Occupy Wall Street

[Crazed Rabbit]

After seeing that it's mostly the same ole socialist protesters, and that many whiny college students* identify with them, I've changed my opinion to one of indifferent contempt (I hate police brutality, but sometimes I just want to see a socialist scumbag get hit).

The real key isn't Wall Street getting special treatment because they make loads of many - it's the political class and those they favor vs the rest of us. Wall Street doesn't have the power - our huge government, which creeps into more and more facets of our lives every year, has the power. The power to destroy your life for violating one of thousands and thousands of federal crime (criminal intent no longer required for many new crimes!), to pick winners and losers (see the loans to that solar panel company, and the bailed out banks) in our economy, and the power to run our lives by controlling what we eat, drink, what we can own, etc.

EDIT: Check out this bizarre and hilarious video of Atlanta "occupiers" deciding whether or not to let civil rights veteran and Democratic congressman J


CR

[Sasaki Kojiro]

"We have someone here..."

"We have someone here..."

"Who would like to address the assembly."

"Who would like to address the assembly."



What is this, Kindergaten??????

I literally can't watch the rest of that video.

[Centurion1]

WHAT THE **** WAS THAT

[a completely inoffensive name]

I watched 3 minutes of that video, does that **** really go on for 10 minutes? Oh my god, if I found myself participating in that, I would shoot myself for early dementia.

[Crazed Rabbit]

I watched 3 minutes of that video, does that **** really go on for 10 f'n minutes? Oh my god, if I found myself participating in that, I would shoot myself for early dementia.

Yes it does. Would have been quicker to just let him speak. It seems most people wanted him to, but not the guy with the mic, who managed to keep asking until he was able to say they should proceed with the agenda.

At about 8:40 it's clear John Lewis isn't going to speak, so he starts heading out. One guy standing near him starts speaking loudly to apologize. Then the guy with the mic starts loudly saying "Mic check! Mic check!" and the crowd echoes him, to drown out the non-conformist trying to apologize.

Watch for yourself, and be glad those folks are really like 0.9%

CR

[Beskar]

Just for something more politically balanced, here is a interview with Noam Chomsky on this matter.

[Beskar]

It is a faux-communist totalitarian indoctrination. You are the state, you speak with the voice of the state....!

Crazed Rabbit, clap your hands!
*The ORG* Rabbit clap your hands!

I said, Crazed Rabbit, clap your hands!
*The ORG* Rabbit clap your hands!

[PanzerJaeger]

If you watch to the end, he doesn't even get to speak!

Reminds me of the Spanish People's Councils during the early days of the civil war.

[Ronin]

After seeing that it's mostly the same ole socialist protesters, and that many whiny college students* identify with them, I've changed my opinion to one of indifferent contempt (I hate police brutality, but sometimes I just want to see a socialist scumbag get hit).

sorry couldn´t resist....it's a common pet peeve I have with Americans.

[Major Robert Dump]

Apparently these protests are the place to be were one wishing to get laid, get drugs and/or poop in an alley

[Crazed Rabbit]

sorry couldn´t resist....it's a common pet peeve I have with Americans.

Did you watch the video? I believe the guy is of the "nationalize industry" variety of socialism, not just a democratic party member. Just because we don't have socialist politicians doesn't mean we don't have a few socialist people, especially in a country of 300 million+ people.

CR

[Lemur]

An interesting comment, with which I largely agree, about conservatism and the OWS movement:

I was interested, and glad, to see this sentence in Gregory Djerejian analysis of the Occupy movement: "They are acting to secure conservative aims of re-balancing a society that is becoming dangerously unmoored and increasingly bent asunder." Why? Because it reasonably identifies a truth about today's Conservative/Liberal political environment - that many on the Liberal side of the political equation are often quite philosophically conservative. And that today's "conservatives" are anything but.

As a long time resident of that liberal political hotbed Madison, Wisconsin, I've often said that it is in fact one of the more conservative places you'll find.

Why? Because even most of the more radical lefties living here (and there are far fewer than some would like others to believe) are living essentially conservative lives; they want a safe place to raise their kids, value their monogamous relationships (gay or straight), support law and order, have decent middle-class jobs, and want their world to be primarily stable and fairly predictable. They surround themselves with generally like-minded neighbors, talk to them over their fences (or across their hoes at the community gardens), and politely wait for their children in the pick up zone of their schools.

Do they vote Democrat or even Green? Sure. But at their core, they want what traditional philosophical conservatives seem to want: community, neighborliness, predictability. When hundreds of thousands of them marched daily around our Capitol last spring in response to the new "conservative" governor's radical policy changes, it was because they felt the changes were moving too fast and the rules weren't being respected. The foundations of their lives - built generally on following the rules, respecting their contracts and following what seemed to be reasonable and stable career paths - were being shaken too vigorously and unfairly. You don't have to agree with their take on the situation to agree that the core of their complaint was about as traditionally conservative as you can get.

