Please tell me someone on here has heard about "OCCUPY WALLSTREET"

[murakami]

i really hope i dont get negged for this. but my feelings of Occupy Wall Street have essentially been this "what the hell are they protesting exactly?" i keep searching but i have yet to come across a good solid argument that isn't painted with a broad brush. are they protesting investment bankers? investment firms? venture capitalists like Bloomberg? the small investors (like myself)? because that all makes up Wall Street...

then i found this Who Is Behind Occupy Wall Street? - The Dish | By Andrew Sullivan - The Daily Beast they folks behind ADBUSTERS apparently registered Occupy Wall Street back in June.

then there's adbuster's anti-Semitic angle Follow Up To The Adbusters Warsaw Ghetto-Gaza Photo Essay | The Propagandist which now makes more sense why i keep "jews run the country" drek from Occupy supporters

im sorry if i can't take this seriously anymore

haha, i was the same to be honest. there is legitimate reason for them to be there. it's getting to the point where corporate controls government more than the actual people. now a lot of people there are angry at the amount of money that is going towards certain things and not paying off debt.

other people are angry at not having jobs or money. and then there are the people who don't know why they are there, but they're just angry because they don't want to blame themselves for a the short comings of their endeavors.

and lastly, a lot of peopel are angry of the ponzi scandal.

The Bernard Madoff scandal: what is a Ponzi scheme? - Times Online

 

[The Reverend]

i think were all seeing this from a poor person's point of view haha.

if any of you were given millions, i cant imagine you would let anyone take if from you, for any reason at all.

i would love to see your decision between helping people you don't know, get jobs.

or opening your own ibby custom shop specifically to make guitars for yourself

I hate this post. Have none of you ever helped someone out? I'm assuming we're all fairly broke, and I'm sure if I asked, each of you would have a story about helping someone in need, regardless of the fact that it wasn't financially practical.

The 1% could do that, too.

We're not talking about the small business owners who got lucky. We're talking about the CEOs of companies who fuck shit up all day everyday to improve the bottom line.

 

[Guitarman700]

I hate this post. Have none of you ever helped someone out? I'm assuming we're all fairly broke, and I'm sure if I asked, each of you would have a story about helping someone in need, regardless of the fact that it wasn't financially practical.

The 1% could do that, too.

We're not talking about the small business owners who got lucky. We're talking about the CEOs of companies who fuck shit up all day everyday to improve the bottom line.

Were it not for my volunteer work with Lost Boys, I wouldn't be who I am today. Their stories really opened my eyes to the realities of human suffering, and how fortunate most of us really are.

 

[Randy]

i think were all seeing this from a poor person's point of view haha.

if any of you were given millions, i cant imagine you would let anyone take if from you, for any reason at all.

i would love to see your decision between helping people you don't know, get jobs.

or opening your own ibby custom shop specifically to make guitars for yourself

The purpose of the government is to provide the "commons", as there are basic things that help everybody or are essential for individuals and industry to survive. At it's most basic, it's streets and police departments and in it's more complex, it's social security, unemployment INSURANCE, educations, etc.

With regard to the "rich" or corporations paying taxes at a rate comparable to (or even above) the middle class, remember that the government and it's commons provided them the ability to make their profit/wealth and those things being in place play a VASTLY larger part in their success than they do in the success of us individually.

Elizabeth Warren touching on it here 50ish onward)



EDIT: And beyond where she goes here, your factory stays open because your workers (and customers) haven't become ill and died because of rampant disease or infections, so on and so forth. The wealth of a REALLY wealthy individual or of a corporation is much larger than the sum of it's parts.

 

[ArkaneDemon]

...Randy's back?

 

[Guitarman700]

Holy Christ on a cracker....

 

[The Reverend]

Holy Christ on a cracker....

And on that note...

There's an Occupy Austin protest going on tomorrow at the city hall here in Austin, Texas, that I will be attending. I'm not happy about Anonymous backing this string of protests (I hesitate to call it a "movement") because I don't respect some of their values or any of their methods, but I intend to show up.

I've rewritten this post a dozen times, trying to both preemptively answer any questions or refute arguments, and explain why I decided to do this, but it keeps amounting to a novella of text, so I'm going to try to be as concise as possible.

I feel like something's wrong with the financial sector, and those in charge of it, both on the private and governmental side.

I can't change it myself, and this series of protests certainly won't change anything, but if you don't try, what's the point of having the right? Imagine if our founding fathers just didn't give enough of a shit to start raising some shit of their own. We'd all have a regular tea time, and would have a lot more religious freedom, especially among atheists. We'd have cool accents, and Canadian women would want to fuck us. Score.

