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Occupy Wall Street Protests Go Global
Hugh Pickens writes "Tens of thousands of people around the world took to the streets Saturday to reiterate their anger at the global financial system, corporate greed and government cutbacks, with rallies held in more than 900 cities in Europe, Africa and Asia. 'United in one voice, we will let politicians, and the financial elites they serve, know it is up to us, the people, to decide our future,' said organizers of the global demonstration. The demonstrations by the disaffected coincided with the Group of 20 meeting in Paris, where finance ministers and central bankers from major economies were holding talks on the debt and deficit crises afflicting many Western countries. Crowds around the world were largely peaceful, but the demonstration in Rome turned violent as clashes in the Italian capital left dozens injured, including several police officers. In London, WikiLeaks leader Julian Assange made a dramatic appearance, bursting through the police lines just after 2:30pm, accompanied by scores of supporters. He climbed the cathedral steps near St. Paul's to condemn 'greed' and 'corruption,' and attacked the City of London, accusing its financiers of money laundering and tax avoidance."
This isnt about Assange and his glory seeking attempts.
This is about our parents, our grandparents, and our future. Our grandparents and parents because their retirement disappeared when bankers toying with other peoples money failed.
Us because, as it stands now...we have no guaranteed retirement plan. At any time any idiot can do the exact same thing and take away our retirement.
Companies are gouging the consumer, stealing from their employees, and then asking them to pay for their own expensive healthcare.
Not only that, but these same companies are claiming no one wants to work for them and asking for overseas employees.
This world that has been created by the Corporations has put enough pressure on the lower and middle class. It is time, once again, to tell them "we are tired and we aint gunna take it no more".
I think 20 years of skewing the system to favor the wealthy while neglecting the majority is finally starting to sink in. It's not that people can't be rich, that there is anything wrong with being rich, or that there is something wrong with capitalism generally. In principle these things are all fine. It is the way that it has been twisted so that every time an economic issue comes up, the majority of people end up paying (bailouts, wage cuts, etc.) while the people at the top manage to skim off an ever-widening fraction. Regular wages barely keep up with inflation or even decline. We're told companies have to remain competitive, which is true, but if that's the case then why have CEO salaries climbed *far* in excess of inflation over the last 2 decades whether there's an upturn in the economy or a downturn? Meanwhile there is a race to the bottom in terms of corporate taxes world-wide, with countries like Ireland luring companies there with exceptionally low rates, then practically going bankrupt the moment there is an economic downturn. Personal taxes go down, but it's a game where the very wealthy get theirs reduced far more than the average Joe. Between corporate tax decreases and disproportionate tax cuts or tax systems that favor the wealthy (capital gains), the middle and lower class ends up shouldering an ever-larger fraction of the total tax burden to run government services, which get cut anyway. Everyone is expected to tolerate "austerity" measures due to a screwed-up financial system that wasn't their fault. Governments cut taxes before paying down debts when times are good (you're supposed to run a surplus in the good times to get rid of the debts so you are ready for the next economic cycle instead of hitting borrowing limits, and so you aren't stealing money from the next generation). The list of grievances is long.
Look, I like capitalism. Like democracy, it's the least-bad economic system that I think we have. But the simple fact is, this was a grand experiment in "trickle-down" economics. Early on, the results were kind of fuzzy, but the result is now becoming clear to everyone: you can't shaft the majority of workers for a generation and expect that things are going to be fine economically. You also can't say you are running a democracy while favoring the wealthy at every possible opportunity. You can't let money buy such strong influence in politics that ordinary people start believing their vote is worthless. You can't do these things for so long and expect that the system is going to remain sustainable.
Unless the rich and powerful eventually want to live in medieval-style castles to keep the common peasants out, they're going to have to realize that they need to pay more into the society that they live in, and focus a little less on their own individual wealth. They need to care more about the future of society as a whole, and bring things back to a more sustainable, balanced system like we used to have in western democracies and economies. This is the wake-up call. Heed it, like a democracy is supposed to do when its people speak up, and things will be okay. Ignore it at your peril.
