The Occupy Wall Street protests ARE changing America’s direction!!!
The protests have already elicited a hysterical reaction from Wall Street, the super-rich in general, and politicians and pundits who reliably serve the interests of the wealthiest hundredth of a percent!!!
This is not just about the USA, it’s about the World!
Post your Occupy Wall Street! videos and links and your ideas about it here.
BillyTheMountain
Obvious allegory should be obvious.
Keith Olbermann Reads The Statement Released By The Wall Street Protesters
Politicians and corporations love class warfare because it gives them more power.
Corporations derive their power from the State… and we hear from the OWS crowd “Increase the State!”
Here’s a handout to give to the protesters: http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/Bankster-Flyer.pdf
After 30 seconds of thinking, I’ve come up with a list of my demands:
If we outlawed high frequency/high speed trading I would be happy.
Close all tax loopholes (hedge funds anyone?) and federally tax all wages (no matter how it is earned) over $500,000/year at something more like 40%. And I’ll be even more psyched.
Turn the military industrial complex into a “achieve awesome things that don’t kill people” industrial complex. I’m hoping for space exploration and renewable energy sources.
Wow, Gilby is still into gold buggery
I read Gilby’s link. Such crap." Boom and bust cycles are caused by fiat currency causing inflation", I get it. We must return to gold and silver money, I get it . It is a stupid concept. Gilby is smart, but doesn’t get it.
2 The current economic decline is connected to a deflation in housing values. We are in a period of housing value deflation. I think Gilby can not understand this, because he only understands a model where fiat currency must cause harm by inflation. We are suffering high unemployment because of deflation.
3 We cannot return to a system based on gold and silver money. There is not enough metal to do this. We are not alone (USA) and live in a world where others own most of the gold. As the economy expands, the money supply must expand, or we will have deflation. Deflation sounds cool if you have a jar of gold coins. So you will keep the coins and not invest. This results in economic recession, as the wealthy wish to not invest. If it is better to do nothing, they do nothing. Wealthy people specialize in that. Study the 1890 USA depression. It sucked. The money you didn’t have was shiny though. Gold buggers seem to fixate on that. I don’t know why. Gold lost 75% of it’s value in 1980ish.
4 I was wrong, I admit I posted when gold was 800 $, bail. Now it’s double that. So I sometimes suck. I remain bearish on gold. It will crash. This inflationary fantasy caused by fiat currency is classic gold bugger crap.
Especially now in the technology age, since there are actually legitimate uses for gold now (besides looking shiny/rich).
I don’t like the way the fed is set up, but gold standard would be just as bad or worse in the long run and absolutely disastrous in the short term.
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While we’re talking Gilby politics, anarchy isn’t a viable solution, either. What we have now isn’t a very good compromise, and corporations do have at least indirect control over a good deal of things that they shouldn’t, but there needs to be some kind of power structure in place capable of keeping the first influential guy with ambition from taking complete control.
The question here is how to make the system more representative of the needs of a diverse population and less subject to the influence of the wealthy few.
It is so strange
Like if Mc Cain won, and croaked, where would we be now ? Prez Palin ?Bachman is not just a demonstrated idiot, this is her big draw, what pulls her donations. She could be prez ?
I take only small comfort in the idea that the prez is sorta not what we think. The puppeteers will keep a lid on things, no matter who is prez.
I find it hard to imagine a prez Bachman, who had real power. What is creepier, a country where the prez is just a puppet, or a prez Bachman with real power ?
Anarchy is never the answer for long. I find myself between a rock and a stupid place.
uuuug, Bachman shudders
We will not be stopped by police brutality.
The protesters should be in DC doing some serious tar and feather work on the fools that are ultimately responsible for the mess our country is in.
Better yet, instead of marching, chanting and looking like a mob of dumbasses, why not work at a local level to get some people elected that can make a difference?
Apparantly, the american public needs to feel a lot more pain before they will do what it takes to change our system. Are Nancy Pelosi and John Boehner really the best that the Dems and Repubs can come up with?
