Occupy THIS, Commie!

Re: Occupy America

So you're saying you'd get a large grassroots group of mostly middle and lower class people together as a group and demand that things change. Something of a, protest, perhaps? Interesting.

 

Re: Occupy America

Proxy activism is a nice idea, but I'm pretty sure they've already developed several tactics to defeat it. Saul Alinsky didn't see this shit coming. Not even close.

 

Re: Occupy America

Yes, but there's a certain baseline we can expect. When they're going around suggesting that the Supreme Court's decision on corporate actions re: speech implies that corporations are free from taxation, or that the nation needs a $20 minimum wage with a guaranteed full income regardless of employment status, or immediate forgiveness of all debt (any kind, any one), or eliminating any and all credit reporting agencies.... these are not the folk we should be listening to. And yes, all of those are actual examples of things they have said. I understand their anger and share some of it, but this is like me traveling to CERN to debate their take on physics.

 

Re: Occupy America

Well thats not true, clearly a rich hippie from Manhattan or Brooklyn has a firm grasp on the nuances of the financial and economic system.

I feel economics has officially become like politics in the way that anyone can have an opinion about it and anyone can think that they are 100% right and if we just listened to them the world would become a utopia. I consider myself pretty knowledgeable about economics, but 9 times out of 10 I won't engage anyone in a discussion about economics because invariably it becomes a shouting match with people saying they got this info from this online source and another person saying they got their info from another online source and theirs is better because some bullshit reason they're making up. For this reason and more I totally abstain from these conversations. The only time I talk economics is if people I am talking to have a real grasp on basic concepts and the ability to comprehend what I say, and if they disagree, disagree with some logic. Sometimes I feel like these people participating in these protests are the same people who believed childhood vaccines gave kids autism. They hear some insane claim, see an incomprehensibly small amount of evidence that supports them, then they run to the masses shouting their new Gospel.

I hate the shouting match that economics has become, I really do. Btw anyone see Gingrich saying we should fire Benanke? This is exactly why the Fed is quasi-governmental. So that one of the major players in our economy isn't prisoner to political bullshit.

 

Re: Occupy America

There's "protest" and "protest"; it's all in the manner in which you do it. Marching on Wall Street and having a whinge when your own personal apathy and self-interest are part and parcel of the problem is not constructive. Changing the way you do things to show a bunch of asshats that what they're doing is unacceptable, on the other hand, is.

I'm sure there are ways to defeat it, just as there are ways to defeat the current situation. Saying it's "too hard, don't bother" is fatalism. What if everyone took all their money out of 401ks and made their own investment decisions? (assuming they can, I don't know your laws)

Well, you'd get two probable outcomes:

1. Investment in dumbass ideas would go up.
2. Someone on Wall Street would take notice.

Either way a change would be effected.

 

Re: Occupy America

Just about anything that becomes a hot-button issue these days devolves into ridiculous shouting matches. But yeah, politics and economic beliefs are intertwined in ways people don't realize. When I took economics in college, my professor was very intelligent and presented the material in a clear, logical manner. It was only later that I understood how very conservative his economic beliefs were. He was for very limited government oversight, believed strongly in pure capitalism, and taught the Laffer curve as gospel, among other ideas. I admit to being somewhat ignorant of economics beforehand, but only later did I realize that there were even other viewpoints to a lot of what he taught. The average student in this class who only grasped "free market good, government intervention bad" would probably wind up one of those shouting their opinion as fact without the reasonable, logical explanation of a professor. The inverse example is easily seen as well.

I guess it all goes back to people being unwilling to examine opinions they've already formed, confirmation bias, etc. That, and nobody knows how to engage in a proper debate or form a logical argument anymore. It's all sort of depressing if you think about things too much.

 

Re: Occupy America

I'm conflicted about this whole thing.

