was in Philly the last few days and saw these blokes protesting... couldn't tell what they were protesting - just seemed like a bunch of leftist rage. my cousin and I talked of going out there with absurd signs displaying messages such as, "this sign is cardboard" or "Free T.I.". instead we just day-drank and hung out by the pool..

10/13/2011 2:52:05 PM

I think there are some serious issues being protested that are lost in the fray that could bring about positive change:

10/13/2011 2:59:22 PM

I thought it was clear this was about the banking establishment and money in politics? That's what's come up the most. I mean, I guess other people jumped in with their causes, but there's a reason it's at wall street.

10/13/2011 3:19:23 PM

http://english.aljazeera.net/programmes/meltdown/

This is a great 4 part series highlighting how our global markets are so insanely intertwined that national governments simply don't currently have the power to prevent these bubbles/crashes from affecting the entire world economy.

10/13/2011 3:31:01 PM

Maybe if OWS could convey it's message via a handful of one liners that fit on posters and bumper stickers, people would stop saying that it lacks a real message. I mean, saying you want government out of your medicare is pretty clear. Calling Obama a socialist muslim nazi from Kenya was pretty easy to fit on a sign. Threatening elected officials with guns makes for an easy to digest headline. Forget any sort of real constructive dialogue about what actually needs fixing in our country, OWS should just boil their entire argument down to a bunch of illogical propaganda and threats of violence. That's freedom baby!

10/13/2011 4:08:57 PM

Quote :

"OWS should just boil their entire argument down to a bunch of illogical propaganda"

That's, in a nutshell, what they've done.

There have been some voices of reason come out but unfortunately, they've been drowned out by the idiotic masses, much like the tea party.

10/13/2011 4:48:15 PM

There is nothing illogical about saying that wall street fucked up the world economy, people should go to jail for it, and that banking should be regulated back to 1933. It's the fucking truth. Yeah, people are using this opportunity to air out a number of other (legitimate) grievances, but that is, and has been from the beginning, the main thrust.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/my-advice-to-the-occupy-wall-street-protesters-20111012

Quote :

"That, to me, speaks volumes about the primary challenge of opposing the 50-headed hydra of Wall Street corruption, which is that it's extremely difficult to explain the crimes of the modern financial elite in a simple visual. "

Also, I had a post very similar to this guys a while back,

10/13/2011 4:57:56 PM

http://cnn.com/video/?/video/bestoftv/2011/10/13/ac-gop-views-occupy-wall-st.cnn

republicans changing their rhetoric. smells like election time is just around the corner.

10/13/2011 5:06:31 PM

Quote :

"There is nothing illogical about saying that wall street fucked up the world economy, people should go to jail for it, and that banking should be regulated back to 1933. It's the fucking truth. Yeah, people are using this opportunity to air out a number of other (legitimate) grievances, but that is, and has been from the beginning, the main thrust. "

well, I mean look at shit like this:

http://occupywallst.org/forum/proposed-list-of-demands-for-occupy-wall-st-moveme/


I mean, don't get me wrong, I'd love to see the execs of the Goldman Sachs and other such firms hanging in the streets, because... well fuck them.

10/13/2011 11:50:18 PM

^
(User Submitted)

Admin note: This is not an official list of demands. This is a forum post submitted by a single user and hyped by irresponsible news/commentary agencies like Fox News and Mises.org. This content was not published by the OccupyWallSt.org collective, nor was it ever proposed or agreed to on a consensus basis with the NYC General Assembly. There is NO official list of demands.

10/13/2011 11:52:44 PM

Quote :

"I mean, don't get me wrong, I'd love to see the execs of the Goldman Sachs and other such firms hanging in the streets, because... well fuck them."

I mean, don't get me wrong, I'd love to see every camel jockey and other such terrorist organizations hanging in the streets, because... well fuck them.

see little bobby poo, hate is never good

[Edited on October 14, 2011 at 12:19 AM. Reason : .]