Even if you feel like I'm just railing out my ingrained sense of entitlement (my generation's a bitch, I know), you have to be able to see that the totally unrestrained capitalism/socialism hybrid we have know is going to implode. The problem is too big to name names, and to point fingers. It's in every business plan, and the motive behind every big corporation: Profit, at any cost. Explorer, I don't think your CEO and CFO are subscribers to that notion. I'm sure they love rolling in their hard-earned pools of gold coins rofl: just kidding), but they are the exact opposite of the kind of institutionalized greed I'm talking about. The American Dream has mutated into lust for wealth unimaginable, at any price, by any means. That's not right.

So that's why I'm going to waste my Thursday evening. I could be BMXing, or playing guitar, or trying to pan-fry steak correctly, but I've decided to stop talking shit about things when I'm drinking with my friends and go to a protest that realistically will have no effect on the problems it's protesting. If only everybody who was dissatisfied with the current way things are would do the same.

 

[murakami]

well in my town there is not a burger king, because McDonalds pays enough money to the city to make sure one is never permitted to be built.
its not even a secret haha.

i guess i can go scream nonsense angrily about how i need some flame broiled goodness, and see if i end up in jail or not.

no burger king?! those. mother. fuckers.

 

[The Reverend]

well in my town there is not a burger king, because McDonalds pays enough money to the city to make sure one is never permitted to be built.
its not even a secret haha.

i guess i can go scream nonsense angrily about how i need some flame broiled goodness, and see if i end up in jail or not.

Brother, I will never understand you.
I can never tell if you're kidding or being serious in your posts!

I'll tell you this: You need to go get mad about that shit, because while McDonald's will always be my first love, Burger King is the fucking shit, too. If you're lucky, Anon will come back you up by shutting down your city's website.

 

[Xaios]

The purpose of the government is to provide the "commons", as there are basic things that help everybody or are essential for individuals and industry to survive. At it's most basic, it's streets and police departments and in it's more complex, it's social security, unemployment INSURANCE, educations, etc.

With regard to the "rich" or corporations paying taxes at a rate comparable to (or even above) the middle class, remember that the government and it's commons provided them the ability to make their profit/wealth and those things being in place play a VASTLY larger part in their success than they do in the success of us individually.

Elizabeth Warren touching on it here 50ish onward)

EDIT: And beyond where she goes here, your factory stays open because your workers (and customers) haven't become ill and died because of rampant disease or infections, so on and so forth. The wealth of a REALLY wealthy individual or of a corporation is much larger than the sum of it's parts.

I enjoyed that video and I think it's a decent point of a view to live by, but it also creates a chicken versus egg argument: if the factories stay open because the taxes of the individual pays for people to be able to get to and from work safely, then it can also be argued that people are able to pay those taxes in the first place because they're receiving employment from the factory.

Ultimately, industry and infrastructure go hand in hand, and trying to say that one follows the other or one is more important than the other is foolish. Each one is utterly useless without the other.

 

[right_to_rage]

 

[Xaios]

You know what's really funny? That guy could have either been on the extreme left or a Tea Party member.

Well, maybe not REALLY funny...

 

[Explorer]

then i found this Who Is Behind Occupy Wall Street? - The Dish | By Andrew Sullivan - The Daily Beast they folks behind ADBUSTERS apparently registered Occupy Wall Street back in June.

Given the huge distrust of and belief in conspiracies in that crowd of protestors, it's sad that they fell for that kind of manipulation themselves....

 

[Demiurge]

Given the huge distrust of and belief in conspiracies in that crowd of protestors, it's sad that they fell for that kind of manipulation themselves....

While there's no doubt that many attendees are completely earnest in their convictions, the organizers teach a good lesson on capitalism- everything can be packaged and sold as a commodity, even endeavors to protest the process itself.

 

[Randy]

I enjoyed that video and I think it's a decent point of a view to live by, but it also creates a chicken versus egg argument: if the factories stay open because the taxes of the individual pays for people to be able to get to and from work safely, then it can also be argued that people are able to pay those taxes in the first place because they're receiving employment from the factory.

Ultimately, industry and infrastructure go hand in hand, and trying to say that one follows the other or one is more important than the other is foolish. Each one is utterly useless without the other.

Not quite "chicken and egg" because the part you're leaving out is that demand feeds supply... not the other way around. Just because I make 100,000 MORE flat screen televisions, doesn't mean 100,000 MORE people are going to buy them. Thus, the factory can't produce without the efforts of the consumer-class (factory workers) nor do they have a reason/funds to make their products without the demand (via extra discretionary income) of people like the workers in those factories. I get your point but I think it's a little more "cut and dry" than that.

