Occupy Wall Street

[Ironside]

I love how some folks will boycott people who state facts not to their liking.

Also -

Income inequality between people in the US is shrinking:

Have you been looking on US gini index compared to other countries? Also, increasing gini for households are indicating higher social segregation (less social mobility), this might possibly be a side effect of higher women salary though. To be speciffic, the US gini index is high enough that people will react on existing differences when they get it problematic for themselves.

[Nowake]

Only dropping in to point towards one of the better articles I’ve read on the subject lately, especially considering the sources it uses to further its arguments (you’ve links throughout the article).
Will Willkinson is a libertarian by the by, I’ve started to follow him about seven years ago when he was writing on the impact of economics of happiness. There’s no serious disclosure to be made about him except that he is a Cato Institute chap.

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

One of the most robust finding in political psychology is that liberals tend to explain both poverty and wealth in terms of luck and the influence of social forces while conservatives tend to explain poverty and wealth in terms of effort and individual initiative. Here's a useful summary of the sort of thing I have in mind:
Harmon (2010a) built on these works by testing their conclusions against six U.S. public opinion polls. Secondary analysis found consistent and strong relationships. Conservatives and Republicans overwhelmingly attributed poverty to the personal failings of the poor themselves (lazy, drunk, etc.) while Democrats and liberals consistently offered social explanations like poor schools and lousy jobs for poverty. Later he looked at the inverse question, the reasons respondents give for others obtaining wealth (2010b). Generally he found that Democrats and liberals attributed wealth to connections or being born into a wealthy family, while Republicans and conservatives declared wealth comes from hard work.
What about libertarians? According to Jonathan Haidt and his colleagues, their patterns of moral sentiment and judgment make libertarians look a lot like liberals who care a great deal about liberty and not very much for suffering. Like liberals, libertarians don't put very much emphasis on what Haidt calls the "binding foundations" of the moral sense--obedience to authority, in-group loyalty, and a sensitivity to moralized purity and disgust--which play a large role in conservative moral sentiment and judgment. This makes libertarians look like a lot like especially freedom-loving liberals with slightly hard hearts.
But, having lived most of my adult life among them, experience tells me that when it comes to the explanation of poverty and wealth libertarians are close cousins to conservatives. It's my view that this shared sense of robust agency and individual responsibility for success and failure is the psychological linchpin of "fusionism"--that this commonality in disposition has made the long-time alliance between conservatives and libertarians possible, despite the fact that libertarians are almost identical to liberals in their unconcern for the conservative binding foundations. That's why controversial "social issues" like abortion and gay marriage are generally pushed to the side when libertarians and conservatives get together. As long as they stick to complaining about handouts for poor people sitting on their asses and praising rich people working hard to make civilization possible, libertarians and conservatives get along fine.
The critical response of Reason editor-in-chief Matt Welch to Salon's "New Declaration of Independence" is nicely illustrative of the libertarian's conservative-like attachment to individual responsibility. And this, I think, helps explain why self-described libertarians are more likely to identify with the Tea Party movement, which was launched by Rick Santelli's indignant rant about subsidizing "losers'" mortgages, than with the Occupy Wall Street movement, which is founded on something like the assumption that individuals are caught in a web of socio-economic forces upon which only the collective action of organized class interests have any influence.
So, Salon's staff has cobbled together a statement they're calling "The New Declaration of Independence," but which is, to no one's surprise, a sort of progressive wish-list. I strongly agree with about half of it, and strongly disagree with about half. It says stuff like this, by way of arguing for broad debt relief:
It is not in the national interest to force the impoverished to become wage slaves to pay off insurmountable debts owned to payday lenders and hugely profitable bankers.
Which really hacks off Welch:
One of the best perks about being a grown-up is that you get to make your own choices, and to own the results, good and ill.
Which is why phrases like "wage slaves," "inescapable debt," and "force" "force" "force" leave me feeling like a brother from another planet. Adult human beings have agency, the ability (even responsibility!) to run their own cost/benefit analyses and choose accordingly. You could go to a state school (or community college) instead of an over-inflated prestige mill. You could pay for a 10-year-old car in cash, instead of a new one on installments. You could try to make it in Minneapolis before living the dream in Williamsburg. You could stare into the face of a no-money-down, adjustable rate 30-year mortgage at the tail end of a housing-price run-up and conclude "Maybe that one's not for me." You could even choose to turn down a bad if high-paying job when you're living below the poverty line. If we indeed live in a "candid world," let us state bluntly that offloading 100% of the blame for your own mountain of debt on a group of Greedy McBanksters who "forced" you to "play by the rules" is more than a little pathetic.
