Slashdot Mirror
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.
After reading this article http://www.businessinsider.com/what-wall-street-protesters-are-so-angry-about-2011-10 and seeing Inside Job http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzrBurlJUNk I am tempted to join them!
200,000 + people in page, 120 k+ are currently talking about it. its bigger than most politicians' pages. Support is really global, and there are people from all walks of life. Albeit, of course, people who have their dinners in monaco.
https://www.facebook.com/OccupyWallSt
Read radical news here
First hand reports of whats going on in London and some tactics used to snuff out demo
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'd love to see something better, but the rhetoric sounds a WHOLE lot like the Bolshevik revolution in Russia. How'd that work out?
In fact, as often as it's been tried, none of them have worked out.
Listen, I understand that you're mad, but you have to provide a solid alternative. Those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it, and no matter how badly you want something to not be so, still it remains. These revolutions have a history of plunging their respective people into the dark ages.
I've seen it in cartoon form too: http://www.onenewsnow.com/uploadedImages/Cartoons/101011.jpg
It's still wrong though. I wouldn't even call it a bad argument, as that would mean admitting it's an argument. It's a good textbook of the ad hominium fallacy: "These people are hypocrites, therefore what they say is wrong."
Just wait 'til the boomers notice that their retirement funds went poof. There's a whole generation that felt entitled to get everything handed to them from cradle to grave. What do you think will happen when you not only take away what they greedily consider entitlement but also what they worked for. You have a lot of people there who are used to complaining if they don't get their way and who are anything but a minority.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Spanish protests go global. Spanished followed the Arab Srping, then there were protests in many cities in Europe, then Israel, then it was the US, and now the whole world. Don't be that stupid centered.
This isn't a political blog this is a technology blog - can we focus on that?
According to this map, they are scattered everywhere. I wonder how much more effective it'd be if the 99% really dropped in on Wall Street and got their money back?
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.
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.
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.
What do the penguins know that the rest of us don't?
Research shows that 67% of those who use the term "research shows", are just making shit up.
Anyone else reminded of Shay's Rebellion? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shays'_Rebellion
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
You either work within the system or start a new one.
I see your point about Freddie and Fanny, government backing allows people to go to college, which means more educated people and more higher paying jobs. Of course this leaves a lull in the service industry, because those that went to college cant afford to work for minimum wage while paying off college loans.
Good intentions, and an attempt to level the playing field has yielded an educated country promised the dream only to be slapped in the face.
As for what is going on now as well as your points:
Did the government have a hand in it? Yes.
Has the government attempted to rectify this? No.
Have corporations done wrong? yes
Do they plan on changing? No
In which case can the common citizen ask for, or attempt change? Government or Corporations? Government... of course.
You see, history has shown that the rich will continue to deprive, deprave, and destroy the common person and when the common person gets tired of it and rises up... the rich just move.
So we must rely on the government to balance the rich attempts to rape our resources, our country, and our common person for their profits and then leave vs the common persons need to survive.
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.
The point of saying this is there is no faith in the system.
The thing that caused the latest world recession has yet to be fixed.
So two things must be done. The government must create laws that prevent what caused the recession and the banks, Wall Street, and the government must restore our faith and provide protections against our retirement being destroyed through investment firms that like to play games with peoples money.
Now they're outsourcing the protesters! Preemptive apologies to rest of the world.
Since they're a movement and not an organisation, no they do not have any specific demands.
The core of the movement is the idea that the 1% should be forced to share their wealth with the other 99%, which will have to happen sooner or later, or we'll get another French revolution.
The specifics of -how- the 1% should be forced to share, and how their wealth should be distributed is not an area where there is any notable unity yet.
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.
government backing allows people to go to college, which means more educated people and more higher paying jobs. Of course this leaves a lull in the service industry
In the UK, we have the opposite problem. We have scores of university graduates (the majority with 'proper' degrees, not just dross like 'hairdressing' and the like), and almost no white collar jobs outside the banking sector. When there are multiple university graduates competing for a part-time job at the local supermarket, something is horribly wrong.
No, Sarah Palin is about as far from Tea Party root principles as can be. She supported the bailouts which were the rallying point for the start of the Tea Party movement! She did, however, see that parade coming by, and jumped at the chance to hop on a bandwagon. So, now you've got a bunch of Palin supporters saying they're part of (or trying to take over) the Tea Party.
The Tea Party isn't organized, it's a true grass-roots movement. Hence, there's no one to really say exactly what it is. But this much is clear - it was named for it's root cause - excess spending/taxation with no effective representation of the people.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
You know, every once in a while you would see a comment like this on /. But as of late they are very common. I'm an easy going fellow, and not one who would promote affirmative action under any circumstance, but this is getting ridiculous. I can make a relevant comment and get moderated into oblivion, but some how this crap is sitting here at the top of the thread for everyone to see. I consider myself a member of the Slashdot community and I do not want to be associated with this outlook. I don't care if it is trolling or not, if it is trolling it is not very good. A good troll is subtle and smart.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
There are only so many art history graduates the economy can absorb. At my workplace the average age of electronics engineers is very high indeed simply because their aren't enough of them around. Students these days don't want to study something "hard" like that. They'd much rather study something "interesting", but totally useless in the real world. This is why I think making them actually pay for their education is a good idea. It concentrates the mind.
Slightly on topic: Does anyone here have any opinion over the Terra - a common world currency that is based on the top 10 or so produce of the world (gold, corn, oil etc.), and so is much more stable and less prone to inflation. I saw it a couple of days ago, and I can't help but feel it would save trillions in efficiency and help benefit the world.
Whitepaper here:
http://www.terratrc.org/PDF/Terra_WhitePaper_2.27.04.pdf
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
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.
Occupy Wall Street in the beginning was the globalization of European Protests... I mean, Greece and Spain were on fire, with people fighting the police on the streets, many months before anything in America.
In soviet russia the government regulates the companies.
All "ism"s fail. Capitalism has just managed to blunder along longer by playing shell games with numbers.
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.