To the current economic situation, the blaming of Wall Street or "greed" in general, I look at it like this... Forgetting the "rich" giving to the "poor" out of charity for a second, and even forgetting the "rich" giving to the "poor" out of recognition of the role they play in acquiring their wealth.

If the rich took their money and either reinvested the BULK of it into their businesses (domestically, of course) or fuck, even used it for living wildly extravagant lifestyles, we'd be fine. Buying a few mansions (jobs for construction, jobs for real estate, money through the banks and money to the municipalities via property taxes, etc.), expensive sports cars (money to shipping, import fees to the government, repair/upkeep from an auto garage, sales tax on registration with the DMV,etc.)... You get the point.

Instead, there's a pretty well proven track record that the "rich" are only spending up to a certain point, then stashing the money away or investing overseas. Hell, even investing in the stock market in industries that barely have any effect on the general public is an extension of that. Whatever the method, the money they've been saving in "tax breaks" is being hoarded instead of recirculated. That's a problem and getting back to the original point, yes, there's a great responsibility to them to reinvest in us.

 

[Loomer]

It's a fucked up world when the hyper-rich need persuading to do extravagant shit like gold-plate their toilets or build 5-storey palaces for their cat.

If you have the dough, fucking live a little!

 

[pink freud]

Gold standard, what a joke. Want to talk about simple math? Well, here's some simple math: Even with a gold standard the worth of X grams of gold is still nothing but a coefficient. The nifty thing about coefficients is that they can (usually) be any number you want them to be. These gold standard fellas are just to chickenshit to realize their idea to the natural result: "let's go back to the bartering system!" Because, face it, gold has no more intrinsic value than anything else when you talk about actual usefulness. You want to base currency around the physical existence of a materiel? Maybe try something other than a material that historically has only had the purpose of showing off to the poor how rich the rich are, and has only in recent times actually shown industrial purpose. Maybe try rare earth metals. THOSE have value.

 

[Xaios]

Not quite "chicken and egg" because the part you're leaving out is that demand feeds supply... not the other way around. Just because I make 100,000 MORE flat screen televisions, doesn't mean 100,000 MORE people are going to buy them. Thus, the factory can't produce without the efforts of the consumer-class (factory workers) nor do they have a reason/funds to make their products without the demand (via extra discretionary income) of people like the workers in those factories. I get your point but I think it's a little more "cut and dry" than that.

Yes, but then we're just digging into the most basic of business sense. Of course people aren't going to buy something that there's no demand for. Building a factory to produce a product that no one wants is just insane on a whole other level. But people are always going to want or need SOMETHING. What makes a businessman good at what they do is identifying the demand in the first place.

The most recent example is the Ipad. Other tech companies had tried building tablet computers in the past, and it was an embarassing failure, because no one really wanted them. But along comes Apple, who designs a more refined product that is simpler to use, even though it sacrifices functionality compared to its forerunners, and it basically creates a demand for a product that no ever really cared about before, mostly because it was being produced by Apple. They managed to manufacture demand for a product simply because of their brand name.

So yes, supply follows demand, but in this day and age, demand can be created.

 

[Randy]

And point well taken.

I strayed a little bit from my original point in that bit, so I'll try to re-sharpen it. The general complaint that's being uses as an indicator of the economy being "bad" is unemployment. Not to make this "one side versus the other" but the argument I've seen given by "that side", so far, is "High minimum wages, high taxes and red tape are to blame. Companies are either sick of the United State or those that are here, can't afford to hire anybody." Alright, and that'd be a credible argument if productivity wasn't up, but it is. As long as store shelves don't sit empty, companies have no reason to "create" a single job.

Again, venturing into the hypothetical... overnight, the government brings corporate taxes to 0%, makes minimum wage $3 and puts zero regulations into effect. Cost of "doing business" plummets and all of the sudden, all these companies have fuck-tons of cash. Do they hire more workers? Why would they. Forgetting for a second that the price they're able to sell their products at would take a steep nosedive (since people are making $3
an hour now), does it drive up production? I own Charmin... do people need more toilet paper , now that I have the capacity to buy more machines or hire more people? I own Apple (doesn't totally work, because they're made in China but we'll pretend they're made here)... most Americans already own a computer or a laptop but now that it's cheaper to produce them, all of the sudden everybody's going to own three or four? No, probably not. Maybe at first but it's a success with diminishing returns.

My point is, this meme that the problem with the economy is that corporations aren't getting enough money back is ludicrous. Taking the tax burden off (and I'd argue, the burden of overpricing goods and utilities) of "working class" people and freeing up more money for them to buy goods is pretty much the only way you "create" growth, unless we go back to manufacturing and exporting but that's a discussion for another day.

 

[Septor]

Boogie2988 posted a really interesting video on this, guys should check it out.