Occupy Wall Street

So it's the average person's fault that the large corporations and obscenely wealth folks have undue influence on the legislative process because the average person consumes too much? And so the average person should stop consuming so much. That doesn't make any sense.

I think your solution, which is really to do nothing at all and just let things get worse, is worthless. At least OWS folk are actually trying to do something. Do you have figures for how many of them are unemployed? Because unless you actually do, you just implicitly admit that you're a tool by trying to imply that OWS is primarily composed of the unemployed.

Even if OWS is primarily composed of the unemployed (not saying I know either way), last time I checked, there were millions more job seekers than there were available jobs, so, despite what Herman Cain might have you believe, it isn't actually like the unemployed can all just go get jobs if they so desire.

 

It's not entirely the average American's fault, but much of it is. Like I said, we've become the greedy, brainwashed consumers that corporations can easily control. If we cut down on our consuming then we cut down on corporate profits. Pretty simple.

 

No. Its not that simple, because much of the Wall Street profits are not from producing goods or providing services. In addition, the outrageous bonuses, golden parachutes, etc. for top Wall Street execs certainly arent performance based.

But I guess you dont accept that fact.

 

Eddie is a great microcosm of modern day conservatism:

- Do something
- Accuse the opposition of doing the thing you're doing
- Act the victim when called out on it
- Rinse and repeat

 

I'm acting the victim? lol, yeah right. I'm not the one picketing in front of some millionaire's house screaming about how he took advantage of me. That would be the liberals, not the conservatives.

 

NYC as a microcosm:



Eddie, do you not see the issue here that is part of the protest.

Wall Street - the securities industries that produce nothing - realizing salaries increases averaging more than ten percent/year, particularly over the last ten years, as compared to the average worker who actually produce goods or provide services and have received average salarly increases of less than two percent/year.

 

This entire comment is rhetorical. I do not see any facts. Hell, I'd have been delighted just to see an original thought.

Is the right wing machine now blaming Obama's stimulus program for the rise in corporate wealth? That's rich.

 

Every thought you have someone has had previously.

 

You mean like socialism, government run health care.....

 

Just me or everyone? How does that square with innovative technology and cutting edge research? Lets run that by a physicist working on a new model for the theory of everything. "Oh hey, don't bother with that! Someone else has already thought about it - let me google it for you."

I'm nothing special but I know how to gather, process and filter information. The end result is my own and I try to present it as such. I don't mimic what others say or parrot what I hear.

 

the ron paul set is obviously a little freaked out by ows in no small part because it exposes the fatuousness of their arguments. what do libertarians offer as a response to market dysfunction? more deregulation. what's the basis of that? the same lunatic non-analysis you see all over the rest of the right: markets=good, state=bad. which of course requires no contact with empirical reality since, say, 1913, which is the point at which, in libertarian-land, everything went to hell anyway. so why think past it? better to dream of reverting to some imaginary 1890s. except for that pesky historical reality part. that no.

what does the libertarian set offer as a solution to the crisis of the american empire? 30s style isolationism. what does the libertarian set offer as a solution to the obscene inequality in the distribution of wealth? nothing. make it worse. fuck the poor. it's their fault. fuck the uninsured. let them die if they can't figure out how to be more john galt, more like libertarians pretend to be (which is almost inevitably a considerable distance from their material situations, like confronted with addressing the world as they are in and the world as processed by the queen of bad writing, ayn rand, they choose the latter. no doubt because of the adolescent elitism that comes from the circle jerk of her purple prose and neitzsche for stupid people viewpoints). what do they offer to the current structural crisis of neo-liberal capitalism? the fed is bad. fiat currency is bad.

what's sad is that for the most part the ron paul set is afflicted in much the same ways by much the same problems as everyone else is. so you'd think they'd be supportive of ows. but instead, their dysfunctional pseudo-analytic framework is such a matter of religious commitment that they can't move out from under it. they don't listen. they don't process. they don't argue---they assert.

there's been an influx of these people into the occupation in philadelphia. initially they were welcome, but they demonstrated themselves to be problems because they cannot process the complexity of the actually existing situation and instead prefer some adolescent john galt fantasy to it. despite participating in deliberations that involved a fundamentally different set of terms and logic than theirs, when a journo asked them why they were participating, it was straight ron paul horseshit. so a line had to be drawn around reality, around a certain basic agreement about what reality is and how to look at it. it's unfortunate, but the fact is that it followed from the rigidly doctrinaire character of libertarianism--which is peculiar, if you think about what they claim to stand for.

and it's funny as well that in my personal interactions in meat-space with them that i've read more hayek and von mises than they have. but i digress.

 

i am not concerned with the criticisms, really. well, i am with some of them, but they're not typically the same as you hear in corporate press. i think that the idea of experience and desired outcomes could cross with the ron paul set was the reason that they were initially welcomed. it was the creation of garble that they brought with them that was the problem. this was compounded by the decentralized nature of the occupation movement and the fact that the press seems to want to interview people. there's a creeping suspicion that what they're hoping for is something monumentally stupid, and the libertarians can provide that in spades. it's a curious situation, this drawing of a line. such things are hard for direct-democratic movements. that's one of the central criticisms of menshevism from back in the day.

 

It's so amusing how everyone is so down on Paul's ideas, as the economy falls apart. The over-taxation of the American people and the growing scope of the federal government are the most concerning issues in my eyes. Corporations get our money by selling us their products...the government, however, gets our money by forcibly taking it from us under the penalty of imprisonment. And when the government gets our money....they give it to the corporations.

Yet OWS spends their time screaming at the securities trader driving to work in his Mercedes. It's so ridiculous...and so typical of this liberal mindset; shout at the top of your lungs but change nothing.

 

What do these OWS think is gonna happen...the fat cats in the skyscrapers are going to start raining down hundred-dollar bills on mobs below? Meanwhile the 90% of employed Americans continue to work and go about their daily lives. OWS will change nothing.

 

It's just jobless hippies wanting free money, right? That's what Hannity told me

 

The OWS folks think the fat cats have too much, right? Which would lead me to believe that they want the fat cats to take some of what they have and give it to those who have less. So when you boil it all down, the OWSers are there telling the fat cats to give them some of their money. Of course, these protesters are relaying their message is a much more subtle fashion, but the message is clear.

Maybe a better approach would be for these protesters to go to the government and tell them to stop giving their money away to the fat cats.