The whole occupy Wall Street Thing has me bemused. While I whole heartedly endorse political activism on about any level, these guys are kind of weird. The anti-capitalism sentiment being espoused combined with the image of all these J Crew clad, I phone carrying, Steve Jobs mourning neo yuppies has me somewhat confused.
What I do know is that if you think porn has issues take a look towards your local city hall, or even more so….Washington DC.
There are a lot of people who are unhappy with the level of government spending, government intrusion into our lives and overall bureaucracy and Occupy wall Street is but one of them.
When these things happen you get the kind of civil unrest we saw in the 1960’s. Now many of you reading this may not remember the 60’s, and I’m sure the school books downplay it these days but we had a civil war then, citizens lost their lives at the hands of the United States Military and it came very very close to getting very very bad.
One thing that history teaches us is that when quality healthcare becomes the providence of only the wealthy, you will get revolution. Fidel Castro knew exactly how to exploit that and if you don’t think that Fulgencio Battista’s Cuba wasn’t a microcosm of the current state of this nation you better look again. The fundamental things that Castro exploited are ubiquitous in the United States right now, Fascism is becoming policy and poor quality education and poor quality healthcare are increasingly unavailable to the shrinking middle class. Our retirees are taking their money to more Libertarian and receptive countries and our most successful are opting for fewer children while those who produce the least are having more children.
We have more people in jail, per capita, than any country on earth, including Iran and Iraq, China and any others you can name. We incarcerate our citizens for smoking a plant that undeniably causes less harm than tobacco or alchohol. One has to wonder if the vanity of the United States Government is worth the price we are paying for it. We are paying that price in blood, the blood of the patriots who fought and died to preserve the freedoms that Washington DC is usurping at an alarming rate.
It is time for a real change, not just rhetoric.
5 Responses
There are quite a few that are confused about what OWS is trying to say. Partly because they’re protesting a concept (I’ll get back to this in a minute) rather than a specific entity, and partly because a sizable segment of the media has deliberately portrayed them as whiney malcontents.
Most people get their “news” from whatever major sources best match their own political bias, so it’s no surprise that they’re confused bye the spin. I deliberately seek out multiple sources, with varying political slants, so I can then filter the spin from the facts. One of the best articles I’ve read recently in regard to what OWS is trying to say is by Matt Tabbi in Rolling Stone. One quote from the article sums it up pretty well, “These people aren’t protesting money. They’re not protesting banking. They’re protesting corruption on Wall Street.”
The full article… http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/owss-beef-wall-street-isnt-winning-its-cheating-20111025
I think you’re bemused because you’re confused. First and foremost, the OWS movement isn’t about anti-capitalism. You sound just like the douche bags trying to play it off like it’s some socialist/communist conspiracy. 100% Negro please. Quit falling for the bullshit the puppets want you to fall for. I thought you were smarter than that. I’m not even going to get into details of what it is about. I think it’s pretty fucking obvious: Millions of Americans have been, and are still getting, fucked in the ass by the 1%, the banks, and the politicians who work for them. Protesting that, wanting to see change that eliminates a system that’s rigged in favor of the wealthiest Americans isn’t about being anti-capitalist. It’s about everyone’s right to pursue their version of liberty and happiness in ways that are fair and equal, not rigged for the benefit of the few.
JimmyD yer right bro….anti capitalism was a poor choice of words anti fascism is honestly more like it. But the truth is I do support political activism, specially right now. Our government of, by and for the people is completely out of control and it will take grass roots efforts and a large degree of solidarity and common sense to fix it. Fuck the Republicans and FUCK the Democrats…they are equally responsible for the mess we are in.
It is time to rise up and effect REAL change.
The OWS movement is about a lot of very straightforward practical things. First and foremost, it is about this: The financial sector (wall street firms, big banks, and various shadow banking institutions (money market businesses, etc.)) fought tooth and nail to DEREGULATE financial markets. Derivatives markets were completely deregulated; SEC restrictions on how high big banks’ leverage ratios could go were relaxed; Glass-Steagall was repealed, and so forth.
The financial sector spent literally BILLIONS of lobbying dollars to effect these changes–all in the name of some airy “free market” ideology, i.e., let the financial markets just regulate themselves, everything will be fine, etc.