[Strike For The South]

The problem is the left in America has no voice.

You are forced to choose between a hollowed out Trotskyist like Chomsky or some underemployed fool who parrots Chomsky but can't even begin to comprehend the subject he's talking about.

The left in America is infatuated with the abstract, not the tangiable. Everything has to be some giant black & white struggle. So kudos for excersising your rights as citizens but [...] shave the beard, put on a suit and speak coherntly you hippie . Clamoring on with no clear agenda other than "hurr derr kill the bankers" is asinine.

[Lemur]

Everything has to be some giant black & white struggle.

Look, I don't much sympathize with hippie drum circles, but they're reacting to a real problem. The financial sector is overpaid, overgrown and out of control. They privatize profits and socialize losses, as the bailout showed. It's almost a textbook-perfect example of a rigged game. The rest of us work hard and play by the rules; not so the securities folks.

Again, I hypothesize that the average investment banker or stock broker is more parasitic and destroys more wealth than a welfare mother. (Some numbers: Annual cost of all means-tested entitlements (Medicaid, food stamps, family support assistance (AFDC), supplemental security income (SSI), child nutrition programs, refundable portions of earned income tax credits (EITC and HITC) and child tax credit, welfare contingency fund, child care entitlement to States, temporary assistance to needy families, foster care and adoption assistance, State children's health insurance and veterans pensions) is around $354.3 billion; estimates for true cost of financial bailout vary, but $4.6 trillion seems to be a not-unrealistic number.)

Not to mention this absurd and counter-factual meme that the financial crisis was created in Washington rather than Wall Street. Read up.

Between 2004 and 2006, when subprime lending was exploding, Fannie and Freddie went from holding a high of 48 percent of the subprime loans that were sold into the secondary market to holding about 24 percent, according to data from Inside Mortgage Finance, a specialty publication. One reason is that Fannie and Freddie were subject to tougher standards than many of the unregulated players in the private sector who weakened lending standards, most of whom have gone bankrupt or are now in deep trouble.

During those same explosive three years, private investment banks — not Fannie and Freddie — dominated the mortgage loans that were packaged and sold into the secondary mortgage market. In 2005 and 2006, the private sector securitized almost two thirds of all U.S. mortgages, supplanting Fannie and Freddie, according to a number of specialty publications that track this data.

Fueled by low interest rates and cheap credit, home prices between 2001 and 2007 galloped beyond anything ever seen, and that fueled demand for mortgage-backed securities, the technical term for mortgages that are sold to a company, usually an investment bank, which then pools and sells them into the secondary mortgage market.

About 70 percent of all U.S. mortgages are in this secondary mortgage market, according to the Federal Reserve.

Conservative critics also blame the subprime lending mess on the Community Reinvestment Act, a 31-year-old law aimed at freeing credit for underserved neighborhoods.

Congress created the CRA in 1977 to reverse years of redlining and other restrictive banking practices that locked the poor, and especially minorities, out of homeownership and the tax breaks and wealth creation it affords. The CRA requires federally regulated and insured financial institutions to show that they're lending and investing in their communities.

Conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer wrote recently that while the goal of the CRA was admirable, "it led to tremendous pressure on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — who in turn pressured banks and other lenders — to extend mortgages to people who were borrowing over their heads. That's called subprime lending. It lies at the root of our current calamity."

Fannie and Freddie, however, didn't pressure lenders to sell them more loans; they struggled to keep pace with their private sector competitors. In fact, their regulator, the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight, imposed new restrictions in 2006 that led to Fannie and Freddie losing even more market share in the booming subprime market.

What's more, only commercial banks and thrifts must follow CRA rules. The investment banks don't, nor did the now-bankrupt non-bank lenders such as New Century Financial Corp. and Ameriquest that underwrote most of the subprime loans.

These private non-bank lenders enjoyed a regulatory gap, allowing them to be regulated by 50 different state banking supervisors instead of the federal government. And mortgage brokers, who also weren't subject to federal regulation or the CRA, originated most of the subprime loans.

[Vladimir]

So you're saying that if securities industry counts on government bailouts? What do you do when your children steal cookies? Do you give them more or cut their hand off?

Well, neither, I hope, but it looks like you're saying the (federal) government is the problem but it's Wall Street's fault. Is Wall Street a branch of the government?

It also seems like you agree with me that too big to fail is an oxymoron. Time for a little AT&T action!

[Papewaio]

Look I think finance is overpaid, but there is actually a very strong contributor to this increase.

Cities speed up as population increases in a non-linear manner, crime, patents, talk, walk all increase faster as the population increases.

