Occupying Wall Street
newstatesman.com
newstatesman.com
The full impact of the greek default hasn't hit yet and it is not unreasonable to expect that Italy or Spain may default next. People have already started leaderless protests. Meanwhile - it's pretty easy to make money on the way down assuming you have it to begin with.
It is not hard to predict some pretty big changes in the next few years.
Spain has a smaller debt 65% of GDP compared to most western countries, including the USA (92%) and Germany (83%). They do have huge economic problems. Right now the biggest danger is that outside trouble brings down their banks.
The solution: more whining?
And, more esoterically, would the world ever progress if everyone accepted it as it was and never pushed for perfection?
..and why is that? I want to see how many of these people protesting actually got kicked out of their homes and why.
"We are forced to choose between groceries and rent."
Do you have a cell phone? Do you have cable? Where do you live?
"We are denied quality medical care."
Interesting how this is somehow wall street's problems. Can I blame them for tax increases too?
"We are suffering from environmental pollution."
lol?
"We are working long hours for little pay and no rights, if we are working at all. We are getting nothing while the other 1 percent is getting everything."
If you can't find a job..you need to ask yourself why. I lost my job a little over a year ago and then started my own company. Since then, I've had tons of recruiters and other companies emailing me because they want me to work for them. There are still plenty of jobs out there. You just need to bust your ass to get them. Most people aren't willing to put in the work.
I saw the start of this entitlement mentality with music and software piracy. Many people from this generation feel it's their "right" to be able to download these things for free. Now they are entitled to a home, a college education, and a job.
They want equality, but the problem isn't we aren't all equal. I work 12 hours a day. As a result, I have more money in the bank than someone that works part-time. Why should I be limited or penalized for this?
"So far, it's pick-your-own cause, with grievances ranging from bank bail-outs to animal testing, and yet what most of the mainstream media seems to have missed is the fact that the occupation itself is its own demand"
This is why I find the entire "occupation" to be a joke. Every left-wing asshole with a grievance against big business is out there protesting.
(These kinds of things are, incidentally, why Lenin-style communists argue for agitation to be tightly organized by a vanguard party, which keeps things on message and makes sure protests and other actions maximize tactical and strategic effectiveness, rather than becoming an incoherent free-for-all. But Leninist organization isn't too in favor on the contemporary left.)
"But anyways. Like most of us, I am also very fortunate to be in tech, and have a passion for programming. But I do not pretend that my good fortune some how means I work or harder or am smarter than other people in our society.",
but then deleted their comment:
you really should repost it. it captures my feelings too and i wanted to thank you for putting them into words.
again and again, i encounter people in my circles of well-employed colleagues who do not realize how lucky they are to have interests coinciding with aptitudes coinciding with particular economic demands in their productive years.
and it makes them sickeningly self congratulatory.
What a defeatist attitude. I do work harder and smarter than other people in our society. My work and success reflects this.
"and it makes them sickeningly self congratulatory."
It's sickening that you would equate having a good job with mostly luck. Winning the lottery is pure luck.
I chose to get involved in the tech industry. If I would have been in any other time, I would have chosen a different industry and most likely been successful. Less than 1% of it has to do with luck. If I would have just sat here and done nothing, my career wouldn't have fallen into my lap and my skill set wouldn't have suddenly appeared.
Anybody can be successful.
Of course, tech bubbles never exist, so that's an imperfect analogy.
I mean, I got hooked on computers when I was 6 or 7, from Logo. I'm pretty sure I didn't get hooked due to my great foresight and economic responsibility. It was just interesting. Other people get hooked on other things, whether it's math or music. I'm fortunate that my thing pays well, but I don't think that makes me better than them. Makes my life easier, sure, but for exogenous reasons.
I don't think it's uncorrelated with merit, but I do think the correlation is very inconsistent. I know brilliant mathematicians with much poorer incomes, for example (pure math doesn't pay well... despite its long-term usefulness, it's hard to capture the value / monetize it).
Also, regarding success: hard work and intelligence matter a lot, but so does opportunity. Have a look at Gladwell's Outliers for an interesting analysis of this.
I'm as critical as anyone when people decide to get liberal arts degrees without at least working on other skills on the side, but let's not be so naive to think that if a CS degree was the new liberal arts degree, that we wouldn't be having the same exact problem in society.
Only we (people on HN) would probably be making much less money.
As for causes of economic distribution: liberals tends to emphasize the role of circumstances and conservatives tend to emphasize the role of individual effort. The error, however, is to become blinded to half the equation because it flatters the ego or is politically expedient. For instance, the successful who only see their own virtue at work (Wallstreet?), or the unsuccessful who only see the context and not their own failures (the "victim mentality").
It'd probably be less pleasant in a lot of ways, but the people still in tech would probably be an interesting group.
It would be like the early 1990s, or living in North Dakota.
If you don't think about the money at some point, then don't complain when you can't find a job. It's not your job to chase money and it's not society's job to pay you for something that's worthless.
"You have to admit that people who are passionate about things that pay well get a better deal in that situation."
You can make money with almost any passion, you just need to be smart enough to find the market. Most people want to be handed it...which just isn't going to happen.
