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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."
Only around 20% of the population were sided against the king during the time America was being formed.
Why is that relevant? Well it just means that it takes a lot less people than you think to get things rolling.
Stop the fear mongering. The protesters simply want to return to sanity. Between the New Deal and the beginning of Voodoo Economics capital was used to produce actual goods instead of financial bubbles. Why not simply return that? Other main concerns are the inefficient privatized health-care and education system. Changing to a european style public system would solve this. Finally, most of the American infrastructure is crumbling while people are unemployed, why not fix two problems at the same time?
A political system where corporations do not have a seat at the table? A justice system where we get to see the rich and powerful do the perp walk more often? A monetary system that doesn't foster bubbles?
There might be some complaining, but nothing will happen.
Right now your troops are being sacfificed (and sacrificing thousands of civilians in the process) to keep the Job CReators profits flowing, where is the outrage there ?
Your healthcare system is a joke, yet the worlds most expensive, your educational system is collapsing and is rapidly approaching Third World outputs, yet where is the outrage ?
Your government is seizing up, you're not even going to have a Postal Service soon...so where is the outrage ?
The right wing consistantly proclaim their 'right to bear arms' as the refuge of the people against government that doesn't give a shit about them, except as cattle...and yet here we are.....where is the outrage ? Where is the militia marching upon Washington ?
The average US citizen has been neutered, their passions diverted off to silly by-ways like reality TV and the weak-wristed practice of american sports. Imbeciles like Glenn beck and Rush Limbaugh are actually given the time of day and the attainment of scholastic achievement is belittled.
Forgive me, this isn't a anti-us rant, but the system there is so fundamentally broken and yet there's no sign of it being fixed. Even the louder political groups, such as the Tea Party, are in reality simple folk bamboozled by the skilful words of the spin doctors to suit their Corporate masters agendas.
So when the Boomers wake up that their 401k's have been plundered, well, they should have realised that was taking place years beforehand and there won't be a thing they can do about it.
I mean, hasn't a bankrupt government, almost Third World educational and healthcare standards, a truly colossal debt and unemployment through the roof ( not forgetting that the average income in the US is woeful) made the penny drop yet ?
The time to fix this is NOW, not in 12 months..not in 2 years...now...it SHOULD have been 10 years ago.
But you will do nothing except complain about gas prices and why there are so many mexicans around these days.
When you say "our parents" and "our grandparents", it's likely that you're talking about the so-called Baby Boomers. We shouldn't feel sorry for them at all. These people have fucked up everything they've gotten involved with, for decades now. Hell, they're largely responsible for the current situation.
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. In hindsight, this was the peak of middle-class America. Rather than trying to improve further on this already-amazing economic situation, many of them ended up becoming hippies fighting against the very system that provided them the best standard of living of all-time.
I'm not a conservative by any means, but neither can I respect those who grow up in a near-perfect environment, yet go ahead and do everything they can to trash this environment. But that's exactly what many Boomers did during the 1960s. They caused some damage, but thankfully were limited in their ability to cause real harm, and their movements fizzled out.
When the 1970s rolled around, some of them finally outgrew these youthful shenanigans. They got involved with corporate America and the American government, which up until that time actually did treat middle-class American workers extremely well. Even lower-middle-class workers could afford vehicles and homes without having to go into debt. But the Boomers would put an end to this as they started moving up the management ladder.
By the mid-1970s, the Boomers were starting to get into positions of corporate and government power. Given the huge amount of people around the same age, many of these Boomers tried to be as outrageous as possible to differentiate themselves from their peers, in order to further their careers. They would suggest courses of action that their parents or grandparents, the previous leaders of corporate America, would think of as being totally asinine and wrong-headed. One such concept that they embraced was outsourcing/offshoring.
They had unfortunately embedded themselves well within American corporations and government by the mid-1980s. They had become the leaders of business and society, and to put it bluntly, they fucked everything up. Every policy they made served to fuck over the American middle class. This is the very same American middle class that begat these Boomers!
