Occupy Wall Street - Page 71

On October 13 2011 21:32 HappyChris wrote:
You actually got a great statesman atm running for the republican party. his name is Buddy Roemer and is a former guvernor and congressman but he dont get heard becuase he refuse to take money from wallstreet so they trying to shut him up. He is not alowed in the debates etc.

This is a truly great statesman and he needs you support

On October 13 2011 22:53 hummingbird23 wrote:
You only have to look at the financial war being waged on Wikileaks by a banking coalition to know that a plutocracy is already in place.

On October 13 2011 21:30 Suisen wrote:


Ignoring people dying in a revolution being called 'mass murder', it all happened in Egypt. It all happens in other revolutions. Freedom isn't won without bloodshed. The freedoms we have in the west right now were paid for with blood by our forefathers. Governments and elites don't give out civil liberties for free.

The ruling class is already ridiculing this movement. You really think Obama is going to be "Ok ok, I got it all wrong. Tell me what to do and I will carry it out. And yes now I will also magically get it through congress."?

If this movement dies out another one will emerge when the country is even worse off.


What is you alternative scenario? The military is going to step in with a coup? Both parties magically disappear tomorrow?


The natural state of humans is chaos. Western civilization and a peaceful society are the exception. Their existence needs an explanation. When people take to the streets in large numbers mob mentality can easily take over. If you look at the statistics enough people for a revolution are seriously hurting right now. And it looks like it will only get worse.

The US doesn't have a functioning democracy or a functioning press. There has been a huge gap between government policy and public opinion in the US for a long time. And all the major media are corporate owned and serve corporate interests. There is free speech, but that is not enough.

I think Bolivia is more democratic than the US. The US presidential elections must be one of the most broken in the world. You vote for two candidates that are both rich older male members of the governing elite and that have basically the same views on all major issues and that will serve the private sector no matter what. And the one who wins is determined about how marketable a candidate is and how much money there is to market. Real politics never ever enter the picture. In In fact, candidates have a billion dollars to spend to deliberately try and make sure that the voters don't even know the positions of the candidates on certain issues.
It's better to only market an image. That way the voter can just project his or her own views on the candidate.
Bush and the Kyoto protocol was a good example. People thought Kyoto was a good idea. People thought Bush was a nice guy. Nice guys have good ideas. So they all assumed Bush was in favour of Kyoto. They couldn't conceive of that Bush would be against such a sensible plan.
This is true against the board.

And even if you elected a president that wants to carry out the will of the common people, the unelected bureaucrats make this near impossible. The president is as much a slave of the system as everyone else is. Obama can't even carry out the minor promises he made. He just doesn't have the power to do so.

Presidents can only start to do good things when they are out of office. Look at Carter, Clinton and both the Bushes.


Also, you are an immoral person for dishonestly projecting on me what I warn against and then attacking me personally. Shameful person.

On October 14 2011 00:07 xDaunt wrote:


For all of those wondering why I and other people have said that the OWS movement is dangerous, I present you Exhibit A. There are a lot of OWS protesters that think like this guy. It's a movement that is prone to being derailed and co-opted by far left extremists. This crap is not the solution to America's problems.

A New Bush Era or a Push Era?

By Amy Goodman

Back when Barack Obama was still just a U.S. senator running for president, he told a group of donors in a New Jersey suburb, “Make me do it.” He was borrowing from President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who used the same phrase (according to Harry Belafonte, who heard the story directly from Eleanor Roosevelt) when responding to legendary union organizer A. Philip Randolph’s demand for civil rights for African-Americans.

While President Obama has made concession after concession to both the corporate-funded tea party and his Wall Street donors, now that he is again in campaign mode, his progressive critics are being warned not to attack him, as that might aid and abet the Republican bid for the White House.

Enter the 99 percenters. The Occupy Wall Street ranks continue to grow, inspiring more than 1,000 solidarity protests around the country and the globe. After weeks, and one of the largest mass arrests in U.S. history, Obama finally commented: “I think people are frustrated, and the protesters are giving voice to a more broad-based frustration about how our financial system works.” But neither he nor his advisers—or the Republicans—know what to do with this burgeoning mass movement.

