Occupy Wall Street better defend its identity

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Emperor_Gestahl said:
Be careful of special interest groups hijacking the message. That's what happened to the Tea Party leading them to be co-opted into the Fox News GOP. Even if people show up who you agree with on some political issue, ask yourselves if that issue is actually related to what the protest is about. There will be, and probably already are, many factions who want nothing more than to turn the entire movement into a DNC fundraiser. Suddenly it will be about collective bargaining for teachers or something else that doesn't involve a corporation at all, let alone Wall Street. The partisans on both sides will try and expand their trenches such that your movement falls into them. Keep an eye out, don't be the next Tea Party.
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DNC fundraiser? Better to keep it a Marxist /Anarchist gabfest.
 
NWO Sentryman said:
Yeah, it's basically:

Phase 1: Protest Wall Street
Phase 2: ????
Phase 3: Revolution!

And a prediction of my own: this will have blown over by November 2011 at the earliest.
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They are all a bunch of sunshine revolutionaries.
 
leftysergeant said:
Capitalism is permissible in a rational society. The capitalists just have to know what their job is and do it. The dirtbags running the financial sector now have forgotten or don't care that they are supposed to be moving money to places where tangible products are produced.

The world lived quite well without capitalists before and can, for a brief period, do so again, if need be.

The unions are actually capable of running the factories, if it comes to that.

Half the suits have no idea what makes their products work any way.
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Lefty, keeping the 30s alive.
 
Malcolm Kirkpatrick said:
So, unions aren'tcapable of running the factories, then?

In any system, someone supplies tools (capital) and someone supplies skilled labor. Finance is a tool, and the skilled labor that wields it is called "management" and sometimes "the investor class". As the United Airlines dispute between the pilots' union and the machinists' union (the owners), on the one hand and the flight attendants' union, on the other, over the appropriate shares of UA revenues indicates, unionization does not confer any special wisdom regarding how to resolve the disputes over "just" compensation.

As an aside, I read that the "Occupy Wall Street" website has posted a recommendation against making lists of demands, after critics used one list to paint them as loons. Yah, they're morons. I reacll one demand: forgiveness of all debt. Personal, corporate, and sovereign. Wipe the slate clean and start from today. Well, who owns any tangible asset that's partially paid for, like a house with a thirty-year mortgage or a hospital's new emergency diesel-electric generator? Does "debt forgiveness" mean that corporations don't have to keep pension promises? Does forgiveness of sovereign debt mean that the US government gets to discount to zero its Social Security obligations? Morons.

The protestors are stupid frontmen for a union-orchestrated pressure play. It's extortion, behind the scenes. "Give us money and we'll call them off".
Just a guess.
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I don’t think the unions are behind this, just a few who want to get in on the action. Those pushing this has to be the Hard Left, envious of what the Tea Party did the last few years.
 
This just in

Day three of our local occupation and, of course, a day three video. Days one and two were pretty much about nothing but today's is all about chemtrails. Crowed has swelled though, we're up into the double digits now

So..where are the other 98.9779654 % ? It was a nice day out, saturday to boot.
 
Drysdale said:
This Wall Street protest just seems fishy.

Almost like they were called to protest by somebody/some entity and would be filled in on the details later.

Just really odd.
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They were all told to show-up and would be provided with free pizza.
 
respect, Taibbi does provide evidence/examples of complicity at the SEC, and explains precisely why bank talent would outclass SEC talent, not to mention those things aren't mutually exclusive so what you meant by "totally changes gears" is a mystery to me.

But whatever, perhaps some further blatant criminality with 0 indictments will change your mind.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-...rtels-admitted-in-wells-fargo-s-u-s-deal.html

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/b...t-to-settle-moneylaundering-case-1921918.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/28/business/28bank.html
 
More fraud for you too if you're among the apparent minority who still believes that fraud is a crime:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-...rned-of-mortgage-lapses-as-early-as-2006.html
During yesterday’s session, the panel was told Citigroup routinely bought mortgages that violated the bank’s own standards. Richard Bowen, former chief underwriter for Citigroup’s consumer-lending group, said he determined in mid- 2006 that more than 60 percent of mortgages bought from other firms and sold to investors such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were “defective.”
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Now tell me how it's not fraud if you were aware (they were) in 2006 that the majority of the mortgages you were selling violated your company's stated credit standards, but you went on offloading them for 2 more years while continuing to represent said make-believe credit standards.
 