The Boomer's precious offshoring, outsourcing and "free trade" destroyed the American manufacturing sector in the 1980s and 1990s. Although younger generations tried to negate some of this damage via the Internet boom, far too much damage had already been done. By the 2000s, the Boomers had started to offshore even the best-paying technical jobs.
As everyone today knows, the Boomers' policies have absolutely destroyed the American economy. They caused the very problems that have rendered many of them "poor" today. The only people they should hold accountable are themselves.
I've been watching these protests, interested in seeing what might come out of them. Unfortunately, no one has stepped out and tried to distill all the chaos down to simple talking points that the masses can understand. Left-wing protestors have a much higher barrier to overcome to be taken seriously. The right wing pundits, Tea Party guys, etc. seem to understand this and keep their rantings simple. They appeal to a wide swath of the country by doing that -- it's easy to convince a plumber that the Evil Government is preventing them from becoming a hugely successful entrepreneur because they're "stealing" his tax dollars. That's where I think a lot of the non-rich right wingers have their thinking misplaced -- they're inadvertently supporting business owners who turn around and make average peoples' lives miserable.
My take on this whole thing is as follows. I don't want communism, anarchy or the guillotining of investment bankers. What I do want is the social contract that companies used to have with their workers put back in place. The world is going to get even more divisive as automation and cheap labor start taking away all those nice safe service jobs. I like the model of Germany and the Scandinavian countries. There are plenty of business owners in those countries who are successful and get rich, but they seem to have a perspective and deal with the burden of paying taxes to support the rest of society. This is similar to the 50s-style social contracts many employers had -- hard work and loyalty were rewarded with a commensurate income ladder, paid health insurance, and paid retirement.
Think about it this way -- you're probably well-educated, worked hard to get where you are, and most people have health insurance, a nice stable job, good income and a few possessions. What makes you think that businesses are always going to need network administrators, Java programmers and other IT people? We're already seeing evidence that businesses would rather deal with sub-par service and skeleton staffs...and most people are a couple of paychecks away from being totally broke short of their retirement funds.
I see why everyone's mad at Wall Street though -- a lot of the reason that social contract went away in the first place is a constant demand for corporate earnings regardless of economic conditions.
If I were leading this thing, I think my simple, Tea Party-style talking points would be as follows:
1. Make everyone pay their fair share of taxes. Don't fall for executives' scare tactics about moving to China -- they're going to do that anyway.
2. To ensure this tax money gets spent wisely, limit corporate influence on the political system. It's amazing how quickly universal health insurance could be funded once some of these tax loopholes are removed.
3. Reduce the hyper-focus on the financial markets. Get individual retirement investors out of the market and into something safer like a pension or annuity. Let average people have a stable retirement, but encourage investment on their own if they want. Let companies breathe for a couple of quarters so they can actually plow money back into things that will produce results further down the road.
These things would resonate with average Americans, and it would be very hard for the right wing pundits to call me a dirty hippie if I came to the table with a good set of arguments.
Social Democracy works just great however. Pretending that there isn't a middle ground between Capitalism and Socialism is stupid.
The OWS crowd have deliberately avoided touting any specific economic models. The fact that you don't know that only shows how ignorant you are of the movement and renders the rest of your comment irrelevant. Yes, I have heard a few protesters condemn capitalism, but I've heard even more say that they simply want capitalism with fairness. They want justice for the crimes of the banksters and less "corporate capture" of government.
As for taxes, the ratios you cite are very similar to those in the USA. However, that's only for income tax revenue. If you include sales tax, property tax, and all the rest, the lower and middle classes pay a much higher percentage of their gross income to the government than the rich do.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
I hope that more people identify the similarities between the Tea Party movement and the Occupy Wall Street movement. Both are capturing the frustration of the middle class that there appears to be no way for them to effect change on their government. The OWS crowd is choosing to direct their frustrations at a Wall Street that for far too long has reaped the benefit of politician's greed, and the Tea Party crowd chooses to direct their frustration at the government that is being purchased, but both are right.