"Also, regarding success: hard work and intelligence matter a lot, but so does opportunity. Have a look at Gladwell's Outliers for an interesting analysis of this."
I don't need to. I see opportunities every day that people in my exact same position at the exact time (at work for instance) miss. Why? Because I have the skills and experience and I know what I'm looking for. Without the skills, knowledge, and experience, the opportunity is worthless.
The more knowledge and skills you have, the more opportunities you will see and the better chance you have at becoming successful.
It's really sad to see so many people equating success with pure luck.
I myself was fortunate. Lucky, to be honest. My parents took advantage of things like student loans so that they could work hard and be successful. The result was that I didn't have to worry about student loans and graduated without debt. I worked hard to graduate, but I don't have illusions that my financial situation was anything other than luck on my part.
You may not call it luck, and I don't know your specific situation, but I'm going to hypothesize that you had some help along the way. How did you educate yourself? How did you pay for it? Did you go to a public school system? Was it better than the ones that exist now? Did you go to a private school? Did you pay for it yourself? My point is, we often take this sort of assistance for granted, and it is gratifying to credit ourselves with 100% of our success. Maybe you are 100% responsible for your own success. If that's the case, you're the first such person that I've ever met.
We could go very far with attributing luck to success. Einstein must have been very lucky to come up with the theory of relativity.
In fact, everything we do must be due to luck because it's lucky our planet is in a position from the sun that's habitable.
"How did you educate yourself"
By going to the library in the beginning (which is free) and then later through the Internet (which is also now free at almost any library in the US). Most people in Highschool and in college are out partying every weekend with their friends..and then they wonder why they aren't successful when it comes to getting a job. I chose to sacrifice my time to learn things that I knew would help advance my career.
"How did you pay for it?" With a crappy retail job that didn't really have much to do with my career.
"Did you go to a public school system". Yes.
"My point is, we often take this sort of assistance for granted, and it is gratifying to credit ourselves with 100% of our success. Maybe you are 100% responsible for your own success. If that's the case, you're the first such person that I've ever met."
I'm still not sure what your point is. It seems to only be brought up when anyone successful achieves anything great or when someone wants an excuse as to why they can't succeed.
I also said luck has less than 1% to do with it. I know people that were in my exact same position at the exact same time. They chose to do things differently and now are working paycheck-to-paycheck. I saved my money (instead of buying the new $500 android phone when it came out) and now I don't have to worry about emergencies because I have enough money to pay for it.
I'm really just tired of people not taking personal responsibility for their actions.
Libraries and public schools are excellent examples. While I can't speak for these protesters as I'm not there with them, a lot of the sentiment that people are expressing is a sense of fewer opportunities. Schools and libraries are getting their budgets slashed across the entire country. This due in large part to fiscal policy. Bad policy leads to lower tax revenues leads to cutting teachers and library resources. I don't have the solution, but I can see how it's related to the finance industry as a whole.
I agree with you that people should be responsible for making use of the opportunities that they have. Being offered a public education doesn't guarantee you anything, you have to actually take the time to learn from it. But that only works so long as we continue to offer quality public educations.
I'm really just tired of people saying "I made it, why can't everyone else?" without considering that their situation may be different.
Are you KIDDING ME!?!?
I grew up in relatively poor small towns most of my life, where the town library was lucky if it had more than a thousand books. Certainly had no internet.
But you know what? I did the same thing rick888 did and I was at that library all the time learning, trying to make myself better.
I took advantage of every opportunity that came my way and I made the most of them.
I didn't have wealthy parents with connections like so many of the rich spoiled brats I see around me bitching about how "lucky" I am to have a good job, or moaning about how there's so many fewer opportunities around them.
Bullshit. Open your eyes. Stop making excuses.
If you want something bad enough, like I (and clearly rick888) did, you will be successful.
Do some people have more opportunities because of who their parents are and/or how much money they make? Sure, but so what? That's life.
I overcame. Rick888 overcame. So can everyone else.
Stop expecting things to just fall in your lap and complaining about how the world "isn't fair" and cast aside your damned entitlement complex.
The world doesn't owe you jack. You have to fight for everything you want. That's the reality, and nothing these protesters do will ever change that.
Seriously.
I'm so sick of people whining about how I'm "so lucky" to have my job. To hear these people talk about how lucky I am is a huge fucking insult because they act is if it just fell in my lap.
It didn't.
I worked my ass off for it, seemingly just like you did. I worked shitty part-time jobs to pay for my own college education. I worked one summer AS A VOLUNTEER (i.e. unpaid) in order to get noticed and it worked, too, because at the end of that summer the company offered me my first decent-paying job in the tech industry (well, it was only $10-something/hr, but it sure beat $5.25 that I was making before).
All this time I was working on contributing to Free Software projects - not just in the hopes of getting noticed, but in order to improve my skills.
After several years of this, I got noticed and got an internship at a start-up and I grabbed that opportunity and I've become very successful because of it.
Saying this was all "luck" is bullshit. I made my own luck. I worked my ass off for everything I got.