Following the controversial Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, which allows unlimited corporate donations to support election advertising, the hunger for campaign cash is insatiable. The Obama re-election campaign aims to raise $1 billion. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, the financial industry was Obama’s second-largest source of 2008 campaign contributions, surpassed only by the lawyers/lobbyists industry sector.

The suggestion that a loss for Obama would signal a return to the Bush era has some merit: The Associated Press reported recently that “almost all of [Mitt] Romney’s 22 special advisers held senior Bush administration positions in diplomacy, defense or intelligence. Two former Republican senators are included as well as Bush-era CIA chief Michael Hayden and former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff.” But so is the Obama presidency an expansion of the Bush era, unless there is a new “Push era.”

The organic strength of Occupy Wall Street defies the standard dismissals from the corporate media’s predictably stale stable of pundits. For them, it is all about the divide between the Republicans and the Democrats, a divide the protesters have a hard time seeing. They see both parties captured by Wall Street. Richard Haass, head of the establishment Council on Foreign Relations, said of the protesters, “They’re not serious.” He asked why they are not talking about entitlements. Perhaps it is because, to the 99 percent, Social Security and Medicare are not the problem, but rather growing inequality, with the 400 richest Americans having more wealth than half of all Americans combined. And then there is the overwhelming cost and toll of war, first and foremost the lives lost, but also the lives destroyed, on all sides.

It’s why, for example, Jose Vasquez, executive director of Iraq Veterans Against the War, was down at Occupy Wall Street on Monday night. He told me: “It’s no secret that a lot of veterans are facing unemployment, homelessness and a lot of other issues that are dealing with the economy. A lot of people get deployed multiple times and are still struggling. … I’ve met a lot of veterans who have come here. I just met a guy who is active duty, took leave just to come to Occupy Wall Street.”

The historic election of Barack Obama was achieved by millions of people across the political spectrum. For years during the Bush administration, people felt they were hitting their heads against a brick wall. With the election, the wall had become a door, but it was only open a crack. The question was, would it be kicked open or slammed shut? It is not up to one person. Obama had moved from community organizer in chief to commander in chief. When forces used to having the ear of the most powerful person on earth whisper their demands in the Oval Office, the president must see a force more powerful outside his window, whether he likes it or not, and say, “If I do that, they will storm the Bastille.” If there’s no one out there, we are all in big trouble.

On October 14 2011 00:07 xDaunt wrote:


For all of those wondering why I and other people have said that the OWS movement is dangerous, I present you Exhibit A. There are a lot of OWS protesters that think like this guy. It's a movement that is prone to being derailed and co-opted by far left extremists. This crap is not the solution to America's problems.

Exhibit A denied: Source is not american, thus cannot be a representative of OWS.

On October 14 2011 01:33 DeepElemBlues wrote:


Does it really matter where he's from? He and OWS have read from the same playbook, so to speak.

What you have quoted there and the speeches and comments being given at various "Occupy" protest sites are very very similar.

Both are also pretty much standard New York Times unsigned op-ed fare (you know, the unsigned editorials the Times uses to be snarky and nasty) or Paul Krugman column fare, minus the calls for violence.

They're all voicing the same argument.

Anyway:

http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/culture/2011/10/3722467/bloomberg-tells-occupy-wall-street-protesters-clear-zuccotti-park-fr

So looks like there will most definitely be some kind of major confrontation at Occupy Wall Street tomorrow or by the end of the week, because those people are not going to want to leave noway nohow.

On October 14 2011 01:49 radiatoren wrote:


Now, that is pure paranoia. Taking one side out from a 2-side post is just silly in this case, since you completely screw the intentions with the post.
Furthermore, calling a news-source out in this case seems uncalled for. You remove the main point of "violence is needed" in the crazy rant, what do you see as left? Trying to compare that to some newspaper therefore is ridiculous since the main point is gone.

