This is good.
Change is good.
Our government and it’s policies are dated, it must change to accommodate for today. The people holding positions of power are mostly relics of a past era and is leading to stagnation in my opinion. Our government is suppose to be living and changing, evolving and adapting but there are too many within it trying to prevent it. Its inefficiency is becoming way too much a problem.
Something needs to come of this. Something will, just a matter of when.
I just look at the dark ages. At one point in human history, only the landowners and royalty learned anything, and it was 3 subjects called the trivium (reading, logic, and rhetoric). Then eventually we kinda taught ourselves shit over the years, but over we were dumb. Then we suddenly start teaching education to children, and WHAM, we invent more things than in ALL OF HUMAN HISTORY. So now we seem to be at an impasse, and we’re stagnating as a society (globally, I might add). Why can’t we educate everybody even more, and start TRULY tackling the issues that are standing between humanity and perfection?
As for the wall street coverage growing, good for it. It’s getting blacklisted from Twitter supposedly (not now though, but it was when it started), and most news were ignoring it for the most. But just like the shit in Libya and Egypt barely got coverage until that shit exploded.
Give this some time, and see where it goes
^Agree except for the perfection part. It’s never attainable, but that doesn’t mean that people can’t strive for it. I’m sure that’s what you meant.
I would also like to see a list of learning material and media. Like documentaries, articles, books, etc. Along with links to the main websites and good news reports.
like this article. http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html
Or “Capitalism: A Love Story”, and “Inside Job” documentaries.
What are they occupying Wall Street for and what are demands?
All I could find is pretty much protesting money instead of people controlling our government. Otherwise, it seems like a lot of people pissed off about the current state of things and want “something” done about it, that something being undefined.
Also, the protestors need to do their thing right and by the book, otherwise they’ll hurt their own cause.
You know I was going to post this long essay explaining why you are wrong, but Ill leave it at this.
Those millionaires you are talking about, they got rich at the expense of America in the 80’s when shit for brains Regan deregulated everything and led us to this shit hole we are in. You are misinformed and drinking to much Fox kool-aid. Please stop it, and stop trolling.
Capitalism doesn’t favor the poor. it favors those who have money, and further solidifies thier power. The capitalism model of you are referring to is from the 1800’s where poor people stumbled across industries like steel and made fortunes of it. This is no longer possible. Those with capital, will make gross excessive capital from thier capital. And the poor who stumble on new technology or industry make a fraction of what they should make because the established elite already control him because they are the investors. So while 1 poor person gets semi rich, the rich get even more rich of the success of somebody who has worked for his money.
You really need to read a book, and then apply critical thinking, you lack it.
Out of curiosity, do you have any stats or sources to back that up? It kind of goes against everything that I have ever read on the subject of American wealth distribution.
Maybe i heard it wrong but i’m hearing that apparently jobs won’t hire you if you’ve been unemployed previously or something along those lines? It was something i caught on the Chris Matthews show a couple of days ago.
Yeah, if you google search that, some companies explicitly state they will only consider hiring people currently working.
and people still want to unregulated companies even further so they can do stuff like this even more. I weep for my future.
Luckily I can put my chemistry to clandestine use if worse comes to worse.
what system would you replace capitalism with to ensure social mobility?
Nothing, just well regulated capitalism, with dabs of socialism done correctly. Capitilism works when you have authority keeping douche bags in check
the problem is getting everyone to agree on who is a douchebag and who isn’t
its quite easy, all there needs to be is massive education and exposure to fraud. these people aren’t careful with how they do thing because they know they have bought out the government. The amount of fraud and corruption in the American government makes the corruption in Mexico during the early and late 90’s look like child’s play.
The real problem is exposing people to the truth. Because the douchbags in power control the media outlets, and the government.
A good example of this is would be the wiki leaks situation. That was necessary and the right thing to do. but look how the government flipped it around and manipulated people into thinking it was the wrong thing.
Education is always the start. When we finally properly tax the rich and corporations just like everyone else, then we can afford the education everyone needs. For now we’re in crunch time, but general progress is only capable with general education.
Not everyone will be able or want to be educated to the fullest extent, but our nation’s general education grown by leaps and bounds since 5 decades ago. It’s been a nice trend for the past several hundred years.
but then you run into the problem of the more educated people there are, the less each one’s individual education is worth
Yes, but now we’re teaching Calculus in high school. It’s quite regular for the top of the class in math will take Calculus, Physics, and other advanced classes at the average high school in California. (at least in the densely populated areas)
What’s next to trickle down from University to high school? What about one laptop per child, how many of them are going to be some kind of engineer or scientist or business owner fully capable of using a computer to their advantage?
We have to take a step back occasionally, such as now, in order to push things forwards two steps.