10/14/2011 12:17:47 AM

Quote :

"There is nothing illogical about saying that wall street fucked up the world economy, people should go to jail for it, and that banking should be regulated back to 1933. It's the fucking truth."

I agree that banking should be de-regulated back to 1933. The sheer number of regulations on the books today is staggering. According to the site below, the federal register has grown more than 800 fold since 1936.
http://www.voteview.com/Fiorina_Keystone_Federal_Register.htm

As for the rest of it, you cannot put people in jail for engaging in legal activity. The government paid people to wreck the economy. You can't then turn around and ex-post-facto pass a law to make it illegal. How can you sacrifice human rights just because it is too difficult to get Congress out of the banking business?

10/14/2011 2:05:56 AM

^the more lax the regulations, the more amok the banks are allowed to run. It really doesn't make sense for banks to also be in the business of investment banking, insurance, and securities, because investment, insurance, and securities are risky enterprises, and if they fail and take the banks down with them...well...



the repeal of Glass-Steagal: Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act

http://youtu.be/veAOoQEy0PI

Watch that video. It was in 1999. The dude even predicts that in 5,10,15 years we would go back and say, "whoops." He's throwing around terms like "too big to fail" and warning about derivative markets and bank irresponsibility.


Why would anyone want zero regulation where bubbles form left and right and market volatility runs wild with rampant speculation? Unless you want to live in a country that has this type of disparity?





Also, I'd like to know the opinions about setting up some type of global regulations. If we were able to crash the world economy because of the failure of a US housing bubble which brought down banks across the globes, what's to stop a Dubai real-estate bubble or a Chinese housing bubble from bringing down the world economy in the future?

[Edited on October 14, 2011 at 3:08 AM. Reason : local markets ain't safe no mo]

10/14/2011 2:55:13 AM

Quote :

"As for the rest of it, you cannot put people in jail for engaging in legal activity. The government paid people to wreck the economy. You can't then turn around and ex-post-facto pass a law to make it illegal. How can you sacrifice human rights just because it is too difficult to get Congress out of the banking business?"

You're right, unfortunately that would be a human rights violation. Soooo, can't we just throw 'em in Gitmo and just label them as suspected terrorists and suspend their habeus corpus? After all, that's "legal" too.


But seriously, since corporations have been given "personhood," shouldn't they be held criminally responsible if any fraud was found? Wouldn't you be able to go after their assets if that were the case? Someone explain this to me and jerk-off my revenge boner.

[Edited on October 14, 2011 at 3:40 AM. Reason : ]

10/14/2011 3:34:09 AM

Quote :

"Soooo, can't we just throw 'em in Gitmo and just label them as suspected terrorists and suspend their habeus corpus? After all, that's "legal" too."

Obama is engaging in very similar human rights violations right now. I'm against those, so I'd be against this too.

Quote :

"^the more lax the regulations, the more amok the banks are allowed to run."

Not at all. All it requires is the presence of vast amounts of government money paying people huge salaries to wreck the economy. No amount of regulation of the private sector would have prevented Fannie and Freddie from wrecking lending standards or state laws preventing full recourse loans.

Quote :

"But seriously, since corporations have been given "personhood," shouldn't they be held criminally responsible if any fraud was found? Wouldn't you be able to go after their assets if that were the case?"

This again. A corporation is not a person. But the people that work and invest there are. They have the right to freedom of speech, freedom of association, and you can throw as many of them as you want in jail after convicting them in court. Corporate personhood is a lie told to inflame audiences. Corporations has no rights, it is the people that make up a corporation that have rights.

10/14/2011 12:05:54 PM

Quote :

"This again. A corporation is not a person. But the people that work and invest there are. They have the right to freedom of speech, freedom of association, and you can throw as many of them as you want in jail after convicting them in court. Corporate personhood is a lie told to inflame audiences. Corporations has no rights, it is the people that make up a corporation that have rights."

