Occupy Wall Street better defend its identity

[Virus]

What a bunch of boring old farts!

"Every generation needs a new revolution." -Thomas Jefferson

The system is collapsing. What do you expect to happen on the streets?

What do you propose as an alternative?

 

[Drachasor]

I don't think this will amount to a positive impact on the political process. Things are too polarized. Like the Tea Party, the initial rage would probably get focused by one group and others will lose interest. Net result is no meaningful change or worse (like the Tea Party) negative change.

The rage is legitimate, but I think the people involved are too small in number. We'd need much, much larger protests involving tons of people across the political spectrum. Certainly the political situation from both parties justifies a lot of anger, but I don't see such a protest happening anytime soon. I don't think we're likely to see much change for a long time.

 

[stokes234]

If you posted an article likely someone either went to jail or is on trial. The corruption I pointed out is all nice and legal, which makes it far more insidious.


Did the banker suffer no consequences?

Nope, he got caught. But not every banker that loses huge amounts of money suffers legal repercussions - in fact, there's a protest that the title of this thread is about that appears to be partly concerned with the complete lack of accountability for the bankers that stood watch over a huge recession. And frankly, when $2 billion goes missing i'm not so sure that one guy getting arrested is enough to wipe the slate clean.

I just showed you how irresponsible public union contracts have bankrupted my state, all nice and legal.

No, you showed that there were a few pension contracts in the hundreds of thousands. You didn't show that the average pension was out of whack, you didn't show what else money was being spent on, you didn't make a convincing argument that tax was previously fair, you didn't attempt to factor in whether or not your state tax levels were being undercut by other states, or anything along those lines. You just pointed at union pensions and said "that's the reason". It's not that simple.

And most of the people responsible are long since out of office or even dead, there's no one to hold accountable for the mess they've made. That's the problem with making deals they know are bad, but the bad things don't happen for 20-30 years. And the good things (getting re-elected, no labor strife) happen right away.

It's an inherently bad system.

To a certain extent, that sounds like a bad aspect of a system, yes. But it doesn't take into account the good done by the system - ensuring of decent pay standards, workplace safety, prevention of unfair dismissal etc. And you can't place all the blame on poor decisions made for future populations by current governors who don't care about the state after their term is up at the feet of the unions - some of the blame lies with the governors themselves. And if they're losing votes as a result of opposing the unions on a deal they see as bad and that the voters would see as bad if they understood it, then some of the blame lies with the voters.

You've highlighted a few cases of downright stupid corruption, and tried to extrapolate that to mean that all public unions do more bad than good, and that they are the primary reason for the state deficit in your state, and as a result they shouldn't be involved in a protest that on paper should coincide quite strongly with the standard political views of their membership. You've not made a very convincing argument as of yet.

 

[Drachasor]

A balancing force.. against the pillars of partisan establishment supporting the republicans. I agree.

Unions balance against managerial and other power in the workplace. Do we need to revisit the 19th and early 20th Centuries?

If the Republicans don't give a dang about that, then that's why the Unions don't favor them. Certainly looks like they are good at working more in favor of Corporate interests.

I'm sure most of the union's members do have a negative attitude toward Wall Street, damn near everyone does. The organization itself though is a powerhouse of two-party politics.. I don't have a problem with them "being there" I'm just saying that if this movement wants to remain an independent non-partisan political movement they had better not become too entangled.. Which could be difficult to do considering the sheer amount of resources the unions have available compared to the OWS protesters.

You takes your political allies wheres yous can gets them.

My warning against becoming too involved with powerful political factions would still apply to the private unions at the OWS protests, though I have no objection to their collective bargaining or strikes.

Right, so Unions shouldn't work with people they agree with. Those people shouldn't work with Unions they agree with. That doesn't seem to make a lot of sense.

The problem isn't that public servants have a union, it's that they have collective bargaining and in some cases the power to strike.