Welch's kicker:
[I]f you have any intention of building up a political case for bailing out your bad decisions, you might start with taking even one percent responsibility for them.
I find all of this especially interesting because my own drift from right-leaning libertarian to libertarian-leaning liberal has a lot to do with issues around the conditions for robust agency and the role of broad socio-economic forces in establishing those conditions, or not. I've come to accept, for example, that diffuse cultural forces, such as racism or sexism or nationalism or intergenerational poverty, can deprive an individual of her rightful liberty without any single person doing anything to violate her basic rights. This takes me a long way toward standard liberalism. But I find that my gut nevertheless leans right on issues of personal responsibility.
I agree that many people are in dire straits and suffering for absolutely no fault of their own, and that policies ought to be in place to provide meaningful material assistance. Still, I find I want anethos of effort and individual responsibility to prevail, and I continue to think people who chose their way into trouble need to be told exactly what Welch seems to be telling the OWS folk: we're not going to feel too sorry for you if you made some bad decisions about taking out mortgages and/or student loans, even if everybody you knew was making them too.
In plenty of circumstances in which people are suffering due to no fault of their own, I think they need both material assistance and the conviction that they can improve their lives if they really try. And this is why I have a hard time seeing eye to eye with some progressives. Progressives are sincerely inclined to impersonal, socio-cultural explanations of success and failure, but I think they're also generally of the opinion that an ethos of initiative, hard work, and individual responsibility will impede the political will to offer assistance to those who ought to get it. I'm not sure that they're wrong. After all, those who tend to oppose progressive transfers tend to do so partly on the basis of their disbelief in the faultlessness of the needy. In any case, it seems to me progressives' deep-seated opposition to victim-blaming and by-the-bootstraps perorations helps keep a lot of suffering people from getting the other, non-material part of what they really need: encouragement to meet the social expectation that they will continue supplying effort on their own behalf, even if that hasn't worked out well so far.
There is some evidence that deterministic messages make people more willing to cheat. There's some evidence that not believing in free will makes people more aggressive and less helpful. Andthis is very interesting:
The proposition that free will enhances the capacity to override impulses is consistent with the findings observed by Martjin, Tenbult, Merckebach, Dreezens, and de Vries, 2002). These authors showed that individuals can longer squeeze a handgrip successfully for several minutes after they need to inhibit or suppress their emotions. Importantly, however, this problem dissipated if participants were informed that discipline and effort is not limited in capacity. That is, if individuals felt they could access an unlimited supply of energy to undertake demanding tasks, they most likely experience a sense of control or free will. This free will enhanced their capacity to inhibit their inclinations even after devoting this effort to other tasks that demand such energy.
I don't mean to say anything about the existence of free will, as a metaphysical matter. And I don't mean to say that acknowledging the power of impersonal social forces over our fates amounts to a commitment to determinism, or skepticism about the importance of trying hard and taking responsibility for yourself. But I think there is some reason to believe that even if our efforts are in fact largely swamped by impersonal forces much larger than we are, it's better not to believe it in our own case, or to try to make other people believe it.
Who does have robust agency, according to OWS-style progs? Well, the 1% does. Unlike most of us, they've got the means to make the world match their wills. More generally, organized groups can be effective agents of real change. (It takes a village.) And groups are easiest to organize along lines of common material interest. That's why, for example, "right-to-work" laws look to progressives like unilateral disarmament of the working classes, next to which the right of an individual to opt out of collective bargaining seems trivial. What's the value of having the right to individually negotiate your terms of employment when all that gets you is screwed over? A politics of nothing but individual rights in a world dominated by social forces is a recipe for domination by those sufficiently powerful or organized to shape those forces.
I think libertarians and conservatives ought to take this line of thinking more seriously, just as progressives ought to take seriously the possible anti-social, demoralizing effects of a culture too quick to absolve individuals of responsibility for their choices.

Source: Tea Party vs. OWS: The psychology and ideology of responsibility

[Major Robert Dump]

Fannie Mae asks for another 6 Billions.....

The White House rejects the Solyndra subpeona.....

