^Just an FYI. JP Morgan Chase donated $4.5 Million the NYPD this year. And a list of other banks all donated $100,000 or more each to the NYPD as well. Haha. This country is so fucked.

[Edited on October 15, 2011 at 7:07 PM. Reason : ]

10/15/2011 6:57:54 PM

Quote :

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

I have no idea how that can be legally justified. Is there some depression-era law about run on banks that makes it illegal to arrest paying customers or something? It's really hard to believe that this is going on.

[Edited on October 15, 2011 at 7:43 PM. Reason : ]

10/15/2011 7:42:56 PM

10/15/2011 8:05:07 PM

more video of the bank account guys getting arrested:

http://youtu.be/RqGzQ4SzCAk



with so many video cameras from these guys, it probably won't take much effort to link the videos together to get a clear idea of what happened.

10/15/2011 8:41:34 PM

When I saw that one cop walking up to the woman who was cuffed and being led out of the bank I just knew he was going to slug her in the face. Hooray for pleasant surprises!

10/15/2011 8:47:16 PM

haha. white shirt police officers are the new pinkertons.

10/15/2011 8:51:25 PM

why dont you be a little more paranoid?

you know, enjoy life.

10/15/2011 10:06:48 PM

Marched yesterday in my local Occupy event. Was glad to see hundreds of people from all walks of life, including plenty of the employed who came down (some dressed in their work clothes to help combat the ignorant perceptions of people like 99% of the Wolf Web).

10/16/2011 8:43:55 AM

Quote :

"More than 20 people were reportedly arrested in a fracas outside the LaGuardia Place Citibank, after upwards of 50 demonstrators entered the bank to close their accounts."

http://www.myfoxny.com/dpp/news/nyc-occupy-on-march-again-dpgapx-km-20111015

10/16/2011 9:16:28 AM

Police get skittish around banks. I was almost arrested for trying to withdraw $40.

10/16/2011 9:32:35 AM

They bagged 175 last night in Chicago. Cuff em and stuff em.

10/16/2011 12:43:32 PM

Quote :

"including plenty of the employed who came down (some dressed in their work clothes to help combat the ignorant perceptions of people like 99% of the Wolf Web)."

WE ARE THE 99%!!!

But seriously, you're not fucking stupid. I'm unemployed and I have work clothes.

10/16/2011 1:42:11 PM

Hmmmm... I didn't take work clothes to mean suit&tie but rather uniforms. Was I mistaken?

/ eh, if they meant uniforms why not say uniforms..

[Edited on October 16, 2011 at 2:45 PM. Reason : .]

10/16/2011 2:45:24 PM

Well, I've got the uniforms (company shirts) from several of the jobs I've worked at, so either way.

I'm sure there's plenty of employed people protesting, but let's not act like their sartorial choices prove it.

And yes, I've been waiting to drop "sartorial" into conversation for a while now.

10/16/2011 3:47:18 PM

I had to look it up. Annnnd....I....learned something today.


Thank you.

10/16/2011 4:43:59 PM

just saw NBC17 coverage on 'Occupy Durham' - amongst a flurry of formulaic hippy drivel, one intelligent young lady steps up and talks some sense by mentioning reinstating Glass Steagall

10/16/2011 11:47:17 PM

Which is actually nonsense because Glass Steagall would have only made the crisis worse.

What we really need is to be more deregulated like Canada.

10/17/2011 9:32:52 AM

Really?