My corporate personhood post was intentionally tongue-in-cheek. I would support a criminal investigation of those who stood the most to gain by wrecking the economy, and if they were found guilty, I would assume their assets could be seized as well. The problem is that the repeal of many depression-era regulatory laws (like the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act) not only gave banks the incentive to merge and form mega-banks dealing in risky investments, but it also made it legal to do so. As a result, criminally prosecuting them will be difficult because of ex-post-facto laws.

Soooo, if we can't prosecute them for breaking laws that were in place in 1998 (but later repealed in 1999), it only makes sense to put back into place the laws that were previously in place that will prevent them from fucking americans in the ass again in the future.

How anyone can be against regulation, at this point, is beyond me.

10/14/2011 2:54:40 PM

Quote :

"http://english.aljazeera.net/programmes/meltdown/ This is a great 4 part series highlighting how our global markets are so insanely intertwined that national governments simply don't currently have the power to prevent these bubbles/crashes from affecting the entire world economy."

Great link! Thanks!

10/14/2011 5:10:25 PM

[Edited on October 14, 2011 at 5:35 PM. Reason : ]

10/14/2011 5:32:01 PM

Quote :

"Great link! Thanks!"

No problem. This is also a great read, if you're interested in knowing how goldman sachs makes its money and promotes political cronyism, disrupts "free markets" and influences supply/demand.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-great-american-bubble-machine-20100405



This is also a good watch: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XdVODFombco&feature=youtu.be

[Edited on October 14, 2011 at 5:51 PM. Reason : ]

10/14/2011 5:43:20 PM

Quote :

"How anyone can be against regulation, at this point, is beyond me."

I told you. I am entirely in favor of deregulating back to 1933. No dodd-frank, no Sarbanes-Oxley, no fannie, no freddie, no federal housing authority, none of the thousands of pages of regulations that have been imposed since then. These repeals will go a long way to preventing this from happening again and less bureaucracy will improve our standard of living. Of course, the easiest thing to do was simply not to bail anyone out, but I digress.

10/14/2011 5:57:09 PM

10/14/2011 9:06:52 PM

We have accepted today the existence in perpetuity of a permanent underclass of scores of millions who cannot cope and must be carried by society -- fed, clothed, housed, tutored, medicated at taxpayer’s expense their entire lives. We have a dependent nation the size of Spain in our independent America. We have a new division in our country, those who pay a double or triple fare, and those who ride forever free.

10/14/2011 9:24:54 PM

Any chance you can keep your horse shit confined to chit-chat?

10/14/2011 9:53:01 PM

Look, you may not care, I certainly don't. But you can't respond as if it is untrue that quite a few Americans are living on the public dime and are very happy with that arrangement. Too many people consider a disability award akin to winning the lottery. Most everyone has at least one in their extended family. I certainly do.

10/15/2011 12:44:51 AM

I don't. But my family doesn't fucking suck

10/15/2011 12:46:05 AM

Odd. Well, I do have a huge extended family. My aunt once removed (we share great grandmothers) is the only one the family is sure about. We don't begrudge her the disability check, because once you've seen her driving she is more than a bit crazy. There are probably others, but given the social stigma not everyone volunteers such information, opting instead to claim they work from home or are perpetually between jobs. While my grandmother's side of the family all went to college, my grandmother had a bunch of sisters living in the mountains of Georgia whose grandchildren didn't all finish high-school. And compared to minimum wage, disability pays quite well.

[Edited on October 15, 2011 at 1:20 AM. Reason : .,.]

10/15/2011 1:17:35 AM

Liberals = Humanities new trolls. They've stopped paying attention to reality and have resorted to denigrating anybody who simply has a different opinion to them.

They mentally aren't capable anymore to hearing other views. No point in trying to convince him. Let him post his random response. You can't fight truth with logic. You can only fight it with insanity like you see all over the place up there ^^ ^^^^

[Edited on October 15, 2011 at 10:20 AM. Reason : .]