I had friends in college that came from much wealthier families than I came from (my family isn't wealthy by any stretch of the imagination) who had plenty of opportunities in their lives but didn't act on them. Where are they now? Probably at those protests whining that they didn't get a job handed to them just for being them.
I'm serious.
Someone I knew in college (studying anthropology iirc) was offered, through a friend, a job interview at the Smithsonian. He didn't take it. Why? Because it wasn't a "sure thing". He was upset that he'd actually have to (heaven forbid) interview.
Where's he now? Living with his parents because he hasn't been able to get a job in the past 8 years.
He had better opportunities than I did, but I made more out of mine than he did.
He's one of the people who tell me how "lucky" I am that I have such a good job.
Makes me sick.
And I know people who are at the protests. And I know many more who would be there if they could. And I try and ignore their pleas for economic help when they also demand that Walmart be shut down.
Now imagine how people in finance are.
and it makes them sickeningly self congratulatory.
It's one of the things that delayed my entry into the technical profession. I grew up a passionate and involved hobbyist, but seeing this kind of self-aggrandising Randian narrative played out over and over in forums and bodies of knowledge that I considered proxies for the values of the profession (i.e. Slashdot) nauseated me. For a long time, I was determined not to go into tech out of loathing for the idea of working with such people.
Ultimately, I went anyway, and realised--as teenagers are wont to do once they grow up--that any world is more diverse than meets the eye. But I can definitely say that the mythos of the well-earning "self-made" IT man was a major blemish on the idea, not an asset.
That's right, there's no self-made anything. It's all luck.
Yes.
What happened to entrepreneurship. What happened to taking control of your life. What happened to working hard and making things happen. These protests make me very sad, and go against every principle this country was founded on.
Given how enthusiastic the American founding fathers were for the French Revolution, which had a definite socialist and anti-elite flavor (not merely anti-monarchism), I'm not sure how true that is. Opinions varied, but many were of the view that a free society needs reasonable equality and can't coexist with large concentrations of economic resources.
Thomas Jefferson hoped (futilely) to achieve it by avoiding industrialization, remaining a nation of yeoman farmers and thereby avoiding what he saw as the ills of British industrial capitalism, with its predominance of wage labor, large factories, etc. (he didn't like either the industrialists or their trade-unionist counterparts). That, combined with robust public education.
Thomas Paine was a proto-socialist, traveling after the American Revolution to France to help with the revolution there, where his Rights Of Man: Part The Second was one of the first comprehensive proposals for what can now be seen as social democracy, with a progressive income tax and inheritance tax used to fund a social safety net.
The existence and independence of corporations was also a pretty active area of controversy until the 1850s or so. Before then, many of the founding generation were of the view that corporations were limited-time constructs under supervision of the state (which held visitation and dissolution rights), not fully independent entities, and were skeptical of corporations with a "life of their own", seen as a European pathology (the Dutch East India Company, etc.).
In other words, I think you're overreacting.
None of the bargain is that it will be interesting. None of the bargain is that it'll be glorified in media. But the bargain is that if you're looking for a job, there'll be one. And the job will be physically safe (unless extra-ordinarily compensated to make up for it), that you can get healthcare, and that you can go to sleep at night without wondering whether you'll be able to make rent the next month.
It's the dissolution of that bargain and that Dream that's driving OWS.
If this is what people think, they have been misled. The american dream has always been that you have the ability to pursuit your dreams, not guaranteed a job. This means, you can start a business as someone who is poor and one day make enough to support your family and more. Right now, we still have this freedom.
With huge taxes and more government regulations and control, the dream will be dead. Then, the only entities left (because they can afford the taxes and regultions) will be big corporations.
"Anyone who is honestly seeking a job and can't find it, deserves the attention of the United States government, and the people." -John F. Kennedy
"In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all regardless of station, race, or creed.
Among these are:
The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the Nation;
The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation; . . ." -FDR
LOL. Says the man who gets money from special interest groups.
The liberal left are all about special interest groups.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." -TJ
"If a man doesn't have a job or an income, he has neither life nor liberty nor the possibility for the pursuit of happiness. He merely exists." -MLK Jr.
Here's a question: Why was unemployment so much lower five years ago than now? Did people just get really lazy?
Every right wing asshole with a grievance against attacks on privilege is out there mocking these protests. Somehow they simultaneously deny that environmental pollution, restricted access to healthcare, and involuntary unemployment exist. But systemic issues do exist.
They're silly because their world view is flawed in many ways. It's not just their ideology which is wacko, but their ontology. One of the chief problems which afflicts the left is their tendency to believe that "good intentions lead to good outcomes", which has the flipside "bad outcomes are caused by bad intentions". They therefore assume that since we're currently having bad outcomes they must have been cauesd by somebody's bad intentions, so they choose a scapegoat [I wrote spacegoat the first time, which is a much better mental image] and blame it until they're blue in the face. I feel sorry for all the workers on Wall Street who have been chosen as the scapegoat this time.
It's not that the economy sucks. It's that institutions of power exist that are doing their damnedest to maintain their position of power. This has led to bad outcomes in this particular historical moment.