How abut charging bankers with the crimes they have committed.
I agree. This is Corporatism at work. But i am saddened to see that the worldview today is so straightforward and simple minded. Sure the Occupy crowd is right, but no one in it mentions that Corporatism can only be "installed" if the Government has no "UAC". We have a big and weak government (the worst kind actually), where legislation which creates Freddie and Fannie (inducting huge market distortions), Housing Acts etc, etc, which do more harm than good. And when the corporations mess up, they get bailed out whereas people have no jobs and no income. No wonder that the Tea Party and the Occupy Wall Street have more than 30% common variance. This is perceived unfairness. One wants the Government out, the other the corporations down. Both are right. And while I agree with you on each and single argument you have there, put one from me on that list: Screw the Government because it is the only one with legislative power and have done nothing but crap with it. Screw them because they have taken away our freedom in the name of defense. Screw them because they are in the same boat with corporations, who in my view want nothing to do a Free Market. All they want is Government protection and consumer gouging. In fact, screw them all.
I take my children to see Madonna(..), but I never for once ever thought I was in the same business.Chris Rea.
It might not technically be a valid form of argument; but this is forum were we are reacting to and pontificating on a protest movement. Its hardly an academic debate we are having here. So even if its not a valid argument form its still worth pointing out the hypocritical nature of some of what they are doing and asking for.
Generally in my practical experience when you find people preaching something other than what they practice one or both of the following is true. They are profoundly lacking in self awareness and understanding of their own situation, or they preaching something that is impractical and often impossible. They may or may not admit it.
I listened to NPR interviewing one of these protesters, he talked about no knowing how he was going to pay all the debt he had, yet called himself middle class. This is the United States, class here is supposed to be about what you have and what you do not what you are. If your net worth is negative, you are not middle class. That is called poor. Is it good to be poor, no, but it does not have to be a permanent condition. I can understand the desire to protest over the lack of mobility, even support it. I find it hard to take political prescriptions from someone who can't even admit or can't understand, perhaps both; his own situation though.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Isn't the point that they want the government to grow some balls and bring down actual justice to the economy sector? If we punished people in proportion to the damage they caused half of wall-street would have life sentences by now and the other half would probably think twice before they do stupid shit to get 0.5% more profit.
Why is there no political system anywhere where the campaigns are funded by a flat levy, and ALL levels of government have equal elections where union and private donations, as well as politician's OWN FINANCES are banned from participating? Each politician gets a set amount equal to all the other candidates with which they can campaign with, and MANDATED/paid media time, and BAN private political advertising. Get rid of these douchebag interest groups from politics they have no place. Politicians shouldn't be allowed to pool their money together into party platforms either. If 50 people across electorates want to campaign for the same thing they should have to each spend out of their allowances individually to get their message out, so 50 conservative candidate ads, not 1 expensive ad running all the time for the conservative party. Anyone running against them should have the chance to do the same. This system that currently exists serves only the rich and powerful and the union bosses that are slaves to them. Kill the financial incentive to suck up to the big end of town and to businesses and make the bastards actually serve the public interest. Everyone knows this is the only way to go, it's high time people stood up for it and made it happen.
The US economy in recent years has followed Adam Smith about as much as the USSR followed Karl Marx. I agree with the GP that government is part of the problem, but that is largely due to the ever-increasing influence of "big money" in politics, culminating in the horrific Citizens United ruling a year and a half ago. Unfortunately, the only way to cut the octopus tentacles away is a constitutional amendment to strip corporations of their "personal" rights. Only then will our government be able to function properly to protect the people from "inhuman" corporate avarice.
As for how to protect us from the conglomerates, I suggest: 1. a STET tax; 2. get out of NAFTA, and reinstate reasonable tariffs as Adam Smith intended; 3. reinstate Glass-Steagall; 4. break up too-big-to-fail banks into smaller units; and 5. put some banksters in JAIL!
