OccupyWallStreet.org Protest

MikeUpNorth

Grinner

All right, it looks like I can't be arsed to go to my home protest so I shall donate my sign idea to somebody more committed:

"Squeeze The Kochs"

ooeat0meoo

Had a wild and crazy day in Washington DC... I followed the Stop the Machine October2011.org people to the Air and Space museum where a civil disobediance was to happen.

Turns out a whole lot of people got maced.

From top on down at my Youtube channel says it all.

Rousseauist1's Channel - YouTube

There had been more drama... between the two protest groups in DC, but I'm exhausted. I've been up for 23 hrs, need sleep.

I've got video of some nutbag at the Stop the Machine October2011.org trashing the Occupydc.org group. ... Long story short ~ the person that got on the microphone at the Freedom Plaza talking shit about McPherson Sq. nearly had me to the point where I was about to kick his ass. ~ His fellow organizers threw him out to the Plaza for causing undo problems.

Ok... time for about 12 sleep.

ooeat0meoo

National Air and Space Invasion of the Smithsonian October 9th

RedKaos

I'm amazed at hows there's still zero to little coverage on this - you'd think a substantial nationwide protest that involves thousands of Americans would garner some sort of media coverage, especially considering how few inbred tea baggers make a racket is enough to attract coverage.

brad-dyrak

I don't watch much mainstream news at all, but I do feel like I've seen a fair bit of coverage. Definitely gets quite a bit of attention in local feeds. Here in Portland it's fairly big news, even given that there's usually something of the sort going on.

brad-dyrak

Why are they bothering the Air and Space Museum?

gooDevil

So I guess that mean Rupert Murdoch doesn't fund this group.

10 tea partiers in a park is news, somehow.

ooeat0meoo

WASHINGTON — An editor for The American Spectator claims to have participated in an anti-war protest at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington that resulted in security guards using pepper spray, sickening a number of people.

The museum was closed after the protest Saturday afternoon. Smithsonian officials said a group of 100 to 200 people tried to enter the museum but were barred by security guards who said they couldn't bring in signs. The guards used pepper spray to turn back the crowd, although protesters remained on the steps of the museum afterward.

Patrick Howley, assistant editor at the conservative magazine based in Arlington, Va., wrote in a blog post that he was one of a "select few" protesters willing to storm the entrance to the museum and that he "may have been the only one" who made it inside.

Some supporters of the protesters criticized Howley, branding him an "agent provocateur" who tried to discredit the movement by inciting violence.

Conservative writer for The American Spectator claims he infiltrated anti-war protest in DC | The Republic


Two more videos I hadn't included in the few above that I recorded... These are of the trouble making Neo-Slime

ooeat0meoo

The day after the Smithsonian incident...

It was a day for fun with the protestors at Malcom X Park

Silva

Occupy London has began

holdsteady

Well Glenn Beck has gone full fascist and called for a Night of the Long Knives and mass murder of the protesters.

AVARiCE

Occupy London was already at an advanced stage of planning two weeks ago. It doesn't properly begin until this Saturday, I believe.

[Just checked] Sorry, I didn't realise they'd actually gone public today, I thought you'd made some sort of random statement!

Anyway, the real reason I came to this thread. The tin foil hat brigade are linking OWS and the early whispers of protest in London to the downtime BBM's currently having. Personally I believe in coincidence and I don't think they'd do something like that but, following David Cameron's comments post-riots, some people do. Thought it'd be a good point of discussion for this thread. Like I said, I'm not so sure but then again, I'd like to see BBM up soon to properly quell the idea.

gooDevil

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO

Red Dreams

looks like the Rethugs are trying to get in front of this movement.

Should prove funny.

Lets hope they lynch the likes of Cantor and Bohner.

ooeat0meoo

Not that anyone talks about specific party affiliations or candidates at many of the Occupy locations ~ The Republicans blew it.

I don't know if any heard about Glen Beck saying that the protestors will 'drag the rich from their homes and kill them!!!' He is such a desperate fool. I would provide a link ~ but that would only boost his ego to know more people are checking him out.


I'm not so plugged into the Wall St. crew.. but the inside scoop with Occupy DC crew is that Dylan Ratigan is doing a special show nearby McPherson Sq. He will be visiting the park and possibly inviting a bunch of ppl to the taping of his show, today.

Drainy

adexkola

I agree with this person.

Commadus

Is he absolving Wall street and the Government of the blame for the financial mess or not?

lynchie

Does he know there are no swearing filters on real life?

AVARiCE

You've both missed the point completely.

