Anybody know anything about or participating in Occupy Wall Street? (bankrupt, schools)
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
Have you even looked at the pictures or coverage of the protests? I don't see the masses of unwashed drugged up hippie losers you are claiming to be behind it. I see a lot of regular people frustrated with the state of the economy and the government. Certainly whenever there is a large protest it draws out all types of fringe elements, but those are not the core of the protests.
This is from CNN iReport that actually has the best coverage of it...
Attacking the protestors may not be attacking "Democrat prinicples" as in the platform of the Democratic party, but attacking them at all is a dismissal of democratic principles. These people have a RIGHT to protest and voice their discontent.
you don't see the joints hanging out of all of their mouths?
CNN has the best coverage? now i KNOW you're lying!
oh yay! let's have a competition. you post all the examples of "lashing out" and crazy protestors tied to this event, and I'll show you all the crazy examples in the tea party protests.
you can get to work now, should be easy enough for 1 person. i've got to assemble a full team of 40 people, buy a ton of computers, and start reviewing all the footage. i'll get back to you in a month or two with all of mine.
oh, and i like the one quote in the video in the article you linked: "i'm here because i think it's about time we had an open dialouge"...wow, he really lashed out.
He owned a house and had two young children, and like you was not laying on the sofa channel surfing all day. This was when he learned that there is discrimination against the unemployed. Some of the questions he was asked were mind-boggling. Like you, Cobra costs ate up a huge part of his unemployment check.
There is definitely discrimination against the unemployed. I was able to secure employment as much by who I knew as what I knew and I was insanely qualified for my the job I took. Still, I needed someone to help open that door.
The double whammy for many comes when job opportunities are being tied to credit reports. So many people have had dings to their credit reports while unemployed, that using that as a barometer for their employability simply isn't fair.
It's ironic that people who were unemployed do to the recession and had their credit destroyed are considered a poor choice for employment while all of the banks and investment houses involved still hold investment grade credit ratings.
Oh yeah, that's horrible. Almost as bad as when the Bush campaign had the Enron jet fly plane loads of Republican Congressional pages down to Florida to "protest" the election in 2000. I actually knew two people who were part of it.
In case you weren't aware (having actually worked on polticial campaigns, I'm aware ) many of the people you see at rallies, protests, townhalls, etc. are actually planted there by the different campaigns or sides in order to make their message/candidate seem to have more passionate support than it really does. They will literally drive busses up to college campuses and hand people a sign and a bag lunch and take them where they are needed. On the way there they are given a pep talk about what they are protesting for/against and a promise of $40 or so when the event is over and they get back on the bus. The Tea Party does this as well. On national campaigns there are even professional protesters/supporters that follow the campaign around to help energize the crowd.
So, it's not suprising to me that some of these protests would have professional or paid protesters involved. However, I do think the majority are primarily grassroots individuals.
I wanted to come back to this. I read a book not too long ago (whose name escapes me) that was written by a long time executive of General Motors, before the bakruptcy and bailout. In it he outlined what went wrong at GM and he points to one particular day.
Generally when the executives at GM gathered in the board room each day, they discussed cars. The planning, the styling, options, what was hot, what was not. Then one day, they sat down and no one talked about cars, they talked about GM's share price on the stock exchange.
From that day forward all the meetings were about the companies share price and net worth. The problem with Wall Street he states is that they are very in the moment. They don't have patience for long product cycles with high development costs. They want results and profits, today. In order to get there, development time on cars was slashed. Cars were decontented to raise their profitability. Cheaper materials were chosen and shortcuts taken. When the union went on strike, they rapidly acquiesced to the demands in order to avoid hurting the stock value with a long term strike. They paid dividends instead of investing in development. He makes a very convincing case.
Wall Street can do a lot of good things, but when a company or we as a society become too focused on the DJIA and Nasdaq and treat as a barometer of our value as a company or society, we are going the wrong way. Maybe if GM had said, screw the stock price we're going to keep building cars the right way, they would have never needed a bailout.
similar story i read recently about the airline industry, and what brought it down. see, the airlines had a pretty simple business model of charging customers to transport them. but, there are risks associated with this business, and they wanted to start looking into ways to control these risks, to stabalize the share prices, and provide growth opportunities. they hired a a guy from the finance industry. he came in, and his department starting coming up with all of these ways to fix those risks, and make profits in other ways. the beginning of "hedging" risks by purchasing oil futures was born. then, airlines started realizing that since they had a pretty good understanding of oil prices/demand, they could start selling their hedges to other companies, thus, making a profit of their hedging of risk. then, they realized they know planes pretty well. they started buying planes and leasing them to other companies. they entered all these businesses that helped increase short term profits, but steered the organization away from the original business. the guy in the story i read spoke about how he had a hard time wrapping his head around how the accounting department became the main profit generator for the company.
i probably butchered some of the points of the story, but i'll find it and link it for you.
there's tons of examples though of short term decisions made for wall street that ended up killing the company in the long run. look at pensions and buyouts. pensions were overfunded in the mid 90s. so companies had this money burning a hole in it's pocket and stock prices that needed to grow. so they started doing early buyouts, and instead of offering severance, which would be a "cost" in the current year and hurt the stock price, they offered increased pension benefits, which decreased their "overfunded pension" and didn't show up as a cost. but...ooops...15 years later, you've created all these things that cost more for the company in 2011, and now there's no way to fix it. but don't forget, it's the unions that crippled these companies. management's involvement in giving these things to the unions had absolutely zero to do with it. just like it's A-rod's fault the Yankees lost. the fact that 2/3 of the team sucked had no impact.
