http://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/2011 ... et/100159/

Props to them to take what action they could.

JPMorgan recently made a $4.6 million donation to the NYPD. Not surprising to see officers acting like hired thugs... Some of the arrests and assaults on citizens (that have been caught on tape) are absolutely infuriating.

Oops! Apparently detaining a female has its perks!

Lots of unproductive people being unproductive... I respect their passion, but wish they were better informed.

"Peaceful assembly"? Looks like a lot of them are using the event as an excuse to act like morons, attacking the working class people who are just trying to do a job.

There's not a one of them who'd turn down a middle-management gig on Wall Street. Haters be hatin'.

Also, hot protester is hot:

Why do all the Occupy Wallstreet protest pics resemble People of Walmart pics?

AZhitman wrote:Lots of unproductive people being unproductive...

I know you weren't aiming for it, Greg, but others have been. Herman Cain said of the OWS protesters that if they were poor and unemployed, they ought to blame themselves and get a job, instead of protesting.

U-6 Unemployment (the measure most of the world uses) in the United States is at 16.7%, as of August - September's numbers are due out tomorrow and don't look good. That's 25.7 million people without a job, and the latest numbers on job openings (July - August's numbers will be out next week) is 3.2 million. The suggestion that these people simply need to make themselves more productive is somewhat insulting.

AZhitman wrote:Lots of unproductive people being unproductive... I respect their passion, but wish they were better informed.

"Peaceful assembly"? Looks like a lot of them are using the event as an excuse to act like morons, attacking the working class people who are just trying to do a job.

There's not a one of them who'd turn down a middle-management gig on Wall Street. Haters be hatin'.

Also, hot protester is hot:

Also people who were also "unproductive" doing unproductive things:

MLK Jr.
Ghandi

No, but nice try.

Again, lots of bumper-stickery sentiments with little facts or research behind them.

I'm not ignorant or insensitive to the economic and employment realities that Isaac cited - in fact, I'm staring a layoff dead in the face, and have been hanging by a thread for over a year now...

My point is that 'we all get it'. They're not bringing anything new to the discussion, and bleating about "fat cats" and interfering with peoples' ability to get to / from work serves only to make them look stupid and irritate people like me.

I wonder how many of them are registered to vote.

Americans have selective senses and selective memories. Same applies here. I applaud what these people are doing because it is drawing attention and making people actually *think* about the parasitic nature of the financial services industry (and you bet it's parasitic and not symbiotic). However, many (but, I believe, far from all) of the people holding up these signs are hypocrites, as they would gladly accept the financial benefits these services could offer them; they would buy a house with a cheap mortgage offered with little to no money down in the hopes they could flip it before the ARM escalates and roll the profit from the sale into a down payment on a bigger and more expensive property, etc etc.

I haven't forgotten the rampant greed that captivated America during the housing bubble. But I also haven't forgotten that the whole thing was cooked up by these financial institutions as a way to attain astronomical short-term profits that they knew, even from the very beginning, were not sustainable and would have disasterous long-term effects. However, America is quickly forgetting and these protest do serve to remind us all that, while we might need these *ssholes (for now, at least), we should never EVER trust them.

I think what Herman, perhaps Greg, and myself are getting at is: their wasting their time that could be better spent elsewhere, wanting to enact drastic knee jerk measures to correct a problem that they themselves helped to create, yet by wasting time dont seem as willing as other to help correct. We're just finally seeing our chickens of "big nanny stateism" coming home to roost. More government is not the answer. As the old adage goes, when it comes to government, LESS IS MORE

I disagree completely. Government should not be about quantity at all. It should be about quality. In some cases that will require more government, not less. When a company wants to correct a problem, they don't do so by cutting the staff and funding needed to solve that problem. Government should be no different. In terms of regulation, you ask anyone in business and they'll say that a reactive approach will fail 100% of the time to prevent a problem. While this seems elementary, it applies to regulation perfectly. The less expensive, most efficient approach is to prevent things from happening, not fixing them after they happen. If we'd had more, higher-quality regulation in the financial services industry during the past decade or so, we wouldn't be in the mess we are today, because someone would have called these people to task for what were the certain consequences of their actions.

