Occupy Wall Street

can we make an effort not to be stupid? no, really. have you been paying any attention? it's pretty obvious what the movement is about if you look. but hey, why bother, right? so much work and you have every right to be spoon fed nice little sound bytes. i mean, given that its a consumer world right? please.

 

Aren't you always mad at plutocracy? Isn't Solyndra a prime example of it? And bypassing laws and ignoring other concerns, the solyndra case increased the national debt while investors get rich off of tax payer money. It's the same as the SEC fiascos, where banks were NOT investigated because top SEC officials kept on being 'bribed' by lucrative positions.

Did you even read the NYT article? It was NOT a good investment. In fact, it smacked of what lead to the economic crisis--unsound investments and papering over legitimate concerns. Sustainable energy is a great investment, but not when we spend hundreds of millions and the deal includes putting PRIVATE INVESTORS over the government should the company go in to bankruptcy.

And For Your Information: I read about the Solyndra case first on Time, a left leaning magazine, then read more about it on New York Times, another left leaning newspaper. I don't watch Fox news. Get over pidgeonholing people in to Faux News Watchers and then dismissing them.

 

But it is rather like telling someone to look into the night sky and see the only star that matters. It's a drop of water in the ocean. A symptom rather than a cause.

Many people are feeling a sense of urgency about the state of affairs that allows these things to happen over and over and over again. And often on a much larger scale. If you don't feel that urgency, that's one thing. But it hardly puts you in a position to say what those that do should be focused on.

 

Ok, so what are the state of affairs and what ought to be done? A loose list of generalized grievances isn't going to accomplish much.

 

The state of affairs is that we are living in a nation that is increasingly dominated by influences and interests that do not align with the interests of the majority of the people.

The first step is to wake people up. Assembling in large numbers is one way. I tend to think this is possibly one of the first signs of wakefulness. Hopefully there will be many others. I think it's possibly kind of short-sighted to dismiss this movement because they don't have a business plan. This is not the Civil Rights or antiwar movement. Then again, like many things American, it might disappear overnight.

 

Not even in the slightest.

Yes.

We know that now. Based on information available at the time, it was likely a good investment. Why are we talking about this in a thread about Occupy Wall Street?

That's not what lead to the economic crisis. Why are we talking about this in a thread about Occupy Wall Street.

Time Magazine isn't liberal or even slightly left-leaning. That you think Time is liberal means you have a Fox News mentality, whether you actually watch Fox News or not. Everything in the media is not either liberal or conservative. Time Magazine, for example, is simply stupid (seriously, read The New Republic or The Economist and compare them to Time's 5th grade reading level and giant, easy to understand pictures) with little to no political machinations. Again, Occupy Wall Street?

 

Yes. Passion and Energy first. Defining the message can follow.

 

Says the guy who proclaims most forms of green energy "wonderful" and "provides jobs" (not for the 1,100 laid off solyndra workers).

"Read [X] magazine if you really want to feel smart." Ho-hum. I read them. Does that make me above average?

If a magazine often cites Bloomberg (a known liberal) as good leadership, and pastes his mug and interview all over the last page, deems second amendment movements "devastating" and pens articles with the underlying supposition that global warming is conclusively established, then yes, it is left leaning.

Uh, again, I ask, did you read the article?

You guys critique the bail outs but then defend the Solyndra fiasco. Wow. I'm done.

 

I think I made my position on the matter perfectly clear. Who here said they supported Solyndra? You are trying to divert the focus of the thread to your own agenda and then criticizing us for not following you. And now your done. Nice.

 

I agree that the Solyndra grant was highly questionable, but that doesnt make the policy of providing federal grants to small start-ups a bad idea. It stimulates innovation and in many cases is the only way for these companies to attract venture capital.

And I certaintly dont think it is an issue around which you can build a movement, other that perhaps the Tea Party that really doesnt care about good public policy.

The issue is the widening income gap, with Wall Street as the face, and the corporate focus on adding to the wealth of the top by not producing anything while the middle class is struggling.

 

1.) Bail-outs for large banks who then turn around and give out bonuses to their execs.

2.) SEC officials who are supposed to investigate banks, order subordinates not to investigate those banks, then the same bank offers these officials lucrative positions.

3.) Unvetted loans to shaky corporations partially because a high level bureaucrats wife worked 'for' the company.

Anyone see a string of problems here? Namely self dealing and conflict of interest with the result of squandered tax-payer money, which probably exacerbates the income gap?

Or, I guess if I complain about my law school loans, I'll suddenly become more credible.

 

The first one I agree with as part of the message. The others, not so much. These are not the driving forces responsible for the growing income gap and the pain of the middle class.

 

I have not said that anyone doesn't have a right to their opinion. What I see is an attempt to own the debate by saying, hey, look here, it's a green company that lost a lot of government money. Why aren't you angry about that? Solyndra may or may not be part of the problem. But is hardly the focal point of the problem. It is disingenuous to purport that it should be for everyone who supports the occupy movement.
--- merged: Oct 8, 2011 3:04 PM ---

are you under the impression that these concerns are not aligned with the occupy movement? there is a gathering here in orlando on saturday. maybe you should go.

