there day, college degrees were much rarer and wasn't really necessary to get a good job. It blows me away that you idiots don't give a shit that the middle class has shrunken and now everyone, regardless of merit, has to fight for scraps.

For those of you rightwingers boasting about how you 'made' it, remember, there are quite a few of you who do a 180 once you get screwed over by the system. I know quite a few conservatives at my job who got laid off who were quite humbled when it was their turned to get ass fucked by the system.