There's an easy way to prevent your retirement savings being destroyed: put them under your mattress, or in a low interest account. The fact of the matter is that if you want the highest return, you must take the highest risk. But it seems to me that what you are advocating here is a high return with a very low risk. I have absolutely no idea how this is to be achieved. If people weren't so greedy as to give all of their money to AIG for the 1% extra it guaranteed, and then see it all lost when the system collapses, then they would still have their retirement savings safe and sound. You cannot blame it all on the finance companies. At some point you, personally, have a responsibility to understand the risks when you are investing.
The only sound argument you can make is that these companies lied, with their AAA ratings and so on. This is almost certainly true, but I suppose this goes to the core of the concept of marketing products: how much of the bullshit the droids come out with is really true? Is this face cream really going to make me look younger? Will these vitamin pills really improve the functioning of my immune system? We are surrounded by bollocks. It isn't just the big corporations that engage in it. Even the guy at the market selling potatoes from the back of his van does it. We should always be on our guard to see through it. We should teach our children to see through it. Maybe if we did, we these things wouldn't happen quite so often.
They are touting economic models that have failed in every single country they have been tried (communism, Marxism, socialism).
You don't even know what the terms communism, Marxism, and socialism mean, do you? Hint: The Occupy movement has nothing to do with them.
Fucking idiot.
Do you realize what absurdity you are spouting? Democracy cannot be stolen from the majority. If the majority is not in control, you don't have democracy. If this statement confuses you because you think we used to have democracy, it's ok. Your lazy teachers didn't explain to you that our nation is NOT a democracy. We live in a republic. The majority DOES NOT RULE. We may democratically select our representatives, but we have no direct control over the laws of our country. If we did, our country would be a very different place.
That being said, what we have now is not a republic, nor a democracy. What we have now is defined as an oligarchy. You are upset at the rich, I am upset at the politicians. A lot of rich people have done horrible things and they deserve some blame. A lot of politicians are responsible as well. At the end of the day though, the rich would have no power over you if the politicians didn't give it to them. The government is responsible. Tell all the politicians to go home. Don't vote democrat. Don't vote republican. Vote 3rd party for EVERYTHING. If there is no 3rd party running, run for office yourself. If you don't succeed, tell your representative to support the CONSTITUTION, not some sort of bullshit called bi-partisan compromise. If the government follows the Constitution, all they can do is defend your rights... Nothing more. Of course realize that then they won't be able to violate anyone else's rights as well, so don't expect free stuff.
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
The middle class IS poor! Look at the mean net worth of the 25-50% (the lower half of middle class) is dangerously near $0. (Though actually I think net worth can be misleading... most people are stuck in a hand-to-mouth mentality that guarantees their net worth will never grow, even if their income was good and their standard of living was high).
But, secondly, if this guy is protesting, don't you think he KNOWS is situation is in jeapordy? That he might not be so "middle-class" after all? I think what he's saying is, "I have skills, I'm economically productive, yet I'm stuck scraping by. That can't be right."
"First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win." --Mahatma Gandhi. I have never been more proud of my fellow Americans than I am now with the Occupy Wall Street movement. You people on Wall Street, you corporate shills, hedgefund kiddies--your days are numbered. You have been able to buy politicians and get legislation that benefits you and no one else. The US voting population understands that Congress itself is full of millionaires. Yes, last I checked, we do live in a democracy. Much as I despise the Tea Party, they are one type of attack on your right side. The Occupy Wall Street movement--which is spreading like wildfire across the entire world--is an attack from the left. You may think you can mock, ridicule and marginalize the OWS movement but I am not so sure. Go ahead and mock, insinuate that it's all Soros and all of your other techniques. Unfortunately for you, the rest of us also went to college and grad school. We too read constantly, get up early in the morning to study our battle plans and plot our strategy. At first I too saw the lack of common purpose as a weakness. I wrote pieces that explained what I saw as the grievances. Then I heard that fine American genius Matt Taibbi--who wrote that Goldman Sachs is a "great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money"--point out that the lack of a common articulated set of goals and a designated single leader is a point of genius. Just because the OWS movement does not articulate their goals does not mean they don't have goals and designs. And with no stated goals, they are a moving target with a thousand goals. With no central leader, there is no one for Wall Street to corrupt and co-opt. This is classic closed cell behavior as practiced by subversive groups for centuries. Wall Street always attacks like this with money. But without a leader to corrupt, without a single defined list of goals to refute, the OWS movement is a moving target, chimeric and powerful. Go on ridiculing them. We are not going away. If we find that our leaders, even our beloved President Obama, don't react to our wishes, they will be replaced. And I promise you, if we need to replace even President Obama, you will like his successor even less. You Republicans plan to nominate Mitt Romney, he of Bain Capital who slashed jobs, drained equity and walked off with millions? Bring it on! I relish the chance to attack that fat cat. Bring it on. Don't start anything you can't finish. Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Merrill-Lynch, Bank of America and Citigroup--to say nothing of all the hedge funds with your poster boy Raj Rajaratnam--you started something you can't finish. You and your millions are no match for our power. We know where you live, we know where you work and where you play. We're coming for you. You had better be afraid, very afraid.
Oh, I thought this was a place to argue with nerds on the internet. Is there any news for nerds that doesn't revolve around phones and tablets anymore?
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
It's said that people are ultimately responsible for their actions, and I agree. Wholeheartedly... Because in the end, when someone if boned, it's their reality. Thankfully, we've got the division of labor thing going so people don't have to be lenders or real estate agents to get a home. Whose burden of responsibility is it to say "No, you can't have that home"? I keep hearing that it's government regulation with the Community Reinvestment Act that caused it, but the act was only compulsory to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac which handled roughly 33% of the secondary loans to low income families. That left 66% loosening up their underwriting standards and giving loans to people that were guaranteed to not be able to afford them. The 66% were companies not covered under the CRA, which did not have to give out the loans. The only reason the loans were a good investment was because they could be repackaged into CDOs and sold off, leaving the risk with the last sucker holding the bag, which was not the underwriting firm. They didn't have a pound of flesh in the game after the securities were sold. The individuals who could not pay the mortgage lacked the sophistication to tell they couldn't afford it was only part of the problem. I know if Tyrone Biggums walked up to me asking me for a loan, while I knew he had no job and a $300/week crack habit, would make me the asshole for giving it to him. Sure, he shouldn't have asked for it, but that doesn't put that money back in my pocket. Maybe there should be a fiduciary duty in the housing and lending markets to ensure the loan meets the expectations.
tl;dr making bad loans was not compulsory to private lending instututions. They did it because they saw dollar signs instead of what it really was: a plan designed to fail for private institutions due to the inherent risk. Subprime means less than optimal. If you're putting your own money up, you're not going for subprime.