One specific example:
When people can be taught the exponential function and growth rates in high school, they will have a much better understanding of what is being told (or not told) to them in the news. They will be able to imagine Long Term consequences for percentage growths per year. I wish all politicians understood this relatively simple math.
This article sounds really good from what I’ve read: http://tarpley.net/2011/09/29/emergency-program-for-anti-wall-street-protestors/#more-3408.
I DON’T LIKE THE OCCUPY WALL ST. DISSES. But he does say some important things.
“In order to fight Wall Street, it is necessary for the American people to understand the basic idea of shifting the cost of the world economic depression off of the backs of working people and the poor where it is now, and onto Wall Street banks and super-rich speculators. Depressions are very expensive. Who should pay for the current depression? The bankers demand that the American people must pay. We want the bankers to pay, and we must specify how. A movement that wants to defend working people against the class warfare of the bankers has the responsibility of putting forward a program to defend middle-class and other working people. In order to win, the anti-Wall Street protests must agitate for a series of demands including the following:”
[details=Spoiler]
1. Student Loan Amnesty. The common experience of many of the protesters is that of being crushed by an outrageous burden of high interest student loans. Today it is common for graduating seniors to carry $50,000, $75,000, or even $100,000 of debt. Add the costs of an advanced degree in teaching, law, or medicine, and the debt burden becomes astronomical. The exorbitant cost of a college education reflects the increasing immiseration of the United States over the past 40 years, as the overall standard of living has declined by two thirds or more in terms of real wages and other considerations. These debts are owed to the same zombie bankers who cashed in on the Bush bailout of 2008, and the even larger loans issued by Ben Bernanke of the Federal Reserve over recent years. This is a system of brutal primitive accumulation against the life chances everyone who knows that they need a college degree to be employable in the 21st century. Total students loan indebtedness is now approaching $1 trillion. This grinding debt is destroying the futures, the lives, and the hopes of college students and recent graduates.
When a debtor country like Greece is unable to pay its debts, it is normal to hear talk of a haircut for the bondholders and bankers. It is time for the Wall Street zombie banks to take a haircut on student loan debt. Most of this debt cannot be paid off, but an entire generation can be ruined by a futile attempt to pay it back.
A leading demand must therefore be a total cancellation of all outstanding student loan debt, meaning a total and immediate forgiveness of all payments of principal and interest coming from this category of borrowing. Carter granted Vietnam draft resisters an amnesty. If Obama wants to keep his job, he must deliver a student loan amnesty to save not just a single generation, but the entire future of the United States and beyond. Otherwise, dump Obama in 2012! The zombie bankers have been pampered enough. It is time for them to take a bath, so that a generation might live. This is also the best stimulus program possible.
2. Stop Foreclosures. Since students alone will never be enough to make a revolution, it is necessary to put forward additional measures to defend other parts of the population from the depredations of Wall Street. In the area of home foreclosures, the bankers have trampled on the law to seize millions of homes, some of which never had a mortgage, and many of which were current in their payments. The banks have used corrupt robo-signers, robo-cops, and robo-judges to carry out these fraudclosure thefts. The answer is to make foreclosure a federal crime, so that anyone who throws an American family out on the street will end up in Leavenworth. Again, the zombie bankers can eat the losses, which are unavoidable in any case. This is not an impossible demand: under the New Deal, the Frazier-Lemke Act stopped all foreclosures on homes, provided only that the owners could get a minimal payment plan approved by any judge in any court. With the help of popular pressure and public opinion, foreclosures virtually came to a halt. This is what we need to be demanding today.
3. Defend and fully fund the social safety net. Wall Street and Washington elites agree that the American people ought to be subjected to genocidal austerity – cuts so draconian that they will kill people. The goal is obviously to fund bigger and better bailouts of Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan Chase when they go bankrupt the next time around. Real unemployment in the United States is now about 25%, meaning that 30 million people cannot find work, and many have been looking for years. Therefore, we need to extend jobless benefits to all unemployed, including those who have been out of a job for 99 weeks and more. 46 million Americans are now surviving thanks to Food Stamps, but the reactionary Republicans are demanding savage cuts, and Obama is more than likely to cave. We also need to defend programs that specifically help children and young. These include S-CHIP, which gives health care to poor children; Head Start, which provides breakfast and preschool for poor kids; and WIC, which provides high-protein meals for pregnant women, nursing mothers, and infants. Older people have special problems, including that Wall Street speculators have destroyed the value of their 401(k) and IRA retirement plans. This means that Social Security pensions should be increased, and not cut, as the Republicans and Obama both want. Obama has already cut $500 billion out of Medicare, but he wants to cut it even more, and the Tea Party is eager to help him. The best healthcare would be to open Medicare to all Americans, while making the investments needed to maintain quality. Medicaid gives healthcare to poor people of any age, and these payments must be maintained.