10/15/2011 10:19:28 AM

Yeah, those damn dirty leftists in Frankfurt, Zurich, Rome, Prague, Manila, Montreal, Amsterdam, London, Johannesburg, Mumbai, Tokyo, Seoul, Hong Kong, Sydney, and dozens of other cities and countries around the world. This is making the Tea Party look like a glorified block party.

10/15/2011 10:58:25 AM

At expense of defending the tea party, it must be noted that they have had significant effect, while these clowns have pretty much been derided and pepper sprayed, and that's about all they'll get unless they change their approach.

10/15/2011 11:18:07 AM

Yeah, it's much easier to have an effect when you're constantly championed by a major news organization and backed by large amounts of money.

Unfortunately for the Occupy movement, both of those would make them hypocrites.

/seriously, Fox News had a camera crew at a ten person Tea Party protest at a freaking school (I think it was in New Jersey) but the major media outlets ignored this in NYC for a week.

[Edited on October 15, 2011 at 11:29 AM. Reason : .]

10/15/2011 11:28:10 AM

so one had an actual well defined position and a clear legal path to bring that legislation to reality and have literally done that.

one decides to basically vandalize a bunch of parks and taunt and spit at cops with absolutely no single legal means to do so.

pryderi ->"i really can't figure out why the protests are only pissing people off and aren't accomplishing a single thing"

10/15/2011 12:30:16 PM

Quote :

"Yeah, it's much easier to have an effect when you're constantly championed by a major news organization and backed by large amounts of money. Unfortunately for the Occupy movement, both of those would make them hypocrites."

Your logic is unsound. When the very thing you are seeking is 1) money and 2) public power and ability to sway the masses. Your logic that you are not backed by a political organization is false. You are currently being funded by various billionaires and activists and would not survive without it.

10/15/2011 1:09:08 PM

What exactly has the Tea Party accomplished? Getting the lowest rated Congress in history elected? Obstructing the passage of any legislation that comes their way? Promoting quite literally the worst group of Presidential candidates we've ever seen? Getting Gabrielle Giffords shot? Yeah, great "effect" they've had. I can't wait until it becomes clear that Obama will win again in 2012 so we can get some all new material of those clowns embarrassing themselves.

10/15/2011 1:24:42 PM

Quote :

"Getting Gabrielle Giffords shot?"

that was one of your own anarchists sadly.

10/15/2011 1:27:49 PM

10/15/2011 1:29:45 PM

No president since FDR has been re-elected with the kind of unemployment numbers or really, any of the economic numbers that Obama is currently seeing. Right or wrong (in my opinion, wrong) the president gets the majority of the blame or kudos for the economy.

As long as the republicans put up somebody with a plan, even a bad one, for the economy and to address the budget deficit he'll likely beat Obama. Look at Herman Cain's huge pop in the polls. People are excited by the fact that the guy has a concrete plan. He's put something out there. Will it work? Probably not as it's currently proposed... it's probably not revenue neutral, it's probably too simplistic and needs significant fleshing out, but he's said "here is my plan, this is what I intend to do." It's more than anybody else has done in the last 3+ years.

Obama sending us into yet another theater of combat doesn't help him any either. How do you sell the need to cut the defense budget, which seems to be a huge point in any democrats agenda, with putting boots on the ground in yet another warzone? He's going to get eaten alive on that point in every single debate.

I don't really like any of the options that will be presented for election in 2012, but I have a hard time seeing Obama being re-elected.

10/15/2011 1:34:19 PM

Yeah well, no black President had been elected ever, so let's not pretend historical trends are all that matters. It's all about the electoral map. Obama could lose basically all the states that "leaned blue" in 2008 and still win the election as long as he holds on to Michigan and Pennsylvania, both of which are highly unlikely to go Red. Not to mention we're still a year away and there has been some fairly promising economic numbers recently, namely hiring, consumer spending and exports.