Oh, so what do you suggest their recourse should be if the Government doesn't treat them well and they have no power? If you don't have collective bargaining or the power to strike, then what's the point of a union?

Here's FDR's take:

http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=15445#axzz1a4B0f1DA

And I disagree. I don't see how any of that necessarily protects government workers from unfair working conditions, bad training, or the like. They have a right to protest that.

Certainly, in some cases full-on striking can't be allowed. Police, firefighters, and others that people depend on to maintain order and save lives have to do their job. There's no reason not to allow collective bargaining or the like, however.

I suppose you might be able to get around that by having laws allowing government employees to sue the government if something bad is going on. That has its own problems, however.

 

[Childlike Empress]

More interviews with participants including some older union folks here and here:

Episode #392 Citizen Radio joins Majority Report's Sam Seder (@samseder) and Naomi Klein (@naomiaklein) at Occupy Wall Street to talk about the occupation, the establishment media's failure to cover the movement, and what the protesters are doing right.

 

[Brainster]

A suggested chant:

"What do we want?"
"We don't know!"
"When do we want it?"
"Stop asking us questions!"

 

[JihadJane]

A suggested chant:

"What do we want?"
"We don't know!"
"When do we want it?"
"Stop asking us questions!"

Nice, reactionary, fart poetry.



I asked a question, above:

The system is collapsing. What do you expect to happen on the streets?

Have you got an answer, Brainster?

 

[JihadJane]

Good overview of the movement and its context:

'Hedges: No way in US system to vote against banks':

 

[Childlike Empress]

Love it.

Like Naomi Klein said in the recording linked above - while the corporate media in the US is pretending to wonder what this is about, the rest of the world is wondering why it took so long.

 

[Neally]

I would rather have the unions in place to watch out for the interests of the workers and the people they are there to serve.

They serve their own selfish interests, no matter who it kills. Like the snow plowers in NY or the protesters in Greece that burned the bank down with employees inside and prevented fire trucks from responding.

 

[Brainster]

Nice, reactionary, fart poetry.



I asked a question, above:



Have you got an answer, Brainster?

What do I expect to happen? I expect the Democrats to lose the next election. Nothing much more dramatic than that.

 

[WildCat]

Nope, he got caught. But not every banker that loses huge amounts of money suffers legal repercussions - in fact, there's a protest that the title of this thread is about that appears to be partly concerned with the complete lack of accountability for the bankers that stood watch over a huge recession. And frankly, when $2 billion goes missing i'm not so sure that one guy getting arrested is enough to wipe the slate clean.

So what do you want? Another law making it illegal to break the first law broken?

No, you showed that there were a few pension contracts in the hundreds of thousands. You didn't show that the average pension was out of whack, you didn't show what else money was being spent on, you didn't make a convincing argument that tax was previously fair, you didn't attempt to factor in whether or not your state tax levels were being undercut by other states, or anything along those lines. You just pointed at union pensions and said "that's the reason". It's not that simple.

I showed you that Illinois public pensions are underfunded by $80 billion, and it has bankrupted our state. If you include county and municipal public pensions the figure is nearly double that, $150 billion or so.

To a certain extent, that sounds like a bad aspect of a system, yes.

Doesn't just sound like it, it is a bad system. I'd say the odds of underfunding such a system approach 100%.

But it doesn't take into account the good done by the system - ensuring of decent pay standards, workplace safety, prevention of unfair dismissal etc.

Oh yeash, government work is frought with hazards. It was all sweatshops before collective bargaining! "Unfair dismissal", that's a good one! I don'f know what a unionized employee has to do to get fired. 25% of the CTA workforce doesn't show up on Monday or Friday. 30% of garbage collectors in Chicago don't show up on any given day. The absentee rate is 25% for toll collectorsw. Those aren't numbers of a workforce that thinks there's even a remote possiblity of getting fired.

