Occupy Wall Street better defend its identity

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bookitty said:
Fascinating and well written. Worth taking the risk of answering honestly, instead protectively. Please keep in mind that I am only focusing on what I see as problems, because my positive views are already well known. This does not mean that I am negating any previous view, only that it is complex and I am exploring another side.

1) The 99% - I could fill a book with my feelings about this. My biggest problem is that it focuses on people, not corporations. Sure, to a liberal like myself, the Koch Brothers are an easy symbol. But it's their corporate, not personal power that makes them figureheads. (I also think the psychology of it is wrong. People admire the exceptional, even to some extent the exceptionally bad. Pointing out just how exceptional is only going to make them seem deserving of recognition.)

2) That is the most muddled message. My take? It is not specific individuals who are the problem, it is an environment which allows corporations to be responsible only to their shareholders creating a system of privatized gains and socialized losses. I personally would prefer that it be framed in those terms.

3) Can we please just drop party-lines and come together to muzzle Michael Moore? A nouveau riche loud mouth professing disingenuous empathy with the common man in order to feed his massive narcissism is not my idea of a spokesperson.

Addressing the symptoms is an easy way to explain that there is an illness. No there should not be an exclusive focus on any one symptom. And yet for many people that symptom (unemployment, stagnant wages, loss of equity, insane cost of higher education) is the reason they are protesting. They are being directly affected. Because they are fallible humans, these negative affects have lead to a bit of paranoia or even conspiracy theory-type thinking. Mostly because finance issues & regulation are incredibly complex.

4) Some of the core issues addressed by the tea party share a common root with OWS but you are wrong in thinking that that OWS wants to put forth a candidate. Although many individual people within OWS support specific politicians (Elizabeth Warren, for example) the OWS movement does not want to put a specific face to their movement. It would sort of defeat the purpose.

5) Whether or not the economy recovers, the issue of corporate influence must be addressed. I personally think that we can not have a complete recovery without it. Even if that's not the case, I seriously doubt that more supply-side economics will be the cure. You are also relying on the fallacy that OWS is primarily made up of the unemployed. That is not the case.

I would love to go into this more but I'm in retail and this time of year is crazy-busy. I'll try to drop by on breaks. Please don't take silence as disinterest.
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I'd actually revised this later to omit #4. It's apparent to me now that the Occupy people have no interest in making a political statement the way the Tea Party did.

I think it's a mistake to appeal to the public on the basis of income inequality but to really mean something else. Income inequality is a tangible that a lot of people can relate to because almost everyone gets a regular paycheque and buys goods and services.

As a Canadian essentially doing an American's work, the part of the Occupy movement that scares the crap out of me is the anti-foreign, anti-outsourcing, and anti-free-trade aspects of it. That kind of talk has even been coming from US presidential candidates, who often talk about erecting punitive tariffs to "protect" American jobs. It's coming from both Democrats and Republicans too. (Mind you, they usually mention China but everyone's in the way of the tariff shotgun.)

American voters and decision-makers have some tough options to weigh and most of these are way beyond things like a bank bailout or Citizens United. Those issues are essentially yesterday's news.

Something as simple as a reduction of unemployment by as little as one per cent to an acceptable level might get everyone's focus back on the meaningful issues. Think of it as a huge HR "bailout" and run the thing for about a year and see how it works. It could have a training component (although "free" training tends to have a high dropout rate).

I'll even buy more US bonds for my RRSP to help finance it.
 
Goldman Sachs conquers Europe

"Simon Johnson, the former International Monetary Fund economist, in his book 13 Bankers, argued that Goldman Sachs and the other large banks had become so close to government in the run-up to the financial crisis that the US was effectively an oligarchy. At least European politicians aren't "bought and paid for" by corporations, as in the US, he says. "Instead what you have in Europe is a shared world-view among the policy elite and the bankers, a shared set of goals and mutual reinforcement of illusions."

