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Originally Posted by Whirlaway
Their solutions (the ones I have heard) are more govenrment spending, more taxpayer bailouts, more unionization and union power, more, more, more...I don't hear any of them saying we need less government, less spending, less regulations.
One of their big demands is forgiveness of student loan debt.
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As i said i am not uncritical either, but you are taking things to literally. Its not so much about what these protestors want (hello? write a letter to santa...) but what has happened and the impact it had on people`s life. I still think to degrade these people is not leading anywhere. We - of all people - should at least strive for consense and an intellectual debate.
and no - they do not want to spend more money. Hello? The most expensive is still US military and who ? Bush ? wasted too much money already, so - i mean this whining about spending money, oh come on!. That is not the point either!
I don`t understand why all political debates here on eccie or in the USA in general have to always turn out to be a big f-ing PANDEMONIUM PARTY ?? Is it not possible to discuss something without badmouthing someone. I have to admit the stronges point i had in criticising the OWS movement was that - now these middle class people - who previously benefitted from the system see how it fails. The criticism was a kind of hypocrisy statement as of saying "oh NOW you find it problematic because you got screwed over" Its logical for anyone who has any idea of economy that systems have ups and downs. Recession comes, no matter what kind of system you support. AND these bankers have been aware of that. They fooled people. Intentionally . So for me its much rather the point of WHO is protesting instead of THE FACT that the movement takes place. Its as if escorts scream "Occupy wives" because all of a sudden no one wanted their services anymore :-)))) and then they start to realize what`s really going on :-))))...
here is an interesting (for me) article who points out all these misunderstandings some of you seem to have:
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics...ating-20111025
"FREE MONEY. Ordinary people have to borrow their money at market rates. Lloyd Blankfein and Jamie Dimon get billions of dollars for free, from the Federal Reserve. They borrow at zero and lend the same money back to the government at two or three percent, a valuable public service otherwise known as "standing in the middle and taking a gigantic cut when the government decides to lend money to itself."
Or the banks borrow billions at zero and lend mortgages to us at four percent, or credit cards at twenty or twenty-five percent. This is essentially an official government license to be rich, handed out at the expense of prudent ordinary citizens, who now no longer receive much interest on their CDs or other saved income. It is virtually impossible to not make money in banking when you have unlimited access to free money, especially when the government keeps buying its own cash back from you at market rates.
Your average chimpanzee couldn't fuck up that business plan, which makes it all the more incredible that most of the too-big-to-fail banks are nonetheless still functionally insolvent, and dependent upon bailouts and phony accounting to stay above water. Where do the protesters go to sign up for their interest-free billion-dollar loans?
CREDIT AMNESTY. If you or I miss a $7 payment on a Gap card or, heaven forbid, a mortgage payment, you can forget about the great computer in the sky ever overlooking your mistake. But serial financial fuckups like Citigroup and Bank of America overextended themselves by the hundreds of billions and pumped trillions of dollars of deadly leverage into the system -- and got rewarded with things like the Temporary Liquidity Guarantee Program, an FDIC plan that allowed irresponsible banks to borrow against the government's credit rating.
The 2008 crash, of course, birthed a whole generation of new bailout schemes. Banks placed billions in bets with AIG and should have lost their shirts when the firm went under -- AIG went under, after all, in large part because of all the huge mortgage bets the banks laid with the firm -- but instead got the state to pony up $180 billion or so to rescue the banks from their own bad decisions.
This sort of thing seems to happen every time the banks do something dumb with their money.
When was the last time the government stepped into help you "avoid losses you might otherwise suffer?" But that's the reality we live in. When Joe Homeowner bought too much house, essentially betting that home prices would go up, and losing his bet when they dropped, he was an irresponsible putz who shouldn’t whine about being put on the street.
But when banks bet billions on a firm like AIG that was heavily invested in mortgages, they were making the same bet that Joe Homeowner made, leaving themselves hugely exposed to a sudden drop in home prices. But instead of being asked to "suck it in and cope" when that bet failed, the banks instead went straight to Washington for a bailout -- and got it.
GET OUT OF JAIL FREE.
Millions of people have been foreclosed upon in the last three years. In most all of those foreclosures, a regional law enforcement office -- typically a sheriff's office -- was awarded fees by the court as part of the foreclosure settlement, settlements which of course were often rubber-stamped by a judge despite mountains of perjurious robosigned evidence.
That means that every single time a bank kicked someone out of his home, a local police department got a cut. Local sheriff's offices also get cuts of almost all credit card judgments, and other bank settlements. If you're wondering how it is that so many regional police departments have the money for fancy new vehicles and SWAT teams and other accoutrements, this is one of your answers.
The point being: if you miss a few home payments, you have a very high likelihood of colliding with a police officer in the near future. But if you defraud a pair of European banks out of a billion dollars -- that's a billion, with a b -- you will never be arrested, never see a policeman, never see the inside of a jail cell.
Your settlement will be worked out not with armed police, but with regulators in suits who used to work for your company or one like it. And you'll have, defending you, a former head of that regulator's agency. In the end, a fine will be paid to the government, but it won't come out of your pocket personally; it will be paid by your company's shareholders. And there will be no admission of criminal wrongdoing.
Can anyone imagine a common thief being caught by police and sentenced to pay back half of what he took? Just one low-ranking individual in that case was charged (case pending), and no individual had to reach into his pocket to help cover the fine. The settlement Goldman paid to to the government was about 1/24th of what Goldman received from the government just in the AIG bailout. And that was the toughest "punishment" the government dished out to a bank in the wake of 2008.
The point being: we have a massive police force in America that outside of lower Manhattan prosecutes crime and imprisons citizens with record-setting, factory-level efficiency, eclipsing the incarceration rates of most of history's more notorious police states and communist countries.
But the bankers on Wall Street don't live in that heavily-policed country. There are maybe 1000 SEC agents policing that sector of the economy, plus a handful of FBI agents. There are nearly that many police officers stationed around the polite crowd at Zucotti park.
These inequities are what drive the OWS protests. People don't want handouts. It's not a class uprising and they don't want civil war -- they want just the opposite. They want everyone to live in the same country, and live by the same rules. It's amazing that some people think that that's asking a lot"
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There is so much hypocrisy on either side of the movements :-). But nevertheless i am more supportive of the PRO OWS arguments, because what could someone possible and rationally say against their motives? I mean they want equal punishment for all, what`s so bad about that? They want risk management in banking? Really bad as well, right? I mean .... MUMMY DEAREST --- what a PANDEMONIUM PARTY :-))).
Its difficult to have all kinds of different friends in private like i do, i always have been proud of the fact that i attract and am friends with many kinds of people and can value some of their opinions to a point (as they value mine), 