Z

Actually, the guy is there because, though he would have liked to make lemonade out of the lemons (or just sell the lemons directly), the same guy who wouldn't loan him the money to start his business instead just bought all the lemons and lemon trees himself. Then he allowed the guy to sit among them and collect tips until he's got enough money to go ahead and start buying the lemons (which the owner will graciously sell to the guy at a 300%+ markup, I'm sure).

We need to free up the markets and get the word out that, if we don't do something now, we're going to live in an authoritarian plutocracy within the next 20 years. You already hav80% of the wealth owned by <20% of the population. We should be familiar with that concept -- it's one of the reasons a few smart guys wrote that Declaration of Independence thing.

I follow you there, but, when a company sees a problem thats out of their jurisdiction, they dont absorb the problem and usurp control.

stebo0728 wrote:I follow you there, but, when a company sees a problem thats out of their jurisdiction, they dont absorb the problem and usurp control.

Okay, I'm not following. What do you mean?

I'd also expect any of those who benefitted from the "greed" of Wall Street to return, with interest, any funds their 401K's, mutual funds, and stock holdings might have accrued as a result of the efforts of those "greedy fat cats".

Any takers?

Not likely. Then again, that crowd doesn't strike me as the type to be financially savvy enough to possess any such holdings, much less the foresight to forego short-term gratification in an effort to obtain them.

AZhitman wrote:I'd also expect any of those who benefitted from the "greed" of Wall Street to return, with interest, any funds their 401K's, mutual funds, and stock holdings might have accrued as a result of the efforts of those "greedy fat cats".

Any takers?

Not likely. Then again, that crowd doesn't strike me as the type to be financially savvy enough to possess any such holdings, much less the foresight to forego short-term gratification in an effort to obtain them.

You could ask the banks to give back all the bailout money.....

AZhitman wrote:I'd also expect any of those who benefitted from the "greed" of Wall Street to return, with interest, any funds their 401K's, mutual funds, and stock holdings might have accrued as a result of the efforts of those "greedy fat cats".

Any takers?

Not likely. Then again, that crowd doesn't strike me as the type to be financially savvy enough to possess any such holdings, much less the foresight to forego short-term gratification in an effort to obtain them.

Hmm. Well, first off, they provide a service and we pay for that service. They didn't give anything to anyone for free, so the question of a return with interest is not applicable.

You are also assuming that an investment in stock has any tangible value in and of itself. It doesn't, beyond the strictly promisory. If you don't intend to sell the stock that you bought, it has no value other than the dividend paid to you by the company.

Lastly, do you think that people who got sucked into the sub-prime market, lost their job, home, and assest really have anything left in their 401k, mutual funds, etc etc? Americans were sold the idea that "your home is the biggest and best investment you can make". Homes were appreciating faster than any other asset, based on ROI. Most people who lost lost EVERYTHING.

Even if the protesters don't come from the ranks of those whose voices they represent, it doesn't matter. Giving voice to the voiceless is part of why this country is awesome.

AZhitman wrote:Then again, that crowd doesn't strike me as the type to be financially savvy enough to possess any such holdings, much less the foresight to forego short-term gratification in an effort to obtain them.

They're probably also mostly unemployed because the economy's in the s***. You want to know what they're pissed about, Greg? It's not people using the stock market to get rich. It's not people working on the stock market. It's not big banks. It's not any of that. It's this:

We handed them a ton of cash without demanding reform in exchange, and even failed to prosecute people who were breaking the law. Poke fun at them as much as you want, but don't forget that there are legitimate grievances.

I find funny that all the people who go, "These people know nothing about economics!" are the same people who crippled the economy.

More very clever signs:

http://www.junkboulevard.com/the-50-bes ... allstreet/

I'm genuinely perturbed by this entire scenario...

bigbadberry3 wrote:I find funny that all the people who go, "These people know nothing about economics!" are the same people who crippled the economy.

All of them?

Because I didn't.

bigbadberry3 wrote:You could ask the banks to give back all the bailout money.....

