"Occupy "insert city name here" Protestors

[Doctor_K]

Well I certainly appreciate being called stupid because I'm asking questions and trying to better educate myself.

Awesome.

I apologize if I'm coming off as crass. But honestly, I can't tell if you're just being genuinely dim-witted or disingenuous when you start spouting that kind of rhetoric. If you're buying into the whole right-wing attack machine line of "Well we really just don't know what they're protesting about!" then you aren't even paying attention to the issues and I WISH I lived in a bubble as cozy as yours. However, if you're just not up to speed with the actual issues the protesters are taking to task, I can accept that.

Fair enough.

For the record, I am indeed asking the questions because I am indeed not up to speed.

What you call cozy bubble, I call providing for my family to the best of my ability.  I'm using my time as best as I can.

[Doctor_K]

I asked some questions regarding the movement the other day and hillary supporter answered them.  I appreciated that the answers were answered in a civil, non sarcastic and genuine manner.

Good to know!

[Captain Zissou]

By the way, where is all the vitriol for the movie stars and producers, "other" corporate moguls (you'll notice no one has said a WORD about Oprah - probably the richest woman on the planet), and all the professional athletes and THEIR multi-millions? 

Santonio Holmes? The Manning brothers?  Tom Brady?  A-Rod?  Derek Jeter?  Chad "Ochocinco" Johnson?  Johnny Damon?  LaDanian Tomlinson?  Reggie Bush?  Pau Gasol?  Coach K? 

Hell, our very own MoJo?

How about Bob Costas?  Barbara Walters?  Wolf Blitzer and Anderson Cooper?  Lady Gaga and Britney Spears?  Cher and Celine?  How come we're not demanding that they pay their fair share as well?  They're evil and rich and, by definition, greedy, aren't they?

Why stop at Wall Street or Hemming Plaza?  You should be occupying Hollywood, every single movie theater and every major sports venue in the country as well.

Nope.  Don't see that happening.

Why? 

And while you're at it: boycott Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, McDonald's, Burger King, YUM! Brands, Google, and every other company listed on the Fortune 500.  They're just as guilty and just as corporate.

Where's the outrage there?

There is a point here and there is blame to be placed, but it is not on the celebrities.  It's nearly impossible to reach the level of success of Mayweather, Manning, etc.... They have worked tirelessly for decades to get where they are. They deserve everything that comes to them.  The criticism should be on us.  Why are we spending so much money on entertainment when most of us have no net worth??  We are the Roman mob cheering for gladiators as the empire collapses around us.  We need to get our personal affairs in order and tighten our individual belts.  Then we can point fingers at the people profiting off of us.

That being said, I think there is plenty of blame to be shelled out on the consumer goods companies.  Their prices keep going up, their quality keeps going down, and they are destroying the smaller companies that make a decent product.  Some companies are achieving success while maintaining responsible business practices, but most of them then get bought out and tanked by the 800 pound gorillas of the industries.  At the same time, we are allowing Starbucks, McDonald's and Applebee's to reduce our wallets, expand our waistlines, and destroy our health while making huge profits.  We need higher standards.

[ChriswUfGator]

By the way, where is all the vitriol for the movie stars and producers, "other" corporate moguls (you'll notice no one has said a WORD about Oprah - probably the richest woman on the planet), and all the professional athletes and THEIR multi-millions? 

Santonio Holmes? The Manning brothers?  Tom Brady?  A-Rod?  Derek Jeter?  Chad "Ochocinco" Johnson?  Johnny Damon?  LaDanian Tomlinson?  Reggie Bush?  Pau Gasol?  Coach K? 

Hell, our very own MoJo?

How about Bob Costas?  Barbara Walters?  Wolf Blitzer and Anderson Cooper?  Lady Gaga and Britney Spears?  Cher and Celine?  How come we're not demanding that they pay their fair share as well?  They're evil and rich and, by definition, greedy, aren't they?

Why stop at Wall Street or Hemming Plaza?  You should be occupying Hollywood, every single movie theater and every major sports venue in the country as well.