Sig not found.
The problem that the top 10% pay 50% of income tax could easily be fixed by keeping their increase of income in line with the other 90%. This is the only group that has seen substantial income increases over the last decades so they also pay more taxes. Soon they'll make 99% of all income and pay 99% of all taxes. And they will complain about this "injustice..
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.
First of all, I think the OCWS crowd wants return to social democracy as it existed or exists in the west (even in America, 50s and 60s with 90% highest tax bracket could be considered social democratic), which, not capitalism, was probably the most successful system tested on national scale.
Second, socialism (= worker ownership of capital) has been tested, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondrag%C3%B3n_Cooperative_Corporation, and it seems to lead to more productivity than the actual capitalism.
Straight from horse's mouth:
"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power."
- Benito Mussolini.
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
Outsourcing/offshoring was not a boomer idea, it was an integral part of Reaganomics. Up until the 70's, a third of government revenue came from import/export tariffs. So-called "free trade" had already been a longstanding desire of conservative business interests for many years, and Reagan started the process that culminated with NAFTA under Clinton.
I agree with the rest of your analysis, but the idea of "free trade" did not originate with the Boomer generation, it had been around for quite a while already.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
Those banks that are "too big to fail" need to be split into smaller pieces that do not represent a systematic threat.
The government has split up AT&T in the 1970s, Standard Oil before that and had anti monopoly laws in place that should be used to prevent another bailout.
Inflation is the hidden tax that robs mattress stuffers and enriches the financial elite because whenever the government decides to dilute the currency, those at the top get to use the money at the non-diluted value, while those who get it after trickle-down, get to use it at its deflated value. Rinse and repeat and the hard earned $1000 you put in a cookie jar in 1970, which would have paid rent for 10 months, will barely cover a month of rent in an extremely modest apartment, i.e., it's worth $555 in 2010. The mattress stuffer got robbed.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
"When there are multiple university graduates competing for a part-time job at the local supermarket, something is horribly wrong."
I resemble this comment. Sadly.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
Of course the rich should be subject to Human Rights, just like everyone else.
Let's take a look at this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Declaration_of_Human_Rights
How do you feel about that one:
Article 29.
(1) Everyone has duties to the community in which alone the free and full development of his personality is possible.
(2) In the exercise of his rights and freedoms, everyone shall be subject only to such limitations as are determined by law solely for the purpose of securing due recognition and respect for the rights and freedoms of others and of meeting the just requirements of morality, public order and the general welfare in a democratic society.
(3) These rights and freedoms may in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.
Those are nice too:
Article 22.
Everyone, as a member of society, has the right to social security and is entitled to realization, through national effort and international co-operation and in accordance with the organization and resources of each State, of the economic, social and cultural rights indispensable for his dignity and the free development of his personality.
Article 23.
(1) Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.
(2) Everyone, without any discrimination, has the right to equal pay for equal work.
(3) Everyone who works has the right to just and favourable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection.
(4) Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests.
Article 24.
Everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay.
Article 25.
(1) Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.
(2) Motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and assistance. All children, whether born in or out of wedlock, shall enjoy the same social protection.
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
At my office, we have a perfect "beer money" job we advertise from time to time when college is back in session -- 6 hours/week, minimum wage, flexible hours within the 9-5 confines. We use the person to do random little things around the office that tend to get left undone.
This last time around, I've round filed resumes from people with Masters and Ph.Ds, none of them in things like pottery making or basket weaving.
After thirty years of job exportation, we should be realizing that educating everyone is not the solution -- we will just have highly educated unemployed. Instead of belittling those who are left standing in this game of employment musical chairs, be glad that you got your fat ass in a job-seat, and be compassionate to those who, unlike you, were simply unlucky. Who knows, you may be the next over-educated over-experienced unlucky unemployed person applying for a $54/wk job.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
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?
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
Occupy is supposed to be about the will of the people, not a rally for any one political party Whichever Occupy groups you may be a member of, beware of those who are trying to co-opt the movement for their own agendas. Democracy not dictatorship!
My views are no more important than anyone elses. That's the beauty of Occupy. It looks like it may be the first truly democratic movement to ever wield the power of the internet. I've always believed that with the internet, we could achieve true democracy where people vote on Parliamentary/Senate/Congress issues DIRECTLY rather than through representatives. We're not there yet, but hopefully we will be soon.
While it's easy to set up some sort of system for voting, it'd be much harder to democratize the process of submitting legislation to be voted on.
The only thing I could suggest is something like the website the US government set up, where anyone can start a petitiion and any petition that collects a certain number of votes during a given time frame would be automatically tabled for voting by the general public.
I figure the same people who would be too apathetic to submit petitions, vote on them, or vote on the tabled legislation is also probably too apathetic to vote in our existing elections.
The Occupy groups are probably going to have to do something like that to narrow down the diversity of demands to a set that can actually be presented and acted upon. While reigning banks in may be a relatively clear goal in the US, the goals of the Occupy protests in the rest of the world are not so clear cut.
I think it's telling that anyone who advocates change that threatens the profits of the status quo is automatically labelled socialist, communist, hippie, or worse by them. It just goes to show how indefensible the position of the status quo is when they can't come up with a better argument than name-calling and labelling to support their abusive behaviour.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
more educated people lead to lowered paying educated jobs
This is likely true on a local scale for a particular area. The relationship may not be so clear overall since more educated people can, if used correctly, generate more opportunities for doing things a) by buying more and b) using the output of other educated people. Think, for a slightly different example, that the value of theatre graduates increases as there are more people who are able to appreciate the difference between a good and a bad play. The same goes for mathematicians. If there are engineers who know what to do with the mathematics then mathematics may actually be a profitable activity.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
The 66% were companies not covered under the CRA, which did not have to give out the loans. The only reason the loans were a good investment was because they could be repackaged into CDOs and sold off, leaving the risk with the last sucker holding the bag, which was not the underwriting firm.
