Wall Street Protests

[Clodfobble]

Originally Posted by TheMercenary

Why should poor people own iPhones and why would that even be a goal?

It's not, and they shouldn't. The point is, poor people today don't generally own iPhones, just like poor people in the 70s didn't own TVs. Stoessel was trying to equate television ownership in the 70s to television ownership today, and the two are not equal comparisons. Poor people today own TVs because you can get one for $10 at the pawn shop. You can't, however, get an iPhone for that price, just like you couldn't get a TV for that little back in the 70s.

[BigV]

Originally Posted by TheMercenary

The point being that the taxpayers need to make sure there is parity. There will never be parity. Someone needs to make my coffee at starbucks while I do my job.

You might be seeking parity, or equality, but no one I've heard from the OWS movement has said that. I have heard that they're seeking less unfairness. I agree that there will never be parity, and that's fine. But that someone who's making your coffee at Starbucks needs to be making enough money to live and thrive. There needs to be greater opportunity for your barrista to improve their standard of living.

Starbucks are generally located in urban areas. Housing is expensive in the city. Transportation from areas with less expensive housing to the place where the Starbucks is located costs money, everything costs money. Starbucks is extremely progressive in that they offer their employees full health benefits, regardless of their employment status. But that's a rare exception. Healthcare costs money. The standard of living for someone making your coffee will be extremely restricted. For you to get your coffee made, you should support a system that makes possible for Starbucks to thrive, and that means happy productive employees.

It's in your self interest to do so.

[BigV]

A Letter from Goldman Sachs Concerning Occupy Wall Street

NEW YORK (The Borowitz Report)– The following is a letter released today by Lloyd Blankfein, the chairman of banking giant Goldman Sachs:

Dear Investor:

Up until now, Goldman Sachs has been silent on the subject of the protest movement known as Occupy Wall Street. That does not mean, however, that it has not been very much on our minds. As thousands have gathered in Lower Manhattan, passionately expressing their deep discontent with the status quo, we have taken note of these protests. And we have asked ourselves this question:

How can we make money off them?

The answer is the newly launched Goldman Sachs Global Rage Fund, whose investment objective is to monetize the Occupy Wall Street protests as they spread around the world. At Goldman, we recognize that the capitalist system as we know it is circling the drain – but there’s plenty of money to be made on the way down.

The Rage Fund will seek out opportunities to invest in products that are poised to benefit from the spreading protests, from police batons and barricades to stun guns and forehead bandages. Furthermore, as clashes between police and protesters turn ever more violent, we are making significant bets on companies that manufacture replacements for broken windows and overturned cars, as well as the raw materials necessary for the construction and incineration of effigies.

It would be tempting, at a time like this, to say “Let them eat cake.” But at Goldman, we are actively seeking to corner the market in cake futures. We project that through our aggressive market manipulation, the price of a piece of cake will quadruple by the end of 2011.

Please contact your Goldman representative for a full prospectus. As the world descends into a Darwinian free-for-all, the Goldman Sachs Rage Fund is a great way to tell the protesters, “Occupy this.” We haven’t felt so good about something we’ve sold since our souls.

Sincerely,

Lloyd Blankfein

Chairman, Goldman Sachs

[ZenGum]

[classicman]

But that someone who's making your coffee at Starbucks needs to be making enough money to live and thrive.

Thrive??? Never gonna happen.

[Lamplighter]

OMG: Occupy Portland Crime Rate up 550-800%.
Well, that's how our local newspaper might want you to react.

The Oregonian's Anne Saker reports on
"the spike in crime around the downtown camp".

<snip>
between Sept. 22 and Oct. 5,
the two weeks before Occupy Portland's march through the city,
police made 2 arrests for vandalism;
between Oct. 6 and Thursday, the first two weeks of the encampment,
there were 11 arrests for vandalism.

Two weeks before the march, police arrested 2 people for disorderly conduct;
in the two weeks after the march around the square,
police made 16 disorderly conduct arrests.

The police report covers the entire downtown business area,
bounded by I-405, the river, and Burnside (A).
Occupy Portland is camped in two city park blocks,
the "Chapman Square" at the center of the map below.

Unfortunately, the Oregonian did not bother to research or cite
the number of arrests in any other "10-block radius" of the city,
or details such as...

8 of 16 D.C. arrests were unrelated to Occupy Portland,
and others were for "interfering with police" while police were
"reclaiming Main Street" after the original OP march.
.

[gvidas]

Here in the D, I have it on good authority that the police have been told to step up enforcement of nuisance ordinances in the area around the occupy protest.

So, 'number of citations and arrests' might mean something different from 'how much crime there is,' either of which could be the 'crime rate', and both of which are only a part of the question of how safe you are in a particular place.

[Clodfobble]

I, for one, wouldn't feel safe at all! I mean, those people might vandalize me, and then disorderly conduct all over my face.



Jesus Christ I can't believe I wrote that.

[Lamplighter]

[Lamplighter]

First person to say "Kumbaya" gets sent to Time Out.

Washington Post
By Marc Fisher
Updated: Saturday, October*22, 4:10*PM

For tea party and Occupy Wall Street movements, some common ground

Wayne Schissler walked the four blocks from his workplace
to the small Occupy Allentown protest to show the young demonstrators
that a tea party member is not a monster.
What he learned after a few hours of talk surprised him.

“They didn’t stink, and they weren’t on drugs,” he said. “I could see me being them, 30 years ago.”

Fifteen hundred miles away in rural Minnesota, Vas Littlecrow,
a tea party die-hard since the movement’s early days,
let the Internet noise about Occupy Wall Street wash over her,
leaving her alternately annoyed and intrigued.
She went on Google Plus to debate the Occupiers,
“and they started saying things that clicked with me,” she said.
“This was deja vu with how I got into the tea party.”
<snip>
No one expects the tea party and Occupy movements to merge forces,
but their adherents are discovering that their stories are often strikingly similar:
They searched for jobs and came up empty.
They found work, but their pay barely covered food and rent,
with nothing left over even to buy an old car.
They saw their towns empty out as young people moved away in search of money and meaning.
<snip>

Sorta nice to hear of people talking to one another.







[PEEP]Kumbaya

[DanaC]

That's heartening.

[ZenGum]

Op-Ed from the New York Times of 10th October: Panic of the Plutocrats.

My favourite selection:

What’s going on here? The answer, surely, is that Wall Street’s Masters of the Universe realize, deep down, how morally indefensible their position is. They’re not John Galt; they’re not even Steve Jobs. They’re people who got rich by peddling complex financial schemes that, far from delivering clear benefits to the American people, helped push us into a crisis whose aftereffects continue to blight the lives of tens of millions of their fellow citizens.

Yet they have paid no price. Their institutions were bailed out by taxpayers, with few strings attached. They continue to benefit from explicit and implicit federal guarantees — basically, they’re still in a game of heads they win, tails taxpayers lose. And they benefit from tax loopholes that in many cases have people with multimillion-dollar incomes paying lower rates than middle-class families.

[Lamplighter]

I enjoy reading Krugman, probably because he agrees with me !

Often I get the image he is clinging to a buoy,
swinging a flare and hailing a ship being blown ashore,
while the Captain and mates play poker down below.

Geitner would do well to pay heed.

[DanaC]

That's a really good article.

[Griff]

I'm not a big Krugman guy but he has his finger on something this time.
We'd probably split on the solution though. I'd say never again to the bailouts while Krugman would probably extend them to everyone. We agree that banking needs tighter regulation and these con-men are no John Galt.