And while government employees get generous retirement benefits and 100% free healthcare (even after becoming eligible for Medicare) the 99% of Illinoisans who aren't public employees get to pay for them. Grandma gets evicted from her nursing home, the poor get fewer services, state vendors don't get paid for 1-2 years after fulfilling their contracts (and many have gone bust waiting to get paid), roads don't get repaired, schools don't get repaired. All because the unions get theirs first, the rest of us have to get by on the scraps.

Did you know Chicago police torturer Jon Burge still collects a $60,000 pension? Apparently the police review board decided that the torturing of suspects wasn't done in the scope of his employment.

And you can't place all the blame on poor decisions made for future populations by current governors who don't care about the state after their term is up at the feet of the unions - some of the blame lies with the governors themselves.

Quinn got elected by 5,000 votes, the difference was his union support. And frankly, no, I don't think he cares at all about the financial condition of the state. It's a running joke here that soon we won't have any public employees in Illinois, because 100% of our tax revenue will be going to pensions and health care to the retired employees. It's not too far off actually, right now 17% of the Illinois budget goes to retirement benefits of public employees. This number will only go up. Businesses are fleeing the state, because they know taxes will rise to pay for this largesse.

And if they're losing votes as a result of opposing the unions on a deal they see as bad and that the voters would see as bad if they understood it, then some of the blame lies with the voters.

Party bosses pick candidates in Illinois, not voters. Districts are gerrymandered so incumbents can't lose. And we just passed "reforms" which limited contributions to political campaigns by individuals, but contributons by political parties remains unlimited. This put even more power into the hands of party officials, and voters have even less influence. Politicians are more loyal to the party bosses than to the voters. Government of, for, and by politicians.

You've highlighted a few cases of downright stupid corruption, and tried to extrapolate that to mean that all public unions do more bad than good, and that they are the primary reason for the state deficit in your state, and as a result they shouldn't be involved in a protest that on paper should coincide quite strongly with the standard political views of their membership. You've not made a very convincing argument as of yet.

Public unions have done far more harm to Illinois than any banker ever did. Illinois was going broke even before the recession hit. The recession just pushed forward the inevitable by a few years, the damage was already done.

 

[Brainster]

The swooning over the protestors by the glitterati continues:

The others in the group respond by raising their hands and wiggling their fingers. This is a silent cheer, and I cannot tell you how well it works. You can also boo silently by pointing your fingers down and wiggling them. Why have they never used this in the presidential debates? Rick Perry could be standing there explaining his immigration policy while Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum point to the floor and wiggle like crazy. So much more civilized. Once again, youth has shown us the way.

 

[Stout]

 

[Stout]

So how are we doing for numbers here anyways ?

Is the protest movement "the 99%" even coming close to making up 1% of the population ? It's not looking so good for occupy Vancouver, according to a news report I just read, they're only expecting 2000 people tomorrow, and that's opening day. So 2000 people out of a (greater Vancouver) population of 2 million works out to.

One tenth of 1 percent.

I have a suggestion for a demand. Prohibit credit companies from punishing merchants who offer a percentage off for cash discount. Seems t me most of the whining about debt loads centers around credit cards as much as student loans and this will give people incentive to not simply slap it on the card but to think about their buying habits on the way to the bank machine.

We'll call it Stout's Law, the saving you from yourself law.

 

[WildCat]

So how are we doing for numbers here anyways ?

Is the protest movement "the 99%" even coming close to making up 1% of the population ? It's not looking so good for occupy Vancouver, according to a news report I just read, they're only expecting 2000 people tomorrow, and that's opening day.

So long as their hockey team wins everything will be OK.

 

[Stout]

So long as their hockey team wins everything will be OK.

Now there's a corporation that will never get protested. even if they are selling sweatshop made t-shirts, beg your pardon, jerseys, at $125 a pop.

 

[stokes234]

So what do you want? Another law making it illegal to break the first law broken?

I didn't intend to debate this, I was merely making a side point, but honestly i'd rather the system was changed so that individuals working for banks weren't making decisions worth billions with other people's money.