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
If that's what you think, then you're packed full of shit and completely out of touch with reality.
The real reason there are no young EEs in the UK and America is because you older fools shipped off all of the entry-level jobs to India and China. Thus the students who do study EE in college and university graduate, but then find that they can't get any sort of a job in the UK or America because they need at least 5 years of on-the-job experience even to be considered for an interview. They don't even have the chance to gain that experience at all, even those who would gladly work 18 hours days for that whole period of time. So they move on to other endeavors, often in fields totally unrelated to EE.
You older guys can't have it both ways. You can't cut costs by handing off the simpler work to third-worlders, but still expect there to be American- and UK-born/trained EEs ready to take your places.
More likely, the foundation of this prosperity was a new and plentiful source of energy, oil. The prosperity of human civilization has always been very closely tied to the availability of energy, and for a while oil has been extremely cheap, and basically unlimited.
Now, as the era of (cheap) oil is over, the prosperity will go back to the norm, except that we now have a lot more expectations and a lot more people to feed.
The problem with the Tea Party is it was coopted by people like Bachman, Palin and DeMint largely with the help of the main stream media and Republican establishment who wanted to gut the Tea Party's populist economic message and defend the status quo. They did a really great job at it too. They managed to turn the Tea Party image from economic populism in to right wing social conservatism. Social and racial issues have absolutely no place in the Tea Party. I really hope OWS saw what happened to the Tea Party and use their diffuse leadership structure to avoid being coopted. Unions and the Democratic party, in particular, will be pure poison to OWS if they manage to insert themselves in the spotlight. Unions are a nice idea in theory to counter corporate excess but in practice they've become just as bad, and corrupt, as corporations and just as much a part of the problem. They are a complete turn off to most American as a result. Its a total farce for Obama to think OWS is on his side, the second he hired Summers and Geitner to run the economy he proved he was part of the problem, not the solution, and "Change you can believe" was total bullshit.
@de_machina
While you're right about the origins and original anger of both...
Firstly, the Tea Party seems to had started in opposition to the bailouts. That is fine. I actually think the bailouts needed to happen...and all such receiptients should have been broken up afterward. But I understand the anger, and why people think they shouldn't have happened at all. (And since no one can change the past, it's a moot point. At this point, everyone can agree corporations that cannot fail should not even exist.)
That was the one shining moment of sanity. And then the Koch brothers hijacked them into nonsense. They started complaining about utterly imaginary taxes they thinks were raised, when we're actually under some of the lowest taxes ever. And they seem to think the debt has something to do with their individual financial situation, and that the government should balance the budget, something which has absolutely no bearing at all on any individual. They also demand the government stop 'printing money' and causing inflation, apparently completely unaware that inflation has, for the last for years, utterly and completely stopped. (Because the superich keep sucking money out of the system faster than we print it.)
I'm sorry, but any movement that operates from such ignorance is not very useful, because the demands make no sense. But that was just random stupidity, and could be understood, at least. In fact, some of that stupidity has shown up on OWS, like cries to 'audit the Fed'. Look, idiots, auditing the Fed isn't going to do anything. The Fed is doing nothing illegal.
But that was ignorance, not malice. It happens in any actual grassroots protest movement.
But then the Tea Party was hijacked (1) to oppose government health care, which had nothing to do with their original complaints. In fact, the cost of health care is the major cause of bankrupcy, so at this point the Tea Party is literally facing backwards in trying to make things better for themselves. Thanks to that idiocrary, we ended up with a 'solution' that essentially let the insurance companies run it. Good work, Tea Party!
Then after that, more nonsense kept getting added. Oh, look, the Tea Party is now against abortion. Or whatever.
And, look, the Tea Party is now the Republican base.
I'm sure there are a lot of Tea Party members out there with basically the same complaints and near identical goals as OWS...and they need to look around at where they are standing, and then need to ask themselves what they actually want. And if, perhaps, they are standing in the wrong protest movement.