Drachasor said:
Do we need to revisit the 19th and early 20th Centuries?
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You're thinking of private sector unions.

You takes your political allies wheres yous can gets them.
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Why didn't they all just go straight to the DNC then? Why waste all this time when the DNC already holds rallies and fundraisers they could attend? Glomming onto the first massive political organization that came along is more or less what the Tea Party did.

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.
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No to the first, yes to the second. The unions have every motive to be there, it's good strategy for both them and the democratic party. They've got republicans to defeat. The protesters however had better be perfectly comfortable becoming part of the DNC and therefore allied with Wall Street before they get too cozy with these partisans.

Oh, so what do you suggest their recourse should be if the Government doesn't treat them well and they have no power?
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If you read the FDR piece you'd understand that "the government" is in fact us. Also it's them. We're not talking about faceless unelected officials here, if the people feel that teachers or firemen or whoever is downtrodden it's quite simple to fix legislatively.

If you don't have collective bargaining or the power to strike, then what's the point of a union?
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Uh.. to advocate on behalf of the union's constituents? PAC money? Pretty much what they do now minus the collective bargaining. It's generally already illegal to strike, though that didn't stop some WI teachers (who ought be fired).

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.
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They should protest and advocate all they want, FDR said that was only natural. Not a rights issue, the 1st amendment has them covered.

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.
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If something "bad" is going on, that's the state legislature's fault. In other words, our fault.
 
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Not only perjury, but apparently even getting caught hasn't stopped them:

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/07/18/us-foreclosure-banks-idUSTRE76H5XX20110718

Documents and statements made to courts that are found to be false can amount to crimes under state and federal laws. Daniel Richman, a Columbia University law professor and former federal prosecutor, said such acts can be perjury, and preparing fraudulent documents can be prosecuted under federal mail and wire fraud statutes. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act makes it a crime punishable by up to 20 years in jail to file false documents in a bankruptcy case, including foreclosures.
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Emperor_Gestahl said:
respect, Taibbi does provide evidence/examples of complicity at the SEC, and explains precisely why bank talent would outclass SEC talent, not to mention those things aren't mutually exclusive so what you meant by "totally changes gears" is a mystery to me.
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The only "evidence" he provides are one sided anecdotes, hardly enough to secure a conviction, and considering that he seems to make no attempt at all to get the other sides of these stories, it looks like propaganda.

Emperor_Gestahl said:
But whatever, perhaps some further blatant criminality with 0 indictments will change your mind.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-...rtels-admitted-in-wells-fargo-s-u-s-deal.html

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/b...t-to-settle-moneylaundering-case-1921918.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/28/business/28bank.html
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So the Treasury, FBI, ATF, DEA, European banks and Warren Buffet are also in on the conspiracy? All we need is vague claims of a plot to take over the world and we will be in Alex Jones la la land.

You might want to read your articles again, they do mention some cases where charges were brought. But I suspect it is that big shot executives haven't been indicted that has you upset. Fining banks for such actions is one thing, bringing criminal charges against individual employees is much more difficult. To get a conviction, prosecutors would almost certainly have to prove that individuals were knowingly, not unwittingly, involved in money laundering. You might also want to consider that your articles mention changes that banks have made to make it more difficult to launder money through them.
 
Emperor_Gestahl said:
More fraud for you too if you're among the apparent minority who still believes that fraud is a crime:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-...rned-of-mortgage-lapses-as-early-as-2006.html


Now tell me how it's not fraud if you were aware (they were) in 2006 that the majority of the mortgages you were selling violated your company's stated credit standards, but you went on offloading them for 2 more years while continuing to represent said make-believe credit standards.
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Perhaps, more details are needed.
 
JihadJane said:
:confused:
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How were they advertised, packaged etc? What are these credit standards on? Lending or investing?

There are a lot of types of mortgages and investments based off of them, as well as differences between lending a person money and investing in an existing loan. It isn't made clear by that article what it means when it says that the mortgages violated the company's internal standards (which would not necessarily be fraud anyway). Are they loans that the company wouldn't have lent out themselves but was willing to invest in, and so on? A lot more information and clarification is needed to accurately comment on that passage in the article.
 
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