The investment vehicles used were created to offload bad debt in the 80's, but rapidly became frowned upon because everyone who did it went belly-up and it simply didnt look like the government would tolerate it on a large scale..
It was only when the worst Fannie and Freddie loans started being packaged that way in the 90's that the rest of the market then saw an opportunity to also offloaded bad loans in the same way, with the idea that the government was now never going to crack down on the practice of rating worthless paper as AAA and further that paper wasnt so worthless if the government was guaranteeing at least some of it.
So it was indeed a market distortion caused by government influences.
The individuals who could not pay the mortgage lacked the sophistication to tell they couldn't afford it was only part of the problem.
This is bullshit that assumes that people that take loans that they cant afford simply don't know what they are doing. Poor people arent naive. Most of the time they know exactly what they are doing.
This idea that there is a large class of people too stupid to make decisions is fallacious.. in fact the idea that a lot of people need government to help them was the fucking problem to begin with. Families that bring home $35K/year know that they cannot afford a fucking $300,000 home. Don't let some twat trying to lay all the blame on the banks tell you differently.
"His name was James Damore."
There are terrific similarities between the two groups. They are both angry about the bank bailouts, but one focuses its rage on the government for providing the bailout and the other focuses its rage on Wall Street for taking it. In fact, the biggest difference between the two may be their demographic: Tea Party is mostly older and OWS mostly younger, making this a conflict of generations rather than classes. The problem is the manipulators are hard at work keeping people from finding any common ground by demonizing the other side instead of addressing their grievances.
The Tea Party got this treatment from the Huffington Post, who focused on the most racist signs from the protesters. Now we're seeing the same thing, with Andrew "we have the guns" Breitbart's photographer blatantly staging a photo of a protester supposedly defecating on a police car. Brietbart's previous credits include videos edited to make USDA employee Shirley Sherrod look like a racist and ACORN employees look like they were giving tax evasion advice on running child prostitution rings.
I sympathized with the early Tea Party. Now I sympathize with these protesters, and this constant demonization of them is so heartbreaking. For the first time in my life I'm confronting these people on Facebook, forcing them to support their statements with references or showing them how they are being manipulated (90% of the time by a story I can trace back to Breitbart). For a week they fought back, but then they toned down their attacks... Unfortunately, watching the new Facebook Ticker, I can see that they have merely taken their hatred to where they think I can't see it. Wonderful social experiment that new Facebook Ticker, see what you're "Friends" are saying about you behind your back and there's no way to turn it off.
All we can do is try to get people to see the human beings behind the villainous caricatures. When they try to connect the movement to the "sinister machinations of George Soros," I point out that Soros is a prolific philanthropist and humanitarian. When they call the protesters scum, slackers, and anarchists, I point them to the We are the 99% blog and ask them to justify their position with references from that site.
People in the Tea Party should be doing the same thing, putting a human face on their movement. We should be finding common ground. Keeping us fighting each other is exactly what the powers that be need to prevent any significant change.
i ~ Celebrating Science, Cyberspace, Speculation
It's of general interest to nerds as it dictates our future condition. Some nerds are in the 1%, but most are at best middle class and this directly affects us either way.
Occupy is supposed to be about the will of the people, not a rally for any one political party Whichever Occupy groups you may be a member of, beware of those who are trying to co-opt the movement for their own agendas. Democracy not dictatorship!
My views are no more important than anyone elses. That's the beauty of Occupy. It looks like it may be the first truly democratic movement to ever wield the power of the internet. I've always believed that with the internet, we could achieve true democracy where people vote on Parliamentary/Senate/Congress issues DIRECTLY rather than through representatives. We're not there yet, but hopefully we will be soon.
While it's easy to set up some sort of system for voting, it'd be much harder to democratize the process of submitting legislation to be voted on.
The only thing I could suggest is something like the website the US government set up, where anyone can start a petitiion and any petition that collects a certain number of votes during a given time frame would be automatically tabled for voting by the general public.
I figure the same people who would be too apathetic to submit petitions, vote on them, or vote on the tabled legislation is also probably too apathetic to vote in our existing elections.
The Occupy groups are probably going to have to do something like that to narrow down the diversity of demands to a set that can actually be presented and acted upon. While reigning banks in may be a relatively clear goal in the US, the goals of the Occupy protests in the rest of the world are not so clear cut.
I think it's telling that anyone who advocates change that threatens the profits of the status quo is automatically labelled socialist, communist, hippie, or worse by them. It just goes to show how indefensible the position of the status quo is when they can't come up with a better argument than name-calling and labelling to support their abusive behaviour.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
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.
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
www.teslabox.com
But a Ron Paul audit is silly, if just because his stated objectives are silly: He believes in hard money, and hard money is not, in any way, shape or form, what we need.
Ask a market monetarist, and they'll say that the issue is not that the fed is doing too much, but that it's doing too little, and in the wrong direction. That what we need is higher inflation, not less. But if we give Paul more of a voice, We'll see ourselves with high unemployment for another couple of decades.
If Ron Paul's economic agenda wasn't batshit crazy, he'd at least get some sympathy from the left. But as it is, he'll never go anywhere. I keep wishing for someone to take his views on immigration and foreign affairs, but tied to some modern economic ideas instead.
Just because you can make a lot of money doing something doesn't mean a degree in it isn't a Mickey Mouse qualification.
I mean, if there was such a thing as a degree in kicking an inflated cow's stomach around for 90 minutes, would the existence of Wayne Rooney and David Beckham mean that said qualification was equivalent to a Master's in engineering from MIT?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
On one hand I agree, on the other I don't. If everyone went to school for something practical they would have less to complain about, even if the glut of engineers and programmers would lower the over-all wages and importance of everyone currently in the fields. But on the other hand our society would become a big, boring, mess completely lacking in content or context. We, as a society, need history, philosophy, and art majors as much as we need engineers. There should be more to education than being a mere high-level trade school. Further, many applied fields would also have to be included, much of math and physics are pretty much useless (from a purely economic point of view). Yes, expecting to get rich from art school is also pretty stupid, but there is nothing wrong with following your passions instead of the almighty dollar. I have more respect for your average English major than someone doing a business program, since it is doubtful the person doing the latter has any actual interest in being a better person.