Nope.  Don't see that happening.

Why? 

And while you're at it: boycott Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, McDonald's, Burger King, YUM! Brands, Google, and every other company listed on the Fortune 500.  They're just as guilty and just as corporate.

Where's the outrage there?

There is a point here and there is blame to be placed, but it is not on the celebrities.  It's nearly impossible to reach the level of success of Mayweather, Manning, etc.... They deserve everything that comes to them.  The criticism should be on us.  Why are we spending so much money on entertainment when most of us have no net worth??  We are the Roman mob cheering for gladiators as the empire collapses around us.  We need to get our personal affairs in order and tighten our individual belts.  Then we can point fingers at the people profiting off of us.

That being said, I think there is plenty of blame to be shelled out on the consumer goods companies.  Their prices keep going up, their quality keeps going down, and they are destroying the smaller companies that make a decent product.  Some companies are achieving success while maintaining responsible business practices, but most of them then get bought out and tanked by the 800 pound gorillas of the industries.  At the same time, we are allowing Starbucks, McDonald's and Applebee's to reduce our wallets, expand our waistlines, and destroy our health while making huge profits.  We need higher standards.

Meh, you've got 1/5'th of the country that can't afford basic food and housing, if they want to watch TV let them. The problems are not individual at this point, they're systemic.

[hillary supporter]

I asked some questions regarding the movement the other day and hillary supporter answered them.  I appreciated that the answers were answered in a civil, non sarcastic and genuine manner.

Good to know!

   You guys are the best!

[Captain Zissou]

Meh, you've got 1/5'th of the country that can't afford basic food and housing, if they want to watch TV let them. The problems are not individual at this point, they're systemic.

By all means they can waste their life if they want to, but when the other 4/5th's are paying for them to watch tv is where I have an issue. 

[Sigma]

^Bingo!

[ChriswUfGator]

Meh, you've got 1/5'th of the country that can't afford basic food and housing, if they want to watch TV let them. The problems are not individual at this point, they're systemic.

By all means they can waste their life if they want to, but when the other 4/5th's are paying for them to watch tv is where I have an issue. 

There are not enough jobs for the number of working-age people in this country, and most of their savings were decimated by the 1-2 punch of the housing collapse and the market crash. What do you expect them to do? Click their heels 3 times and make a job appear, or money show up in their bank account? You are being rather myopic, the problems are largely systemic.

[acme54321]

Meh, you've got 1/5'th of the country that can't afford basic food and housing, if they want to watch TV let them. The problems are not individual at this point, they're systemic.

By all means they can waste their life if they want to, but when the other 4/5th's are paying for them to watch tv is where I have an issue.

X2

[RMHoward]

Well I certainly appreciate being called stupid because I'm asking questions and trying to better educate myself.

Awesome.

I apologize if I'm coming off as crass. But honestly, I can't tell if you're just being genuinely dim-witted or disingenuous when you start spouting that kind of rhetoric. If you're buying into the whole right-wing attack machine line of "Well we really just don't know what they're protesting about!" then you aren't even paying attention to the issues and I WISH I lived in a bubble as cozy as yours. However, if you're just not up to speed with the actual issues the protesters are taking to task, I can accept that.

Fair enough.

For the record, I am indeed asking the questions because I am indeed not up to speed.

What you call cozy bubble, I call providing for my family to the best of my ability.  I'm using my time as best as I can.

Well Dr. K,
You dont understand because there is simply no answer.  After 3 pages of conversation on this topic, you have not been given a satisfactory answer because one does not exist.  However, as is expected, you have been called "stupid" or been accused of living in a bubble.  The truth is that many on this forum dont understand themselves.  What they do know is that these groups protesting are supported, if not financed and directed by elements in the far left.  That in itself is more than enough to garner the full support of many (not all) on this forum.  Its like the mindless repeating of Mr. Microphone at the protests. 

[Captain Zissou]

Meh, you've got 1/5'th of the country that can't afford basic food and housing, if they want to watch TV let them. The problems are not individual at this point, they're systemic.

