Wall Street Protestors

[CarltonBanks]

http://dailycaller.com/2011/10/06/organizer-admits-to-paying-occupy-dc-protesters-video/

I'm concerned you aren't a journalist because that article is as reliable as an ESPN story that uses "sources say".

Right, because the video with the man saying, "Some of them are volunteer and some of them aren't." And refusing to identify which ones he paid is unreliable. Who are you going to believe? The video or your lying eyes?

 

[The Big Ragu]

Those banks are in business to make money for their shareholders.

Then they need to stop telling us how it's vital that they be allowed to do what they want so that they can make loans to people.

It's selfish **** like this that pisses people off. Yes, banks have shareholders. But they also have customers. Once upon a time, those people were more than a source of revenue.

Banks are NOT just another corporation. They serve a vital, fundamental purpose in the economy, as they are fond of telling us about every 6.2 seconds. Therefore, they are and must be about more than just "making money for their shareholders."

If they don't want to put the interests of actual, real people somewhere on the totem pole, then we have every right to make them do it.
And if they still don't want to, then maybe it really is time for a new system.

I disagree with you. They are just corporations. That is all they are. Corporations beholden to their shareholders. The rest of it: The politicians pointing fingers at them; the rhetoric from them about regulation and how they'd loan if only. ... ; your posts about greed and selfishness, as subjective criteria as those are; it's just senseless noise. Bank of America doesn't owe me anything. And frankly, I am glad for that, because I don't think it is going to survive another year. At least I give it less than a 50/50 shot. Maybe this time around we don't get more special interest cronyism from our government, and we let BofA and Morgan Stanley and any others that don't have viable businesses to go by the wayside rather than handing out unfair favors that add to our debt. Banking can be a great business--if you have the ability to minimize risk and maximize profits. A lot of the largest banks in the world have failed miserably at the minimizing risk problem, whether it was CDOs on mortgages or exposure to sovereign debt that presupposed that the global economy would continue to expand infinitely.

There are plenty who can manage their risk better, and will do it better than the ones that have failed. We should just let it happen. The same way any business that mismanages itself goes out of business.

But this notion that any of these companies owes use anything? They are in business to earn a profit. And somehow, because of attitudes like the one you expressed in your post, they get put in the position of apologizing for trying to do it.

If they want to be seen as essential to the fabric of society, as I'm pretty sure they do, then they need to start acting like it.

If not, then why did we spend hundreds of billions to keep them afloat, and why are we spending billions more trying to bribe them to actually lend money to people?

What you say about corporations is true. Where we differ is that I see that as a fundamental problem. It's about more than the relentless, blood-sucking pursuit of profit for shareholders. Or at least it ought to be.

Ask Henry Paulson (former CEO of Goldman Sachs before he was Treasury Secretary) why the TARP program and those payouts were so damned important?

I will caution about the overgeneralization, though. Paulson put the heads of nine of the largest banks in a room, and used the full force of regulatory threat to force them to take that TARP money. The document that came out through the FOI showed that he put a very LARGE gun to their heads. A couple could really have used that money, and still didn't want it, because they feared the government control. About half of those banks didn't need any bailout to survive, most notably J.P. Morgan Chase.

Now look at the flip side if we didn't have that day when they were all summoned to their arm twisting ceremony. The weak banks would have gone out of business. The stronger ones (such as Goldman and J.P. Morgan) would have benefited from their demise. We'd all be in a better place probably today, as a result.

Instead, we rewarded mismanagement at the cost of billions that we are all on the hook for. Jamie Dimon -- whose job WAS AND IS to maximize profits -- should have been telling his board that the failures that would have occurred would be a great thing for J.P. Morgan Chase, because his company would have benefited from the failures of some of its competitors.

Instead, we had Hank Paulson, Ben Bernanke and Tim Geithner playing God, though, and Dimon couldn't look out for the best interests of his firm, because it would have meant the wrath of what those three could do to his company if he didn't play along with their scheme.

What are we left with today? Not a tale about how the whole TARP thing was thought up by a couple of unelected officials who forced it down our collective throats. We get, "Why did we spend hundreds of billions to keep them afloat, and why are we spending billions more trying to bribe them to actually lend money to people?"

Great question. Why did we?

 

[deskslave]

Because multiple massive bank failures are things that generally have a negative effect on, like, everything?

Three or four major banks fail, and people start assuming that all banks are in trouble. All of a sudden, they start pulling their money out of not only the big banks, but also the First Bank of Podunk. That in turn leads to trouble for First Bank of Podunk, which eventually leads to massive losses on deposit insurance and the like. Not to mention the original panic leads to the devaluation of the currency, which means our money is suddenly worthless and our economy is paralyzed.

And of course, when the depositors leave, with them goes the ability to make loans. Which is, again, not exactly a good thing.

But, ya know, trying to prevent that DID deprive JPMorgan Chase of a chance to make more money. So that was unfortunate. I mean, it ONLY made $5.4 billion last quarter.

 

[Azrael]

Privatize profit. Socialize loss.

 

[Boom_70]

Save us, Tucker Carlson!