Remind me why these scabs aren't protesting at the White House

[Papewaio]

In union terms a 'scab' is someone who breaks ranks with the union and continues working.

Politicians look after each other 99% of the time... When they don't it's normally only done for gain not moral fortitude.

[Sasaki Kojiro]

http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?...in;cbsCarousel

Interesting video with Abramoff. Offering to hire politicians' chiefs of staff in the future is a pretty ingenious way of influencing things. Wonder what it would take to get a bill passed banning former politicians or their staffs from becoming lobbyists. The occupy people should focus on that.

In other news, the occupy movement in front of the white house is protesting the oil pipeline thing.

[Nowake]

Abramoff keeps talking about it since he was released. Am pretty sure he launched the idea in one of his first interviews in the summer of 2010. Probably desperate for even a minor position in an NGO’s policy department if nothing else.
I assumed OWS sought the destruction of legal lobby by default though. Certainly they must’ve enumerated it amongst their demands already?

Anyway, their main issues right now are logistics and public sympathy. I believe they should wake up and adopt a position similar to what we’ve seen on this side of the pond in ’89, the Montagsdemonstrationen. The impact on the communist regime was very powerful despite the “program” imposed, and the numbers attracted were huge. I am sure it would even appeal to citizens who formerly decided not to join OWS demonstrations. It is civilised, very sustainable and it would gain them legitimacy as a citizen protest rather than a mob.

[PanzerJaeger]

Wow - don't stop your chant for five minutes to see if an old woman who just fell down a flight of stairs in front of you is alright.

[a completely inoffensive name]

Every angry mob acts this way. I personally don't see how this puts the movement in a bad light.

"The french citizens chopped off the head of their king!?!? How barbaric, their cause must be terrible."

[Sasaki Kojiro]

Every angry mob acts this way. I personally don't see how this puts the movement in a bad light.

That doesn't make sense. You call it an angry mod but you don't see the bad light?

"The french citizens chopped off the head of their king!?!? How barbaric, their cause must be terrible."

I mean, what do you think about how the french revolution went?

[a completely inoffensive name]

That doesn't make sense. You call it an angry mod but you don't see the bad light?

I mean, what do you think about how the french revolution went?

Shh, I am just being cynical right now Sasaki. Mondays, you know?

[Nowake]

The clip shows a couple of elderly ladies who fell to the ground who are well attended by four to five persons each at any one time. Any more and the area would have to be cleared around them.
They are constantly receiving help and attention out of sight of the main group of protesters.


If the clip's author wants to try to drown out the message of a small OWS crowd in front of a bank in irrelevant bouts of "outrage", he would do well do be smarter about it
This also makes him look silly and, of course, completely callous, seeing as he has actually seized upon the plight of the elderly ladies, unlike 90% of the crowd, and he continues to film them instead of putting his camera aside to offer them the help he points out is not being offered.

[Sasaki Kojiro]

The clip shows a couple of elderly ladies who fell to the ground who are well attended by four to five persons each at any one time. Any more and the area would have to be cleared around them.
They are constantly receiving help and attention out of sight of the main group of protesters.


If the clip's author wants to try to drown out the message of a small OWS crowd in front of a bank in irrelevant bouts of "outrage", he would do well do be smarter about it
This also makes him look silly and, of course, completely callous, seeing as he has actually seized upon the plight of the elderly ladies, unlike 90% of the crowd, and he continues to film them instead of putting his camera aside to offer them the help he points out is not being offered.

It's the latest propaganda technique, most people are still suckers for it as far as I can tell. You get a whole bunch of people with video cameras or cell phone cameras and try and get something on film that supports your cause. At one moment it looks like he jerks the camera away from some of the protesters coming to check on the woman. That plus selective editing + enough cameras will get you your moments. The protesters themselves throw bottles, stones, glass, paint, urine, what have you, at police officers...spit on them, insult them, antagonize them enough to get tear gassed or arrested, and then put that video up. It's a bizarre charade.

It's sad that people buy it, I don't think they are all that stupid, they just have no character intellectually is the best way I can put it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBT0...ature=youtu.be

What does it look like in the mind of someone who will stand and chant "We are people"? I don't want to know.