 

Well, we could be here for weeks posting examples (symptoms) and not come any closer to an agenda.
I watched a really effective Daily Show segment this morning that addressed the lack of 'coherency' in the occupy movement which answered the claim by showing the equal lack of coherency that Washington has exhibited in dealing the with the economic problems we are facing.
To say that people should shut up and stay home because they can't solve the problem is like saying that you shouldn't run out of a burning building if you don't have the capacity to put it out.
--- merged: Oct 8, 2011 3:30 PM ---
What people are responding to are influences in our government that have become progressively entrenched largely since the end of the Civil War. There are no easy answers because the channels of power and influence are dug very deeply. This is the primary reason that I have some doubt about the effectiveness of any movement to change things. They don't need us. Still, I am going to go downtown next Saturday and participate in our local Occupy event.

 

i find this assumption of some imaginary consumer sovereignty exasperating. but this is a thing that is particular to myself. i don't think people receiving messages with varying degrees of passivity are in a position to tell people who are making something---anything----what to do. you aren't owed that. you aren't owed anything. you can do as you like in terms of passive reception, that illusion of control that follows from choosing skippy rather than jiff or a red dress rather than a blue one--but that's it. but, again, this is a personal bete noire of mine, and does not, i expect, reflect an explicit attitude out there. it's the subject of several long-running conversations with friends about what an artist owes to an audience. this to explain my impatience on the subject.

the orientations are pretty obvious. and it seems that most of the people who are drawn to the occupation movement can tell you at length and in detail what contemporary neo-liberal capitalism looks like, what it does, what works and for whom, what does not work and for whom. there are problems of detail, really, to do with the various non-responses to the financial crisis of 2008.

there are matters of structure---the financial sector is a node in a transnational network of capital flows. these flows are largely autonomous. what that means is there's no necesssary connection between the circulation of these flows and the socio-economic well being of any particular place. the traditional role of the state in modern capitalism---which it helps to have an image of as a concrete social form and not merely as an abstraction that trails after simple sentences you happen to like the sound of----has been to provide legal and policy frames that limit/redirect/shape the way capital operates, usually with the idea of, cynically but basically, fostering a degree of social stability--and political consent--for the circulation of capital, so for the capitalist form that is in place at any given time, and, by extension, for itself as arbitor. the main problems are "(1) neo-liberal ideology itself and (2) that the state is dominated by a class faction (in old-skool marxist-speak) that's linked directly to trans-national capital, either in its circulation and the (very considerable) levels of profits that are derived from inside those circulations. the former serves, as it has, to rationalize (in the psychological sense) the separation of capital flows from anything like a coherent socio-economic situation in the country. from this follows the entire logic of the 99%.

neo-liberalism has to go--or be soo fundamentally altered as to effectively no longer be itself. much of the sense that people---rightly---have that they have no future as things are currently organized follows from that. one of main things that ows is **already** accomplishing is the rapid erosion of the illusion of consent for this. but it's hard to reduce changing an ideological frame--so changing collective worldviews (aspects of them, which become more evident as one moves from one's immediate experience into the various, largely imaginary frames called the world that situates that experience). it's not a talking point. and even if it was, it would be tactically stupid to articulate it directly at this point.

wall st is a symbol of plutocratic control. so there's both particular (the non-responses) and general reasons to focus on it. the implications should be obvious.

personally, i think that the movement should also begin occupying aspects of the dominant media, television networks in particular. because if people are reading off meanings from the sites, and if the main problem is ideological, it makes sense to both consider the dominant media a Problem and to begin pressuring the networks to change---and to represent them as fundamental to the many problems that face the united states.

there has to be changes in orientation of policy. personally, i think ows is also about a general demand for that, which includes a basic rethink of things that have eaten massive amounts of money like the national-security state. but this last matter is likely to follow from others for a while because to take it on directly risks unnecessary divisions.

and besides, people in most sectors, including people with day gigs in firms linked to the national-security state, are in the
same boat a the rest of us

this took about 15 minutes to write. so it's not that hard to figure out what the political direction and aims of the movement are.
the statements that have come out from the general assembly in nyc include most of these points, along with others that i recognize but don't really figure for me as central concerns. but it's fine if they are for others---it's a very broad rejection of the way the american system is currently oriented and a demand---long overdue to my mind----that we, collectively, try something else after 30 year of a neo-liberal socio-economic experiments that's been almost entirely regressive from a socio-economic viewpoint once you move out of the top 1% of the population in terms of wealth who've been the primary beneficiaries of that experiment.

this experiment was supposed to deliver the greatest good for the greatest number.
it hasn't.
the conventional political system has demonstrated that it cannot do anything but repeat its inability to think beyond the same framework that got us into this mess...

tahrir square and tunisia showed another possibility.
the older, conventional channels simply haven't delivered. at all. and people are hurting and concerned and look into what they imagine the future to be and see nothing but a wall---or worse, some dismal pathetic slide into backwater fascism. it's worth trying something else. it's past time.

 

Not that it is right, but solyndra is a drop of water in an ocean of subsidies to oil and nuclear power plants. I think that making an issue of the former and not of the latter is a statement about environmental preference rather than government intervention. Similarly, demanding some sort of coherence from a leaderless movement is a sort of copout.

Not that I am particularly sympathetic to occupy wall street. I like my movements radical and unionized, not so much middle class and reformist. But the double standards regarding occupy wall street are pretty blatant.