I genuinely believe 'the system' isn't broken. I think it does exactly what it sets out to do, which is benefit the people that run it. Full disclosure: I'm young and only just getting an introduction into how power and influence work at even a fairly low level, but the 7 figure deals I've personally seen done have been agreed in a quiet meeting long before the cover your ass justifications get presented to whatever committee is officially running things. This isn't even a conspiracy theory, so much as it is human nature (we trust people we know and that are similar to us, not abstract figures on a spreadsheet). The powerful people run the system, almost by definition. They run it for their own self interest, which again is human nature. I don't like the hypocrisy where they claim to run it for the common people, but I guess its necessary (to keep the people being exploited dormant.) So, if you think 'ordinary' people should have a greater say in how things are run, you better fucking get off your ass and protest. I think it's great that people are actually starting to take notice of what happens behind the curtain; the more attention paid, the less corruption and legally fine but morally odious dealings take place. I'd love to see the whole system drastically changed (although personally I think US drug reform should come before all of this shit; oh, you are living on ramen and will never buy a house? Well, people are literally being tortured to death from Mexico to Afghanistan because some cunt politician in the US (and Australia, and the UK, et al) wants more votes from morons with a 'tough on drugs' stance.).

On the other hand: I'm not convinced that general protesting without a specific list of demands achieves anything but an illusory feeling of power for the protesters. Wasn't there something that happened recently that made the point that without goals and an exit strategy, it's hard to effect meaningful change? I'd like to be wrong, but without a single focus (equal rights; stop invading countries; etc) I struggle to see how this will do anything at all. Also, I think they undermine their own cause with the huge doses of self pity. I personally am much more sympathetic to "We're getting screwed; stop sodomising us in the following way" as opposed to "my life sucks, and I don't know why, but someone fix it for me" .

Tealdeer: the system benefits those that run it; to change this, activism is great; the Occupy Wallstreet activism leaves me cold.

 

Re: Occupy America

Interesting enough thread. Somewhat all over the map, much like the protests.

The protests have captured the imagination of the young and/or unemployed, and the media. But they haven’t done a good job yet of communicating any actionable demands.

The U.S. is not currently on a good trajectory. The U.S. economy is soft, as is the current world economy. Unemployment is a definite problem. The inherent gains in productivity with globalization and information technology are not helping unemployment go down any time soon.

However, there is also hope for the U.S. Corporations have about $2 trillion in cash reserves now. Banks have another $2 trillion. Banks aren’t lending to small businesses much, which is a problem given as how small businesses tend to create a lot of jobs. Corporations aren’t investing in inventory, production, or personnel too much now, which is also a problem.

But unlike the last several years, there is now a significant cash reserve available in the private sector to boost the economy quickly through a lot more jobs being opened up if anything can convince the private sector to spend the cash.

Regardless of where the protests go for the next month, I am very curious if the protestors continue to Occupy Wall Street in late November and December. Because then the East Coast weather becomes fairly nasty, and the protest is no longer one big happy dirty hippy party.

 

Re: Occupy America

I think people that want to know what exactly the protests are about are going to be sorely disappointed. There isn't one single thing to focus on. It's not like the Rodney King riots or Vietnam. I don't know if you've noticed, but there's shit like this going on all over the world. Yes, there's countries that are way more fucked up than the US, but that doesn't invalidate the problems going on here. Just because there's a dude being raped by a cactus doesn't mean that the guy being raped by the spiked dildo should shut the fuck up because it's not as bad.

The system is broken. There's so many things wrong with it that it's impossible to protest one thing. This is a country that has a military budget bigger than the whole world. That has spent untold billions of dollars on what is basically an unwinnable war. That, when it's struggling for money, thinks that education should be the first thing to cut. That gives CEO's millions of dollars that are used as retirement funds. This is a country where Michelle fucking Bachman is a serious presidential candidate.

I've talked about it before, but this is a system that thinks that just because I'm 21 that I need less money for healthcare. That thinks it's okay to overturn a decision by a judge without giving a reason for it and might not even let me appeal the decision without so much as a letter. That, when we find a private insurance to make up for $70,000 something dollars a year that they cut, will make the other insurance pay first and might not even reallocate the money they save for my nursing care. And, by the way, that private insurance? $500/month + other fees and a $75,000/year spending limit.

