Wallstreet loosers / rubber bullets or diapers?

[BoDiddley]

What do you think, rubber bullets or should we by them bibs and diapers to help them keep clean while they are demonstrating for the down trodden.  Yes I know it is the all American freedom to demonstrate, but they are comparing themselves to people that are really crapped on and have no food to eat.  They are mad because they have to pay back their student loans.  Why are they not marching on their hallowed Columbia U instead of Wallstreet, Their endowment is drawing ten percent!  I can see demonstrating for a real cause but do they have one?

[ManaloEA]

Greed (Wall St) and Envy (Occupy) go together.

[Popeye the Sailor]

[LMT]

+1     

[muskrat]

 



it's really hard to keep quiet on this.....doing everything I can. 

[kopfjäger]

All I have to say, is get a job

[Punx Clever]

Futurama Hippie

[Vindingo]

I can see demonstrating for a real cause but they do not have one.  Discusting!

" Does anyone really not know what the basic message is of this protest: that Wall Street is oozing corruption and criminality and its unrestrained political power â€" in the form of crony capitalism and ownership of political institutions â€" is destroying financial security for everyone else? "

http://www.salon.com/2011/09/28/protests_21/

Before you run off to Walmart to buy your rubber bullets, try reading the article.



oh yea... IBTL  

[Grappa]

IBTL!!

Saw a video of some people who had entered a bank and one of the protesters was going on and on about how much debt he had from college, and how he went to college with the understanding that it would equal him having job opportunities.  I don't think a college degree comes with a promise of employment.  And if an individual takes on enormous debt to go to college, that is their problem.  One can always go to community school for the first 2 years, working their way through the bills, then finish their degrees at a state school.  Seems like a whole lot of entitlement mentality to me. 

To me the whole thing seems so misguided.  People should be angry at the government for setting the stage for a poor economy, not angry at banks.  Angry at the bailouts?  How come nobody is occupying Detroit?  GM and Chrysler received a good bit of cash.    The term has been thrown around a lot lately, but it seems so true to me... class warfare.  Fomented by the POTUS who can't help but make critical statements about, "millionaires and billionaires" every time he opens his mouth.  I thought he ran on being a unifier?  I thought that was what presidents were supposed to do?

Want to work a blow towards crony capitalism and corporate influence on politics?  Simplify the tax code.  Congress uses the tax code to pay off and reward some groups while punishing others.  That's why there are over 70,000 pages of crap that make up the tax code.  Simplify it!  No write offs, no deductions, no loop holes.  Just a simple, easy to understand flat-tax.  These people should be marching and camping in D.C.  Not Wall Street.  No company should ever be allowed to become too big to fail.  Whose fault is it if they do?  The government.

Think of it like this...  if you are playing a soccer game and your team (company) is playing ethically and by the rules, while the other team (competing company in same industry) is constantly off-side and touching the ball with their hands and pulling on your jersey and breaking all the rules to achieve an unfair advantage, and the ref (government) is not calling a penalty, the other team will certainly win (put you out of business.)  Therefore, your team will either have to start to play dirty as well, or just accept losing.  The ref needs to do it's job!!  Ultimately, banks are competing with each other, and they will do whatever it takes to succeed.  And if you hamstring yourself by adhering to rules that nobody else adheres to, you will go out of business.  You need a ref involved in the game who is not beholden to either side.

People are pissed because the country has fallen on hard times and the government is picking winners and losers.  But in doing so you will always piss people off.  It's spending money on programs to help people who spent more money than they should have and got themselves into the shits.  But for those fiscally conservative, who were prudent and responsible, they don't get shit.  The government is spending money bailing out failing industries, propping them up, which puts their more prudent competitors at a disadvantage.  I read somewhere that GM and Chrysler can now pay their employees an hourly wage in the $20's because of the bankruptcy, but a direct competitor of theirs, Ford, still has to pay it's employees a wage average in the $40's.  So now GM and Chrysler have an unfair advantage over Ford in a competitive market, and all because Ford did a better job of having it's shit together.  And for that, Ford gets punished.  This is why the government should not jump in to bail people or industries out.  In picking winners, you punish losers.  Abolish the student debt?  With tax dollars?  Paid by people like me who didn't go to college partly for financial reasons, but got a job instead and started paying federal income tax.  Shit, I should have gone to college, then complained about my bills, and the government would have just taken somebody else's money to pay for them and I would have gotten a free ride.  Guess the working man is a sucker.

And please, please, please don't think that voting Democrat or Republican will make a difference in hell.  They are mostly all douches.  And they will continue to be douches until the voters look at issues deep enough to realize that going into the streets to scream at police officers and going into bank branches to scream at employees who make $10/hr is a totally pointless endeavor.

Sorry, but this thread was most certainly doomed from the beginning, so I figured I might as well have at it and vent.

[Mother]

Democrat/republican

Liberal/conservative

Socialist/capitalist

Hippie/hipster

Employed/unemployed

Owner/employee

None of it matters

The current rates of unemployment, wages, insurance, inflation, social security and taxation are not maintainable

[zarn02]

None of it matters

The current rates of unemployment, wages, insurance, inflation, social security and taxation are not maintainable

+∞

In FY2010 the federal government took in $1,294 thousand billion less than it spent.

No tax hike can make up for this.

The various lobbying and voting blocs will not allow for the cuts needed to balance the budget.

Borrowing from foreign states, and inflating the dollar are poison band-aids on a gunshot wound.

The ship is going down.

[Ddan]

I can't believe this is still up.

[zarn02]

I can't believe this is still up.

Oh, it probably won't be by the time I'm up and going again.

Whiskey told me that I should contribute to this thread.

[Ddan]

Oh, it probably won't be by the time I'm up and going again.

Whiskey told me that I should contribute to this thread.

There is so much that could be said...

[Mother]

I spent the last 4 years isolated from our make the beast with two backsed up situation because of our union CBA

I got a little snippet from Jess working for BofA and watching that ship sail

now we are in the midst of a TA and I am having to absorb in a few days what everyone else has been watching/dealing with for the last few years

um

I'm pissed

and

the protesters are right

for the most part (I'm not on board with the education loan forgiveness bullshit)

but

their accusations of limitless corporate greed are founded

even so

their tactics are as doomed to fail as is our current social and financial trajectory

but

they aren't wrong to be pissed the make the beast with two backs off