Yes, I'm biased, as one half of my education is pretty much universally considered "useless" (and I don't care). I never expect to get rich from it, I never expect to be able to formally apply it (sans being a professor), I never expected to exploit my education so I can buy another house/car/arbitrary symbol of monetary success. I really don't even care if I can, since that wasn't the point. I could have gone to school for something "valuable", but chose not to, since I don't care if I'm ever rich. Hell, everyone tried to nudge me down engineering or CS, since they match my real life interests and hobbies. I could never bring myself to do it though, since I don't want to turn my hobbies into a soul-less, joyless, life of drudgery (unless I'm extraordinarily lucky). I also don't complain that people won't hire me based on my academic program, though.
The other half my my education is useful if one takes it down the practical path, sadly I focused on the purely academic, research path instead.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
Give me a break -- a person with an advanced degree looking at this kid-job is desperate because there are not enough real jobs out there even for people who could provide value. If I had a position requiring a Ph.D. -- I'd round file all the apps from current undergrads. Or as another example, when I need my taxes done, I don't call a plumber, but I sure don't call my accountant when my toilet backs up. That isn't hypocrisy.
The real root problem of this is the lack of good jobs, even a lack of crappy jobs. Those jobs have largely left the country and now the highest aspiration one can have is being a middleman taking a cut of some financial transaction. That isn't sustainable.
If you accept that job-exports have hurt the middle class, you should ask yourself why that happened. In most cases it will surely boil down to the cozy relationship between mega-business interests and the politicians they buy and this is at the heart of the OWS issues.
Now, there are different ways to attack the problem -- one could tax those who have manipulated the system, or one could eliminate that system altogether. The discussion right now should not be about ridiculing those who are trying to improve the lot of the middle class, but in deciding how to go about fixing our problems. I personally would rather see a systemic change, but something really must be done.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
They can't, because it's bullshit. Here's a link to the act itself. Note the words "consistent with safe and sound operations."
Then there's the fact that most bad subprime debt was issued by institutions outside the scope of the act, and that commercial real estate - also outside the scope - is in an equally bad or worse state than home loans.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Due to the failure of government to block an unending stream of bank mergers, leading to ever more greater concentrations of financial risk and power, that's true.
But it doesn't excuse the fact that a year later the banks turned obscene profits, offshored those profits, and paid virtually NOTHING in taxes. The bailouts should have been LOANS -- every single bank financial statement I've seen for the year shows they made enough money to pay back their bailout funds, but not ONE offered to do so.
One thing the TEA party and Occupy definitely seem to agree on is that corporate bailouts need to stop. No business should be allowed to grow so large and powerful that it's failure can bring down the economy of an entire nation. Allowing it to get to that point was insanity; government's refusal to correct the issue is criminal.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
There's definitely been some illegal stuff going on. For example, banks have been systematically committing perjury to get foreclosures on houses they can't even prove they own the mortgage on.
It goes even beyond that. The GDP/capita in the U.S. has increased 6 fold (after adjustments for inflation) since 1960 and yet real income for 99% of us has declined.
We get told we're being greedy when we want more income. There is NOTHING greedy about wanting more income when we're producing 6 times as much as we did before. The greed is that we're being paid less and have less security than ever.
Then to add insult to injury, the only government "services" that don't get cut in an austerity budget are the ones that provide no benefit whatsoever to the people.
This isn't confined to the U.S., I just used those figures because they're the ones I know.
We are under no obligation whatsoever to let corporations exist at all. We are under no obligation whatsoever to continue consenting to be governed by the current U.S. government. We are under no obligation to let 1% of the population control 50% of the wealth. Given that, even the more "extreme" demands being heard from Occupy protestors are quite reasonable. They could all be granted today in full and the 1% would still never do without for a day in their lives.
Indeed, almost all industrialised countries have always been somewhere between, it's funny how heated arguments can get about jumping a few inches on the long line.
I think it's fairly ignorant to blame all of the US's current issues on entitlements however. The country is also paying for an army big enough to fight the rest of the world at once that's busy waging two simultaneous wars while it's government is deadlocked into a position where it can neither raise taxes nor lower expenditure(Since you can't politically survive lowering the military or entitlement budgets).
And even disregarding the sorry state of the US government budget, the wealth discrepancy in the US appears to have been growing consistently for over half a century which shows that if there are too much entitlements, they don't appear to be going to the poor.
So... people should be responsible for their own actions, unless they're bankers, in which case the responsibility of them granting too many high-risk loans and going bankrupt should be laid on the poor instead?
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
That's not a symptom of an over simplified worldview, that's a symptom of soundbite reporting. If you have perhaps 10 whole seconds to express your view to the so-called news, what would you say? Keep in mind that whatever you say, they will probably just lift a sentence or two out of context anyway, especially since they have been consistently downplaying Occupy from day one.
Social Democracy works just great however. Pretending that there isn't a middle ground between Capitalism and Socialism is stupid.
I happen to live in a social democratic country (Denmark), and let me tell you that it's not dance on roses by any means. It may sound like the golden middle road, and it might be, but it also combines evils of both the system. It is also a system that tend to lead to more and more socialism, and less and less on capitalism, which has sent Denmark sliding down the list of rich countries (we are currently loosing a few ranks every year).
Oh sure, the best system is probably some mix of capitalism and public benefits, but getting the right mix is neigh impossible. And anyway, USA is not even close to pure capitalism, especially not the real estate and banking segments.
Currently, I am wondering whether voting should be reserved for those not receiving public benefits. Alienation would be a key problem with that idea, though.
Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.
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.
The Occupy Wall Street demands are starting to focus. They're all quite reasonable. This is a revolutionary movement that wants to pass HR 1489, the "Return to Prudent Banking Act". That's something that real conservatives ought to be supporting. It's about returning to the system that worked from 1933 to 1999, where banks had to stay out of the stock market and brokerages couldn't accept deposits. This separation prevented trouble on Wall Street from taking down banks.
The Occupy Wall Street movement wants the Department of Justice to get tough on crime on Wall Street. That, too, is completely in line with conservative tradition. They want a tougher Securities and Exchange Commission and restrictions on campaign spending. None of this is even slightly radical.