Perhaps this is where many people disagree. I don't think the 2008-present economic crisis was a random freak event, like a hurricane, or caused by immutable laws analogous to atmospheric convection. Instead, I would guess, there are definite structural causes, which should be understood, and to the extent some of them are mutable, either fixed or mitigated (the U.S.'s particular arrangement of financial infrastructure isn't a law of nature).
I do agree that there's too much focus on bad intentions. I think the problems are structural more than they are moral; it's not a matter of convincing a bunch of "greedy bankers" to be more egalitarian, but of addressing the causes of economic instability.
Government has taught big business that if they donate money to re-election campaigns, wine-and-dine legislators, and even ghostwrite legislation or regulations then the business is rewarded. Incentives like this only encourage more of the same.
Pointing at businesses and saying that they are greedy for grabbing at the billions that Congress and state legislatures dangle in front of them is missing the point.
Could the raise of the minimum wage have something to do with increased unemployment?
What is a 'living wage'?
> just because someone is employed doesn't mean that they are in a good position.
They certainly are in a better position than somebody who is unemployed.
As Thomas Sowell pointed out: The real minimum wage is always zero: unemployment.
All the minimum wage does is distort the labour market to favour automation and highly skilled workers over the inexperienced and low skilled.
Basically, it hurts precisely the people it was supposed to help.
How I define a living wage: Enough income for a 1 BR apartment, 3 square meals a day (from a grocery store, not a resturaunt), and health care. Basically, the bare minimum.
I'm not skilled enough in economics to be sure whether removing minimum wage would benefit workers. My suspicion is that it would, and you have made a good argument to that affect. I just feel the need to play the devil's advocate.
Thanks for your input.
By the way, are you the same Uriel as the one on Reddit?
> How I define a living wage: Enough income for a 1 BR apartment, 3 square meals a day (from a grocery store, not a resturaunt), and health care. Basically, the bare minimum.
The "bare minimum" is quite different if for example you are a student living with your parents that is working to help pay for university, or if you have children, or a working spouse, or savings.
Not to mention the HUGE differences in cost for the things you mention in different locations within the same country or even state.
For more info and links to many studies on the topic see: http://harmful.cat-v.org/economics/minimum-wage/
And yes, I'm the same uriel as in reddit :)
And don't some nations reevaluate the value of their minimum wage annually, adjusting for de/inflation? That seems reasonable to me. And stops the arguments over when/if to increase it. (Though of course many obviously believe we shouldn't have it, but that's a different conversation.)
My mouth literally waters imagining what would happen when all the "hippies" and "losers" were gone and no one was left but self proclaimed "hard workers" and the mega rich. Listening to people like you try to rationalize the fact that, despite all your "hard work", your wealth was staying flat or decreasing (in relative terms if not literal) while the top 1% continued to capture more and more of all the created wealth would be pure bliss.
And I'm sure all the "99%", who would be enjoying systems with much healthier distributions of wealth would be enjoying the show as much as I was.
Left-wingers got us into this mess in the first place by demanding that banks give out subprime loans to people who would never pay them back and Clinton promised these banks that the US Government would bail them out in return.
Now that same liberal left got bitten by their own ideology and who do they blame? The banks and Republicans, of course! Republicans bailed out the banks (because they were obligated to by Clinton) and the "greedy" banks loaned money to people who couldn't afford to pay them back!
If the liberal left used their brains for once they'd see that they caused these problems themselves. They have no one else to blame but themselves.
Instead, they blame everyone else for their problems.
It should be blatantly clear that the liberal left do not believe in taking personal responsibility nor do they believe in free will.
For if they believed in those things, then it's not the banks they'd be blaming at all. The banks didn't put guns to people's heads to take out loans that they couldn't afford to pay back. The banks didn't just wake up one day and decide to start giving out subprime loans. No, they were pressured into doing it by the liberal left's own greed.
They made their bed, now they can lay in it.
They better not come begging me for handouts. All they ever did for me was force my taxes to go up and try to drag me down with them. No thanks.
Now they're still repeating their original mistake: they're asking others to fix their situation. But the game has changed while they had relinquished control: real economic damage has been caused (Tragedy of the Commons). Of course, as usual, now there is a call to arms and a protest at authority, but they still don't understand: instead of asking for handouts they should fix their situation by putting in effort, taking responsibility and standing up for themselves and each other.
Isn't that exactly what they're doing?
Taking responsibility can take many different forms. No, those people are not taking an individualist entrepreneur route that most here on this particular forum are probably more comfortable with. However, the individualist approach cannot solve every problem. Sometimes, a different route is needed.
The Occupy Wall Street protests are exactly the kind of process by which people are taking responsibility. Ideas are fermenting there, people are activated, becoming involved at whichever level (political or otherwise). This is not a uniform process - certainly, many people will just be there out of rage, not really becoming activated, but at the same time, many people undergo transformations, gaining knowledge, forming goals, talking about and then attempting concrete steps to get what they want.
This is hard to believe if you've never actually been in touch with a movement like this, mostly because it is impossible to see such developments from the outside. I've been personally involved in similar things when I was younger (though at a smaller, local scale), and even I can't see what's going on as an outsider. But believe me, if you think those people are all shouting for somebody else to fix everything for them, you have absolutely no clue what you're talking about.