How Alinsky-esque of you!
I want to know where the black people are in this "protest." We heard about how "white" the Tea Parties are, how about the Occupy Wall Street protesters? Pretty Wonder Bread from the looks of it.
(Will now wait while Az scours the Interwebs to find a picture or two of black protesters...should be a hoot).

I saw that story about Michelle Malkin on FOX too. I counted at least 6 black people in the photo they used. But I'm sure those are the only six in the thousands that are marching.

I always knew that John Belushi was still alive.

 

[Flying Headbutt]

Just when I think Eric Cantor can't get any more clueless and abrasive...

Cantor said in a speech at the Values Voters Summit in Washington that he is "increasingly concerned" about the "growing mobs" represented at the protests.

http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/10/07/8206043-cantor-says-hes-concerned-by-mobs-at-occupy-wall-street

 

[Azrael]

******* beatniks.

 

[vicd]

Save us, Tucker Carlson!

How Alinsky-esque of you!
I want to know where the black people are in this "protest." We heard about how "white" the Tea Parties are, how about the Occupy Wall Street protesters? Pretty Wonder Bread from the looks of it.
(Will now wait while Az scours the Interwebs to find a picture or two of black protesters...should be a hoot).

I saw that story about Michelle Malkin on FOX too. I counted at least 6 black people in the photo they used. But I'm sure those are the only six in the thousands that are marching.

I always knew that John Belushi was still alive.

That's the third, less famous brother "Little Joe Belushi"

 

[The Big Ragu]

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

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.

 

[Boom_70]

Save us, Tucker Carlson!

How Alinsky-esque of you!
I want to know where the black people are in this "protest." We heard about how "white" the Tea Parties are, how about the Occupy Wall Street protesters? Pretty Wonder Bread from the looks of it.
(Will now wait while Az scours the Interwebs to find a picture or two of black protesters...should be a hoot).

I saw that story about Michelle Malkin on FOX too. I counted at least 6 black people in the photo they used. But I'm sure those are the only six in the thousands that are marching.

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.

 

[CarltonBanks]

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.

 

[Azrael]

Filthy hippies!

 

[vicd]

Save us, Tucker Carlson!

How Alinsky-esque of you!
I want to know where the black people are in this "protest." We heard about how "white" the Tea Parties are, how about the Occupy Wall Street protesters? Pretty Wonder Bread from the looks of it.
(Will now wait while Az scours the Interwebs to find a picture or two of black protesters...should be a hoot).

I saw that story about Michelle Malkin on FOX too. I counted at least 6 black people in the photo they used. But I'm sure those are the only six in the thousands that are marching.

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.

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.

 

[Bob Cook]

I think the problem is the lack of accountability for the ultra rich that is pissing people off. Not so much that they are ultra rich. Billionaire lose all their money? No worries, claim bankruptcy and live off the money stowed away in offshore accounts. Committed fraud? No worries, the company goes under, everyone loses their jobs, and the CEO gets a huge payout. Committed illegal deals with other countries? No big deal. Don't want to pay taxes? Cool. Just use all the loopholes.

Meanwhile people are getting years in jail for a puff of weed or stealing a couple bucks worth of items from a store, and popping out close to 40% of their paychecks. It's not the disparity. It's that the quality of life is going down for the middle class in the poor, while the rich continue to get richer, despite many of their very shady and illegal practices. Then they took our money to bail them out, and then instead of reinvesting it in more jobs, they horde it while making record profits. That's the real issue.

Side note:
It's hilarious how on Fox News they're saying all these people are just lazy and won't go out and get a job, then 5 minutes later complain about how Obama isn't creating any jobs. The Tea Partiers were patriots, these people are lazy bums. Funny how that dynamic works out.

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:

If you can't tell, that says, "We are the 1%."

 

[Stitch]

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

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haymarket_affair

 

[The Big Ragu]

I think the problem is the lack of accountability for the ultra rich that is pissing people off. Not so much that they are ultra rich. Billionaire lose all their money? No worries, claim bankruptcy and live off the money stowed away in offshore accounts. Committed fraud? No worries, the company goes under, everyone loses their jobs, and the CEO gets a huge payout. Committed illegal deals with other countries? No big deal. Don't want to pay taxes? Cool. Just use all the loopholes.

Meanwhile people are getting years in jail for a puff of weed or stealing a couple bucks worth of items from a store, and popping out close to 40% of their paychecks. It's not the disparity. It's that the quality of life is going down for the middle class in the poor, while the rich continue to get richer, despite many of their very shady and illegal practices. Then they took our money to bail them out, and then instead of reinvesting it in more jobs, they horde it while making record profits. That's the real issue.

Side note:
It's hilarious how on Fox News they're saying all these people are just lazy and won't go out and get a job, then 5 minutes later complain about how Obama isn't creating any jobs. The Tea Partiers were patriots, these people are lazy bums. Funny how that dynamic works out.

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:

If you can't tell, that says, "We are the 1%."

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.

 

[Greenhorn]

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.

 

[cranberry]

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.

 

[WTFünke]

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

 

[terrier]

http://www.baltimoresun.com/entertainment/tv/z-on-tv-blog/bal-cnn-erin-burnett-smug-insensitive-superficial-20111005,0,5545277.story

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.