I think part of the point is that our political system has been pretty much been bought and paid for, partly by the wealth generated on wall street.
Also, the political system pretty much keeps the majority of folks out of it. Most people don’t have time to work 40+ hours a week, and raise a family, and get involved in politics to a level that would actually be able to bring about change. Not to mention the money it takes to run even a local campaign.
Oh and about that “marching, chanting and looking like a mob of dumbasses.” You do know that’s how the system works, right? Maybe you’ve heard of the civil rights movement of the 1960’s? Turns out it kind of works sometimes.
Just been reading this.
Interesting stuff.
I was getting a bit disheartened until a couple of days ago by the lack of class analysis behind the “we are the 99% mantra” and the bizarre belief that cops are part of the “99%” rather than agents of the state employed to protect the property and power structures of the ruling class.
Here in the UK it seems that there’s plenty of energy and enthusiasm for similar displays of discontent, even if some of the most prominent voices thus far are the fairly familiar, middle class activist types that (likely due to their often unacknowledged privilege) often manage to get their voices heard above others within supposedly horizontally organised gatherings/movements.
The general assembly held on Westminster bridge during the NHS protest on Sunday, in preparation for occupying the London Stock Exchange on Saturday, was very well attended with people speaking who have been involved in square occupations in New York and Madrid.
Don’t get the point of the picture you posted, Gilby. What other choice do people have when buying things than to buy them from corporations given the dominance they have over economic life. What these leaderless movements may (hopefully) do is give people the revolutionary organisational tools and principles necessary to occupy and take over the factories and offices currently used by corporations to produce the goods we consume.
Got to go but will post more next time I’m near some internet.
x
99% can’t be wrong, mahhhhn
Uh huh. Then the world was moved away from the center of the universe, it stopped being flat and man figured out how to fly. Then we flew to the moon.
Next revelation?
The illustration Gilby posted was funny for a second, but then I realized those people aren’t protesting against all corporations, or the idea of large corporations. They are protesting the breaking down of democracy by vast sums of money. It therefore makes sense that they are not rich people. Remember, this country was started by mobs of radical people. They seem easy targets for poking fun. But do they not have a point?
My problem is, how do you get Wall Street to even pay attention to such things, let alone be changed by them? I don’t know how they can even make a dent. But I appreciate it that they are trying.
I’ve put on a few pounds lately and I think I can occupy a goodly portion of Wall Street.
My take on the situation is thus: The large movement across the country doesn’t necessarily need a leader. The fact that this many people are willing to take to the streets should be proof enough to the fat cats and politicians (on both sides) that they are more than likely pissed off enough to take to the voting booths.
I think the majority of Democrats as well as a good number of moderate Republicans support the movement. I think it is foolish and short-sighted of the Republican presidential candidates to dismiss the people in the streets as “mobs, anti-capitalists, dirty, lazy, un-American”. I feel that this disconnect with the “man in the streets” will ultimately spell defeat for whichever candidate wins the Republican nomination.
These street people are Americans who have had enough and out of frustration with the stalemate in Washington, have decided to exercise their First Amendment RIGHT to peacable assembly. I think that is about as American as you can get. The party that embraces and supports them will win. The party that fears and ridicules them will loose. Viva la Revolution.
Wow, it looks like you failed reading composition. Nowhere does that article advocate a return to gold and silver money. It tries to explain the business cycle, which is the cause of the current economic problems. Nothing stupid about it. When the government and central bank create an environment where certain investments are encouraged over all others, it results in malinvestments, and the natural result of these malinvestments is a correction (ie, the “deflation” of that asset). The boom is the inflation, and the bust is the deflation you mention.
People in the Austrian school of economics were talking about this as far back as 2001, or 2003, as is seen in this video:
He called the housing boom/bust in 2003, now he is calling the collapse of the dollar. Yeah, that’s going to be fun for all of us. What we are going through now is nothing compared to a collapse of our monetary unit. Thanks federal reserve and f****** government.
