Occupy Wall Street

It's a slogan, Eddie. A lecture about FDR's administration and the tax code doesn't fit on a poster. Ronald Reagan's presidential campaign slogan was "It's morning again in America", do you you think that was adequate in describing his policies?

I didn't vote for Bush. I voted for Cobb in 2004. Oh, did you not know that it was actually President George W. Bush that gave away money, not Obama? You may have confused the bailouts (under Bush) with the stimulus (under Obama), much of which is being repaid.

All that having been said, I've never been an Obama supporter. I voted against McCain in 2008.

 

They're not just words on a sign...this is what these protesters are talking about. Watch Democracy Now and listen to the interviews with the protesters. They all talk about how our nation's wealth is in the hands of the 1% and that it needs to be spread out more evenly.
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You are the one who made the initial accusation that my views are based on nothing concrete. A baseless and completely ignorant accusation considering you know nothing about me, my life and experiences. But that's alright, you can continue to think whatever you want about me. It doesn't change anything.
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I'm talking about the money that Obama gave to the banks and corporations when the recession hit. I think all told it added up to several trillion dollars of taxpayer money.

 

Again, you're confusing slogans with the full argument of the occupiers. If you had a 10-15 second opportunity to summarize your host of complaints about the political system, I can't imagine you'd be able to go into much detail, therefore you summarize as best you can. Actually, if I were asked to summarize why I'm supporting and showing up for the local occupation protest, I'd say basically the same thing. "The 1% has been waging class warfare for decades, and in so doing have sabotaged both the government and the large percentage of the American people. In the process, they've been able to accumulate an unprecedented amount of wealth as the rest of us have had less and less." can be summarized as "Our nation's wealth is in the hands of the 1%."

You are not entitled to your own reality, and if you insist on sharing your incorrect assumptions and unsupportable biases, you should be prepared to have them challenged. This "you don't know anything about me" thing is ridiculous, as we are responding directly to your publicly shared assertions, not to some hidden part of your character.

The entire American Recovery and Reinvestment Act was approximately $787 billion, and much of that was spent on infrastructure, education, health, green jobs, expansion of unemployment, and tax cuts. Please cite specifically what you're referring to.

 

No, I'm not. Any more assumptions?

 

Says the pot.

Honestly, aside from a few thoughtful posts, most of the responses to me I've seen in this thread have been knee-jerk. People too busy falling all over themselves to tell me I'm wrong before ever addressing my actual words. The bottom line is, we aren't going to change each others opinions or beliefs. It's just not going to happen. You have no intention of seeing things my way and I simply disagree with your leftist ideology and personal observations. No harm done.
Tomorrow morning should be an interesting event as Bloomberg sends in the police to clear out the protesters.

 

Excuse me? You don't know anything about us. That's a baseless and completely ignorant accusation considering you know nothing about us, our lives, and experiences. But that's alright, you can continue to think whatever you want about us. It doesn't change anything.

 

it's simplistic to the point of disengenuousness to reduce ows to some resentment against the 1% that control what---40% of the capital? you know, a distribution of wealth like any other third world country---it's the entire system that enabled this concentration not just of wealth but of political power. it's the fact that this redistribution---largest ever recorded, presided over by a conservative mythology that claimed the opposite was happening any minute now, any minute now but never did---accompanied a radical separation between transnational capital flows and the socio-economic well-being of any particular geographic space...a process that began with the internationalization of the stock trade under nixon and accelerated with the integration of capital flows and net technology. this in a context of some sociopathic obsession with deregulation. what people are talking about has been coming for many years, but the dominant media in combination with other factors too near to really figure out entirely yet (the stuff that holds a community together--its ideology or worldview---which people like eddie and other far right people demonstrate need have no contact with empirical reality to be socially functional within particular strata of people)---coupled with the explosion of money made autonomously from finance---created a separation of class worldviews quite different from the moronic right/less right split that's been foisted on most people---between a system that is only oriented toward movements of capital from no particular place to no particular place and generating money from it---and people who live in the socio-economic orders abandoned by that class fraction. and that same class fraction/stratum controls the political process and is oriented primarily toward the well-being of intermediaries in systems of capital flows to the almost entire exclusion of the well-being of the social system in which these same people live---in a version of that system, separated spatially and informationally from the rest of us.