So no, "Shut the fuck up and get a job" is not a valid counter argument. Saying that there's no point in complaining because it's too broken to fix is exactly the opposite of what this country was founded on. It has to start somewhere, journey of a thousand miles and all that. You want to just sit there while everything goes to shit? Fine. But don't expect everyone else to do the same.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have drum circle to get to. .

 

Re: Occupy America

Phila Lawyer's take on the Occupy movement: <a class="postlink" href="http://bit.ly/okIaF1" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://bit.ly/okIaF1</a>

Spoiler

Are you gonna bark all day, little doggy, or are you gonna bite?
- Mr. Blonde, Reservoir Dogs

"This is beginning of a revolution!" "The oligarchs can't stop us!" "The 99% are taking back the country!"
Nonsense. Occupy Wall Street is a dead end movement - a gaudy carnival of confused, frustrated misfits heading for the mother of all heartbreaks.

Not because they're soft-headed hippies, Socialists, or touting a hopelessly un-American message. Because their energy's misspent, misdirected, and they haven't a stitch of the commitment, or the appetite for risk, needed to succeed in flipping the status quo.* No, the fatal flaw in Occupy Wall Street's strategy, if that term can be applied to their efforts, is the fatal flaw in every other protest movement we see in America: All bark, no bite.

The One Percent these Ninety-Nine Percenters attack work in finance, government, and the bare knuckle intersection of industry and politics known as Crony Capitalism. These people are nihilists, predators. People who view life as combat, every interaction a zero sum game. These sorts don't bow to the government, and they sure as hell don't bow to public opinion. They long ago bought off all the regulators, all the Congressmen, and they own the mainstream media. You can scream at them from the sidewalks until your vocal cords are sandpaper and They Won't Hear a Thing. They will, rightly, snicker at you. Because you are weak. Because you are naive. Because you believe you can petition some magical referee for fouls and handicap a rigged game with free throws.

Here's a fact, my deluded, placard holding friends: The only time the One Percent listen - to anything - is when it impacts their bottom line. Unless you're costing them money, directly imperiling the system on which they're dependent for their wealth, in the most immediate and painful sense, your rallies might as well be mime theater in Central Park.

The only hope Occupy Wall Street has of achieving its goals is to rob the banking system of some of the capital it needs to live. And the only ways to do that are mass default, and mass withdrawal of funds. A monstrous collective exodus of deposits coupled with a unified refusal on the part of five or ten million borrowers to pay debt service to the banks they're protesting.**

The protesters don't have to do it forever. A few months of millions of previously performing borrowers withholding mortgage, credit card, and home equity payments to Bank of America would crater the company's already weakened stock, create a shark frenzy of epic proportion among short sellers. Five million people withholding on average $500.00 in monthly payments deprives the bank two and a half billion dollars. Five million people yanking all of their money out of BofA at once sucks out another what? Five, ten billion? All of it money on which the banks would be paid at least .25% by the Fed simply to hold as "excess reserve."

Now, with one trillion in deposits, neither of these things is going to sink BofA, or any other megabank like JPMorgan, Wells Fargo, or Citibank. But it would drive volatility through the ceiling, damage the banks' abilities to resurrect their already sagging stock prices, and far more important than those short term tangible economic impacts, it would cause the rest of the world to ask:

Have American citizens decided contracts mean nothing? That they're only as good as their unforceability? And does this attitude extend to their government? Does it plan walk away on certain of its debts? Surely America knows it can, and there isn't much the world could do about it. It also knows that if it's going to do so, it should do it now, before any of its creditors have enough power to inflict serious punitive measures on it for such a default.

That's a panic consideration. And if you want to fight a cabal of too big to fail financial institutions, the best, perhaps the only, effective weapon is panic - the hand grenade pin of bank runs and market collapses. When the paranoia sets in, minds turn to jelly. The reptile brain takes over - instinct, emotion... desperate manic hedging. The Masters of the Universe, as Tom Wolfe once described them, turn to bleating, feces-flinging monkeys. Everybody runs the horror show scenario in his head, gauging how the dominoes will crush him.