This is The Goldman Sachs Project. Put simply, it is to hug governments close. Every business wants to advance its interests with the regulators that can stymie them and the politicians who can give them a tax break, but this is no mere lobbying effort. Goldman is there to provide advice for governments and to provide financing, to send its people into public service and to dangle lucrative jobs in front of people coming out of government. The Project is to create such a deep exchange of people and ideas and money that it is impossible to tell the difference between the public interest and the Goldman Sachs interest."
 
applecorped said:
That was a good response.
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He was on the radio this morning. I can't remember his exact words, but he basically said, "I could get out the zip cuffs, but then someone would start yelling about hurting their back and someone else would shout 'Police Brutality'. It's easier to let them freeze, get bored and go home."

The above has not been enhanced for humorous purposes. That's more or less what the man said, and using mostly the same words. I'm burning my N.W.A. "**** Tha Police" t-shirt as we speak.
 
Howie Felterbush said:
He was on the radio this morning. I can't remember his exact words, but he basically said, "I could get out the zip cuffs, but then someone would start yelling about hurting their back and someone else would shout 'Police Brutality'. It's easier to let them freeze, get bored and go home."

The above has not been enhanced for humorous purposes. That's more or less what the man said, and using mostly the same words. I'm burning my N.W.A. "**** Tha Police" t-shirt as we speak.
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I also liked his comment "I'm not going to fulfill their martyrdom fantasies". Spot on.
 
"George Orwell wrote that all tyrannies rule through fraud and force, but that once the fraud is exposed they must rely exclusively on force. We have now entered the era of naked force. The vast million-person bureaucracy of the internal security and surveillance state will not be used to stop terrorism but to try and stop us."

'This Is What Revolution Looks Like'
 
JihadJane said:
"George Orwell wrote that all tyrannies rule through fraud and force, but that once the fraud is exposed they must rely exclusively on force. We have now entered the era of naked force. The vast million-person bureaucracy of the internal security and surveillance state will not be used to stop terrorism but to try and stop us."

'This Is What Revolution Looks Like'
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It's like seeing George Orwell's Animal Farm in action
 
JihadJane said:
"George Orwell wrote that all tyrannies rule through fraud and force, but that once the fraud is exposed they must rely exclusively on force. We have now entered the era of naked force. The vast million-person bureaucracy of the internal security and surveillance state will not be used to stop terrorism but to try and stop us."

'This Is What Revolution Looks Like'
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What a delusional imbecile. Friend of yours?
 
JihadJane said:
"George Orwell wrote that all tyrannies rule through fraud and force, but that once the fraud is exposed they must rely exclusively on force. We have now entered the era of naked force. The vast million-person bureaucracy of the internal security and surveillance state will not be used to stop terrorism but to try and stop us."

'This Is What Revolution Looks Like'
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You do realize of course that 99.9999999% of the population isn't protesting and camping out in tents.
 
bikerdruid said:
just because we are not camped out in a park, does not mean we do not care.
this movement has opened the eyes of many millions.
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Has it? Around here, people seem to think and believe the same things they always did. I haven't seen any change from you, for example.

if you are not pissed off, you are not paying attention,.
abysmally far right-wing sheeple are sooo bizarre.
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I thought one of the accusations against the Tea Party was that it was just a bunch of angry people.
 
Howie Felterbush said:
He was on the radio this morning. I can't remember his exact words, but he basically said, "I could get out the zip cuffs, but then someone would start yelling about hurting their back and someone else would shout 'Police Brutality'. It's easier to let them freeze, get bored and go home."

The above has not been enhanced for humorous purposes. That's more or less what the man said, and using mostly the same words. I'm burning my N.W.A. "**** Tha Police" t-shirt as we speak.
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**** Tha O.W.S.
 
Popular Hawaiian musician Makana sung this song, We Are the Many, for President Obama, Chinese leader Hu Jintao of China, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, and more than a dozen other heads of state as part of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation gala in Hawaii, for 45 minutes:

"We Occupy [Until] You Do the Bidding of the Many, Not the Few”



Great song, guaranteed to make your heart glow with revolutionary fervor!
 
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