By all means they can waste their life if they want to, but when the other 4/5th's are paying for them to watch tv is where I have an issue. 

There are not enough jobs for the number of working-age people in this country, and most of their savings were decimated by the 1-2 punch of the housing collapse and the market crash. What do you expect them to do? Click their heels 3 times and make a job appear, or money show up in their bank account? You are being rather myopic, the problems are largely systemic.

The people who make up the unemployment figure (those actually seeking a job) are not who I am talking about.  I was among them and reversed my fortune from a negative net worth to a comfortable existence.  They will too.

I'm talking about those who have never tried to find a job, who are still watching a new tv and wearing designer clothes courtesy of Uncle Sam.  To think that the actual unemployed are the problem is myopic. 

[urbanlibertarian]

From City Journal:

http://www.city-journal.org/2011/eon1007ng.html

Nicole Gelinas
Apples and Oranges
Steve Jobs was a real capitalist, as the Wall Street protesters seem to understand.
7 October 2011

Steve Jobs was a wealthy man. Yet the crowds that have descended on Apple stores since his death Wednesday night have shown only gratitude for his vision, not resentment of his money. “I came not just because I work on Macs,” graphic designer Effie Latif told the New York Post, but out of respect for Jobs’s drive. “Even when he was sick, he was working for the company, was so dedicated.”

When word of Jobs’s death got out to the Occupy Wall Street protest in Lower Manhattan, where some protesters have used Apple’s products to disseminate their message, “the typing stopped.” It would be easy to say that Occupy Wall Street’s grief over Jobs’s death is a sign of the movement’s hypocrisy. In their first official statement, didn’t the protesters say that they stand with people “who feel wronged by the corporate forces of the world”? And aren’t they demonstrating against the “1 percent” of the population to which Jobs belonged?

But the protesters’ affection for Jobs isn’t necessarily a sign of bad faith or ignorance. Rather, it could be a healthy discernment, however poorly articulated. The point is not that Jobs was “this different, quiet billionaire,” as one protester put it, but that he lived by the rules through which free-market capitalism should work. When Apple released a product that people rejected, such as the Apple III or the Lisa in the early eighties, the company suffered the consequences. Apple could not expect tens of billions of dollars from the U.S. Treasury or from the Federal Reserve to save it from its own mistakes. Apple was not too big to fail. Before the iPod, the company was struggling. Apple had to make itself too good to failâ€"and that’s exactly what it did.

Contrast the capitalist world in which Jobs lived with “capitalism,” as the U.S. government has applied it to the big banks against which the Zuccotti Park crowd isâ€"imperfectlyâ€"protesting. If you’re a bank or an insurance firm, and you create a product that your investors and your regulators can’t understand in a crisis, you aren’t punished, as Apple was when it released products too complex for its customers. Instead, you get rewarded with bailout money. It’s hard to argue with the Zuccotti protesters’ manifesto on this point: “They have taken bailouts from taxpayers with impunity.”

In the past few years, surviving banks have “succeeded” not by giving people needed or wanted products, as Apple did, but through their ability to hold the entire global economy hostage. Imagine if Apple and Microsoft executives, instead of competing against one another, had banded together to deliver taxpayers an ultimatum: give us tens of billions to stay afloat, or else we’ll blow up the whole economy. Does anyone think that strangers would be leaving flowers, photos, and bitten fruit?

If this is capitalism, we should all be protesting it. The good news is that it’s not. We’re in this messâ€"with unemployment holding at 9.1 percentâ€"because the capital markets are utterly broken, and have been for some time.

Who broke the markets? Both parties in Washington. Republicans and Democrats treated financial firms as a class protected from capitalism for years, so long as the banks would keep feeding debt to American homeowners and consumers. To maintain their protected status, large financial firms fed some of the spoils right back to the politicians, in the form of campaign contributions and revolving-door jobs. The Dodd-Frank law, an attempt by the Obama administration and Congress to ensure that massive financial bailouts are a thing of the past, only tied Washington and Wall Street even more closely together. It hasn’t solved the problem any more effectively than the protesters have.