Okay, yes. In a way. But they're taking responsibility to try to get other people to do something for them. You're right, I do have an individualistic perspective on this. I don't think it works well. The only control they will get over the situation will be the control they're given by the government/big industry.
> But believe me, if you think those people are all shouting for somebody else to fix everything for them, you have absolutely no clue what you're talking about.
I'll take the bait. What are they doing other than protesting for a government response/solution to their woes?
First of all, I think we have to make sure we understand each other what the question is here.
Most of the griefs of the protestors, as far as I understand them, can almost by definition only be solved by a government solution. (Assuming you accept their claim that they are not protesting for their individual well-being, but are instead protesting against systemic issues in society.) Bank regulation comes to mind - obviously, banks cannot be regulated by individuals. The same thing applies to macroeconomic problems such as mass unemployment.
Once you recognize that a given problem can only be resolved by government changing its behavior, there remains the question of how you proceed. Do you simply shout about it on the street, or are you trying to do more?
It is this "more" that I was talking about, which usually happens in movements like this. Of course I cannot give you concrete examples since I am not involved in the whole Occupy Wall Street thing, and outside observers can only see them after the fact, if they have been successful.
It usually starts with people genuinely interested in learning. Groups form where people teach each other and become creative. People spend a lot of time thinking about how to fix the problems, and trying to reach out to those who are already in a position to implement their plans. Some may go on trying to run for office themselves. And so on.
This is often unsuccessful for obvious reasons - changing the behavior of government is extremely difficult. But it's not unsuccessful for a lack of trying. More often, the greatest problem is the fact that the people involved are simply inexperienced in dealing with those type of power structures, and therefore fail to acquire enough social influence to really effect a change.
> What are they doing other than protesting for a government response/solution to their woes?
There are two ways to read that "their":
A) Each person is protesting for a solution to his or her individual woes. B) They are protesting for a solution to the woes of all of them.
The distinction is important because yes, if all you're protesting for is your own personal well-being, then I would agree that you should get off your sorry ass and just improve yourself.
However, if you are genuinely concerned about the well-being of society as a whole, things are suddenly very different.
I suspect that you are implicitly working off an A-type interpretation, while I am working off a B-type interpretation. That's a likely source of misunderstanding.
No. They are blaming everyone else for their problems and expecting everyone else to pick up their slack. That's not taking personal responsibility.
What they need to do is learn to spend responsibly - if they're in debt up to their eyeballs, who's fault is that other than their own for not planning ahead and spending responsibly? Learn the expression: "Save for a rainy day".
Learn how to shop around for jobs (sorry, but companys don't come knocking on the average recent college grad's doors begging him/her to work for them). I've been laid off twice in the past 4 years (once as recently as May) and I haven't had any problems finding a new job either time. Is that because I'm one of the "evil" 1% that is taking advantage of the poor helpless 99%? Fuck no, it's because I'm not a whiny little spoiled brat. It's because I take personal responsibility.
What these "99%" protestors really want is government handouts. But who pays for those handouts? People like me who take personal responsibility and save our money and work our asses off so we actually have jobs.
Money's gotta come from somewhere, folks, and that somewhere is the pockets of the people out there working at jobs they worked hard to get.
What these protestors fail to realize is that they are the very problem they are protesting against. They are the ones who voted for the politicians who forced the banks to provide subprime loans to home-buyers who were spending far beyond their means and gave promises to those banks that the government would bail them out if things ever went south (and duh, they did). They were the ones that put pressure on those politicians to put pressure on the banks to loan money to people who shouldn't be taking out loans they'd never be able to pay back. Then they voted for Obama who foolishly thought throwing money around would magically solve the situation. Duh, it didn't - it just made the middle class poorer.
Then to make matters worse, they pushed Obamacare on all of us. What's that going to cost middle-America? Last estimate I saw from the Democrats was 4 TRILLION which means it'll be more like 8 trillion all said and done (politicians are horrendously bad at simple math, ever notice that?). Nevermind the fact that if Democrats get their way, it'll mean more tax hikes (and not just for the wealthy for whom politicians always like to provide loopholes because they themselves dodge taxes like fiends - just take a look at Obama's cabinet - some of whom were caught not having paid taxes in decades).
So what has this extremely expensive Obamacare gotten for the average working-class American? Allow me to enumerate all that we got:
- trillions more debt to pay off
- higher taxes (gotta pay off that debt somehow and now we get to pay for healthcare for freeloaders as well, yippie!)
- longer lines at the clinics (did you really think providing people who didn't have healthcare before with free healthcare was going to make shorter lines? If so, I got a broken android phone to sell you).
- higher health insurance rates
- higher deductables (mine has gone up from $300 to $1000 and according to a news article I read the other day I'm not alone, something like 20% others got shafted the same, with the rest of the population sure to follow in the next year or two).
Oh, yea, let's all cheer for Obama care. [unenthusiastic cheer].
Seriously, people, use your brains and think for once. Instead of wasting everyone's time protesting, get off your asses and get a job so the rest of us can stop being forced to support you by paying higher taxes. You're only compounding the problem and dragging the rest of us down with you.