The other thing is that Obama's favorability numbers among his base are still in the high 70s, which is a very strong number. None of the GOP candidates are viewed that well among Conservatives, and the most likely nominee, Romney, isn't even a conservative. Also, don't kid yourself about Cain and his "plan", it's a joke and so is he. It amounts to a giant tax hike on the poor/middle class while not even coming close to covering our expenditures.

Obama is also leaving all the GOP candidates in the dust when it comes to fundraising, just like in 2008.

[Edited on October 15, 2011 at 1:54 PM. Reason : :]

10/15/2011 1:48:59 PM

Quote :

" no black President had HAS been elected ever"

Correction. Obama is 50% british white american and 50% african american

But you have your first opportunity to vote for a TRUE 100% pure african american president in exactly 1 year.

10/15/2011 1:51:03 PM

http://abclocal.go.com/wtvd/story?section=news/local&id=8392512

Quote :

"Occupy Wall Street event begins in Raleigh RALEIGH (WTVD) -- After almost a month, the occupation of Wall Street has become quite a spectacle. On Saturday, that spectacle reached North Carolina, as Occupy Raleigh launched its first major protest at the State Capitol. By early afternoon, a group estimated at more than 500 people had gathered at and around the State Capitol. About 100 or so broke off and led a march around 1 p.m."

[Edited on October 15, 2011 at 2:18 PM. Reason : .]

10/15/2011 2:15:38 PM

I bet the Kaplan Frisbee golf course is completely empty for the first time in months.

10/15/2011 2:18:11 PM

10/15/2011 2:34:04 PM

Maybe now I'll actually be able to find a parking space at Whole Foods.

10/15/2011 2:36:53 PM

Quote :

"At expense of defending the tea party, it must be noted that they have had significant effect, while these clowns have pretty much been derided and pepper sprayed, and that's about all they'll get unless they change their approach."

Think that might have anything to do with the "Taxed Enough Already" and "Don't punish job creators" mantra disproportionately favoring the wealthiest Americans, who, coincidentally, also carry the most political weight?

10/15/2011 3:38:32 PM

I think taxed enough already resonates with pretty much everyone, especially the poorest, even if changes in the tax code won't do much for them. They still feel like they're heavily taxed.

10/15/2011 4:04:25 PM

^then why did they oppose the election of obama, who ran on saying that he would raise taxes on the 2% of the wealthiest (which he still hasn't done, by the way), and not the tea-party demographic? Or, why do they insist on not burdening "job creators" with a higher tax rate?

My point isn't that the main-stream tea partiers were too stupid to realize that the political leaders they helped to get elected are the same political leaders who are going to further enrich the top earners of society.

Does anyone really think that Michelle Bachmann or Paul Ryan or Rick Perry is really going to look out for the best financial interests of middle-america? I know the limbaugh/glenn beckian tea partiers think that, but do any real people think that?

[Edited on October 15, 2011 at 4:19 PM. Reason : ]

10/15/2011 4:17:31 PM

Quote :

" real people"

your black / white reverse racism, hardworker/leech inferiority complex is out of this world. were you actually raised a slave or something?

10/15/2011 4:33:53 PM

Naw man, I'm just a carpenter, spittin' the truth.

10/15/2011 4:55:21 PM

Police seem to have detained and arrested people inside a Citi Bank who were trying to close their accounts as a form of protest

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TH3kiaJ1-c8&feature=share

[Edited on October 15, 2011 at 5:47 PM. Reason : ]

10/15/2011 5:44:08 PM

so it's a crime to pull your money out of a bank, now?

10/15/2011 6:48:40 PM

Looks that way. Apparently two were charged with disorderly conduct, the rest with trespassing. Not sure how it's trespassing to be in a bank at which you're a customer to conduct a business transaction. Aren't people supposed to be able to freely choose the business that best suits their needs? My... free... market....

10/15/2011 6:50:29 PM