While the OWS does tend to be more liberal in their proposed solutions (instituting a 'living wage', supporting public sector unions, opposing Citizens United) and the Tea Party tends to be more conservative (support for term limits, opposition to health care reform, etc), there is real value in the fact that everyone is recognizing that something really big is wrong - and now it's time to talk about how to fix it.
Do the Tea Party and OWS agree on the solutions? Probably not, but these two groups are the heart of America. This is the debate that we should be having. Instead, we have two parties pandering to the highest bidder. Stop letting the career politicians drive these groups apart. Instead, both should be rallying against the political class that rules them, convincing their fellow Americans that the system is broken, and coming together to discuss the solutions. We can be united in our cause and divided on the solution.
Social Engineering Expert: Because there is no patch for stupidity.
As an example of how ball-less, consider the S&L crisis where 1000 FBI agents investigated white collar crime. About 1000 bankers went to jail. The S&L crisis was 1/40th the size of the current meltdown.
Instead of investigations, there ate 120 FBI agents spread out across the country (even Enron required 100 investigators and WA Mutual is even bigger). Obviously, not even a single indictment let alone a conviction, despite the problem being 40x bigger.
If the Executive branch wanted to do something about it, it could very easily just by hiring more investigators.
William Black, lead prosecutor in the S&L crisis, has been trying to get this point understood, but googling him in google news leads to a real dearth of results. This is a good interview transcript:
http://www.creditwritedowns.com/2011/09/why-nobody-went-to-jail-during-the-credit-crisis.html
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
The problem here is most of the stuff the banks did, and that caused the crash, wasn't really illegal. It was immoral but not really illegal. You see, the banks have anough control over the Fed and the Congress that they can make whatever they want to do legal so they don't have to break the law. If there was illegality most of it was at the low level where loans were originated and the easiest people to nail are the people who lied on loan applications which is the wrong group of people to go after.
One place there was law breaking by the banks was robosigning and other foreclosure abuses but that was after the crash, not the cause of it, and chances are the banks will pay a hefty fine and walk away otherwise unscathed.
Much of the crisis was caused by repealing Glass Steagel. Why was this done? Because Citi and Travelers wanted to merge in to a giant mega corp offering all financial services. Glass Steagel made this illegal, so what did the do? Bob Rubin, Larry Summers and Phil Graham pushed a new law that that repealed Glass Steagel under Clinton. Bob Rubin then went to work for Citi, Graham went to work for UBS, to reap the benefits of what they had sowed. Summers was hired by Obama to run the economy despite being as much to blame as anyone.
The solution to the 2008 crisis is, unfortunately, not criminal prosecution. You need to prevent the Fed and Washington from being completely controlled by Wall Street, and making everything they do legal. Unfortunately this is a very difficult thing to accomplish, but it is exactly what OWS is all about.
@de_machina
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.
Without an audit of the public-private beast that is the Federal Reserve System, how would you know whether they've done anything illegal or not? I don't know if the Ron Paul's version of the audit was ever passed, but Senator Sanders got an amendment inserted into some-bill-or-another. His office has this page:
"Audit the Fed" was Ron Paul's effort to hold the Federal Reserve accountable. It was a preliminary step to ending the system whereby "Wall Street" loans the economy its money supply. If you have a dollar bill in your pocket, it's only there because someone borrowed it from a banker - the bills are printed by the treasury and purchased by the Federal Reserve at cost [2 cents?]. If you have a quarter or a dime or a Susan B. Anthony dollar in your pocket, the Fed bought these from the Mint for face value.
The initial "Tea Party" rallies were held by Ron Paul's supporters in the 2008 presidential campaign, in response to the bailouts. Paul eventually dropped out of that race, but the "powers that be" thought the "tea party jingle" would be useful to perpetuate the concentration of power.
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