But when they finally got everything they wanted–what happens? They immediately go about creating incredibly risky investments and instruments (given AAA ratings by the ratings agencies that are in their pockets), all for the sake of making SHORT TERM profits. Without ANY concern towards anything long term.
Perfect example: credit default swaps. The firms selling these “insurance policies” made millions upon millions of profits in the short term. But of course, they did not have sufficient capital set aside to pay in the event that the defaults they were insuring against took place. And why? Because they LOBBIED Congress to make sure that they didn’t HAVE to have any capital set aside. Thanks to fucks like Phil Gramm, the derivatives market went completely unregulated. And then, after getting what they wanted (a deregulated market), they immediately went about making absurdly risky investments that would be guaranteed to make money in the short term, and also pretty much guaranteed to cause massive failure in the long term. They didn’t care.
Why didn’t they care? 2 reasons. First, because the compensation structures on Wall Street and in investment banks do NOT reward long term success or punish long term failure. They ONLY reward short term success. Second, Wall Street knew they could count on the Fed and the government to bail them out in the event of a crisis–just like they had over and over again for the past 20 years.
Oh yeah, the people in the risk management departments in these firms, the ones who saw what was perfectly obvious to anyone who cared to look, and who raised red flags and tried to warn the executives of the crisis in the offing? They were FIRED. To a man.
Oh yeah, the people who made the decisions to raise the banks’ leverage ratios to 30:1, and to sell the credit default swaps with no capital set aside to pay in the event the underlying assets defaulted, and to stop investing in the productive aspects of our economy and to engage entirely in speculation–those people, the ones who fucked us ALL…they got rich. Obscenely rich. They didn’t go to jail; they didn’t lose their jobs; they got rich. And they’re getting richer.
And all this is just a perfect example of the ongoing trend over the past 20 years: Banks are participating less and less in actually GROWING the economy (making loans to businesses, etc.), and are using more and more of their capital on speculation (the mere trading of commodities, financial instruments, etc.).
Meanwhile, as a result of this, the spending power of the middle and working classes has declined enormously. And as anyone who knows anything about economics can tell you–if the middle class has no spending power, then we go into depression. It’s as simple as that. I am a small business owner; I need a robust middle class to buy my products. If they go, I go. And so do thousands of other businesses.
But Wall Street doesn’t give a shit about the U.S. economy. That is the thing that OWS is trying to communicate to anyone who will listen. After all, Wall Street is dealing with a GLOBAL economy. As long as money is moving around SOMEWHERE, Wall Street can get rich. It doesn’t need to be in the U.S. They couldn’t care less about the U.S. middle class; those people aren’t the ones buying Wall Street’s products anyway.
So what is the big lesson we learned in 2008, and the one that OWS is trying to spread? First and foremost that the right-wing ideology of Let-the-financial-markets-regulate-themselves DOES NOT WORK. Wall Street firms are designed to make money–they are motivated by greed. Which honestly is fine–people wanna make a buck, you can’t fault them for that. BUT that doesn’t mean we have to let them use OUR money in whatever reckless ways they want. They need to be thoroughly REGULATED.
So yeah, lets bring back more vigorous regulation of all these financial markets; lets require banks to use a certain percentage of their capital for making loans to businesses to help GROW the productive aspects of our economy; lets outlaw compensation structures on Wall Street that reward only short term success, and allow someone to become a multi-millionaire because he designed a financial instrument that makes a short term profit, even if that same instrument ends up costing the firm twice as much in losses down the road; and when we hand trillions of tax dollars to the banks, lets be sure we vigorously regulate how that money is used; lets abolish too-big-to-fail banks; und so weiter…
OWS isn’t about anti-capitalism; rather, it’s opposed to the notion that the financial sector can be left to its own devices, and be trusted to behave responsibly. It cannot be so trusted. 2008 PROVED that.
Honestly, I can’t help but think that the complete IDIOCY of the current Republican candidates arises like a death gasp of that now proven-false ideology. They know that their philosophy of deregulation has been PROVEN to not work. So they are all desperately trying to justify that ideology with more and more extreme and weird justifications…culminating in the remark of Herman Cain, probably the most pure mystification ever heard in a presidential debate: If you’re poor, it’s your fault.
@SlavojLiraut: Spot on!!!