Wall Street Protests

[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.

[Stormieweather]

I don't think it's just the banking industry that needs tighter regulation, I think corporations need to bring the jobs home or pay a penalty (in taxes).

Oh you say you can't make money paying Americans to do the jobs? Well, we (the 99%) are expected to make it here in America, you, the corporations, need to find a way to do it also.

[Lamplighter]

Stormie, that's worth printing on a sign.

[classicman]

Another great post Stormie.

They want us, no they expect us to purchase their products. How the hell is that going to happen if we don't have jobs?