I do not know how many of them are lazy. I would not think many since it takes quite a lot of work to organize what they have and keep pushing forward. Many of them simply can not find a job and find themselves in a spiral without any help because of temporary difficulties. We have had plenty of posts here on HN just how poor people are trapped into poverty. Banks get money, little people get kicked out.
Anyway, maybe you should visit their websites and read what they want.
I keep seeing this idea of 'asking for more equality' and I have no idea what that means. Equality of what? pay? opportunity?
Forced redistribution of money to equalize incomes would be an unmitigated disaster so I can only hope that isn't their actual demand.
Anyway, the protesters and their supporters need to refine their message a bit.
Seriously, it's ironic that the same set of people who claim that "material possessions aren't important, it's the people that matter" are the ones who find money so important that they've got to redistribute what others have earned. But they don't give attention to the myriad other ways in which some people are better-advantaged than others.
Not really. A different balance of taxation would be a form of redistribution of income (and indeed would be interpreted as 'forced' by some). Would that be an unmitigated disaster? Well, it needs checking in the detail, but one suspects that such different tax profiles and hence 'redistribution' existed at various times in the USA's past: the 1960s probably, for example. That is unlikely to be called a period of disaster: it was one of growth and creativity, was it not? If all that happened was going to the moon and inventing the internet, you would have to call it pretty good.
I'm sorry, but I simply can't take you seriously.
you don't understand that the very definition of a tax incorporates the idea of 'force' (hint if it is optional, it isn't a tax)
you are confusiong redistribution and/or progressive tax structure with 'equal incomes'
you claim without any evidence that the 1960s represented a time when this redistribution was implemented
My comment was about the ambiguity of 'equality' without any clarification or context and about the dangers of promulgating 'equal incomes' via forced redistribution.
I do not want to live in a world where any individual effort made to raise my income above the average results in the government grabbing my wallet and giving it to someone making no effort at all.
From what I've seen from the posts all over the internet, it runs the entire political spectrum from the very progressive liberal/socialist(tax the rich, end wars, socialized medicine) to the very libertarian(end the federal reserve, go back to the gold standard). There is also a lot of anti-globalization stuff in there, as well. That's on top of the anti-corporate greed goals(which are what I assume the entire thing started about, but quite frankly, I'm not sure anymore).
The problem for me, even as a liberal, is that a lot of the demands are either impossible(removing the fed) or so unspecific(there is a lot of talk about "personal liberty") that they could mean anything to everyone that it's hard to state that I support them or am against them.
As for what they want, they want to feel like they have opportunities. I genuinely do think it's a discontent that's risen from feeling like their voice carries little/no weight in society, politics included, and that the control is in the hands of those with wealth. It's your garden variety populist uprising, only from the American middle class, so expect to see less blood and more coffee.
> A bunch of dumb decisions? Not necessarily.
> Sometimes life just happens.
Not all change for the better comes about by buckling down and getting a second job.
"If you wind up with a boring, miserable life because you listened to your mom, your dad, your teacher, your priest, or some guy on TV telling you how to do your shit, then YOU DESERVE IT." — Frank Zappa
It's very easy to point to a dictator and lay the blame on him. The violence and injustice perpetrated by a dictator is easy to identify.
If you have a complex system where injustice is not generated by a single individual, but rather by the interplay of many different actions, or even generated by the structure of the system itself, this is much harder to identify.
You'll note that people in Egypt got rid of Mubarak, but they're not entirely happy about the current state of affairs either.
The problem with economic violence is that while the issues are understandable and can be explained, they are hard to boil down to a short slogan.
Example:
People have high student loans
because college is expensive
because more people want to go
and can get loans from the government
so colleges can charge higher pricesExample: free Ivy-League education available at http://ocw.mit.edu for the self-motivated.
My wife & I have 5 nontrivial degrees between us, at a cost of under $100k and no debt. A little creativity and flexibility got us a long way.
Supply and demand. People are willing to pay high prices for education in exchange for credit-card-easy access, so colleges are willing to charge it. Dig & negotiate a bit, be flexible, and the price comes in a lot lower.
Its about the fact that many decent jobs won't accept any applicants without a degree. Yes you can get all of that knowledge but what proof do you have?
By the way im a CS grad with a job
Im just saying this as someone who is frustrated with people all ways using the strawmen of free online education which only recently became prevalent and the fact that they fell into circumstances that allowed them to either not need college or go for cheap.
The story my generation was sold as kids is that you go to college and then you get a good job.
Somewhere along the way that contract was broken... that is part of what this protest is about
You can get the education, or at least well under way with it, for free before committing to an expensive certification process. I had the basics of computer engineering down (and that long before free online education - get thee hence to the library!) before shelling out lots of cash for certification. Lacking certification, you can create proof via a portfolio. Lacking openings, you can create one (this IS the reason for ycombinator.com, ya know).
And no, getting the degree isn't assurance of work. When I came out with a respectable CE degree, the market was way down and I had to do tech support for 1.5 years, and got that gig much because my personal education efforts gave me a foot in the door pre-graduation.