Canada has a different style of regulation than what we have in the US (and might be worth looking into and mimicking), but to say they are deregulated is disingenous and it definitely isn't the type of deregulation that the banks in the US are fighting for.

http://articles.businessinsider.com/2011-09-26/wall_street/30203172_1_jamie-dimon-basel-iii-s-bankers

Quote :

"Jamie Dimon reportedly exploded in a meeting at the IMF conference when the governor of the Bank of Canada argued in favor of tighter bank regulations. The governor, Mark Carney, who many believe is the future head of the Financial Stability Forum, supported what bankers call "growth-killing" capital requirements. According to the Financial Times, Carney and Dimon were at a private meeting of the Financial Stability Forum in Washington DC at the IMF conference. .... The confrontation reportedly got so bad that the CEO of Goldman Sachs (who is head of the Financial Services Forum bankers’ group which arranged the session) had to step in. Lloyd Blankfein emailed Carney, currently the Bank of Canada Governor, to try to smooth relations, says the FT. "

10/17/2011 10:06:58 AM

There's some pretty tight leverage limits on most banks in Canada. They don't have the low lending standards we had (partly due to gov., yes), but they have stricter standards on risk-taking elsewhere. Apples and oranges.

This is yet another one of those scenarios where LoneSnark thinks he's wowing everyone with his "actually that thing everyone knows isn't true" bullshit. Tell us again how the US is more socialist than Sweden? He doesn't expect people to dig into this information and discover that comparing countries that use completely different regulatory structures or paradigms of social welfare is pretty silly on a superficial web forum discussion level.

10/17/2011 10:50:00 AM

Quote :

"Which is actually nonsense because Glass Steagall would have only made the crisis worse. What we really need is to be more deregulated like Canada."

how dare you post such things on tww

10/17/2011 11:18:10 AM

Yeah, I'm sure you can tell us a lot about the issue, what with your broad expertise in trolling.

10/17/2011 11:56:10 AM

Understand how the banking system works or stay an idiot. I'm pretty confident you'll do the latter.

10/17/2011 12:10:53 PM

No chance. I literally have an IV of articles from the Mises Institute going into my brachiocephalic artery right now. I also have my tinfoil hat handy to stop any information from the non-Austrian cabal of "economists" from touching my brain.

10/17/2011 12:17:08 PM

Quote :

"Which is actually nonsense because Glass Steagall would have only made the crisis worse"

explain.

i just want banks to be banks. if they want to be buy side/sell side funds, hedge funds, or even casinos, they should call themselves that and be separate of lending institutions. also, too big to fail = too big to exist.

10/17/2011 12:25:51 PM

If you "want banks to be banks," then you should be opposed to the fractional reserve banking system, which is powered by the Federal Reserve. You want banks to secure people's money. You don't want them being able to loan out 10 dollars for every 1 dollar they receive in deposits, because they tend to give out risky loans and the people are forced to eat the losses.

10/17/2011 12:38:04 PM

Quote :

"But seriously, you're not fucking stupid. I'm unemployed and I have work clothes."

Ian shut the fuck up I have zero patience to argue with you over fucking minutiae. It's logically possible every single person in their work clothes could have been lying about being employed, of course. Is it probable every last one of them was lying? Stop playing the idiot.

^ lol financial primitivism will surely work

hey guys let's get anti-scientific as fuck and start listening to guys like destroyer, who can fit the entirety of their ideological sophistication on a flier

[Edited on October 17, 2011 at 1:52 PM. Reason : .]

10/17/2011 1:50:00 PM

Quote :

"But seriously, you're not fucking stupid. I'm unemployed and I have work clothes."

Yeah, and 1 percenters can hire people like James O'Keefe to infiltrate Occupy Wall St. to shit on police cars.

10/17/2011 2:08:35 PM

Quote :

"^ lol financial primitivism will surely work hey guys let's get anti-scientific as fuck and start listening to guys like destroyer, who can fit the entirety of their ideological sophistication on a flier"

You mad, bro.

10/17/2011 2:15:13 PM

ITT: we realize that the 99% folks have never left the country and thus don't realize how great they have it.





[Edited on October 17, 2011 at 3:37 PM. Reason : ,]

10/17/2011 3:33:27 PM

ITT we investigate the thoughts and images that pass through the mind of a bitter racist who has suffered a stroke and is on life support (or: pack_bryan's posts)

10/17/2011 3:45:24 PM

I assume you have some sort of education to make your opinion worth something? Neither sociology nor philosophy degrees count, by the way.