4. Pay for healthcare and social services with a 1% Wall Street Sales Tax. When they hear demands like these, Fox news commentators will demand to know how these programs can be paid for. The answer is simple: the Tobin tax or Wall Street sales tax. Today the total financial turnover of the banksters in terms of buying, selling, and other trading comes to well over three quadrillion dollars yearly – that’s more than 3,000 trillion dollars. The rest of us pay sales tax on most purchases, often including the groceries, but Wall Street zombie bankers and hedge fund hyenas pay absolutely zero on that colossal sum. The most unfair aspect of the entire US tax system is that Wall Street pays virtually no taxes. It is time for the bankers to cough up 1% of every stock, bond, and derivatives transaction, be it program trading, high frequency trading, or computerized flash trading at the rate of one million transactions per second. The total revenue could be split between the federal government and the states, and would amount to hundreds of billions of dollars, perhaps even trillions – depending on how determined the speculators are to keep up their dirty deals. There is nothing impossible about this demand: the federal government had a financial transaction tax from the time of World War I in 1967. And even today, the largely right wing governments of the European Union are about to enact their own Tobin tax. Why can’t it be done here as well?
These are immediate agitational demands that can be readily understood by any person. They can form the leading edge of a struggle to break the political power of Wall Street. In addition, a full recovery from depression and the attainment of full employment for the first time since 1945 will require the nationalization of the Federal Reserve, and the issuing of successive tranches of $1 trillion of 0%, very long-term Federal credit for the building of infrastructure, with a goal of creating 30 million new productive jobs with adequate capital investment per job.
Another essential point is that Wall Street is the biggest nest of warmongers anywhere in the world. Anyone seeking to gain influence over the anti-Wall Street movement should be willing to condemn and denounce Obama’s wanton aggression against Libya, as well as to call for an immediate pullout of US troops from Afghanistan and Iraq. Anyone who refuses to do this should be regarded with grave suspicion.
The alternative to such concrete demands is, whether we like it or not, to remain in the orbit of Obama’s Democratic Party. Earlier this year, students, workers, and others occupied the state capitol in Madison, Wisconsin in response to attacks on working people coming from the fascist governor, Walker. The resistance against Walker was betrayed first of all by the Democratic Party, which announced that it would not fight for wages and benefits, but only for trade union rights in the abstract. That is a good program for trade union bureaucrats, but not so good for working people, who bore the brunt of Walker’s austerity. A president who was on the side of the people would have gone immediately to Madison, Wisconsin to hold a town hall on the occupied grounds of the state capitol, an event that would have looked much different than the canned, pre-screened teleprompter town halls Obama likes to address. A real president would have taken Attorney General Holder and Labor Secretary Solis along to investigate the denial of civil rights and labor violations by Walker. Obama did none of these things. Rather, he damned the movement with a few words of faint praise, and cut it loose. The lesson is that the Democratic Party is more than willing to sell out mass struggles anytime it can. And it is only by having your own program of anti-Wall Street demands that you can become independent of the rotten two-party system.[/details]
IMO this sounds reasonable. They are not regulated enough, and control the economy, along with politics and the media. They cause the “bubble” to pop and when it does they are ready to profit from that too, while the average joe’s financial situation turn to shit.
Don’t believe me? Check out this vid. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3ddIJajQ0w
He’s a trader from Europe but banks are the same all over the world. They are only trying to use other people’s money to make profits for themselves, even at the cost of the economy.
From the spoiler above:
It does not sound reasonable to give amnesty for all student loans and to make it illegal to foreclose on a home.
It does not sound feasible to pass every foreclosure case through the courts, no matter how much scrutiny foreclosures require.
Cancelling all student debt makes no sense. First, those of us who have no debt, should we get paid back? That would be equivalent to printing more money if I was able to retroactively take out a student loan and then have it cancelled. Secondly, all students are guaranteed a loan. That is the real problem.
When people look at welfare they tend to focus on one of two sides. They either focus on those taking advantage of it or those who really need it. When a friend gets laid off it’s nice to think some of my tax dollars go to help him or her and their family. But then one could also think of the lazy slobs living off of welfare, leeching my tax dollars. We all agree, kill the leechers, help those really in need.
What we have are compromises which are not perfect and need fixing. How do we fix them? Well, nothing like a tight economy to help motivate people to scrutinize every dollar spent. I think we need more scrutiny by everyone involved.
Number 4, the 1% ‘wall street’ tax, or well I’m not sure which companies/people this effects, but whatever the answer is, something needs to be done to make sure corporations and rich people get taxed appropriately, that is just as much as everyone else. I like number 4 the most, I agree something needs to be done, and I don’t have a better solution myself.
People are worried about the government controlling the media, but we’re getting to the point the where the people who control the media and other big businesses are controlling our government.
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