This protest is indeed about something broken: the failure of education to tell kids that nobody owes you anything (despite the demands for free food/clothing/shelter/education/debt/entertainment), that having a degree doesn't guarantee a job (improves odds, but no assurance), and that living wages cannot be just legislated/declared into existence. Sorry, not everyone is going to tell you everything you need to know, including how harsh the real world can be. Nobody said there was a "get degree = get job" contract.
If those protesters would quit yelling at strawmen and decided to pool their talents and technology (enough laptops & smartphones to do it) to create marketable goods/services, they'd have the jobs they're demanding. They sure have the time & opportunity & resources right now.
I see it as somewhat similar to the Tea Party in that sense, which was an amorphous sense of dislike for "big government" and a feeling that something should be done about it (tax cuts, spending cuts, etc.); this is an amorphous sense of dislike for "big finance", and a feeling that something should be done about it.
This Jimmy Kimmel video answers that question: http://www.hulu.com/watch/285456/jimmy-kimmel-live-occupy-wa...
Megaphone: What do we want?
Crowd: We're not really sure!
Megaphone: When do we want it?
Crowd: Now!
I'd bet a vast majority of people there would get behind this.
For the lazy: "when a state regulatory agency created to act in the public interest instead advances the commercial or special interests that dominate the industry or sector it is charged with regulating" (Wikipedia)
Their current single obtainable goal, whether it's their intent or not, seems to be forcing the media to at least acknowledge that the economy really really sucks and the government has done basically nothing about it for the 99%, even if they dismiss the protestors as unserious hippies.
[1] Abstracting the arguments to an umbrella term or position makes it vague almost by definition. Would a cohesive chant against "regulatory capture" satisfy the morning news crowd? It's somewhat more precise, but I get this feeling that it wouldn't change the press perception.
[2] The common defense of the fractured nature of Tea Party groups was that a lack of cohesive voice was seen as a sign of authenticity amongst grass-roots movements. And that does honestly ring quite true to me.
Imagine being a user of a set of a suite of applications (Democracy 12.5, Free Market 6.7, etc) that have been sold to you as The Best Thing Since Sliced Bread and The Solution To All Your Problems. Yet the applications are performing increasingly worse, they keep crashing and not doing what you need them to do.
You try to do something about it, but the customer service channels are horrible and even when you manage to log a bug, a complaint or any other feedback, the best you can hope for is that it's ignored; the worst you can hope for it that a patch comes out that doesn't really fix your problems and creates several new ones.
At this point, you start complaining loudly and publicly about it. What's the most infuriating reaction you can imagine? I don't know about you, but I've got one that's pretty close to the top of my list is "Well, how would you solve the problem, then?" Remember, we're talking about an average user, not a programmer. By all rights, the answer to such a question should be "How the fuck am I supposed to know that?"
Of course, what's going on in the world is a lot worse than this hypothetical situation. If you're using apps that don't work, you can "vote with your wallet" and use something else. If you're forced to use them at work as part of company policy, you can ultimately decide to change jobs, if you want to. But this? You have no choice but to go out and protest and ask for "change".
I do not think this is necessarily a democrat's protest. This is a people's protest, the 99%.
The protesters we see now will have a difficult time not getting pushed aside by the machine. What the unions/DNC could not create they certainly can take.
“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been 200 years.” ― Alexis de Tocqueville
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Alexis_de_Tocqueville#Misattrib...
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Alexander_Fraser_Tytler#Unsourc...
And the ones that still do aren't disillusioned enough yet.
The odd thing is the labor unions are participating in this. But the unions themselves were beneficiaries of bailouts (see GM's bankruptcy).
I can't help feeling that at least some of these protesters are really only in it for handouts.
But consider that the GM/Chrysler bailouts almost included a gutting of the UAW. (They had to fight to retain their collective bargaining power in the deal) And you may have noticed the spate of anti-union legislation proposed, and in some cases passed, across the nation.
The unions have (rightly) seen any benefit they did get as incidental and temporary at best.
And perceiving a movement through possible positions of a minority is a pretty intellectually dishonest way to tar the group. It's as disappointing as dismissing the concerns of the Tea Party for their racists.
> [UAW] had to fight to retain their collective bargaining power in the deal.
A deal which, had it not been struck, had meant their total annihilation.
> The unions have (rightly) seen any benefit they did get as incidental and temporary at best.
Unions, like banks, don't have an inherent right to exist. They are clinging to political favors to keep boyant.
And? Sarah Palin didn't invalidate the Tea Party.
> "A deal which, had it not been struck, had meant their total annihilation."
It would have meant GM and Chrysler's annihilation, along with many UAW members losing their jobs. But every other car maker in North America has union plants. The UAW itself wasn't going anywhere if GM and Chrysler failed.
> "Unions, like banks, don't have an inherent right to exist."
A specific union or bank doesn't. But the right to form a union or bank does. And the very right to organize is what union struggles are increasingly about. Just look to Ohio and Wisconsin.
No, but her co-opting the movement for her own political ambitions diluted the message and removed focus from the original grievances.
> It would have meant GM and Chrysler's annihilation, along with many UAW members losing their jobs. But every other car maker in North America has union plants. The UAW itself wasn't going anywhere if GM and Chrysler failed.