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Oh but I just have to say. Are you going to refer to "hey hey, ho ho, corporate greed has got to go" as a "message" with a straight face

[Nowake]

No, not even I can spin that one much meh – there would be a “medium is the message” argument making the case for their bitter determination to demonstrate overshadowing the lack of eloquence? Ideas ideas...

But yeah, always had a pet peeve against popular protests (mainly strikes here) going for the chants a la football match.
What’s wrong with the old rhythm-less “Hang them” or “We’ll make skis out of your mother’s grave cross”? A lot more intense. Mobs don't hate like they used to sigh.

I can keep a straight face through a lot worse though!

[Vuk]

[drone]

Long time, no see, GC! Welcome back.

[Idaho]

Just thought I would drop by and see what ideas the right-leaning members of the Org had digested from their approved news sources, and haven't been dissapointed.

[Lemur]

An interesting commentary on how the financial collapse's blame should be measured. I find myself in agreement:

Even if the bank knows it is selling a pile of **** and separately bets against it, as long as it adequately discloses that it is selling a pile of ****, that is how our market works. As a capitalist, you can't blame the banks. If they fail to disclose that they are peddling a pile of ****, they are liable civilly and criminally. So far, surprisingly, there have only been isolated (though well publicized) cases brought against the banks for misleading investors.

Why did the banks sell piles of ****? Because of the Wall Street compensation system that pays annual bonuses upon closed deal, regardless of whether those deals go bad. They made a lot of money doing so. The bankers who were more responsible and did not peddle piles of **** were fired for not making as much as their competitors. So there was a race to the bottom to sell the most piles of ****. [...]

[T]here are many others to blame:

The investors. These are not your mom and pop investors, but very sophisticated pension funds and others. Astoundingly, I would hear at conferences that they were "chasing yield," which meant that they were seeking higher returns, which meant that they were looking to buy, in my view, risky ****. Which is why the bankers could sell them a pile of ****. Further, many of the investors also suffered from the generational issues. The younger ones did not think that real estate would go down because they never lived through a market crisis and the older ones did not understand the complexity of the new-fangled deals that were being done. So these sophisticated investors, while thinking they were taking on some risk, took on more risk than they thought. In their defense, partially, they were buying rated securities.

The rating agencies, along with the complicit investors, also deserve a lot of the blame. From the early 1990s to the mid 2000s, the deals were getting riskier and more complex, yet the agencies were giving these deals higher ratings. It was the rating agency imprimatur that allowed the banks to turn a pile of **** into golden nuggets. Once again, the blame was due to compensation. The banks would shop around to the various agencies to get the best ratings, creating a race to the bottom. If the ratings were too low, the agencies would not get paid or would not get future deals. The "false" ratings colored the market and left the regulators asleep.

But the blame goes further. The deals could not get done without inflated appraisals on properties. Once again, appraisers felt the need to give inflated appraisals in order to get future business from the mortgage companies, making them co-conspirators. As someone who refinanced his house several times, I always found it interesting that the appraisal always came out to an amount which allowed the bank to lend me the amount requested.

Then there is the public. Although there is some percentage of homeowners who needed the money for medical emergencies or other legitimate reasons, for about a decade, the American public treated their homes as ATMs. Nobody forced anyone to take out a loan. Yes, there were some folks who were duped and took out adjustable rate loans that they did not understand, but who gets the blame for public ignorance? Many of these same people then took some of the proceeds and were further ripped off by unscrupulous auto salesmen or timeshare companies. Are we also blaming them? And the people ripping off the public were not the Wall Street banks necessarily, but rather the local mortgage companies and local banks.

Then there was the government to the degree you noted, but in my view the government was more asleep than complicit.

[drone]

Then there was the government to the degree you noted, but in my view the government was more asleep than complicit.

The Fed enabled a lot of this by keeping the rates at rock-bottom for so long.

[Slyspy]

Film somebody falling down the steps then carrying filming right in her face in order to make a point that other people aren't helping? Hilarious!

[PanzerJaeger]

The clip shows a couple of elderly ladies who fell to the ground who are well attended by four to five persons each at any one time. Any more and the area would have to be cleared around them.
They are constantly receiving help and attention out of sight of the main group of protesters.