Some in a non-linear manner for instance you get along the lines of double the amount of people and you get 15% more crime per capita.

So do pay rates... increase the number of people and so does the income... just compare country towns to small cities to large ones.

One of the confounding things is finance sectors attract the best/worst and concentrate them in one city generally per country (London, New York, Tokyo, Sydney). Essentially that group of workers has a population based on the country's total population not just the local city... and at a non-linear increase rate too.

So you need to compare this to the general population increase of the US and apply a non-linear pay increase.

[Centurion1]

Look, I don't much sympathize with hippie drum circles, but they're reacting to a real problem. The financial sector is overpaid, overgrown and out of control. They privatize profits and socialize losses, as the bailout showed. It's almost a textbook-perfect example of a rigged game. The rest of us work hard and play by the rules; not so the securities folks.

Again, I hypothesize that the average investment banker or stock broker is more parasitic and destroys more wealth than a welfare mother. (Some numbers: Annual cost of all means-tested entitlements (Medicaid, food stamps, family support assistance (AFDC), supplemental security income (SSI), child nutrition programs, refundable portions of earned income tax credits (EITC and HITC) and child tax credit, welfare contingency fund, child care entitlement to States, temporary assistance to needy families, foster care and adoption assistance, State children's health insurance and veterans pensions) is around $354.3 billion; estimates for true cost of financial bailout vary, but $4.6 trillion seems to be a not-unrealistic number.)

Not to mention this absurd and counter-factual meme that the financial crisis was created in Washington rather than Wall Street. Read up.

Between 2004 and 2006, when subprime lending was exploding, Fannie and Freddie went from holding a high of 48 percent of the subprime loans that were sold into the secondary market to holding about 24 percent, according to data from Inside Mortgage Finance, a specialty publication. One reason is that Fannie and Freddie were subject to tougher standards than many of the unregulated players in the private sector who weakened lending standards, most of whom have gone bankrupt or are now in deep trouble.

During those same explosive three years, private investment banks — not Fannie and Freddie — dominated the mortgage loans that were packaged and sold into the secondary mortgage market. In 2005 and 2006, the private sector securitized almost two thirds of all U.S. mortgages, supplanting Fannie and Freddie, according to a number of specialty publications that track this data.

Fueled by low interest rates and cheap credit, home prices between 2001 and 2007 galloped beyond anything ever seen, and that fueled demand for mortgage-backed securities, the technical term for mortgages that are sold to a company, usually an investment bank, which then pools and sells them into the secondary mortgage market.

About 70 percent of all U.S. mortgages are in this secondary mortgage market, according to the Federal Reserve.

Conservative critics also blame the subprime lending mess on the Community Reinvestment Act, a 31-year-old law aimed at freeing credit for underserved neighborhoods.

Congress created the CRA in 1977 to reverse years of redlining and other restrictive banking practices that locked the poor, and especially minorities, out of homeownership and the tax breaks and wealth creation it affords. The CRA requires federally regulated and insured financial institutions to show that they're lending and investing in their communities.

Conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer wrote recently that while the goal of the CRA was admirable, "it led to tremendous pressure on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — who in turn pressured banks and other lenders — to extend mortgages to people who were borrowing over their heads. That's called subprime lending. It lies at the root of our current calamity."

Fannie and Freddie, however, didn't pressure lenders to sell them more loans; they struggled to keep pace with their private sector competitors. In fact, their regulator, the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight, imposed new restrictions in 2006 that led to Fannie and Freddie losing even more market share in the booming subprime market.

What's more, only commercial banks and thrifts must follow CRA rules. The investment banks don't, nor did the now-bankrupt non-bank lenders such as New Century Financial Corp. and Ameriquest that underwrote most of the subprime loans.

These private non-bank lenders enjoyed a regulatory gap, allowing them to be regulated by 50 different state banking supervisors instead of the federal government. And mortgage brokers, who also weren't subject to federal regulation or the CRA, originated most of the subprime loans.

that graph is literally the most worthless piece of drivel ive ever seen

also these people are protesting the evil 1% and how they have all the wealth. They just look like ignorant buffons.

also i live in the city and some of the kids at my school are there (shocker). The ultimate irony is their parents are likely part of that evil 1%

[Strike For The South]

The CIA was giving away crack?

[drone]

The CIA was giving away crack?

Not even the CIA is that stupid. They were selling it for $10 a vial.

[Beskar]

Just because we don't have socialist politicians doesn't mean we don't have a few socialist people, especially in a country of 300 million+ people.

Bernie Sanders is a Socialist Politician.

I am just being nit-picky, but I think he is simply a "scumbag". He just happens not to be the typical-"Hi, I am on Fox!" variety such as Glenn Beck.

[TinCow]

Sorry, I know this is spammy, but I couldn't resist...

[Lemur]