Politicians of both parties should be wary about painting the Occupy Wall Street protesters as “dangerous” or as wagers of “class warfare,” as Mitt Romney did earlier this week. They should be careful, too, in confusing the hard-core, overnight campers in Zuccotti Park with people who go to work every day but share the protesters’ post-TARP alienation. Tom Dematteis, a pizzeria owner and Navy veteran, told the Wall Street Journal Tuesday that “it was his first time protesting and he didn’t plan to camp out,” but that “he believes the financial system . . . doesn’t work for average Americans.” One of President Obama’s rivals might do well to address the fear and anger expressed in the protests. After all, on Thursday, Obama said: “The American people understand that not everybody has been following the rules; that Wall Street is an example of that.” If that’s still true more than a year after Obama signed Dodd-Frank, then the president is accountable.

In the long term, what’s far more “dangerous” than a motley group of civil dissidentsâ€"and far more expensive than a few million dollars in NYPD overtimeâ€"is a bipartisan policy of pretending that the financial crisis and the enormous harm that it has done to America is somehow over and done with. The financial crisis, and government’s response to it, remains with us, as does the debt that spurred the crisis. Ignoring it won’t make it go away.

Nicole Gelinas, a City Journal contributing editor and the Searle Freedom Trust Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, is the author of After the Fall: Saving Capitalism from Wall Streetâ€"and Washington.

[hillary supporter]

sorry, I couldnt resist. 

Occupy Sesame Street

Post the other one where the cop is peppering the muffet. Those muffets are boshelviks, i mean look why else is he red!

[JeffreyS]

From City Journal:

http://www.city-journal.org/2011/eon1007ng.html

Nicole Gelinas
Apples and Oranges
Steve Jobs was a real capitalist, as the Wall Street protesters seem to understand.
7 October 2011

Steve Jobs was a wealthy man. Yet the crowds that have descended on Apple stores since his death Wednesday night have shown only gratitude for his vision, not resentment of his money. “I came not just because I work on Macs,” graphic designer Effie Latif told the New York Post, but out of respect for Jobs’s drive. “Even when he was sick, he was working for the company, was so dedicated.”

When word of Jobs’s death got out to the Occupy Wall Street protest in Lower Manhattan, where some protesters have used Apple’s products to disseminate their message, “the typing stopped.” It would be easy to say that Occupy Wall Street’s grief over Jobs’s death is a sign of the movement’s hypocrisy. In their first official statement, didn’t the protesters say that they stand with people “who feel wronged by the corporate forces of the world”? And aren’t they demonstrating against the “1 percent” of the population to which Jobs belonged?

But the protesters’ affection for Jobs isn’t necessarily a sign of bad faith or ignorance. Rather, it could be a healthy discernment, however poorly articulated. The point is not that Jobs was “this different, quiet billionaire,” as one protester put it, but that he lived by the rules through which free-market capitalism should work. When Apple released a product that people rejected, such as the Apple III or the Lisa in the early eighties, the company suffered the consequences. Apple could not expect tens of billions of dollars from the U.S. Treasury or from the Federal Reserve to save it from its own mistakes. Apple was not too big to fail. Before the iPod, the company was struggling. Apple had to make itself too good to failâ€"and that’s exactly what it did.

Contrast the capitalist world in which Jobs lived with “capitalism,” as the U.S. government has applied it to the big banks against which the Zuccotti Park crowd isâ€"imperfectlyâ€"protesting. If you’re a bank or an insurance firm, and you create a product that your investors and your regulators can’t understand in a crisis, you aren’t punished, as Apple was when it released products too complex for its customers. Instead, you get rewarded with bailout money. It’s hard to argue with the Zuccotti protesters’ manifesto on this point: “They have taken bailouts from taxpayers with impunity.”