On October 14 2011 01:49 radiatoren wrote:


Now, that is pure paranoia. Taking one side out from a 2-side post is just silly in this case, since you completely screw the intentions with the post.
Furthermore, calling a news-source out in this case seems uncalled for. You remove the main point of "violence is needed" in the crazy rant, what do you see as left? Trying to compare that to some newspaper therefore is ridiculous since the main point is gone.

On October 14 2011 01:57 xDaunt wrote:


Maybe you haven't noticed, but there have been ringleaders at pretty much every OWS rally who have advocated violence. Is this reflective of every protester who attends the rallies? I hope not. Nonetheless, it's foolish to simply ignore that it's there.

On October 14 2011 02:34 H0i wrote:


So this is why, when the protesters were on the bridge (after the police sent them there), and when they were boxed in and arrested, people shouted to sit down so chaos and violence would not start?

You do not agree with the movement and try to ridicule it, claiming they advocate violence. Stop being so ignorant. If you can't come with real arguments, go away instead of spreading these lies.

On October 14 2011 03:10 bonifaceviii wrote:
So there's this really arcane blog post on a low-key mathy economics blog that has been furiously making the rounds of all the major economic news sites.

In this blog post, the author applies a mathematical regularity known as Benford's law to the SEC filings of 20,000 public corporations and finds something very, very interesting.

Not conclusive, by any means, but interesting nonetheless.

On October 14 2011 04:32 logikly wrote:
Listen to this and This ALL you need to know about the OWS scum

http://media.townhallstore.com/dp/rs/dp_rs_20111010-1_Mon_e0e55813-43d3-441d-a34a-c68f7074afeb_radio-show_Hi.mp3

On October 14 2011 06:11 DrainX wrote:

*Bashing Howard Zinn for not knowing whether or not the founding of the US, including the genocide of the indigenous people of the Americas was in the end a good or bad thing.

Answering that question in any other way would have been extremely intellectually dishonest. How can you possibly know how history would have changed if that had not happened? Was the founding or the fall of the Roman Empire a good or bad thing, all things considered? No one can possibly know that.


"The Wall Street crowd who are overwhelmingly funders of the democratic party"

True.

"The democratic party has aligned itself with these people"

False. He seems to be under the impression that the only possible political opinions are those caught between democrats and republicans when OWS is opposed to both.

*Something about OWS not bringing toilets and food and not cleaning up after themselves*

What makes you think that the police would allow them to install portable toilets in a public park? They do bring their own food and they started an initiative to clean up the park near Wall Street today.

"The more that the average American sees the left, the better." (He thinks that the average American would not agree with OWS and that a prolonged protest would turn people away from them)

According to this poll:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/post/the-morning-plum/2011/10/13/gIQAULRHhL_blog.html

the opposite seems to be true.

*Bashing "Go the fuck to sleep" thinking it is a childrens book meant to be read to kids"

It is intended for adults.

*Randomly bashing what he perceives to be the demographic that the OWS is made up of*

Yawn. The movement is to a large extent made up of younger people so of course there will be fewer people who are married and have children compared to the Tea Party movement. There are however people from every background there. Army veterans, doctors, school teachers, wall street bankers, athletes, students etc. Since the format of the protest is an ongoing "occupation" there will of course be fewer people with jobs there compared to a weekend one day march. If you have a job you will only be able to attend the protests on evenings and weekends. It is also, so far, early on in the movements existence so there will be more young people and students compared to when the movement peaks. This can be seen in any popular movement of this kind. Look back at Egypt as an example. It started out with students and other young people protesting but as the protests grew, the mainstream joined in. Or look at the 60's in the US. Same thing there. Everyone can't afford to be arrested and the mainstream needs the young and bold to pave the way for them before they can take to the streets.

*Refering to topless dancers as anarchists*

lol

He then goes on to link, one sink in one café close to the protest being broken to OWS protestors by and large being people with no sense of responsibility. If they had no sense of responsibility, they would be home on their couch, not out protesting.

On October 14 2011 06:16 xDaunt wrote:
For better or for worse, the democratic party is moving to align itself with OWS. Pelosi, Obama, and several other democratic leaders have come out and supported it. Liberal media outlets are also playing up OWS. Personally, I think that's unwise for their sake, but we'll see.