Everything on that list would have been supported by President Eisenhower, arguably the best Republican president in the last century. (Eisenhower delivered peace and prosperity while facing down the Soviet threat, which was quite real back then. He made it look easy; he'd often knock off around 3PM and go play golf. Of course, he'd already been in charge of winning WWII in Europe; compared to that, the presidency was a vacation. His greatest skill was that he could pick the right subordinate for the job and keep them on mission. He managed both Patton and Montgomery effectively during WWII.)
The Republicans have lost their way. (Look at the collection of losers and weirdos running for the Republican presidential nomination.) Republican moderates should be supporting Occupy Wall Street.
I think the scheme was something like this: (1) lie about having a job on your load application, since nobody seems to care to actually check; (2) buy a $400k house; (3) your house goes up in value 20% per year = $80k (increasing); (4) get a 2nd mortgage on the increased equity and use the $80k as income; (5) repeat.
Occupation: professional homeowner, and it pays enough to live off of and pay your mortgage. This scheme works well until your house stops increasing in value enough each year, in which case it all goes kerblooey. The only real naivety in this scheme is thinking a house will appreciate 20% in value every year forever; that's just not sustainable. But still, if you're a deadbeat, you get a few years of living large until going back to deadbeathood.
The problem is the tea party is a sham. Oh sure it started out as this grass roots thing, which had some good ideas like term limits, but then the Koch bros and the "tea party express" rolled in and ran over the grass roots portion like a Mac truck. Now it is just another mouthpiece for the 1%ers.
Hell look up what the Koch bros are for, then look at the tea party platform, you'll find its pretty much point for point, and that is because the Koch bros and Tea Party Express are bankrollong to the tune of millions to make sure the tea party becomes teabaggers and so far looks like they've succeeded.
That is gonna be the problem with trying to get grass roots ANYTHING going for long enough to actually change anything, because if they can't crush it (look at how many in the MSM is lining up to call OWS every filthy name in the book) then the 1%ers will simply buy it, as the Koch bros did with the tea party. Herman Cain is a Koch bros creation BTW, follow the money, he's been bought.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
It's about your grandparents and great grandparents, because they were the ones who put you into this cabal by voting the way that promoted their personal interests but completely neglected the eventual outcome. Now you are standing there, 17 Trillion USD were already paid out more in SS benefits than were collected in taxes, but the bonds are there and the taxes must be raised to pay for them! Well, maybe you think the Fed will save you by monetizing all that debt, after all this is the prevailing Keynesian policy that everybody seems to love so much. Of-course that's the same policy that is one of the larger reasons out there for the gambling in the market, which leads to inflating all sorts of bubbles instead of promoting actual savings and investments and businesses.
But don't worry, the white knight in the shining armor will come out with another brilliant 3d chess type strategy to save the day.
Obviously all of this is possible because have short memories and they don't even bother to learn about their own history even if it only happened 50 years ago, that the markets serve people's interests better than governments do (bonus points for government data used in the presentation.)
And now, the people are occupying Wall Street with demands that give the Communist Manifesto itself run for its money, even though we know just how wrong Marx was.
But I guess these are the same people who sincerely do not have an answer to a simple question, what is economy - consumption or production?
---
Main problem identified? Ignorance.
Solutions? Vote for people who actually know their shit even if you believe it goes against your own personal short term gain for once.
You can't handle the truth.
I didn't say it had anything to do with the Communist manifesto, I said (and I quote):
And now, the people are occupying Wall Street with demands that give the Communist Manifesto itself run for its money
.
It gives Communist Manifesto RUN FOR ITS MONEY.
Here is Communist Manifesto in simple point form:
1. Abolition of private property and the application of all rents of land to public purposes.
2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance.
4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
5. Centralization of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.
6. Centralization of the means of communications and transportation in the hands of the State.
7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the state, the bringing into cultivation of waste lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.
8. Equal liability of all to labor. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries, gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country, by a more equitable distribution of population over the country.
10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children's factory labor in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production.
Here are some of the OWS demands that I gave a point by point analysis in a link in my first comment:
Demand one: Restoration of the living wage. ....... raise the minimum wage to twenty dollars an hr.
Demand two: Institute a universal single payer healthcare system.
Demand three: Guaranteed living wage income regardless of employment.
Demand four: Free college education.
Demand five: Begin a fast track process to bring the fossil fuel economy to an end while at the same bringing the alternative energy economy up to energy demand.
Demand six: One trillion dollars in infrastructure (Water, Sewer, Rail, Roads and Bridges and Electrical Grid) spending now.
Demand seven: One trillion dollars in ecological restoration planting forests, reestablishing wetlands and the natural flow of river systems and decommissioning of all of America's nuclear power plants.
Demand eight: Racial and gender equal rights amendment.
Demand nine: Open borders migration. anyone can travel anywhere to work and live.
Demand ten: Bring American elections up to international standards of a paper ballot precinct counted and recounted in front of an independent and party observers system.
Demand eleven: Immediate across the board debt forgiveness for all. Debt forgiveness of sovereign debt, commercial loans, home mortgages, home equity loans, credit card debt, student loans and personal loans now! All debt must be stricken from the "Books." World Bank Loans to all Nations, Bank to Bank Debt and all Bonds and Margin Call Debt in the stock market including all Derivatives or Credit Default Swaps, all 65 trillion dollars of them must also be stricken from the "Books." And I don't mean debt that is in default, I mean all debt on the entire planet period.
Demand twelve: Outlaw all credit reporting agencies.
Demand thirteen: Allow all workers to sign a ballot at any time during a union organizing campaign or at any time that represents their yeah or nay to having a union represent them in collective bargaining or to form a union.
-----
I thus contend that Communist Manifesto is NOTHING compared to the list of demands from the OWS movement based on just the points about guaranteed minimum income, guaranteed health care and overall debt forgiveness ALONE, never mind the rest of that drivel.
My point stands, you have no right to call my statements ignorant as you have no idea what you are talking about.
You can't handle the truth.
A moderate opinion on slashdot? How dare you!
You are correct on all points about the Tea Party being co-opted by politicians and the OWS movement also summarily moving in the same direction except it is being subverted by the socialist agenda. I personally believe that this is in no small part due to the 24 hour news cycle pulling some half literate socialist off the street and giving them a bit of barely comprehensible air time. The same thing could be found when the Tea Party movement started, the media grabbed one of the tricorne wearing, misspelled sign waving, isolationists stuck them up in front of the camera and said "Well here's what the Tea Party is." Obviously there are problems on all sides, however the majority of Americans straddle the fence on many many issues despite what the media and the politicians would like you to believe.