I'm fine with that as well.

Isaac, I don't disagree with what you say. Let's remember that in '12, because as Roger Daltrey said, "Meet the new boss/Same as the old boss".

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rp6-wG5LLqE[/youtube]

AZhitman wrote:Isaac, I don't disagree with what you say. Let's remember that in '12, because as Roger Daltrey said, "Meet the new boss/Same as the old boss".

In some ways, you're right that President Obama's policies are the same as President Bush's. But that's because much of President Bush's policy was standard American policy. I agreed with much of it, but I disagreed with the bits that were wholly owned by Bush-43.

With that in mind, I would have loved to see strings attached to the bank bailouts, in much the same way as President Bush attached strings to the auto bailouts. But I'm not opposed to the bailouts themselves. I think President Bush's policies in the second half of his final year were the first of his economic policies to make sense.

Though, in reflection, I think that's only because he'd been doing it wrong all along and the economy changed for him.

AZhitman wrote: Isaac, I don't disagree with what you say. Let's remember that in '12, because as Roger Daltrey said, "Meet the new boss/Same as the old boss".

The odds of the new boss being different from the old boss once sitting in the Oval Office, regardless of what is said on the campaign trail, are about the same as a cyclone sucking a cheetah up into the atmosphere, transporting it across the ocean, and dropping it on Ashton Kutcher while he's windsurfing off the coast of Maui.

And the reason for this extreme unliklihood is exactly what these protestors are saying: money runs politics, and Wall Street has the money.

Had you said "cougar", I'd say those are good odds. Cheetah? Notsomuch.

And back to your comment - therein lies the problem. Those who "drank the kool-aid" when the current Administration was on the campaign trail need to set pride aside, quit defending the failed policies of yet another political regime that values dogma over pragmatism, and demand accountability before the whole house of cards comes tumbling down.

In other news, we're getting "rope-a-doped" yet again with distractions like the F&F investigation and "tough talk" from BHO on Ahmedinnerjacket's latest shenanigans.

Which still sortof dodges the issue, though, right? I mean people are saying "Wall Street buys politicians". If that's true, it's worth protesting over. If it's not true, then why is Wall Street the sacred cow of every administration?

The problem is not investment. The problem is debt. Big banks dangled a Faustian bargain out in front of us, and a vast majority said "Yes, please!". They then sold that debt off to someone else so they don't have to take accountability for it. The only mistake was that they were so busy trying to play three-card-monty with the toxic mortgages that they forgot how fast they were saturating the debt markets and ended up having to keep some of that debt themselves. So they went to the government and said "Please sir, we spent all the money that people had invested with us on these toxic securities. If we go under, everybody loses everything." And we said "Yes, have some" and gave them TARP money. So the worst that happened to them was that they didn't make quite as much as they thought they would, the executives got huge bonuses for making the bailout happen, and we the people got the shaft.

People love to talk about corporate responsibility. There is little of that on Wall Street as history has shown. And if enough people raise their voices, then somebody's going to put some money and influence into taking action beyond holding signs.

Encryptshun wrote:If that's true, it's worth protesting over. If it's not true, then why is Wall Street the sacred cow of every administration?

Good. Protest at the ballot box. Storm the gates of 1600 PA Ave. Send letters to your Congressman telling him/her to shape up or GTFO.

But leave the people who are just going about their day-to-day the HELL alone.

Encryptshun wrote:And we said "Yes, have some" and gave them TARP money.

Not "we". "They".

Encryptshun wrote:And if enough people raise their voices, then somebody's going to put some money and influence into taking action beyond holding signs.

And that somebody can be bought. That somebody is called a lobbyist. And there's lots of them.

Sorry to be cynical, but this is what people get for fawning over the Second Coming. It's more of the same, with a Chi-town accent.

AZhitman wrote:

Encryptshun wrote:And we said "Yes, have some" and gave them TARP money.

Not "we". "They".

Yup.

I was certainly very opposed to it and wrote to my Congressperson about it - posted here about it at NICO too: post4127561.html ... I was remarkably prescient three years ago!

Needless to say, I got back a form letter in response.

Z