10/17/2011 3:50:58 PM

So...let's support more aid efforts in the 3rd world by all sorts of organizations?

I wonder how much money self-described libertarians in here give annually to unicef or doctors without borders as opposed to reason magazine or the charity that gives sick kids video games. yes, OBVIOUSLY YOU ARENT JUST USING THAT 99% TO BADGER LIBTARDS.

Quote :

"I assume you have some sort of education to make your opinion worth something? Neither sociology nor philosophy degrees count, by the way."

This is literally the most pathetic rejoinder to any argument, to appeal to the whole "durrrr i only value degree that give me money, money = smartz" thing.

[Edited on October 17, 2011 at 3:55 PM. Reason : x]

10/17/2011 3:51:34 PM

Quote :

"I assume you have some sort of education to make your opinion worth something? Neither sociology nor philosophy degrees count, by the way."

I have a degree in computer science

if that "legitimizes" me to you, which it needn't, but I do study the majority of my waking hours and you clearly don't know shit kid

[Edited on October 17, 2011 at 3:55 PM. Reason : .]

10/17/2011 3:53:51 PM

Take people like the rich guy in Chicago who's paying some dude $22 an hour to protest, the "Working Families Party" who's putting out ads in Craigslist looking to hire people for $350-650 a week, and the liberal dude in D.C. who's paying 10+ random Mexicans to protest with him, throw in people like those referenced in the pic above who complain about "big corporations" and being poor while they buy the latest cell phones from big corporations, and add the multi-millionaire celebutards who have joined the OWS protests such as Tim Robbins, Susan Sarandon, Kanye West, Michael Moore, Russell Simmons, Roseanne Barr, Yoko Ono, Jane Fonda and Alec Baldwin (the latter is the spokesman for Capital One Bank), and what do you get?

Filthy rich actors who work for corrupt and greedy Hollywood studio's joining forces with rich people who like to pay others to protest for them and a bunch of nobodies who have no problem with giving largely corrupt and greedy corporations lots of extra cash that they supposedly don't have, all gathered together in unison to protest corrupt and greedy rich people.

What. The. Fuck.

10/17/2011 3:56:09 PM

we could turn on rush or read free republic and get the same insight you're offering. please try something new.

do you even have any principals other than "liburuls r stupid, conservative haul ass get paid"?



cause if not, you're pretty much just trolling. even aaronburro has his anti-science principals.

10/17/2011 4:00:57 PM

^ lol

10/17/2011 4:02:50 PM

Quote :

"we could turn on keith olbermann or read huffington and get the same insight you're offering. please try something new. do you even have any principals other than "consrvtrdz r stupid, liberals haul ass get paid"?"

fixed

10/17/2011 4:10:29 PM

Dude it's hilarious how you think people on the left are all little mirror images of yourself

10/17/2011 4:15:25 PM

ive never understood the appeal of keith olbermann

he is for politics what george will is for baseball. yeah, you're passionate, but you make no fucking sense.

10/17/2011 4:32:56 PM

was just replying to his rogue post insinuating exactly that. i was just playing along with his troll efforts

back on topic

Here's what confuses me. if they are so jealous of the 1%, why don't they just buy shares in multinational corporations then? Instead of bitching about how AWESOME people who do that have it?

10/17/2011 4:35:04 PM

keith olbermann bugs me. rachel maddow, on the other hand, makes me moist.

10/17/2011 4:50:38 PM

I'm sure you're just being intentionally obtuse, but come on dude, we both know by now it's not about jealousy. Nobody's asking for a yacht and nobody's threatening to burn your house down and steal your gun collection or whatever.