In a climate this skittish, no one would be immune from the madness. The fools and pros alike would all start running for the doors, pulling the money out of the market, out of the savings account... taking the gold bars out of the safe deposit box. And this chain reaction of fear, of irrational over-reaction, would be a nuclear Black Swan. It would brutalize investors, erase any hopes of us avoiding recession, and savage the global economy in which the highest income brackets mint their gains... And then, for good or ill, the voices behind things like Occupy Wall Street would have not only the serious attention of the One Percent, but real leverage with which to demand change.

This, however, would take risk - brass balls risk - and require massive organizational skill, and trust. And that's why it's never going to happen.

It's one thing to bark, quite another to bite.*** You can argue that sleeping in a park is a sacrifice of sorts, but not in the same way refusing to make a monthly loan payment will immediately tank your credit rating by fifty points. You can claim that going without a proper shower for two weeks is conceding creature comfort, but it's hardly comparable to giving up that essential credit card number you use for everything from Netflix, to buying your birth control pills, to purchasing the Amtrak tickets you used to get to downtown Manhattan in time for the first day of the occupation.

The ugly hidden reality of Occupy Wall Street is its every bit as nihilistic as Wall Street. The protesters' essential complaint isn't that the bailout of Wall Street was fundamentally unfair, but that they didn't get one too. Distilled to a single message, the crowd's incoherent gripes are no more than a demand for the same mulligan the incompetent bankers in the towers above them received. These protesters don't want change. They want their slice of an unsustainable, government-propped status quo... A fraudulent status quo that's going to collapse on those bankers soon enough.

It's that naked self-interest, coupled with a total lack of self-awareness, and absolute ignorance of the context in which they operate - the same pathology exhibited by bankers - that ultimately dooms Occupy Wall Street and other protests like it.

Occupy Wall Streeters would never - could never - band together to attack the banks' bottom line because they could never trust each other enough. To achieve a default en masse, by the millions, requires a movement of people able to move past the "Prisoner's Dilemma" at the heart of the undertaking: How can I be sure I'm not the only fool purposely defaulting? How can I be sure my fellow travelers are taking the same risk I am? These protesters are nowhere near united enough in their goals, or complaints, to observe that level of loyalty to one another.**** Just as a bunch of cynical bankers would, they'd suspect every other would-be defaulter was lying, and they'd lie too. Only a 100,000 or so of the five million defaults needed would occur.

And that low number gets to the final reason Occupy Wall Street will never show any teeth. A dog with a loud enough bark can telecast the impression he's many times his actual size. As long as no one looks behind his owner's hedge rows and sees he's a poodle, to passers by, he could be Doberman, or a Rottweiler. In exactly the same fashion, as long as they stick to filling a park or two in New York, and similar spaces in numerous cities around the country, the Occupiers can project the image of a possibly enormous revolution. If, on the other hand, they were compelled to put up or shut up - to seriously, concretely attack the banks with a mass default and withdrawal - their numbers could be determined with accuracy. Or, more specifically, the number of them truly committed to change and reform would be known.

That number would be small. Tiny, in fact. Because the ugly truth of the "Ninety-Nine Percent" is they're Just Another One Percent. The crowd only seems enormous because its judged against the backdrop of a single New York precinct, it's loud, and its goal is maximum attention. But if you look a little closer... If you consider Occupy Wall Street against the backdrop of an entire New York City metropolitan area of over eighteen million people, and compare the size of other protests to the populations of the cities in which they're taking place, you realize these gatherings involve a mere sliver of the citizenry.

Which isn't at all surprising, because protesting is what you do when you when you don't have the balls or brains to take serious action against that which aggrieves you. It's the comforting fiction you're doing something seditious, the safe rebellion. And that's why it will never succeed, and the rest of us needn't pay it mind. (Except for amusement, and to wonder if the people getting screwed in this economy will ever learn to fight fire with fire.)

Occupy Wall Street will never create meaningful change as long as it seeks to do so within the confines of the system. And it sure as hell isn't going to gain any sympathy seeking a goal as cynical as its "fair share" of Treasury Department largesse. If that's all it can do... If it can only bitch and whine for a do-over like the idiot bankers it protests-- Well, then it ought to find a good contractor and build permanent housing where it is - the bailout capital of the world.