There really is no fix all to the situation, however I feel that term limits to prevent professional politicians, and hard caps on campaign spending would be a step in the right direction. It was probably a Slashdot commentator who said it best (so I'm going to rip them off) "Did you ever stop to wonder why someone would spend 80 million dollars to be elected to a 180 thousand dollar a year job? Obviously there is something else going on behind the scenes."
We are under no obligation whatsoever to let corporations exist at all.
This is a point that is usually missed, and hopefully the OWS will bring to the forefront. The existence of corporations is not a right. It is a privilege.
"So wtf happens? Of course the banks do as required and make loans to people who really shouldn't be getting those loans, the government said they have to."
That's simply wrong. Nobody required banks to make bad loans. NOBODY. Government only required to use the same criteria for loans in 'bad' and 'good' areas.
And facts show that delinquency of loans in 'bad' areas is the same as for the loans in 'good' areas. So government had absolutely no part in it, apart from allowing banks to build CDO scams.
the list of demands from the OWS movement
You mean the list of the demands from some guy posting on a forum.
It represents the OWS movement about as much as the people demanding that the government keep its hands out of their Medicare represent the tea party.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
It was only when the worst Fannie and Freddie loans started being packaged that way in the 90's that the rest of the market then saw an opportunity to also offloaded bad loans in the same way, with the idea that the government was now never going to crack down on the practice of rating worthless paper as AAA and further that paper wasnt so worthless if the government was guaranteeing at least some of it.
So it was indeed a market distortion caused by government influences.
Really? The government failing to crack down on malfeasance is a market distortion caused by government influences? I agree they were the right ones to stop it, but failing to stop the banks from crashing the world and being the cause are two different things.
Families that bring home $35K/year know that they cannot afford a fucking $300,000 home. Don't let some twat trying to lay all the blame on the banks tell you differently.
Seriously? You seriously believe that millions of people bought houses that they knew they would not be able to pay for? That millions of people went into it knowing they would be foreclosed? You really believe that such a large number of people -- in fact, a very large percentage of the people who bought between 2004 and 2007 -- would buy a house, fully understanding that it would get foreclosed?
You don't find it slightly more probable that they did not understand the concepts of ARM or reverse amortization? That the banks that were writing the loans had not decided to downplay the risk since they were selling the paper before the ink was dry, and hence faced no risk themselves?
Let me put it in perspective; I'm working on an economic research project relating to maximizing income by maximizing the long-term GDP growth rate. I am consulting with people from a variety of perspectives. Only two have intuitively grasped that maximizing long-term GDP growth is equal to maximizing income. I'm having a hard time explaining it to, among others, a retired investment banker who now teaches economics at a respected business school. And you think the average chucklehead understands reverse amortization?
You think that he understands reverse amortization, and knows he will get foreclosed, but signs on anyway? And that it wasn't just a few hundred, or a few thousand, but millions that did the exact same thing?
You write well, so you are clearly not retarded, but it seems like you haven't taken the time to critically analyze the situation from all angles.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
I don't know if you've noticed this, but neither of those things involve the government forcibly spending your money on things you don't want or approve of, and as such, they aren't evil (not that a society can really exist without some measure of that, but people should be aware that while it's a necessary evil, it's still evil), whereas the kind of socialism which pundits are talking about do involve government coercion. Limbaugh might not make the distinction, but I do, and you should. Food for thought.
Disclaimer: IANAL. This post is, however, legal advice, and creates an attorney-client relationship.
What is with all the corporate sheeple posting all the negative personal attacks against a worldwide movement of people? Front what I've seen these groups are far too diverse to be summed up so simplistically.
Capitalism should not be a religion but it sure has become one over the years. You can attack god more easily than the mighty mammon. Some of these TV bastards seem to have combined the two into 1 god.
Class warfare is something that never stopped and probably never will - anybody who acts like it isn't going on is either waging it or not competent enough to listen to. Many of these issues are the same age old ones just with newer details.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
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.
Wasn't the Tea Party just somewhere for disaffected Republicans in the first place anyway?
I've always called it the "I cant beleive it's not the Republican" party.
It seems like a good ploy to prevent a disaffected voter base from going to the opposition.
1. Voters become disaffected due to policy of ruling by fiat.
2. Disaffected voters have too much cognitive dissonance to outright join the opposition.
3. Create smaller party with wide eyed ideals.
4. Wait for disaffected voters to sign up.
5. Use preferential voting system to make smaller party's vote count towards major party.
6. Profit (continue ruling by fiat).
Seen this happen in Australia. Conservatives unhappy with the Liberal party (big L, they're conservatives) vote National, but the National party is a member of the Coalition with the Liberal party. In other words, the Liberals own the Nationals. So Disaffected Voter A votes National to stick it to the Liberals. Liberals get his vote via preferential voting, Disaffected Voter ignorant of preferential voting believes his plan has worked but remains disaffected.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Actually, a liberal arts education is a good preparation for doing practical things.
Look at the biographies of the Nobel laureates in medicine or chemistry. http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/ A lot of them were liberal arts majors, before they switched to science. For example, Eric Kandel. The old European scientists knew the value of a broad education. When things weren't going according to the textbook, they knew how to think it out.
They knew how to think.
(BTW, Steve Jobs took a course in calligraphy during his dropout days, and it turned out to be damn useful in designing the first Macintosh. That's why he put all those typefaces in.)
My take on these demands.
Oh, sure, everybody who has debt find this appealing. Too bad for everybody who ever saved and whose money was loaned out.
However you have a mortgage, so you want debt to be forgiven, but your house is an asset that was bought by the bank and it's owned by the bank. You can easily have your debt forgiven - walk out of your mortgage.
If you don't walk out, but you want the debt forgiven, then what you actually want is confiscation of an asset from the bank, who owns it, and transfer of that asset to you.
--
Except for free money printed by the federal reserve, where do banks NORMALLY get money from? Loans by the bank's clients (so called 'depositors', but they are no depositors, they are lenders).
