The question I can't find an answer to is, what do they actually want? I feel like "change" isn't specific enough. They need a single, obtainable goal, and focus on getting the media to say that goal with every report.
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 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.
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.
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'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)
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!