the right has nothing--at all---to offer even at the level of an accurate picture of what the world looks like now---only bromides that promise more of the same shit that got us here in the first place--and this as a matter of repetition-induced identification---one quirk of which is that the intellectual automatons of the right like to imagine themselves heroically individualist. it's laughable. the populist right has been played for chumps and they identify with being a chump. other sectors of the population are waking up...and what does the right do? it panics because its political position is directly endangered by people waking up.

what makes ows powerful is not where it is so much as the fact that it exists, that it is growing----what makes it powerful is that it is changing the language games that people use to think about where they are and what can happen. what's crumbling first and already is the residual impression that there's any reason to take conservative economic ideology seriously. it asks none of the right questions and so can generate no useful answers. that this nonsense has been dominant---still---explains in large part the legitimation crisis that ows is tapping into. and it's not new, and its not connected directly to the movement---a wide range of the population knows that the same old same old cant even coherently say where we are, much less propose anything coherent as a way out. and this isn't to even start with the cretins in the republican party who hold office.

so no, eddie dear, if what you write correlates with what you know about ows, i don't think you know anything at all.
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btw--the above is hardly comprehensive as a picture of what neo-liberalism has enabled...think the fragmentation of the manufacturing sector via variants of just-in-time production systems run through the speed of tracking softwares....think the breakdown of basic social arrangements regarding wages in favor exclusively of the interests of capital....there are lots of ways to talk about the fiasco that neo-liberal globalization has been for the metropole that cheerleaded for it----and this isnt to even start on the steaming ball of shit it's been for most places that got the exported versions of the worst forms of old-school capitalist exploitation....and this only in manufacturing....there's another, equally foul story in agriculture and another in the bloating of the national-security state---with conservative cheerleading from jump. so yeah, it's a giant ball of shit the right's handed us and they seriously expect anyone to take their petty, stupid misrepresentations of ows or anything else seriously?

 

Where I'm coming from? I'm just a guy giving his opinion. That's where I'm coming from. Pretty simple. I'm sorry if you're not used to conservatives coming on this message board and messing up the vibe, but if I decide to stick around, maybe you'll get used to a bit of diversity.

 

Opinions are great. We all have them.

What makes discussion interesting is discussing what informed those opinions. Like, you know, information and stuff. Who knows? If you can back up your opinion with data, I might change mine. I do that sometimes.

 

I've expressed what I think about OWS and explained why. If that's not good enough for you that's your problem, not mine.

 

A diversity of opinions is welcome; an unwillingness to accept facts posted by others or an unwillingness to support your own opinion with facts, as numerous others have suggested, does not contribute to an honest and open discussion.
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Sounds like what you are saying is that you dont feel a need to support your opinion with facts or data and the fault lies with others for not accepting an opinion that you are unwilling to support with facts in a manner consistent with a mature, intelligent discussion.

 

As I just stated, my opinion was accompanied by an explanation, which I was perfectly prepared to elaborate on until the attacks started.

 

What you characterize as attacks were simply requests for you to document your opinion with a little substance. You have not demonstrated a willingness to do so in any discussion. Instead, you resort to cheap uninformed rhetoric about liberals, socialism,....

It is disingenuous and does not reflect a real desire to address the issues honestly and intelligently.

But carry on, if it makes you feel good.

 

I'll guess we'll just agree to disagree. I don't think we need to beat this death anymore.

 

This fits in this here thread, as well as others floating about.

 

Could you point out where you supported your opinion, Eddie?

If the reasons you gave were disputable, wouldn't you expect them to be disputed? I learn quite a lot from these threads - none of us know it all.