I'm not even going to go through the errors I see there (I spot at least two major ones). The point with OWS is that the 99% are funding the 1%. Who do you think is racking up this person's 30+ hrs worth of minimum wage at the top of the food chain? Why is this person working that hard just to maintain--as you can clearly see--a relatively modest lifestyle? Why should this person have to work 30+ hours on minimum wage to get an education in a civilised country?

Here's the big zinger. If something beyond this person's control falls out of place (ie. they fall ill in a country with no free healthcare or they're evicted because someone else will pay higher rent) then the "bad decision" wasn't theirs. Who bails them out though? No-one. They have to battle even harder.

When bankers and other fatcats went and sold every single one of us down the drain, every single one of us had to chip in to bail them out. They still got bonuses.

How people fail to see this disparity actually offends me. It stems beyond left wing and right wing politics, it's about human fecking decency.

Sir Matt

The last line is complete bullshit.

The issue behind this whole protest is that while the top 1% or .5% keep gaining more and more wealth, everyone else is making less or stagnating economically. Production has increased almost exponentially over the past several decades while salaries for average workers, who helped enable that increased efficiency and production, have seen their salaries remain the same or go down, while benefits haven't improved. At the same time, the executives see their salaries skyrocket with improved bonuses and stock options. Whether or not the company performs well.

While sales at places like Target, Walmart, and other lower level stores have dropped during the current crisis, sales at places like Nordstrom, Neiman Marcus, and other luxury goods vendors have gone up. While everyone else is struggling, people who currently have the largest proportion of wealth they've ever had in history keep getting more. Despite fucking over everyone else by wrecking the economy through stupidity and greed. Goldman Sachs bet against its own loans that ended up in default. So did a number of other companies. They knew they were junk, but S&P wanted to make the banks happy so it could make more money and rated them AAA instead of junk. As a result of the housing bubble collapse, the job market and economy are completely shit. Companies are sitting on record profits but not hiring because of "uncertainty" that some of them helped to create.

The SEC was completely useless, which isn't surprising since it was under the GOP that this started and they're all OMG FREE MARKETS 11!!11 REGULATIONS ARE TEH EVUL!! So, by combination of incompetent government and disgusting business practices in the financial world, everyone got shit on. Except for the people at the root of it. Nothing bad has happened to them unless they had to move from Bear to Goldman, the horror.

Adding that to the trend over the last 30 years for the rich to get richer while everyone else works harder and earns less, is the motivation behind this protest.

Commadus

Sir Matt & Avarice - I agree wholeheartedly.

I didnt miss the point - I just thought it was a weird statement - probably some stunt.

golden_blunder

i think the person is making, in a somewhat simplistic way, a point about personal responsibility

ooeat0meoo

The above photo is completely ignorant of the facts. End of...






I keep coming up empty with donations towards printing of shirts and a flag for this concept... I will not give up.



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The kid with the college education should be able to tell what the Occupy movement is about by these charts. It's less about his ability to get himself through college, as it's more about a broken system and a suffering population.

golden_blunder

So, what that graph shows is that people in top jobs earn more

people who do the 'top' jobs earn more than those who dont, shock horror

is it fair? probably not
will it change? probably not

niMic

It doesn't say that they are earning more. It says that their wages have grown much more.

golden_blunder

ok maybe i worded that badly, i mean those at the top are still taking home considerably more than those at the bottom (ie. those in top are taking home 281% more after tax)

shock horror

adexkola

Yeah, that was the sentiment I was agreeing with in the picture. I also share Sir Matt and em's views on the whole issue.

Pogue Mahone

I'll see you your graph and raise you this one.

ooeat0meoo

Personal responsibility is admirable... but the Occupy Movement has nothing (or very little) to do with his point.

It is crystal clear that the Occupy Movement is full of very bright and motivated people pushing up on corporate influence and political corruption...

For anyone that has known me throughout the years... This is my thing... I'm full on into this movement. Helping the McPherson Group get up and going has been an inspiration beyond anything I've ever experienced.

ooeat0meoo

Yeah, but that's 2005... I'm trying to find more current graphs. It is impressive, though.


Thanks Pogue

rednev

I think the issue is that the gap in earnings between those at the bottom/middle and those at the top is widening at an alarming rate.