I can't imagine a result more fitting than Wall Street and Occupy Wall Street living together. No two roommates deserve each other as much, or would compliment each other better. As anyone who's spent a few minutes observing the social dynamics of his local dive bar would attest, failures get along smashingly.


*That and, come Winter, they're done. It's one thing to camp in Indian Summer. Quite another to do Thanksgiving, and Christmas Eve, in a tent in thirty degree weather. ^
**I know the retort: "These people don't have any loans, or bank accounts. They're indigent deadbeats." My reply? Take a look at how many are carrying iPhones, and video cameras, and how many are wearing what appears to my somewhat trained eye to be Banana Republic clothing. These people have credit cards, and they have banks accounts. ^
***As someone who chucked a lucrative job he could no longer stand, taking a six figure income hit, I know the difference between whining to colleagues about wanting to quit, and actually doing so. ^
****Any one of them would quit the movement tomorrow if promised a well-paying job, or even a mere cash payment to leave. ^

 

Re: Occupy America

Spoiler

No, I will not be helpful.

 

Re: Occupy America

Might finally get laid.

 

Re: Occupy America

Citation needed.

If OWS really wanted to have an impact, somebody should print this

and hand it out to all the occupiers. When cold weather comes, it'll give them something to think about doing to try and get real attention. Of course, if they did get 5 million people to unite like that, BoA might just raise their new fee from $5 to $6 to make it up.

 

Re: Occupy America

These numbers look horribly low. What do they count a college degree as? Associates? Bachelors? Technical? I can honestly say that zero of my friends or acquaintances started as low as that median income out of college. By the age of 25, they were almost all much higher.

I could be way off, and my school (U of Minny) and friends could be outliers, but I'd say of the 30 or so people I'm using as a sample, I would say we're that far off. I'm also considering a mix of race, gender, and economical background but there is a lean to white/middle class.

 

Re: Occupy America

Apparently they have been reading our thread and have a plan similar to the one put forth by Philalawyer in his article. You can read about their plan here. I especially love the November 5th date. Seems like a reference to V For Vendetta. An excellent movie I just recently saw btw.

 

Re: Occupy America

I think the idea of OWS is interesting, and as such, am curious to see where it goes.

That said, I'm horribly jaded to protests in my city because I live in good old Portland, OR. I had class downtown the day of the big protest, and the protestors jammed up the light rail/bus lines to "march on the financial district." We don't really have a financial district, so they were just marching down streets in the downtown area. All they succeeded in doing was making sure the few sad people who did have jobs that required public transit didn't make it to their jobs on time that day.

Yesterday, I drove downtown and I realized the protestors have erected a shanty town in the middle of the city. I can't do anything but laugh about it. I don't think it is convincing anyone of anything except that people in Portland love living in tents, even within city limits. One person had a sign that just said, "WHITE PEOPLE."

I don't get it.

 

Re: Occupy America

Keep in mind that a few very small numbers from grad students and the partially employed will surely bring down the averages. When you add in your baristas, starving artists, Gamestop employees, etc. it's easier to see why the average might be lower than you'd initially expect.

But yes, these seem remarkably low for my experience. Among my cohort (admittedly upward biased: Georgetown 2011, mostly quantitative majors of some kind and a finance/econ bias), I'd put the pre-tax and post-signing-bonus average north of $50K. And the overwhelming majority are employed or in some kind of grad school, many of them having a choice between more than one job offer.

But these sorts of things tend to be heavily uneven. Not all college degrees are created equal. The numbers at a top tier school will look better than most flagship state universities, which will look better than most mediocre private schools, which will look better than mediocre state schools. My cohort also have it far, far better than your average graduate nationwide, and certainly recent graduates have it better than graduates of two to three years ago when hiring freezes were going into effect.

Employment prospects is an area where often talking in averages doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

 

Re: Occupy America

I can see how the movement might benefit people who have decent jobs, but want to be able to hold on to a bit more of their money have some increased stability going forward. And, I can see how this could benefit students still in school, who will benefit if entry level hiring picks up by the time they graduate.

But, what about the big mass of currently unemployed people (yo)? Is there anything in this movement that benefits them?