I showed you that Illinois public pensions are underfunded by $80 billion, and it has bankrupted our state. If you include county and municipal public pensions the figure is nearly double that, $150 billion or so.

No, you didn't. You linked me to some articles (one of which says "read the other editorial" on a page with about 50 links) saying that illinois was tens of billions in debt and had tens of billions of pensions obligations (doesn't specify over how many years those will be paid out), and then added the figures in yourself. You then peppered this with a few examples, and left completely alone the issue of how much an average pension was or anything along those lines.

I'm not purely partisan, if you can show me that average pensions in illinois are higher than elsewhere, or higher than can be argued fair or neccessary, i'll concede the point (that collective bargaining for pensions is badly handled in some situations, not that public sector unions are inherently a bad idea). But you haven't done that yet.

Doesn't just sound like it, it is a bad system. I'd say the odds of underfunding such a system approach 100%.

Then look around the world at the public pension funds that are being handled well. This Grauniad page discusses future funding for UK public sector pensions - as a percentage of GDP, they are projected to fall, and that's before the tory contribution hikes are implemented (though I think after their retirement age hikes - bit cloudy). The Norwegian Pension Fund is doing pretty well too.

Oh yeash, government work is frought with hazards. It was all sweatshops before collective bargaining! "Unfair dismissal", that's a good one! I don'f know what a unionized employee has to do to get fired. 25% of the CTA workforce doesn't show up on Monday or Friday. 30% of garbage collectors in Chicago don't show up on any given day. The absentee rate is 25% for toll collectorsw. Those aren't numbers of a workforce that thinks there's even a remote possiblity of getting fired.

I'm not calling you a liar, but you can see why I might have trouble taking these statistics at face value. Can you back them up?

And while government employees get generous retirement benefits and 100% free healthcare (even after becoming eligible for Medicare)

If they're taking the free healthcare, they're saving money by not using the state healthcare at the same time. I know private healthcare is expensive, but surely its not that much more expensive that switching to it for 1% of the population would bankrupt the state.

the 99% of Illinoisans who aren't public employees get to pay for them. Grandma gets evicted from her nursing home, the poor get fewer services, state vendors don't get paid for 1-2 years after fulfilling their contracts (and many have gone bust waiting to get paid), roads don't get repaired, schools don't get repaired. All because the unions get theirs first, the rest of us have to get by on the scraps.

If public sector workers make up 1% of the population, exactly how much are you paying them in order to bankrupt the state? 50 times average wage?

Did you know Chicago police torturer Jon Burge still collects a $60,000 pension? Apparently the police review board decided that the torturing of suspects wasn't done in the scope of his employment.

That seems like an example of american bureaucracy being stupid, rather than a point on a wide enough scale to be of significance.

Quinn got elected by 5,000 votes, the difference was his union support. And frankly, no, I don't think he cares at all about the financial condition of the state. It's a running joke here that soon we won't have any public employees in Illinois, because 100% of our tax revenue will be going to pensions and health care to the retired employees. It's not too far off actually, right now 17% of the Illinois budget goes to retirement benefits of public employees. This number will only go up. Businesses are fleeing the state, because they know taxes will rise to pay for this largesse.

Again, some sources would be nice, along with any kind of analysis of how much average public sector workers get as pensions, how long they worked, typical private sector pensions, anything like that. On its own, these statistics don't mean much.

Party bosses pick candidates in Illinois, not voters. Districts are gerrymandered so incumbents can't lose. And we just passed "reforms" which limited contributions to political campaigns by individuals, but contributons by political parties remains unlimited. This put even more power into the hands of party officials, and voters have even less influence. Politicians are more loyal to the party bosses than to the voters. Government of, for, and by politicians.

That's some screwed up democracy, but you can't blame all that on public sector unions. More like america needs to have a quiet word with itself about political corruption.

 

[Brainster]

NSFW:

Link

Somebody had the wrong meaning of the word "movement" in mind.

 

[Brainster]

The people's democracy inaction: