Occupy Wall Street Protests Go Global 944
Hugh Pickens writes "Tens of thousands of people around the world took to the streets Saturday to reiterate their anger at the global financial system, corporate greed and government cutbacks, with rallies held in more than 900 cities in Europe, Africa and Asia. 'United in one voice, we will let politicians, and the financial elites they serve, know it is up to us, the people, to decide our future,' said organizers of the global demonstration. The demonstrations by the disaffected coincided with the Group of 20 meeting in Paris, where finance ministers and central bankers from major economies were holding talks on the debt and deficit crises afflicting many Western countries. Crowds around the world were largely peaceful, but the demonstration in Rome turned violent as clashes in the Italian capital left dozens injured, including several police officers. In London, WikiLeaks leader Julian Assange made a dramatic appearance, bursting through the police lines just after 2:30pm, accompanied by scores of supporters. He climbed the cathedral steps near St. Paul's to condemn 'greed' and 'corruption,' and attacked the City of London, accusing its financiers of money laundering and tax avoidance."
Quick Hitsory Lesson (Score:5, Interesting)
Only around 20% of the population were sided against the king during the time America was being formed.
Why is that relevant? Well it just means that it takes a lot less people than you think to get things rolling.
"they have iphones" and other garbage comments (Score:0, Interesting)
I've seen this type comment around a lot. "They are protesting against corporate greed but they are using iphones and computers that were made by large multinational corporations!!!"
It is not a ironic that the people protesting are using tech that was made by near-slaves in china.
if we were to live some sort of exploitation free life we would have to return to the jungle and live primitively.
People are just doing what they can with what they have.
The rich have stolen democracy. Return democracy to the 99%
End the collusion between corporation and state!
Protesting in Wall St is useless (Score:0, Interesting)
Protesting outside a companys office achieves nothing
you need to track down the board members and executives of these companys, you know follow the money, and setup camps outside those fuckers houses
protesting the company is useless, you have to protest at the people who created this mess, when shit gets real at home, and they feel personally threatened for their safety and their life is disrupted by constant harassment, then perhaps they will take a good look at what they did to piss everyone off.
While you are shouting at concrete at their office, they are at home enjoying themselves in peace with their ill gotten gains, their life is mildly invovienced (cant go into the office, but can sit by the pool and telework), you have to piss these people off personally to get change.
Re:Quick Hitsory Lesson (Score:4, Interesting)
But it takes even fewer people to keep the status quo. Less than 5% of the population of Nazi Germany were die-hard Nazis.
Re:What's the alternative? (Score:5, Interesting)
Stop the fear mongering. The protesters simply want to return to sanity. Between the New Deal and the beginning of Voodoo Economics capital was used to produce actual goods instead of financial bubbles. Why not simply return that? Other main concerns are the inefficient privatized health-care and education system. Changing to a european style public system would solve this. Finally, most of the American infrastructure is crumbling while people are unemployed, why not fix two problems at the same time?
Re:What's the alternative? (Score:5, Interesting)
A political system where corporations do not have a seat at the table? A justice system where we get to see the rich and powerful do the perp walk more often? A monetary system that doesn't foster bubbles?
Re:And it will come to nothing. (Score:5, Interesting)
There might be some complaining, but nothing will happen.
Right now your troops are being sacfificed (and sacrificing thousands of civilians in the process) to keep the Job CReators profits flowing, where is the outrage there ?
Your healthcare system is a joke, yet the worlds most expensive, your educational system is collapsing and is rapidly approaching Third World outputs, yet where is the outrage ?
Your government is seizing up, you're not even going to have a Postal Service soon...so where is the outrage ?
The right wing consistantly proclaim their 'right to bear arms' as the refuge of the people against government that doesn't give a shit about them, except as cattle...and yet here we are.....where is the outrage ? Where is the militia marching upon Washington ?
The average US citizen has been neutered, their passions diverted off to silly by-ways like reality TV and the weak-wristed practice of american sports. Imbeciles like Glenn beck and Rush Limbaugh are actually given the time of day and the attainment of scholastic achievement is belittled.
Forgive me, this isn't a anti-us rant, but the system there is so fundamentally broken and yet there's no sign of it being fixed. Even the louder political groups, such as the Tea Party, are in reality simple folk bamboozled by the skilful words of the spin doctors to suit their Corporate masters agendas.
So when the Boomers wake up that their 401k's have been plundered, well, they should have realised that was taking place years beforehand and there won't be a thing they can do about it.
I mean, hasn't a bankrupt government, almost Third World educational and healthcare standards, a truly colossal debt and unemployment through the roof ( not forgetting that the average income in the US is woeful) made the penny drop yet ?
The time to fix this is NOW, not in 12 months..not in 2 years...now...it SHOULD have been 10 years ago.
But you will do nothing except complain about gas prices and why there are so many mexicans around these days.
Occupy Wall Street: What’s Really Going On (Score:0, Interesting)
Excellent blog post by CM describing the situation on the ground:
http://www.chrismartenson.com/blog/occupy-wall-street-whats-really-going/63603
Daniel Shay, anyone? (Score:4, Interesting)
Anyone else reminded of Shay's Rebellion? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shays'_Rebellion [wikipedia.org]
Re:Assange condemns greed? (Score:3, Interesting)
I see your point about Freddie and Fanny, government backing allows people to go to college, which means more educated people and more higher paying jobs. Of course this leaves a lull in the service industry, because those that went to college cant afford to work for minimum wage while paying off college loans.
Good intentions, and an attempt to level the playing field has yielded an educated country promised the dream only to be slapped in the face.
As for what is going on now as well as your points:
Did the government have a hand in it? Yes.
Has the government attempted to rectify this? No.
Have corporations done wrong? yes
Do they plan on changing? No
In which case can the common citizen ask for, or attempt change? Government or Corporations? Government... of course.
You see, history has shown that the rich will continue to deprive, deprave, and destroy the common person and when the common person gets tired of it and rises up... the rich just move.
So we must rely on the government to balance the rich attempts to rape our resources, our country, and our common person for their profits and then leave vs the common persons need to survive.
Re:What's the alternative? (Score:3, Interesting)
I think the outlines of a convincing alternative are coming into view.
The sources of the worlds current problems are complicated and messy. But there are two big themes.
One is that democracy increasingly feels undemocratic, a hobsons choice between two nearly identical sets of alternatives. Party democracy was for the longest time the only reasonable way of doing things, but modern technology offers us the potential for something better, namely delegated voting [google.com]. By allowing people to automatically delegate their votes by topic, it gives decisions much greater democratic legitimacy and consequently reduces the power of "bad" lobbying (as opposed to "good" lobbying, ie, persuasion of the people through education and argument). This isn't directly related to the financial crisis. But societies current problems aren't purely about finance. They're about a feeling of powerlessness, a feeling that a small elite runs the show for their own benefit. And in the USA perhaps a feeling that politics is getting ever crazier and more influenced by lobbyists.
The other big theme is of course the financial system itself: how it seems to be constantly on the verge of collapse, how it went so wrong that the world entered recession and how nobody seems to have any ways to fix it. I know there are a lot of skeptics on Slashdot, but I think together Bitcoin and Ripple are the most concrete proposals for an alternative financial system. Banks and the financial system are so powerful today because they are trust aggregators and we cannot currently do without that, the result being that they cannot be allowed to fail. This results in the well known "moral hazard" [wikipedia.org] - the profits are privatized but the risks are socialized, and nobody can opt out.
The underlying principle of Bitcoin is minimizing the need for trust. There's a lot more to Bitcoin than just sending and receiving payments. It's a complete framework for distributed contracts [bitcoin.it], an HTML of transactions if you will. The potential of the protocol is still being explored, but what's clear is that where previously you may have needed large, 'trustable' institutions to perform various kinds of of trades, now you can do them with cryptography instead. This in turn makes finance more competitive and thus democratic, by reducing the barriers to entry and allowing smaller lesser-known companies to compete on an equal footing. The 99% have a chance at doing the work of the 1%, which means the inequalities between finance and the rest of us should even out somewhat.
Are these proposals perfect? No. They are, however, concrete and specific ideas that can be debated on the details, rather than merely slogans to be thrown around.
The Boomers have always been fucking up. (Score:5, Interesting)
When you say "our parents" and "our grandparents", it's likely that you're talking about the so-called Baby Boomers. We shouldn't feel sorry for them at all. These people have fucked up everything they've gotten involved with, for decades now. Hell, they're largely responsible for the current situation.
They were born into one of the most, if not the most, prosperous times in the history of humanity. The foundation of this prosperity was planted by their hard-working ancestors, and they grew up in it and eventually inherited it, so they can't actually take any credit for it. In hindsight, this was the peak of middle-class America. Rather than trying to improve further on this already-amazing economic situation, many of them ended up becoming hippies fighting against the very system that provided them the best standard of living of all-time.
I'm not a conservative by any means, but neither can I respect those who grow up in a near-perfect environment, yet go ahead and do everything they can to trash this environment. But that's exactly what many Boomers did during the 1960s. They caused some damage, but thankfully were limited in their ability to cause real harm, and their movements fizzled out.
When the 1970s rolled around, some of them finally outgrew these youthful shenanigans. They got involved with corporate America and the American government, which up until that time actually did treat middle-class American workers extremely well. Even lower-middle-class workers could afford vehicles and homes without having to go into debt. But the Boomers would put an end to this as they started moving up the management ladder.
By the mid-1970s, the Boomers were starting to get into positions of corporate and government power. Given the huge amount of people around the same age, many of these Boomers tried to be as outrageous as possible to differentiate themselves from their peers, in order to further their careers. They would suggest courses of action that their parents or grandparents, the previous leaders of corporate America, would think of as being totally asinine and wrong-headed. One such concept that they embraced was outsourcing/offshoring.
They had unfortunately embedded themselves well within American corporations and government by the mid-1980s. They had become the leaders of business and society, and to put it bluntly, they fucked everything up. Every policy they made served to fuck over the American middle class. This is the very same American middle class that begat these Boomers!
The Boomer's precious offshoring, outsourcing and "free trade" destroyed the American manufacturing sector in the 1980s and 1990s. Although younger generations tried to negate some of this damage via the Internet boom, far too much damage had already been done. By the 2000s, the Boomers had started to offshore even the best-paying technical jobs.
As everyone today knows, the Boomers' policies have absolutely destroyed the American economy. They caused the very problems that have rendered many of them "poor" today. The only people they should hold accountable are themselves.
Re:Assange condemns greed? (Score:5, Interesting)
The Tea Party isn't organized, it's a true grass-roots movement. Hence, there's no one to really say exactly what it is. But this much is clear - it was named for it's root cause - excess spending/taxation with no effective representation of the people.
Re:What's the alternative? (Score:2, Interesting)
There are too many people now, and not enough resources.
Re:What's the alternative? (Score:4, Interesting)
I won't say the 70s and 80s of the past century didn't have their own problems but at least in Europe we all had a chance to a decent life without a hazy group of top brass manipulating politics and thus legislation trying to keep it all to themselves.
Re:The Boomers have always been fucking up. (Score:4, Interesting)
I... have nothing to add to this.
It's a shame you posted this as AC. People should read this. It's not everything, but it's pretty damn close.
Terra currency (Score:4, Interesting)
Slightly on topic: Does anyone here have any opinion over the Terra - a common world currency that is based on the top 10 or so produce of the world (gold, corn, oil etc.), and so is much more stable and less prone to inflation. I saw it a couple of days ago, and I can't help but feel it would save trillions in efficiency and help benefit the world.
Whitepaper here:
http://www.terratrc.org/PDF/Terra_WhitePaper_2.27.04.pdf [terratrc.org]
Someone needs to organize these guys (Score:5, Interesting)
I've been watching these protests, interested in seeing what might come out of them. Unfortunately, no one has stepped out and tried to distill all the chaos down to simple talking points that the masses can understand. Left-wing protestors have a much higher barrier to overcome to be taken seriously. The right wing pundits, Tea Party guys, etc. seem to understand this and keep their rantings simple. They appeal to a wide swath of the country by doing that -- it's easy to convince a plumber that the Evil Government is preventing them from becoming a hugely successful entrepreneur because they're "stealing" his tax dollars. That's where I think a lot of the non-rich right wingers have their thinking misplaced -- they're inadvertently supporting business owners who turn around and make average peoples' lives miserable.
My take on this whole thing is as follows. I don't want communism, anarchy or the guillotining of investment bankers. What I do want is the social contract that companies used to have with their workers put back in place. The world is going to get even more divisive as automation and cheap labor start taking away all those nice safe service jobs. I like the model of Germany and the Scandinavian countries. There are plenty of business owners in those countries who are successful and get rich, but they seem to have a perspective and deal with the burden of paying taxes to support the rest of society. This is similar to the 50s-style social contracts many employers had -- hard work and loyalty were rewarded with a commensurate income ladder, paid health insurance, and paid retirement.
Think about it this way -- you're probably well-educated, worked hard to get where you are, and most people have health insurance, a nice stable job, good income and a few possessions. What makes you think that businesses are always going to need network administrators, Java programmers and other IT people? We're already seeing evidence that businesses would rather deal with sub-par service and skeleton staffs...and most people are a couple of paychecks away from being totally broke short of their retirement funds.
I see why everyone's mad at Wall Street though -- a lot of the reason that social contract went away in the first place is a constant demand for corporate earnings regardless of economic conditions.
If I were leading this thing, I think my simple, Tea Party-style talking points would be as follows:
1. Make everyone pay their fair share of taxes. Don't fall for executives' scare tactics about moving to China -- they're going to do that anyway.
2. To ensure this tax money gets spent wisely, limit corporate influence on the political system. It's amazing how quickly universal health insurance could be funded once some of these tax loopholes are removed.
3. Reduce the hyper-focus on the financial markets. Get individual retirement investors out of the market and into something safer like a pension or annuity. Let average people have a stable retirement, but encourage investment on their own if they want. Let companies breathe for a couple of quarters so they can actually plow money back into things that will produce results further down the road.
These things would resonate with average Americans, and it would be very hard for the right wing pundits to call me a dirty hippie if I came to the table with a good set of arguments.
Re:Assange condemns greed? (Score:5, Interesting)
Social Democracy works just great however. Pretending that there isn't a middle ground between Capitalism and Socialism is stupid.
Re:Assange condemns greed? (Score:4, Interesting)
All "ism"s fail. Capitalism has just managed to blunder along longer by playing shell games with numbers.
Re:Assange condemns greed? (Score:4, Interesting)
The only sound argument you can make is that these companies lied, with their AAA ratings and so on. This is almost certainly true, but I suppose this goes to the core of the concept of marketing products: how much of the bullshit the droids come out with is really true? Is this face cream really going to make me look younger? Will these vitamin pills really improve the functioning of my immune system? We are surrounded by bollocks. It isn't just the big corporations that engage in it. Even the guy at the market selling potatoes from the back of his van does it. We should always be on our guard to see through it. We should teach our children to see through it. Maybe if we did, we these things wouldn't happen quite so often.
Re:Excellent article on what's wrong (Score:5, Interesting)
Because even though Congress has an approval rating of less than 20%, it is always all the OTHER members who are causing the problem. Not MY Congressman/Senator. At least, that seems to be the way the voting goes.
The deck is stacked in favor of incumbents. In both Houses -- at least in the United States -- power comes from which committees you are on or Chair. Those are divvied up by seniority. The longer you are in, the more power you have.
That is a big selling point during a campaign. "Sure, I'm scum. But I bring home the bacon and I've been in long enough that I get my voice -- your voice -- heard. Vote me out and it'll take decades before any real projects come back to this district."
Re:"they have iphones" and other garbage comments (Score:4, Interesting)
The middle class IS poor! Look at the mean net worth [wikipedia.org] of the 25-50% (the lower half of middle class) is dangerously near $0. (Though actually I think net worth can be misleading... most people are stuck in a hand-to-mouth mentality that guarantees their net worth will never grow, even if their income was good and their standard of living was high).
But, secondly, if this guy is protesting, don't you think he KNOWS is situation is in jeapordy? That he might not be so "middle-class" after all? I think what he's saying is, "I have skills, I'm economically productive, yet I'm stuck scraping by. That can't be right."
Wall Street Should Be Afraid (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:5, Interesting)
The OWS crowd have deliberately avoided touting any specific economic models. The fact that you don't know that only shows how ignorant you are of the movement and renders the rest of your comment irrelevant. Yes, I have heard a few protesters condemn capitalism, but I've heard even more say that they simply want capitalism with fairness. They want justice for the crimes of the banksters and less "corporate capture" of government.
As for taxes, the ratios you cite are very similar to those in the USA. However, that's only for income tax revenue. If you include sales tax, property tax, and all the rest, the lower and middle classes pay a much higher percentage of their gross income to the government than the rich do.
Re:Assange condemns greed? (Score:5, Interesting)
While the OWS does tend to be more liberal in their proposed solutions (instituting a 'living wage', supporting public sector unions, opposing Citizens United) and the Tea Party tends to be more conservative (support for term limits, opposition to health care reform, etc), there is real value in the fact that everyone is recognizing that something really big is wrong - and now it's time to talk about how to fix it.
Do the Tea Party and OWS agree on the solutions? Probably not, but these two groups are the heart of America. This is the debate that we should be having. Instead, we have two parties pandering to the highest bidder. Stop letting the career politicians drive these groups apart. Instead, both should be rallying against the political class that rules them, convincing their fellow Americans that the system is broken, and coming together to discuss the solutions. We can be united in our cause and divided on the solution.
Re:Assange condemns greed? (Score:4, Interesting)
First of all, I think the OCWS crowd wants return to social democracy as it existed or exists in the west (even in America, 50s and 60s with 90% highest tax bracket could be considered social democratic), which, not capitalism, was probably the most successful system tested on national scale.
Second, socialism (= worker ownership of capital) has been tested, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondrag%C3%B3n_Cooperative_Corporation [wikipedia.org], and it seems to lead to more productivity than the actual capitalism.
Re:Assange condemns greed? (Score:5, Interesting)
As an example of how ball-less, consider the S&L crisis where 1000 FBI agents investigated white collar crime. About 1000 bankers went to jail. The S&L crisis was 1/40th the size of the current meltdown.
Instead of investigations, there ate 120 FBI agents spread out across the country (even Enron required 100 investigators and WA Mutual is even bigger). Obviously, not even a single indictment let alone a conviction, despite the problem being 40x bigger.
If the Executive branch wanted to do something about it, it could very easily just by hiring more investigators.
William Black, lead prosecutor in the S&L crisis, has been trying to get this point understood, but googling him in google news leads to a real dearth of results. This is a good interview transcript:
http://www.creditwritedowns.com/2011/09/why-nobody-went-to-jail-during-the-credit-crisis.html [creditwritedowns.com]
Re:Assange condemns greed? (Score:2, Interesting)
Of course the rich should be subject to Human Rights, just like everyone else.
Let's take a look at this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Declaration_of_Human_Rights
How do you feel about that one:
Article 29.
(1) Everyone has duties to the community in which alone the free and full development of his personality is possible.
(2) In the exercise of his rights and freedoms, everyone shall be subject only to such limitations as are determined by law solely for the purpose of securing due recognition and respect for the rights and freedoms of others and of meeting the just requirements of morality, public order and the general welfare in a democratic society.
(3) These rights and freedoms may in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.
Those are nice too:
Article 22.
Everyone, as a member of society, has the right to social security and is entitled to realization, through national effort and international co-operation and in accordance with the organization and resources of each State, of the economic, social and cultural rights indispensable for his dignity and the free development of his personality.
Article 23.
(1) Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.
(2) Everyone, without any discrimination, has the right to equal pay for equal work.
(3) Everyone who works has the right to just and favourable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection.
(4) Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests.
Article 24.
Everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay.
Article 25.
(1) Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.
(2) Motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and assistance. All children, whether born in or out of wedlock, shall enjoy the same social protection.
Re:Assange condemns greed? (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem here is most of the stuff the banks did, and that caused the crash, wasn't really illegal. It was immoral but not really illegal. You see, the banks have anough control over the Fed and the Congress that they can make whatever they want to do legal so they don't have to break the law. If there was illegality most of it was at the low level where loans were originated and the easiest people to nail are the people who lied on loan applications which is the wrong group of people to go after.
One place there was law breaking by the banks was robosigning and other foreclosure abuses but that was after the crash, not the cause of it, and chances are the banks will pay a hefty fine and walk away otherwise unscathed.
Much of the crisis was caused by repealing Glass Steagel. Why was this done? Because Citi and Travelers wanted to merge in to a giant mega corp offering all financial services. Glass Steagel made this illegal, so what did the do? Bob Rubin, Larry Summers and Phil Graham pushed a new law that that repealed Glass Steagel under Clinton. Bob Rubin then went to work for Citi, Graham went to work for UBS, to reap the benefits of what they had sowed. Summers was hired by Obama to run the economy despite being as much to blame as anyone.
The solution to the 2008 crisis is, unfortunately, not criminal prosecution. You need to prevent the Fed and Washington from being completely controlled by Wall Street, and making everything they do legal. Unfortunately this is a very difficult thing to accomplish, but it is exactly what OWS is all about.
Re:What's the alternative? (Score:4, Interesting)
Nobody is even looking for the crimes so of course they will never be found. In the S&L crisis, 1000 FBI agents investigated banking fraud and 1000 bankers went to jail. The current meltdown 40x the size of the S&L crisis, there are 120 agents spread out over the country. Just going after Enron took 100 investigators, so 2 or 3 in each state isn't going to accomplish anything at all.
You should hear William Black, top litigation director in the S&L crisis -- not even a hint of hippie: http://www.financialsense.com/financial-sense-newshour/guest-expert/2011/09/14/william-k-black-phd/why-nobody-went-to-jail-during-the-credit-crisis [financialsense.com]
The Federal Reserve operates behind closed doors (Score:5, Interesting)
In fact, some of that stupidity has shown up on OWS, like cries to 'audit the Fed'. Look, idiots, auditing the Fed isn't going to do anything. The Fed is doing nothing illegal.
Without an audit of the public-private beast that is the Federal Reserve System, how would you know whether they've done anything illegal or not? I don't know if the Ron Paul's version of the audit was ever passed, but Senator Sanders got an amendment inserted into some-bill-or-another. His office has this page:
"Audit the Fed" was Ron Paul's effort to hold the Federal Reserve accountable. It was a preliminary step to ending the system whereby "Wall Street" loans the economy its money supply. If you have a dollar bill in your pocket, it's only there because someone borrowed it from a banker - the bills are printed by the treasury and purchased by the Federal Reserve at cost [2 cents?]. If you have a quarter or a dime or a Susan B. Anthony dollar in your pocket, the Fed bought these from the Mint for face value.
The initial "Tea Party" rallies were held by Ron Paul's supporters in the 2008 presidential campaign, in response to the bailouts. Paul eventually dropped out of that race, but the "powers that be" thought the "tea party jingle" would be useful to perpetuate the concentration of power.
Re:The Federal Reserve operates behind closed door (Score:3, Interesting)
But a Ron Paul audit is silly, if just because his stated objectives are silly: He believes in hard money, and hard money is not, in any way, shape or form, what we need.
Ask a market monetarist, and they'll say that the issue is not that the fed is doing too much, but that it's doing too little, and in the wrong direction. That what we need is higher inflation, not less. But if we give Paul more of a voice, We'll see ourselves with high unemployment for another couple of decades.
If Ron Paul's economic agenda wasn't batshit crazy, he'd at least get some sympathy from the left. But as it is, he'll never go anywhere. I keep wishing for someone to take his views on immigration and foreign affairs, but tied to some modern economic ideas instead.
Re:Mod Parent Up (Score:4, Interesting)
They can't, because it's bullshit. Here's a link to the act itself [federalreserve.gov]. Note the words "consistent with safe and sound operations."
Then there's the fact that most bad subprime debt was issued by institutions outside the scope of the act, and that commercial real estate - also outside the scope - is in an equally bad or worse state than home loans.
Re:Assange condemns greed? (Score:5, Interesting)
Due to the failure of government to block an unending stream of bank mergers, leading to ever more greater concentrations of financial risk and power, that's true.
But it doesn't excuse the fact that a year later the banks turned obscene profits, offshored those profits, and paid virtually NOTHING in taxes. The bailouts should have been LOANS -- every single bank financial statement I've seen for the year shows they made enough money to pay back their bailout funds, but not ONE offered to do so.
One thing the TEA party and Occupy definitely seem to agree on is that corporate bailouts need to stop. No business should be allowed to grow so large and powerful that it's failure can bring down the economy of an entire nation. Allowing it to get to that point was insanity; government's refusal to correct the issue is criminal.
Re:Assange condemns greed? (Score:3, Interesting)
Indeed, almost all industrialised countries have always been somewhere between, it's funny how heated arguments can get about jumping a few inches on the long line.
I think it's fairly ignorant to blame all of the US's current issues on entitlements however. The country is also paying for an army big enough to fight the rest of the world at once that's busy waging two simultaneous wars while it's government is deadlocked into a position where it can neither raise taxes nor lower expenditure(Since you can't politically survive lowering the military or entitlement budgets).
And even disregarding the sorry state of the US government budget, the wealth discrepancy in the US appears to have been growing consistently for over half a century which shows that if there are too much entitlements, they don't appear to be going to the poor.
Re:Assange condemns greed? (Score:3, Interesting)
So... people should be responsible for their own actions, unless they're bankers, in which case the responsibility of them granting too many high-risk loans and going bankrupt should be laid on the poor instead?
Re:Political systems worldwide. (Score:4, Interesting)
"Why is there no political system anywhere where the campaigns are funded by a flat levy, and ALL levels of government have equal elections where union and private donations, as well as politician's OWN FINANCES are banned from participating?"
There are. France [loc.gov] runs elections that way. "Campaign finance is strictly regulated. All forms of paid commercial advertisements through the press or by any audiovisual means are prohibited during the three months preceding the election. Instead, political advertisements are aired free of charge on an equal basis for all of the candidates on national television channels and radio stations during the official campaign."
It really works that way. French campaigns are short and intense. I've been in Paris for one. The official poster boards go up in sets, one board for each candidate, and the candidates poster boards go on them. The minor and major candidates get equal billing. Everybody makes their pitch on TV in their allotted time slots, and it's discussed to death in Le Monde and ranted about in Libe. Then the citizens vote. France uses a two-round presidential election; if nobody gets an absolute majority on round 1, there's a runoff two weeks later.
They're getting organized (Score:5, Interesting)
I've been watching these protests, interested in seeing what might come out of them. Unfortunately, no one has stepped out and tried to distill all the chaos down to simple talking points that the masses can understand.
The Occupy Wall Street demands are starting to focus. [occupywallst.org] They're all quite reasonable. This is a revolutionary movement that wants to pass HR 1489, the "Return to Prudent Banking Act". That's something that real conservatives ought to be supporting. It's about returning to the system that worked from 1933 to 1999, where banks had to stay out of the stock market and brokerages couldn't accept deposits. This separation prevented trouble on Wall Street from taking down banks.
The Occupy Wall Street movement wants the Department of Justice to get tough on crime on Wall Street. That, too, is completely in line with conservative tradition. They want a tougher Securities and Exchange Commission and restrictions on campaign spending. None of this is even slightly radical.
Everything on that list would have been supported by President Eisenhower, arguably the best Republican president in the last century. (Eisenhower delivered peace and prosperity while facing down the Soviet threat, which was quite real back then. He made it look easy; he'd often knock off around 3PM and go play golf. Of course, he'd already been in charge of winning WWII in Europe; compared to that, the presidency was a vacation. His greatest skill was that he could pick the right subordinate for the job and keep them on mission. He managed both Patton and Montgomery effectively during WWII.)
The Republicans have lost their way. (Look at the collection of losers and weirdos running for the Republican presidential nomination.) Republican moderates should be supporting Occupy Wall Street.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Power OF the People (Score:4, Interesting)
My goodness, what a terrifying prospect. It would be a disaster if people could propose legislation and vote on it directly. That would mean cataclysm. How would the people formulate a national budget? People can't even manage their own personal finances (housing bubble, college loans), much less those of society more generally.
Limited power? Yes. Constitutional rights? Yes. Representative Democracy? Yes. Direct political participation? NO.
Direct democracy would just end up in dictatorship anyway. Direct democracy would fuck everything up so badly in 5 years that the current predicament would seem like good times in retrospect. For example, people would pass a law which says that Social Security benefits must be tripled and their taxes halved, or something similar. Or that we'll institute a "living wage" while increasing salaries for the middle and upper-middle classes too. Or we should take all investment capital from the top 1% and distribute it equally for consumption. Or we should stick it to the drug companies. Or the Chinese. Or we'll fight global warming and phase out nuclear (Germany). After which, all the accountants in government would quit at some point, which would be "OK" because they're a bunch of uptight elitist asshole suits anyway (and maybe traitors besides). Then there wouldn't even be any consistency in legislation, or any way to know what to expect next. Then everything would collapse. Then people would vote for a dictator who promised to restore order and who promised a return to the "good old days." Since people ultimately don't want freedom (they want a condo and Netflix, and that's what they'd try to achieve by direct voting), they would vote for a dictator at that point who promised to fix everything, and they could accomplish it by amending the constitution directly to allow dictatorial powers.
Take a look at the Greek protests, which have people simultaneously demanding high benefits and chanting "I won't pay" for basic taxes and tolls.
Right now the people themselves are the main impediment to rational policies. Any rational and well-thought-out policy is always profoundly unpopular because it cannot be explained in 8 seconds or less to someone with no prior understanding.
If people can't be trusted to monitor their politicians, then they can't be trusted to govern. Right now politicians are corrupt because voters don't even read a single word of the thousands of pages of legislation that politicians pass. How would things be better, if people voted directly upon that legislation? Or if we decentralized this function to non-experts? People would vote for legislation based upon the "gist" they received from the first few sentences of that legislation, and the result isn't hard to predict.
Almost all of our problems are caused by hyper-democracy already. The solution is not more democracy. Remember that most of our crises (dot-com bubble, real estate bubble, and the coming disaster of unrepayable college loans for millions of people) were caused by people trying to invest, something which they simply cannot do. Warren Buffet can invest; "the people" cannot.
What we need is more elitism. The people should restrain themselves to ordering their own personal lives, to punishing politicians who made serious mistakes, and to punishing unconstitutional usurpations of political power. The peoples' only function should be to say "no" on occasion to ideas proposed by elites. They should never, ever try to implement their own ideas directly. It would make more sense if they started designing bridges directly, or performing surgery on each other without prior training.