So for all debts to be 'forgiven', all of those loans to the banks also must be forgiven. This means everybody loses their meager savings, the personal accounts and pension funds and all the bonds ever printed by the government and all private corporations.
Don't forget, any bond is a debt obligation - you own any shares of a company? Company's debts are now forgiven, your shares are confiscated.
Of-course if such a thing was to happen, then the incentive to loan anybody any money again would be near 0. The interest on any debt would have to be approaching 100%/year (if not MORE), because the moral hazard would exist - anybody would just accumulate all the debts they could because you know what? They 'forgave' all the debts once, why not again?
--
Of-course this is what Americans are counting on right now, they are getting into more and more credit card debt as they have their mortgages. Somebody who makes 30-40K/year, has a 300K mortgage and 30K on a credit card... this person knows that he will NEVER be able to pay it, so for him the incentive is now to get as many credit cards as he possibly can, and buy more on them. 30K? Why not 35K? 40K? 50K?
Of-course who is really suffering, right? Just those Chinese, who produced all these goods and will not get their money back (also a confiscation).
--
So what about those student loans? All those students were told they need a degree or they won't get any job at all. So they went for those sociology majors and literature, etc., who cares what, right? After all - government guaranteed the debt. I expect the gov't WILL 'forgive' the debt. Of-course again, this is a giant confiscation, but also a huge moral hazard.
The only way that would make at least minimum amount of sense would be to forgive student debt by means testing (so only forgive it to those, who can't pay), but also get rid of student debt guarantee, so banks would really have no reason to give out loans to all those students for tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars for sociology.
Private loans are still possible, but you have to prove to the bank that you are doing something productive, so that you will be able to pay the money back. At the same time the demand for education would CRASH, because most people won't get loans, and it's a good thing, it would immediately bring the prices down (and many of those ridiculous institutions will have to downsize and cut spending as well).
This is a GOOD thing. USA doesn't need millions of sociology majors. It needs actual workers and business people - the kind that go out and do something on their own.
--
The entire system is broken of-course, many debts won't be repaid, not just by students and house 'owners', but by financial institutions and cities and States and countries. But this will NOT increase prosperity, but it will put an end to all this borrowing as interest rates would be crazy high due to all this moral hazard.
You can't handle the truth.
So poor people should be held to account for taking loans offered to them they knew they couldn't afford, but private loan repackagers and those offering said loans weren't smart enough to to realize that the "everyone is making tons of money on crap labeled AAA" merry-go-round would eventually stop and crash the world economy? The latter was merely a "market distortion caused by government influences"? So they were dumb, or just couldn't help themselves, or what?
Actually, we ALL know the latter is true: they were smart enough to know they were taking HUGE risks of running the economy into the ground, but they were too selfish to care, and hoped someone else would be left holding the bad when the whole thing collapsed...and they were right, WE (the 99%) were left holding the bag.
With the first link, the chain is forged.
How about the specific items OWS would like to see changed:
1. CONGRESS PASS HR 1489 ("RETURN TO PRUDENT BANKING ACT" http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=h112-1489 ). THIS REINSTATES MANY PROVISIONS OF THE GLASS-STEAGALL ACT.
2. USE CONGRESSIONAL AUTHORITY AND OVERSIGHT TO ENSURE APPROPRIATE FEDERAL AGENCIES FULLY INVESTIGATE AND PROSECUTE THE WALL STREET CRIMINALS who clearly broke the law and helped cause the 2008 financial crisis
3. CONGRESS ENACT LEGISLATION TO PROTECT OUR DEMOCRACY BY REVERSING THE EFFECTS OF THE CITIZENS UNITED SUPREME COURT DECISION which essentially said corporations can spend as much as they want on elections.
4. CONGRESS PASS THE BUFFETT RULE ON FAIR TAXATION SO THE RICH AND CORPORATIONS PAY THEIR FAIR SHARE & CLOSE CORPORATE TAX LOOP HOLES AND ENACT A PROHIBITION ON HIDING FUNDS OFF SHORE.
5. CONGRESS COMPLETELY REVAMP THE SECURITIES AND EXCHANGE COMMISSION and staff it at all levels with proven professionals who get the job done protecting the integrity of the marketplace so citizens and investors are both protected.
6. CONGRESS PASS SPECIFIC AND EFFECTIVE LAWS LIMITING THE INFLUENCE OF LOBBYISTS AND ELIMINATING THE PRACTICE OF LOBBYISTS WRITING LEGISLATION THAT ENDS UP ON THE FLOOR OF CONGRESS.
7. CONGRESS PASSING "Revolving Door Legislation" LEGISLATION ELIMINATING THE ABILITY OF FORMER GOVERNMENT REGULATORS GOING TO WORK FOR CORPORATIONS THAT THEY ONCE REGULATED.
8. ELIMINATE "PERSONHOOD" LEGAL STATUS FOR CORPORATIONS.
I'm not exactly sure what point you are trying to make, but I hardly see where concepts like the 8 above are "fooling" anyone into doing something bad for this country.
but in a *lot* of cases the loan agent (who is supposed to be working *for* them) would take advantage of them...It's not fair to just kick everyone out of their homes
People want to be treated as adults, but when the going gets tough some of them don't want to shoulder the responsibility that comes with that status. It's true that RL can be a harsh mistress, but how much have these people really lost? They got to live in their homes for a couple of years with low payments that were almost 100% interest so that they could write them off their taxes. They weren't really "homeowners", as the term has previously been understood, but rather glorified renters. Well, now it's time for them to take a trip through bankruptcy and find a cheap place to rent. There is nothing more expensive than ignorance and now it's time for them to settle that debt. Perhaps in the future they will spend less time updating their Facebook status and more time reading. They can start with Dave Ramsey's books, sometimes crude but very effective, and work their way up from there.
Obviously, you're frugal and would *never* make a financial mistake, or get laid off in the worst economic crisis in 70 years
Actually, I've been laid off twice and rehired twice since this whole mess began in 2007 and thanks in no small part to my fiscal prudence I was able to use some of what I had so carefully saved to get myself and my family through the rough patches. Of course, when you ask young people today what savings are they look at you like you're some relic left over from the Great Depression. Maybe now they can finally understand what their grandparents were talking about when they said debt was to be used sparingly, if at all, and savings was something that only fools did without.