1) The 'Tea Party' was never really hijacked. Protests managed to exist outside corporate control for a few weeks. But the second it was given a name, it was in corporate control, it was the very first thing corporations did, making it about 'freedom from taxes' instead of 'freedom to not have our government hand shitloads of money to people who blew up the economy'.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
I'm afraid I have to disagree with some of your conclusions.
They were born into one of the most, if not the most, prosperous times in the history of humanity. The foundation of this prosperity was planted by their hard-working ancestors, and they grew up in it and eventually inherited it, so they can't actually take any credit for it.
They were lucky. Their immediate ancestors were the group of people who caused the Great Depression, still considered to be the worst economic collapse this country has ever experienced. The government was largely unsuccessful at fixing it until World War II rolled around and restarted our economy. Suddenly the manufacturing capacity was needed to supply ourselves and our allies with weapons.
In hindsight, this was the peak of middle-class America.
I'll agree with that, but point to WWII as the source again. Must of the rest of the industrialised world had been destroyed by war. Factories and production through out Europe and Japan had been destroyed to win the war. The US responded by rebuilding them, which involved selling our industrialised services to them. When you are the biggest or only source of an item or service, of course you will be doing well.
One such concept that they embraced was outsourcing/offshoring.
This to me is just the conclusion of the rebuild efforts. The US being the only source of high tech products was not a sustainable model. Other countries were sure to develop similar abilities. An example, you never hear much about non-American cars from the 50s. But with the 60s you start to hear more about European cars (like the VW bus so popular with the hippies you metioned) and with the 70s you start to see the sales of some of the now iconic Japanese cars (like the Honda Accord). Similarly during the 50s airliners were generally a US product from companies like Boeing, Lockheed, and Douglas. Once the 70s rolls around and you see the start of Airbus.
The Boomer's precious offshoring, outsourcing and "free trade" destroyed the American manufacturing sector in the 1980s and 1990s.
No, our economy would have declined even had none of those practices ever been employed. We had it good selling to the entire world after a major war. The rest of the world caught up, wanted their share of the pie, and were willing to do things cheaper than we were. We would have lost sales to the rest of the world either way.
So in conclusion, the Boomer's ancestors f-ed things up every bit as badly as we did (the Great Depression), WWII saved our economy and we were lucky there were no major strikes on the US mainland, and finally the world recovered and our position as the dominant producer became unsustainable.
Your accusations regarding the protesters' hygiene habits and the crass lack of consideration for others that you are exhibiting does absolutely nothing to refute the point which is being made by these protests. In fact, the only thing you are accomplishing is to portray yourself as a modern-day version of Archie Bunker, with all the considerations that goes for his intelligence and insight on social affairs.
Regarding your meaningless abuse of the worn-out cliché of "OMG THEY USE IPHONES!!1!1!ONE!", just because someone is against the racketeering and ponzi schemes that defines the financial institution, along with all the corruption and manipulation of the democratic process, it doesn't mean that everyone should suddenly avoid using any tool at their disposal, go Luddite and protest wearing nothing but something they built out of hemp and straw. the civil rights movement also wasn't a hypocrite for using the telephone system, no matter ho big Ma' Bell was.
So, your pathetic attacks on the protesters only goes to show how full of blind hate you have become, and how you are letting your stereotypical bigotry cloud your judgement.
Well, I can see how the government and corporations will do their best to derail this movement, but I seriously doubt that "the bulk of the populace will be against you". Only the useful idiots among us, which includes the little archie bunkers such as yourself, will believe that violent suppression of a political movement does anyone any good, let alone be compatible with a democratic system of government. But in order to do that, you first need to explicitly and blatantly violate your countrymen's rights to freedom of speech, freedom of assembly and even freedom of petition. That means that in order to enact your "violent" opposition of a political movement you first will have to violate the very core of what defines your country. To put it in simple terms for you to understand, the actions you are suggesting are blatantly un-american, and against everything your country stands for.
So, guess who is screwing up your country, mr Bunker?
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