My impression was that GM and Chrysler was UAWs last stronghold and that all the foreign car makers had set up shop in right-to-work states exactly to avoid UAW influence. But the point was, you make it sound like they generously made a concession, when they in reality took government money to arrive at a better result than the starting point (bankruptcy).
> But the right to form a union or bank does.
You can form all the unions you want, but if you use government power to inject yourself between the employer and the employee, you're just as bad as a rent-seeking corporation using government regulation to give your company an advantage.
> And the very right to organize is what union struggles are increasingly about. Just look to Ohio and Wisconsin.
OWS has been firmly grounded in financial issues as the name suggests. Union rights don't seem to be at the front of the agenda, although I have no doubts the unions would like to change that.
You'll note that I did say "at least some of these protesters". With those qualifiers, you'd be right.
I'm not trying to tar the whole ... event (I hesitate to call it a "movement", since I haven't seen any cohesive set of ideals coming forth) ... but some portion, of indeterminate size, of the group.
consider that the GM/Chrysler bailouts almost included a gutting of the UAW... The unions have (rightly) seen any benefit they did get as incidental and temporary at best.
First, it's my understanding that the settlement that UAW got in the GM bankruptcy was pretty clearly outside of the way bankruptcy laws specify that the debts are to be discharged. They got a big-time sweetheart deal -- not a one-time "temporary" pile of money, but a good-sized ownership stake.
In any case, I'm sure that the banks who were bailed out would say something similar: "it's just this once, and bailing us out really benefited the economy of the whole country". The thing is, this is (a) self-serving, and (b) pretty impossible for them to say objectively, given the complexity of the economy.
Then what's your point in bringing it up? You could say the same of any political group.
> "They got a big-time sweetheart deal"
I don't think that's a fair characterization, but it's neither here nor there to my point. My point is that they bargained for what they got using collective bargaining power that many were trying to outright strip from them.
And "temporary" was to refer to the point that without continuing political action they almost certainly would/will lose their bargaining power, making any current union deal more of a silver parachute for current membership as the union itself faded into history.
Part of the problem is that we do not have instant runoff elections, so big money need only promote 4 candidates for each position, and FUD all of the others. That way, one of their 4 is almost always chosen (2 "sides" in each D/R primary). Barring instant runoff, perhaps we would be better off with proportional representation in Congress: if Green or Libertarian parties received 10% of the vote each, at least they would have some members present.
Instant runoffs are only marginally better than the American "first-past-the-post" system. In particular, they suffer from the perverse effect where voting for your favorite candidate can actually cause him to lose.
There's a mathematical proof (Ken Arrows, maybe? I'm getting forgetful) showing that it's impossible for any voting system to have all the handful of qualities one wants in a democratic process. This is actually a pretty decent branch of mathematics. There exist better options, but none that are perfect.
This is what you had in mind.
Maybe they should be happy they're not the 99% of the world who die of starvation and preventable diseases instead of whining that it's so unfair.
The protestors ARE in the 1%. It's depressing to see their open greed and belief they are entitled to more.
Maybe if they applied all that energy toward creating wealth instead of protesting, they would be in a better situation. Or better yet, try and help the 99% of the world that's worse off than them.
Which is, of course, the underlying point. Who is really "creating" the wealth? That's a matter of perspective. I'm sure the self-described "99 percenters" feel they're the ones who "created" much of the wealth the "1%" has.
Protesting that other people have more money than you is just the same as a 2 year old throwing a tantrum.
Also, the proper way is to vote out the government if they do something like that, and to make it clear you don't think it was a good idea.
Protesting on streets is a barbaric way to do things.
If the 99% (or even 50%) really sympathized, there is no point in camping in a park, just run some candidates for office and take over government. The large sums floating around in politics can possibly swing a margin across the middle, but there's no way it can shut up 99%.
Laws that serve the common good. Economic policies that promote progress and well-being.
If such things exist, what would your solution be to make things "fairer"?
IMHO, things ARE pretty fair, and these protests are just basically "We don't know how to make money, we messed up buying crap we didn't need, but you lot are rich. therefore it's not fair and you must have some unfair advantage"
Nor are they willing to take any sort of personal responsibility for the "mess" they are in. You didn't necessarily get screwed, you probably screwed yourself. And if you are complaining about tuition costs go protest at the universities, not Wall Street. How dumb can some people be?
Certain financial institutions may certainly be at fault to a degree, but so is Washington and Congress and YOU. Take responsibility and do something positive for the country. This is a joke.
I personally don't feel bad for or listen to those who refuse to vote.
On the one hand I absolutely agree with you, but on the other hand, corporations vote with their dollars every single day.
The US is a two party system where both parties get the majority of all their funding from big business. Why would they care what individual citizens have to say? Elections are won with campaign money.
If you think that's a "joke", not really sure what I can say to you.
Similarly, if you think the appropriate response to this is to hand-wave into trying to blame the people who are protesting for the results of, let's face it, massive fraud perpetrated on the world by "certain financial institutions", I have a hard time even beginning to comprehend your worldview.