That is, perhaps, a bridge too far - and incidentally my main issue with the protestors. Obviously the video is propaganda and the accusations of pushing are not supported by it, but it is also clear that the protestors continued to belligerently scream their chants and crowd the area as the two women lay on the ground. They are certainly not out of sight of the main group as can be seen toward the end of the video. If I were among the protestors, that would be my cue to stop the aggressive chants, calm the situation, and see what could be done to help. Then again, I'm not the kind of person who screams meaningless slogans at old women in my free time. (Couldn't theses wimps find some titan of industry to hassle?) The police have at least recognized the growing violent, confrontational behavior the occupiers have been engaging in, so hopefully they will not be allowed near any more elderly folks (or any normal human beings) in the future. I cannot imagine how my own grandmother would have dealt with that kind of situation. I just want to give that poor woman a hug.

[Slyspy]

Yes, the whole group should just push past those security guys and see whether they can help the group of people already around the lady and giving aid.

[Vuk]

Yes, the whole group should just push past those security guys and see whether they can help the group of people already around the lady and giving aid.

And yet that is what everyone is arguing the cameraman should have done.

[Lemur]

If I were among the protestors, that would be my cue to stop the aggressive chants, calm the situation, and see what could be done to help.

An ageing hippie offers helpful advice to address just this sort of problem with the OWS crowd. Doubtless the graybeard's words will be ignored. Abbreviating to section headers; follow link if you want to read the full advice.

I wish I could say that the problems that the Occupy movement is having with infiltrators and agitators are new. But they’re not. In fact, they’re problems that the Old Hippies who survived the 60s and 70s remember acutely, and with considerable pain.

As a veteran of those days — with the scars to prove it — watching the OWS organizers struggle with drummers, druggies, sexual harassers, and racists brings me back to a few lessons we had to learn the hard way back in the day, always after putting up with way too much over-the-top behavior from people we didn’t think we were allowed to say no to. It’s heartening to watch the Occupiers begin to work out solutions to what I can only indelicately call the ******* problem. In the hope of speeding that learning process along, here are a few glimmers from my own personal flashbacks — things that it’s high time somebody said right out loud.

1. Let’s be clear: It is absolutely OK to insist on behavior norms.
2. It is OK to draw boundaries between those who are clearly working toward our goals, and those who are clearly not.
3. The consensus model has a fatal flaw, which is this: It’s very easy for power to devolve to the people who are willing to throw the biggest tantrums.
4. Once you’ve accepted the right of the group to set boundaries around people’s behavior, and exclude those who put their personal rights ahead of the group’s mission and goals, the next question becomes: How do we deal with chronic ********?
5. It is not wrong for you to set boundaries this way.

[Slyspy]

But the cameraman was already right beside her and wasn't kept away by security. Yet instead of helping he just kept on filming. Clearly the protesters were not alone in believing their agenda to be above humanity. Although on reflection the cameraman was alone in using the incident to further his political agenda.

[Crazed Rabbit]

Occupy Oaklanders struggle with black bloc anarchist scum:


CR

[Sasaki Kojiro]

Occupy Oaklanders struggle with black bloc anarchist scum:

You call that struggling?

What a disgusting display.

edit:Is that really the occupy people themselves who released that video???

[Beskar]

edit:Is that really the occupy people themselves who released that video???

Yes, to denounce the acts of violence.

[Sasaki Kojiro]

Yes, to denounce the acts of violence.

I guess they are even more out of it than I thought. They really don't get how bad that video makes them look? Do you get it?

Who is going to applaud them for standing there shouting "WE ARE BETTER THAN THIS"?

[Sasaki Kojiro]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buov...has_verified=1

*walks into baton*
"Stop Beating Students!"
*walks into baton*
"Stop Beating Students!

http://blog.sfgate.com/crime/2011/11...tampDescending

#4 has a police eye view from the little cameras they are apparently wearing. It's crazy the sheer amount of cameras...all the police have them and half the protesters are just filming!

[Beskar]

I guess they are even more out of it than I thought. They really don't get how bad that video makes them look? Do you get it?

Who is going to applaud them for standing there shouting "WE ARE BETTER THAN THIS"?

True, but they could simply not do anything at all then it simply get spinned by the 'right' as the entire group getting labelled in such a manner opposed to a minority hijacking it for their own purpose.

I mean, some one falling down the stairs whilst receiving aid by five people whilst others continued was spinned as "Evil OWS failing to help" when it was clear Help was there and others were getting police/ambulance to the scene. The propagandist cameraman zooming the camera up into the poor woman's face in an act of abuse for his own personal agenda.