Be real with me here: Do you like living in a country where you're one medical emergency away from being bankrupt, whether or not you have health insurance? Do you like living in a country where you can responsibly put away money for retirement in your 401(k) and have it wiped out overnight because a bunch of guys in Manhattan were allowed to cook up highly-leveraged financial instruments that no one understood and tank the stock market? Do you like living in a country where, if you don't go to college, you will probably have to work two or three jobs to support your family, and, even if you did go to college, you still might end up having to work a couple jobs because yours got outsourced? Maybe you were an employee, but your status got switched to independent contractor so your employer could cut your benefits and pay you less. It's been shown that wages as a percentage of GDP have been declining steadily since the 70s:



What's the proper response when this happens on a nationwide scale? Just sit quietly and be glad someone took pity enough on you to give you a job at all?

Here's the current state of the US, in the simplest possible terms: The middle class, by and large, is getting screwed. Why is it greedy to want safety and security for yourself and your family in exchange for your work, while the super-rich, who trashed the economy and continue to buy up political power to the extent that the average American has less of a voice than ever before, are capitalist supermen who should be respected and admired? Note that they don't really do all that well for the people who use their services anyway, according to those Leninist Marxist Nazis at the Wall Street Journal, but still apparently deserve their massive salaries: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203914304576628873340076918.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

I'm just curious why you think we can't strive for better as a nation. Things have been getting worse for people in general everywhere outside of laboratory economics experiments - why do you think they don't have the right to be pissed off about it?

10/17/2011 9:23:10 PM

Just be patient. It'll trickle-down eventually.

10/17/2011 9:27:08 PM

^^ The proper response is to dismantle over a decade of unchecked government growth.

What would you have us do? Would raising taxes on the wealthy 4% really make you satisfied?

10/17/2011 9:47:25 PM

^^^We agree on a lot when it comes to what's wrong, but I think there's a disagreement on how these problems came about. You would probably say that it's "deregulation" - if only the government had made more regulations (you know, in excess of the 50,000 plus regulations that were added to the federal register during Bush's two terms), the financial crisis would have been prevented.

I think you suffer from economic tunnel vision. There are larger, structural problems that it seems many on the "left" are unwilling to recognize. I'll continue beating the dead horse that is the Federal Reserve + the Fractional Reserve Banking system until you have no choice but to get informed.

Essentially, the argument is "if only we had regulations that discouraged the behavior that the government was actively pushing with artificially low interest rates/easy credit, the consequences of risky behavior would have been avoided." That's just...not a good argument. It's the same as saying, "if only we had enough band aids, we wouldn't have had all these wounds that got infected." Well, maybe the best advice would have been to not dive head first into the thorny brush, and, additionally, that we shouldn't continue returning to brush time and time again and expect different results.

[Edited on October 17, 2011 at 10:04 PM. Reason : ]

10/17/2011 10:01:09 PM

It's a start. In an ideal world, I'd cut the military budget in half, open up Medicare to everyone, reform student loans to at least make them dischargeable through bankruptcy, reinstate Glass-Steagall, and raise the minimum wage to a level that's at least above the poverty line. But since probably none of that will ever happen, I don't even know. I think we're probably SOL as a nation already. I've actually been thinking a lot about what the future of work in this country is going to be, but it will take me some time to get that worked out to a point where I can actually make it coherent.

As to your other point, I get that you don't like government growth, but I tend to think the size of the government isn't the problem in and of itself, but that it doesn't serve the people. How do we get a voice in democracy again (and no, having a binary choice between Obama and Romney next year doesn't really count as having a voice)?

^Well, I mean, I'd agree that the government definitely fucked up by pushing easy credit. I don't think everyone necessarily needs to own a home, and I like the idea of making banks have more cash on hand. I don't know if we really are all that far apart there. If you get rid of the Fed, though, what do you replace it with?

I dunno, man. Maybe I have too much faith in the government's ability to manage the programs I'd like to see, but it seems obvious that if you had everyone in the country on, say, the same health insurance program you'd save massively on administrative costs and economies of scale. Like, it should work if everyone just did what they were supposed to, so why can't we pull it off? Why don't we as a nation demand it? Instead, half the people want to give it a try, half the people say we should just be happy with what we've got, and everyone just ends up being pissed off at one another. It's frustrating.

