These protesters are channeling the spirits of Italian Soccer players. Basically their dream in life is to provoke the police as much as they can, then FLOP like a player diving for a yellow card the moment the slightest of contact happens. If you think about it, it's all they can do. They don't have the moral high ground, they don't have a clear or even unclear list of demands, and they don't have the ability to make anything happen either through intelligent actions or force. So they break the law in seemingly innocuous ways, refuse to deal with the consequences and thus drive up the consequences of their law breaking, and hope for a confrontation. Because if only a couple of them get cracked in the skulls with nightsticks, or a crowd of them get pepper sprayed with granny catching some, then they can claim some sort of righteousness out of nothing based solely off of the actions of the police. You'll have to forgive me if I don't show sympathy for people who are getting what they want, a confrontation with them being on the receiving end of a billy club.
Things with a higher approval rating than the current Congress: -The IRS -President Nixon during Watergate -Paris Hilton -BP during the oil spill -The United States going full communist That's how broken the system is. That's how widespread the dissatisfaction is. This is a system that cannot be trusted with even the tiniest public policy decision, and that's why people are upset.
Don't be ridiculous. Congress is clearly unaffected by the lobbyists of powerful corporate interests, and can see as well as anyone what is good for the nation. Pizza is a vegetable.
Jesus. Not to play the middle-ground pansy, but come on. Not all police are raging cunts looking for a legal excuse to commit aggravated battery. Not all OWS protestors are dirty hippies looking for an excuse to piss off the world and cry foul when they provoke a police response. That said: Aetius' college story relates to Oakland very well. They both sound to me like examples of police showing up in provocative gear and waiting for an excuse to go nuts. I don't think this is the case with every occupy movement, but assaulting random members of a crowd based on the actions of a few? Don't most large cities have teams who are trained to go undercover in a crowd, identify violent individuals, and quietly extract/arrest them? It's already been posted, but a baton thrust to a tiny girl? Pepper spraying an old woman? And yes, I am saying that while not all protestors at a given location are responsible for the actions of a few in the crowd, all the police at the scene of a protest are responsible for the actions of one. This is a double standard, but there's a fucking reason - because the police, unlike the protestors, are uniformly armed. They are physically and legally capable of using overwhelming force without consequence to themselves. The old saying is that you keep military and police separate, because military defends against outside threats while police maintain civil peace. That's why the two were separated in the first place - a military-minded force is trained to handle things much differently than a police force is. Militarizing the police force removes the entire reason the police and military are separate in the first place. When you have a United States Marine verbally defending citizens from members of a POLICE force, that is a sign that there is something seriously wrong. Maybe NYPD and OPD should go home and let the local National Guardsmen or a detachment of Marines handle things. Not only would the military be hard-pressed to do worse, but the protestors might actually respect people who have shown more interest in defending their rights and liberties than waiting for an excuse to beat them down. I'm only half-joking here. The point was made that the protesting in Libya and Egypt was supported by the US government, yet now that it's happening here, the government is upset. Anyone who thinks things here are nearly as bad as Libya or Egypt is an idiot, but they come down to the same root issues: A broken system wherein the government sets rules that protect a status quo of corruption and greed, at the cost of the majority. Regarding the issue of OWS being unorganized and with no clear goal: Again, not to make it sound like we're under a murderous dictatorship, we're not, but it's a bit easier to set a clear objective of "Get this murderous prick out of our country" than it is to address the exact methods and goals of change when you're in a mostly peaceful situation that involves complex economic issues and shit so thick you can't tell where the legitimacy ends and the corruption begins. Call me paranoid and raving mad, but you don't think the people banking off the system right now didn't put contingencies in place to help protect themselves? It's hard to explain the root of why the economic situation is wrong when your education system is broken. You could go take econ in college, but that requires money, which requires....fuck. A good job. Meanwhile, it's been easy to keep the public's mind off of real issues when you're shoving down their throat a pop culture of conspicuous consumption, irresponsibility, and glorification of a lack of personal responsibility. And this didn't spring up overnight, it's been growing and spreading its reach for decades. Is this all the fault of the people at the top? No, but they sure as hell enabled the idiocy, and encouraged the tide because idiots are easier to distract and control than intelligent people. The public is just as much to blame for accepting that mindset without a fight, for failing to sit up and say something a long time ago. I'll be the first to say I'm just as much to blame as anyone, and I'm a hell of a lot more culpable of being a sheep than just about anyone on this board.
"But about 200 demonstrators have headed back to Zuccotti Park, after Occupy Wall Street lawyers received a court order preventing the city and park owners from kicking out protesters." Who is paying for these lawyers? I thought all the protestors were in debt and unemployed. I'm not trying to make a point, I actually want to know. Is this the type of case that an attorney would take on speculation of a big settlement later that would cover their fees?
Whoa, whoa, whoa. Out of work lawyers? I thought all of them were living in their mom's basement in Alabama.
Been getting your info from Fox News and the Idiot Board? The core of this is filled with people who are fed up with corruption and a system designed to perpetuate it. That group of people are employed and unemployed, ditch diggers, mechanics, nurses and lawyers, teachers and truck drivers, salesmen and graphic designers. Regular fucking people. It isn't hippies looking for handouts, it isn't potsmoking Che worshipers hoping for anarchy and a chance to provoke police brutality, it's regular fucking people who see that the system is fucking broken and the only winners are the ones who can afford to buy their government. We let our belief in the free market get wildly out of control, and we let the people who legislate and govern us get bought and sold, and it's time to reign it the fuck back in. Period.
There's something that's odd about the fact that there are so many videos of the police taking down people, shown in a manner which depicts the police as being in the wrong. At this point, the police know they are being, or at least have every potential, to be filmed. This brings up a few things: Either the police are being painted in the wrong light by the media/ members who were being harassed/ or The people up top, those above the average cop on the streets, aren't telling them to stop. It is clearly and obviously bad press, bad for where they are, bad for everything and will continue to get worse. I refuse to believe that the higher ups in NYPD are so dumb as to allow officers to commit acts of supposed police brutality, on the national scale that it's at now, without repercussions. It's ludicrous that they would think they would be able to get away with it, which is why I'm always wary about these reports, because there's something more. There's no denying that bad cops exist, but this shit just reeks of the narratives the media is coming up with while covering this event.
If these millionaires feel so guilty about their money, they can always make a gift: Gifts to the United States U.S. Department of the Treasury Credit Accounting Branch 3700 East-West Highway, Room 622D Hyattsville, MD 20782 There is nothing in the world stopping them from sending in however much more that they want to. If they do not freely and willingly send in their own money as a gift, you can tell that they have ulterior motives by demanding their taxes be raised.
What an outstandingly astute observation. Nobody giving money to the government has ever, ever had an ulterior motive for doing so.
They want the marginal tax rate for the bracket they're in to be raised. It's not an ulterior motive when you state it openly as your motive.
You mean that, perhaps, they might use their positions of public notoriety as leverage to make their voices heard and thus effectuate policy change they want? NONSENSE. Are you being dense for the sake of being dense at this point? They realize that a slight increase in the top level tax rates would have an effect that would greatly outstrip their own personal means.
I think you guys are missing Lasersailor's point, have you ever heard the concept of "lead by example"? You don't think it's a little odd that they advocate a higher marginal tax rate, and then hire people to sweep as much of their income under the rug as possible and pay the bare minimum on the balance?