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Wall Street Protestors

Discussion in 'Sports and News' started by Boom_70, Oct 7, 2011.

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  1. The Big Ragu

    The Big Ragu Moderator Staff Member

    They didn't avert catastrophe. The whole "We saved the day," narrative is self-aggrandizing bullshit.

    What they did was create a prolonged mess -- and now find reasons to keep adding to the mess -- that is worse in scope (and growing) than anything we would have faced in one-off face the music in 2008.

    There was several trillion dollars of toxic debt sitting on various private balance sheets in 2008. There was a market that could have sorted out that debt at whatever cost, even if it was pennies on the dollar (and it was likely higher than that).

    Do you REALLY believe that the Federal Reserve just made it all magically disappear somehow and saved the day?

    Have you once since questioned what became of it, and what the consequences to our economy have been since then, and what the anchor to economic growth is going to be for years to come?

    They took a very bad private problem, made it an even worse public problem, and have tried to avoid facing it in so many different ways that they keep compounding it and making it into an even bigger problem than it was in the first place.

    And people seem so blithely unaware of it. Our horrible economy is a direct reflection of fiscal policy since 2008 (some related to the financial meltdown, but not all), and the monetary policy that has been used as a tool to try to inflate away the problems they keep creating.
     
  2. Boom_70

    Boom_70 Well-Known Member

    Glad to see celebrities joining the protestors.
    Tiger Woods locking arms with Jeff Pearlman. Sigourney Weaver
    in 2nd row.
    Sean Penn must be in transit.
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Dec 15, 2014
  3. CarltonBanks

    CarltonBanks New Member

    I think it was Krugman...maybe Mellon that said, "The best way to fix unemployment is to tear down corparations." These geniuses make so much sense.
     
  4. Azrael

    Azrael Well-Known Member

    Filthy hippies!
     
  5. vicd

    vicd Active Member

    Sean Penn is bringing Haitians so there can be some black people. And with the money they'll earn protesting, he's killing two birds with one stone.
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Dec 15, 2014
  6. Bob Cook

    Bob Cook Active Member

    Well put. The point of the protests is to put this question in people's minds: Is it good for the country to have 1 percent of the population controlling as much of the wealth -- and power -- as they do? (Power that's growing all the time, by the way.) And to put a focus on this point: That the economic elite drove this economy into a tree, got bailed out, left the rest of us to fight over the scraps, and still acts like they're so put-upon even though, really, they've never been held accountable for what they've done. That while most everyone else plays by the rules, the top 1 percent continue to bend them and rig the game in their favor.

    By using social media and street organizing, rather than concentrating a single, Koch Brothers-like sugar daddy to keep the movement going, Occupy Wall Street ends up being more organic, and makes a statement about people taking advantage of a new way of doing things, rather than relying on centralized systems (business and government) that seem utterly incapable of asking the main question and dealing with the situation in a meaningful way.

    Of course, with any protest movement, there are going to be some screwballs, but the protestors, for the most part, have kept things very respectful. In the main, the idea is not to engage police in a fight (though there have been acts of civil disobedience), because the police are allies, not foes -- they're not part of the 1 percent. Also -- and certainly they've learned this from the excesses of the Tea Party -- there are exhortations not to use profanity, and to have signs that focus on the problem. Hopefully the exhortations include checking spelling.

    This is a hearts-and-minds battle. And it's helped when you have douchebags in the Chicago Board of Trade who put up something like this in response:

    [​IMG]

    If you can't tell, that says, "We are the 1%."
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Dec 15, 2014
  7. Stitch

    Stitch Active Member

    You can see how the people in power in Chicago react to protests.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haymarket_affair
     
  8. The Big Ragu

    The Big Ragu Moderator Staff Member


    Your focus on that 1 percent. Look at the Forbes list of wealthiest Americans. You made a very general post and made some very general conclusions. Give me specifics. Which of these people "drove the economy into a tree," as you put it? Bill Gates, Warren Buffett. Larry Ellison, the Koch brothers, the Walton family, George Soros, Sheldon Adelson, Michael Bloomberg, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, John Paulson (actually foresaw the meltdown in 2008), Michael Dell, Steve Ballmer?

    Because those are the people we are talking about when we get into a small percentage of people with higher net worth than those same wealthiest people had say 30 years ago.

    It's true that we have a greater concentration of wealth at the top than we ever have. A few things that don't get discussed. That list is somewhat fluid. People move in and out, and more of the people on that list were self made than born insanely rich, defying the whole "rich get richer" thing that is always implied. In fact, some very not rich people have gotten insanely rich over the last 30 or 40 years.

    The other thing is that none of those people have driven our economy into a tree. Microsoft, Berkshire Hathaway, Oracle, Wal-Mart, Facebook, Dell Computers, etc. have all grown our economy, not driven it into a tree.
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Dec 15, 2014
  9. Greenhorn

    Greenhorn Active Member

    Austin had a local version yesterday:

    http://www.statesman.com/news/local/occupy-austin-protesters-air-grievances-without-drawing-police-1900452.html

    Some of the protests, both in NYC and Austin have a Ron Paul vibe which makes me feel iffy about that aspect of it.
     
  10. cranberry

    cranberry Well-Known Member

    It's pretty simple: We're finally reaching the conclusion that, no, we don't want a society in which so few control so much of the wealth. It's obscene to most of our core values that a tiny minority of people can sit on so much wealth while so many people unnecessarily suffer.

    I don't think anyone hates or begrudges Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, Michael Bloomberg, Jeff Bezos (OK maybe the Koch brothers and the Waltons) or any of the other captains of industry who have amassed such wealth; they just want a little more revenue sharing, especially given our debt crisis, which needs to be brought under control before we can have a humming, full-employment economy again.

    We've come more and more to resemble a plutocracy over the last 30 years and it's finally beginning to dawn on people.
     
  11. WTFünke

    WTFünke Member

    In case you can't make it out, this shows the evolution of four banks. In 1990, there were more than 35.

    I'm no economist, but I think less competition might be an issue here ...

    Here's a link if you want to see it better: http://i.imgur.com/9DQv5.jpg

    [​IMG]
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Dec 15, 2014
  12. terrier

    terrier Well-Known Member

    It's not just FNC trying to make Occupy Just. Go. Away.
    The fact that the International Superstar who just got the 8 p.m. CNN slot handed to her is engaged to a Citigroup exec has nothing to do with her attitude, of course.
    Between Erin and Maria Bartiromo's corporate jet rides with her Citigroup paramour, it makes you wonder if these CNBC "journalists" are just an upscale version of Tim McCarver on Derek Jeter.
     
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