Personal responsibility is not the issue here. A worker can be as responsible and as prudent as physically possible, the reality is that he is going to be poorer, in relation to his productivity, than he would have been 40 years ago had he worked and saved in the same way. And the data shows that the trend is increasing. More wealth is being created, yet this isn't being reflected in earnings. The growing difference between productivity and earnings isn't just vanishing into thin air, it's mostly going into the pockets of those with enormous capital, i.e the ones who don't contribute labour value. Workers are rightly angry about this, and this is their way of showing it. And it's not just a working class issue, by the way, it's a also a middle class issue. Or at least it should be, if people would just wake up and see that they are being fucked over big time.

Pogue Mahone

I was being devil's advocate as I actually hate the "reduce taxes at all costs" mantra you've got in the US. Apparently the lowest income earners pay a huge proportion of their income on social security which distorts the income tax % used on that graph.

gooDevil

The funny thing is, anyone who knows American history knows what happens when you have no business regulation. We tried it, it was a disaster.

Turns out Ross Perot was right all those years ago, about the sound of American jobs going overseas. It's not like it's a surprise what would happen if you take all the middle class jobs out of the country.

I'm not really a big fan of tariffs and whatever methods were used to keep companies from moving job overseas, but that was protecting the wealth of Americans, and some of our loss of wealth is a result of the loosening of those regulations that allowed thousands of jobs to move overseas ever week of the Bush II's reign.

Not that Clinton wasn't down with it as well. All cheaply bought and paid for.

Funnily, it would probably be better to have a king, that way he'd want his country to be stronger, not weaker, because it's his damned country. No one feels like America is theirs to protect, just a carcass to be picked clean.

rednev

It's hilarious, if not worrying, to see all these teabaggers talk about restoring the US economy to its former glory by decreasing government influence, especially when they talk about getting the manufacturing sector back to work. Even if we ignore China, how do they think developed countries like Germany and S.Korea have managed to maintain strong and competitive manufacturing sectors? By leaving government on the sidelines? They did it by creating a firm gov' policy on the manufacturing sector that included both public investment and gov' regulation. It's fairly obvious that the laissez faire approach doesn't work, and that industry doesn't gain strength by magic. The laissez faire approach might as well see the markets tear down the sector in the US brick by brick. The whole Tea Party movement is living in cloud cuckoo land when it comes to the American economy.

Sir Matt

The graph shows the change in salaries. While lower salaries have stagnated, those at the top have increased rapidly. It's not that they make more than the other people, that's to be expected. It's that their salaries steadily increase at a high rate while everyone else's stays basically the same. "Real" salary has hardly budged in 3 decades in the US. People aren't complaining, at least most aren't, that the rich are rich. It's that the rich are getting more rich while else everyone stays the same or even loses money. So the only people making gains from improvements in efficiency, productivity, etc, are those at the top. Other people get to work harder for the same or less salary. If they still have a job.

MarceloFalcon

Whats gets me about the movement is the "everything's wrong, change it all" idea. I'm not oblivious to what's happened in the US in the last 10 years as far as income distribution and I do think its an issue.

But its not an issue with an easy solution. The main issue is that this economic model, whatever you wish to call it, which has been in practice for about 100 years in developed countries, with significant but not revolutionary changes, has created the greatest wealth in the history of humanity. It is the reason why anyone of us on this board live a better life than a king 100 years ago. (And don't take that for granted, because life for a peasant didn't change much for over 1000 years)

I'd like to get people from the movement and bring them down here to Brazil. Study a bit of our economic history, look at all the great "workers rights" we have, how we protect national industries, and other things that they'd like to see implemented in their country. And look at where that's got us. We've got a GDP per Capita about a quarter of the USA's and other developed countries, and a much larger Gini Index (more unequal income distribution). Then look at Argentina, which was one of the wealthiest countries in the world from 1900 to 1945 (Canada and Norway levels of GDP per Capita), and now sits around 50th, close to Russia. And it got there by making those same changes in the economy, nationalizing big British companies, and extending worker's rights beyond anything reasonable.

Then maybe they could go back home, and not not protest, but realize that their system isn't all wrong, and you don't need to overhaul it, it just needs tweaking.

The one good thing I take from this protest is how it can serve as a counterweight to lobbying by financial institutions in Washington. I do think improved legislation is needed, I don't know what that legislation looks like, and if you ask most economists around the world they aren't really sure either. But obviously financial institutions would like to keep things as they are, so its important that the public be aware and perceives a need for change.

niMic

I'd just like to make a point about the "tax" comeback (I know that's not really how Pogue used it), that some people like to use. Of course they pay most of the taxes.. because they own everything. That doesn't change the fact that their incomes are increasing even faster, while the bottom has stagnated.

golden_blunder

like I say, "shock horror"