[Edited on October 17, 2011 at 10:14 PM. Reason : ]

10/17/2011 10:01:11 PM

anybody catch the segment on NPR last week where they were talking about college students and the reporter goes in to some pizza shop or something like that and talks to two college-aged kids? He finds out they support the protests, finds out they are both college students, and then asks them what their majors are. One of them says "History". He then asks that girl "what can you do with a history degree," to which she responds, "Nothing, really." He then asks her "how is that Wall Street's fault" and without batting an eye the other dude responds "because college is just a recruiting ground for Wall Street." what. the. fuck.



btw, I sure loved all of the glowing reviews and interviews that NPR, CNN, NBC, ABC, and CBS gave to Tea Party protestors. Way to show your true colors, guys

Quote :

"Maybe I have too much faith in the government's ability to manage the programs I'd like to see, but it seems obvious that if you had everyone in the country on, say, the same health insurance program you'd save massively on administrative costs and economies of scale."

only, you wouldn't. only a fucking FOOL would think that the government could actually cut costs and run things efficiently. jesus fucking christ

[Edited on October 17, 2011 at 10:16 PM. Reason : ]

10/17/2011 10:15:59 PM

Why though? Because that's the way it is?

Here are some of the things you pay for with private insurance: Underwriting, advertising, high-level administrator salaries and bonuses, profits. On the provider side, doctors have to pay administrative costs of dealing with countless different insurance companies and plans. The average American doctor pays $61,000/yr more in administrative costs than the average Canadian doctor. In the aggregate, that's almost $30 billion and 17.5 hours per week that gets wasted on administrative costs that could go toward providing actual healthcare.

There's no reason we couldn't take advantage of that if the program was actually managed worth a damn.


[Edited on October 17, 2011 at 10:26 PM. Reason : ]

10/17/2011 10:17:23 PM

Quote :

"Well, I mean, I'd agree that the government definitely fucked up by pushing easy credit. I don't think everyone necessarily needs to own a home, and I like the idea of making banks have more cash on hand. I don't know if we really are all that far apart there. If you get rid of the Fed, though, what do you replace it with?"

What are your reasons for believing the part in bold? You open a bank. I deposit 100 dollars. The government says that you can now legally loan out somewhere between 800 and 1000 dollars and charge interest on it. Doesn't that seem wrong to you? Doesn't it kind of seem like the banks are profiting off of...well, nothing, except the backing of the government?

Quote :

"I dunno, man. Maybe I have too much faith in the government's ability to manage the programs I'd like to see, but it seems obvious that if you had everyone in the country on, say, the same health insurance program you'd save massively on administrative costs and economies of scale. Like, it should work if everyone just did what they were supposed to, so why can't we pull it off? Why don't we as a nation demand it? Instead, half the people want to give it a try, half the people say we should just be happy with what we've got, and everyone just ends up being pissed off at one another. It's frustrating."

Faith is a great way to describe it, because history shows that the government doesn't manage much well, and in some cases, they manage things so poorly that millions of people die needlessly.

I like the idea of people voluntarily coming together and doing things for each other, and I think that human nature will guide them to do that. I like the idea that people can choose to not participate in these collectivist activities and live the shitty life that it would entail.

I think there is never a time when a government represents your interests better than you do. Any time you give all the biggest guns to one central power and expect them to do what's right for the people, it won't happen. They're going to do what's right for them. A few politicians will try to do what's right, and their voices will be overwhelmed by those that are self-serving.

That's why I find it so absurd when these protesters suggest we "get the money out of politics." That has never happened in human civilization, ever. Politics and money are inseparable, because ultimately, politics are a means for individuals and groups to get economic benefits that would have been unobtainable otherwise.

[Edited on October 17, 2011 at 10:26 PM. Reason : ]

10/17/2011 10:25:02 PM

Corporations have too much cash on hand btw.

10/17/2011 10:29:42 PM