In the past few years, surviving banks have “succeeded” not by giving people needed or wanted products, as Apple did, but through their ability to hold the entire global economy hostage. Imagine if Apple and Microsoft executives, instead of competing against one another, had banded together to deliver taxpayers an ultimatum: give us tens of billions to stay afloat, or else we’ll blow up the whole economy. Does anyone think that strangers would be leaving flowers, photos, and bitten fruit?

If this is capitalism, we should all be protesting it. The good news is that it’s not. We’re in this messâ€"with unemployment holding at 9.1 percentâ€"because the capital markets are utterly broken, and have been for some time.

Who broke the markets? Both parties in Washington. Republicans and Democrats treated financial firms as a class protected from capitalism for years, so long as the banks would keep feeding debt to American homeowners and consumers. To maintain their protected status, large financial firms fed some of the spoils right back to the politicians, in the form of campaign contributions and revolving-door jobs. The Dodd-Frank law, an attempt by the Obama administration and Congress to ensure that massive financial bailouts are a thing of the past, only tied Washington and Wall Street even more closely together. It hasn’t solved the problem any more effectively than the protesters have.

Politicians of both parties should be wary about painting the Occupy Wall Street protesters as “dangerous” or as wagers of “class warfare,” as Mitt Romney did earlier this week. They should be careful, too, in confusing the hard-core, overnight campers in Zuccotti Park with people who go to work every day but share the protesters’ post-TARP alienation. Tom Dematteis, a pizzeria owner and Navy veteran, told the Wall Street Journal Tuesday that “it was his first time protesting and he didn’t plan to camp out,” but that “he believes the financial system . . . doesn’t work for average Americans.” One of President Obama’s rivals might do well to address the fear and anger expressed in the protests. After all, on Thursday, Obama said: “The American people understand that not everybody has been following the rules; that Wall Street is an example of that.” If that’s still true more than a year after Obama signed Dodd-Frank, then the president is accountable.

In the long term, what’s far more “dangerous” than a motley group of civil dissidentsâ€"and far more expensive than a few million dollars in NYPD overtimeâ€"is a bipartisan policy of pretending that the financial crisis and the enormous harm that it has done to America is somehow over and done with. The financial crisis, and government’s response to it, remains with us, as does the debt that spurred the crisis. Ignoring it won’t make it go away.

Nicole Gelinas, a City Journal contributing editor and the Searle Freedom Trust Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, is the author of After the Fall: Saving Capitalism from Wall Streetâ€"and Washington.

Great find UL
+1
Like

[ChriswUfGator]

Meh, you've got 1/5'th of the country that can't afford basic food and housing, if they want to watch TV let them. The problems are not individual at this point, they're systemic.

By all means they can waste their life if they want to, but when the other 4/5th's are paying for them to watch tv is where I have an issue. 

There are not enough jobs for the number of working-age people in this country, and most of their savings were decimated by the 1-2 punch of the housing collapse and the market crash. What do you expect them to do? Click their heels 3 times and make a job appear, or money show up in their bank account? You are being rather myopic, the problems are largely systemic.

The people who make up the unemployment figure (those actually seeking a job) are not who I am talking about.  I was among them and reversed my fortune from a negative net worth to a comfortable existence.  They will too.

I'm talking about those who have never tried to find a job, who are still watching a new tv and wearing designer clothes courtesy of Uncle Sam.  To think that the actual unemployed are the problem is myopic. 

Then your entire rebuttal was a strawman, since you've now acknowledged you were talking about something different than the systemic issues I was referring to. At the end of the day, there are less jobs than people. You can tell whatever feel-good personal story of success that you want, and unless that systemic problem is addressed then there will continue to be large numbers of unemployed people. A fact you seem rather reticent to address.

The support for your argument is some personal belief that these people must be wasting their money on designer clothes and vegging out in front of the TV all day, rather than the more obvious problem we face, which is that the economy is in the toilet and there are more people than there are jobs. I think the protests and general frustration you're seeing from much of the public is a reflection of this very conversation, there is always some feel-good downhome 'commonsense' bullcrap answer interjected into what really should be a discussion of systemic deficiencies. Just because you ignore, doesn't mean it'll go away.