I assume you mean the “panic” of 1893. Now days, the government calls panics and depressions “recessions” since those terms have a bad history to them. The flyer I pointed to did not mention the federal reserve, even though that institution is what currently has a monopoly and controls the money supply independently of the government, for the most part.
Like today’s economic downturn, where it was caused through monetary inflation with low interest rates on housing, and regulations that encouraged/forced this on the public, the 1893 panic was caused by the earlier monetary inflation promoting investment in railroads, and the bad monetary and bimetalism policies of the federal government.
What caused people to invest in the housing market? I bought my house in 2003, and I remember the huge push from government for everyone to achieve the “American dream” of home ownership. The government made legislation encouraging people to buy homes. The federal reserve made loans cheap. This inflated the cost of housing, which eventually lead to the correction in home prices once the boom went bust. You point out the symptom, without addressing the actual cause.
You and I have gone over this before. You seem to think that we need enough gold to equal all other assets in the world to be able to have a gold standard. That’s simply not the case. The ideal monetary system is one that the free market produces. It may be gold, silver, or something entirely different. In any case, if gold were the standard, all it means is that gold is the unit of value in which all other assets are priced in. You don’t need that amount of gold to match the value of all other assets. It’s only the index used to value labor, assets, loans, etc.
If I create a business that is valuable, I don’t need someone else to mine the same amount of gold to make my business have the value the market determines it has. I created wealth, and it is simply valued as being the same value as a certain amount of gold at a given time.
You mention a drop in price in gold in 1980. This shows your ignorance in how things are priced. Yes, we price things in dollars here. Anything from labor to things at the store. People price things in large part based on past prices. This gives the current monetary unit an advantage in how stable it is. Since gold was not the unit of money at that time, it makes sense where it would fluctuate a bit in comparison to that unit of money. If it was the unit of money used by society, it would not have the huge increase we saw in the 1970s and then the correction in 1980 that we saw. But, overall, looking at gold long term, it has increased in value, and this is due to the inflation of the federal reserve note (which is the “dollar” today).
So, you think gold will crash. What happens when the dollar crashes? At least gold has value in several industries. The dollar is ultimately only as good as the value of the paper it’s printed on, or as good as the ability of the government to extract assets from it’s slaves. It’s unfortunate, but that ability is still pretty good right now. But, given the protest from the left with their OWS, and the protests from the right, with their tea party, maybe that will “deflate”. 
That’s interesting. You claim we need a power structure to prevent a power structure from taking control. As history has shown, the existence of a power structure attracts those who want to control that power structure. The USA was built on a minarchist power structure, and yet now we have a power structure that controls almost everything. What keeps the first influential guy with ambition (ahem, Rockefeller/Rothchild) from taking complete control of this power structure?
If we had anarchy, and the people in society knew they were free, and did not have to adhere to the authority of the single power structure, then how could an influential guy dupe all of these people to give into being the slave of this guy? Only when people think they have to answer to a single power structure can someone take control of that power structure giving them complete control.
Gilby’s words, minus gold bug crap
“You and I have gone over this before. You seem to think that we need enough gold to equal all other assets in the world to be able to have a gold standard. That’s simply not the case. The ideal monetary system is one that the free market produces. It may be gold, silver, or something entirely different. In any case, if gold were the standard, all it means is that gold is the unit of value in which all other assets are priced in. You don’t need that amount of gold to match the value of all other assets. It’s only the index used to value labor, assets, loans, etc.” - Gilby writes
What I read minus goldbuggery is :
"You seem to think that we need enough gold to equal all other assets in the world on a gold standard. If gold were the standard, all that means is that gold is the unit all other assets are priced in. You don’t need that amount of gold to match the value all other assets are priced in. " - Gilby logic, minus goldbuggery .
So, we make gold our money (which by definition is what all world assets are weighed in), yet we don’t need that amount of gold. Really ? … Really ?