These wall street millionaires work HARD for their multi-million dollar a year salaries, and they deserve all of the bailouts and tax cuts that we give them.
Why would we raise a millionaire's taxes by 3% when we could just cut a teacher's salary by 20%? Everyone knows it's lazy and grossly overpaid teachers who drove our economy into ruin!
The top 1% in this country only control 40% of the wealth! The CEO to worker pay in this country is only 475:1. That's BARELY keeping pace with China and other third world nations where middle classes don't exist! That is, of course, unless you want to end up with a crummy economy like Germany or the UK, where CEO to worker pay is 12:1, and 22:1, respectively. The middle class is not disappearing fast enough in the United States. The top 1% in America NEED our help. Can't you all see that?
I absolutely found myself questioning what happened to the McCain of 2000 when the past election rolled around. The only thing I can come back to is that there was no way a Republican Party corrupted by the fringe elements was going to put up a candidate that didn't espouse all of their "values". That led to McCain trying to pander to the base to get elected, picking Palin as a running mate, etc. McCain sold out for his chance and it ultimately doomed him when it came time for the independents to vote. The machine that motivated the conservative base to come out and vote for Bush was simply beaten by the machine that Obama put together.
Closet confession number 2...I really wish Hillary had won the primary in 2008 or would consider running against Obama in 2012, I probably would have voted for her.
When I collected it was really easy. I went online hit a couple buttons and my benefits were direct deposited in my account. Now, it is much harder. My SIL is unemployed and she has to jump through a lot of hoops to get her benefits.
The issue as I see it isn't that unemployment benefits are bad, they do provide a vital safety net. There is some abuse and we could do better with managing them. Personally, I'd love to see people on unemployment doing some kind of civil service or receiving job training, or even being loaned out to companies as temp workers.
i'm with you. i'm now thinking that maybe hillary was the better choice.
also with you on unemployment. there's things that can be done, but one has to remember, there are costs involved in reducing abuses. i have worked in consulting and compliance and internal controls work for a while now. there's a cost/benefit to each control you implement. you can only go so far before you hit your diminishing returns...
I actually don't disagree. I have given up. As a lot of people have. Short of a revolution I can't see anything changing in any meaningful way and that cure would be worse than the disease.
it doesn't have to be a revolution. it has to be involvement. i realize what's caused you to get to the point where you feel like you have no power, and that has caused you to throw in the towel. but you need to continue. you need to vote in all elections. you need to reach out to politicians and tell them directly when you're pleased or displeased. people forget that that is part of our obligation as citizens in a Republic. it's not set up to be elect-then-forget. you must be engaged.
that's what's happening right now in both parties. people are becoming engaged again.
I understand where you're coming from and you know I don't disagree on principle. The problem is there needs to be give and take from both positions and accountability for all. The governments role needs to be limited and applied to the areas that they are best at. Spending needs to be reigned in and the books balanced. The difference is that I have no problem with higher taxes if it means we also create impactful changes to entitlement programs and reign in defense spending. Until someone can come to me with a balanced plan and approach, I have to default to my not one more red cent position. The difference is unlike those in power, I'm willing to compromise and don't consider my tax rate a "sacred value".
it doesn't have to be a revolution. it has to be involvement. i realize what's caused you to get to the point where you feel like you have no power, and that has caused you to throw in the towel. but you need to continue. you need to vote in all elections. you need to reach out to politicians and tell them directly when you're pleased or displeased. people forget that that is part of our obligation as citizens in a Republic. it's not set up to be elect-then-forget. you must be engaged.
that's what's happening right now in both parties. people are becoming engaged again.
I do vote. Probably more out of guilt than anything. But I don't think it amounts to anything. Pick from a list of people who aren't going to change anything.
They don't give a **** when I'm pleased or displeased. They care about who thee owe favors to. And who can make them look good.
I honestly think the system is fatally flawed. You can't get elected without accumulating a lot of "IOUs". You can't get re-elected without doing the same. Those will always trump everything else. And the desire to get elected/re-elected will always trump the desire for anything else no matter what a politician says.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
CNN has the best coverage? now i KNOW you're lying! 
) many of the people you see at rallies, protests, townhalls, etc. are actually planted there by the different campaigns or sides in order to make their message/candidate seem to have more passionate support than it really does. They will literally drive busses up to college campuses and hand people a sign and a bag lunch and take them where they are needed. On the way there they are given a pep talk about what they are protesting for/against and a promise of $40 or so when the event is over and they get back on the bus. The Tea Party does this as well. On national campaigns there are even professional protesters/supporters that follow the campaign around to help energize the crowd.
