To be clear I haven't actually heard of any violence at these protests outside of tony bologna pepper spraying the protesters, and a few other incidents that were similar. What I am wondering is what 'peaceful' protest is going to get done? What would violent protest get done? I'm, admittedly, not sure, but I think that the latter would be more successful in exacting the changes we need.
Wow, another Pro-Occupy thread advocating violence. How shocking.
:roll:
are you really going to let 2 posters taint your views and the contents of the entire thread?
have you been to an occupy protest?
i have been to 2 and they have been completely peaceful.
:roll:
Are you really NOT going to condemn those who advocate violence in this thread then? Seems a bit strange that none of the pro-occupy board members condemn those who come in these threads and advocate violence. It's almost as if.... nah, no way.... yeh... it's almost as if... you're fine with these movements becoming violent. Otherwise, I'd think you'd condemn those who want these protests to turn violent.
To be clear I haven't actually heard of any violence at these protests outside of tony bologna pepper spraying the protesters, and a few other incidents that were similar. What I am wondering is what 'peaceful' protest is going to get done? What would violent protest get done? I'm, admittedly, not sure, but I think that the latter would be more successful in exacting the changes we need.
To be clear I haven't actually heard of any violence at these protests outside of tony bologna pepper spraying the protesters, and a few other incidents that were similar. What I am wondering is what 'peaceful' protest is going to get done? What would violent protest get done? I'm, admittedly, not sure, but I think that the latter would be more successful in exacting the changes we need.
am I the only one who wants this shit to get ultraviolent?
Call me crazy, but that appears to be advocating violence. Whoops.... pardon me, that appears to be advocating ultraviolence.
I wrote the first one last night under the influence of alcohol...shouldn't have presented it in that way for sure. Just got fired up by watching some of the media reax to the protests. I guess what I am asking is what are we trying to accomplish through OWS and what will enable that change? For those who are against violence (that's a valid way to move forward) how will non-violence get the change to happen? For those of us who think maybe violence is an answer where would it need to be directed? Who would need to be held responsible? Would violence actually be better than non-violence?
I wrote the first one last night under the influence of alcohol...shouldn't have presented it in that way for sure. Just got fired up by watching some of the media reax to the protests. I guess what I am asking is what are we trying to accomplish through OWS and what will enable that change? For those who are against violence (that's a valid way to move forward) how will non-violence get the change to happen? For those of us who think maybe violence is an answer where would it need to be directed? Who would need to be held responsible? Would violence actually be better than non-violence?
First, I'd say, the movement would need to know what it wants and be able to push for that in non-violent means. The messages coming out of this movement are all over the place. Sure, people have reason to be upset, but to direct all the anger in the direction the White House wants you too, is naive, atleast in my opinion. If OWS people don't see that they are doing exactly what the Obama administration wants, they are misguided. Mr. Obama is our President, yet I see no (to very very little) blame coming his way at these protests. Which is interesting considering the multitudes of issues put forth at these protests.
It would be interesting if the author did the same cost analysis at Washington's other fine public university, Washington State, located in Pullman, WA. You would avoid the high cost of living that Seattle experiences (which I know first hand) and still get a 1st class education.
I know Pullman is not as exciting as Seattle is, but from a cost / education perspective, it's a viable option. And if I was paying my way through school, it would be the only option.
seriously? this is what your take away is? go live in pullman? you saw that she found the cheapest possible places to live outside of seattle right? that she didn't go out to eat ever and lived off $200 month for food? just a quick look at pullman's craigslist shows that she is likely to save $100/month for housing so $1200 less/year or $4800 over 4 years. Tuition cost looks to be about the same. The story is still bullshit.
Wow, another Pro-Occupy thread advocating violence. How shocking.
:roll:
are you really going to let 2 posters taint your views and the contents of the entire thread?
have you been to an occupy protest?
i have been to 2 and they have been completely peaceful.
:roll:
Are you really NOT going to condemn those who advocate violence in this thread then? Seems a bit strange that none of the pro-occupy board members condemn those who come in these threads and advocate violence. It's almost as if.... nah, no way.... yeh... it's almost as if... you're fine with these movements becoming violent. Otherwise, I'd think you'd condemn those who want these protests to turn violent.
it is not my responsibility to condemn them for what they have said in this thread. i respect both of those posters and agree with them on most things so i am not going to jump all over them for their views here. we all have our differences of opinion. i am for peaceful protest because most regular people who do not have a dog in the fight can not relate to, let alone advocate violence. if violence is used as a tactic, they are automatically alienating people who might otherwise agree with the movement and it will turn people against the movement. so in my opinion violent action would be shooting the movement in the foot. the people at occupy wall street and the people in this thread are good people and they want what they think is best for the country. just as most of us do. we just disagree on the means to the end.
Post edited by gimmesometruth27 on
"You can tell the greatness of a man by what makes him angry." - Lincoln
It would be interesting if the author did the same cost analysis at Washington's other fine public university, Washington State, located in Pullman, WA. You would avoid the high cost of living that Seattle experiences (which I know first hand) and still get a 1st class education.
I know Pullman is not as exciting as Seattle is, but from a cost / education perspective, it's a viable option. And if I was paying my way through school, it would be the only option.
seriously? this is what your take away is? go live in pullman? you saw that she found the cheapest possible places to live outside of seattle right? that she didn't go out to eat ever and lived off $200 month for food? just a quick look at pullman's craigslist shows that she is likely to save $100/month for housing so $1200 less/year or $4800 over 4 years. Tuition cost looks to be about the same. The story is still bullshit.
Housing is only one part of it. I moved from Seattle to the midwest, stayed at the same salary, and it was the equivalent of a 23% raise.
As for the story the author went off on, it is B.S., that I'll agree with. Tuition has increased 100% at the state university I attended in just over a decade ago. I was able to meet ends meet working part time, but tuition was around $5K. I can't understand how every university has doubled their price. I think kids today would be better off going to college online or getting experience as a welder.
violence is not a neutral terrain. it is the terrain of the state... and it is not an arena that those seriously seeking change can ever hope to compete in, nor do they wish to. when dealing with the state no excuse should be given to them to use force.. it is their way and it shores up the hierarchical system dominated by men.
hear my name
take a good look
this could be the day
hold my hand
lie beside me
i just need to say
violence is not a neutral terrain. it is the terrain of the state... and it is not an arena that those seriously seeking change can ever hope to compete in, nor do they wish to. when dealing with the state no excuse should be given to them to use force.. it is their way and it shores up the hierarchical system dominated by men.
This is what I was looking for a reasoned debate on the merits of what OWS is trying to do, and how they/we are going about doing it. I get that violence would not be fought on an equal playing field, and that alienation could and would occur, however, what is non-violence going to get us? Newer forms of civil rights legislation that future generations of demopuplicans and republicrats will spend years stripping of its power (see: Title IX, Civil Rights, etc.). Further, if the state doesn't actually know how to "act" non-violently, how then do we get them to speak our language? I would prefer that non-violence be the answer but is it possible to be non-violent and get long lasting structural change?
Well the problem is multi-fold, but getting experience doing manufacturing jobs and trade positions is going to be tough since most of those positions have either been sent overseas or are being done by laborers working more cheaply. So kids are now compelled to go to college...only colleges are feeling the pinch from a reduction in state funding (I had to take furloughs for the last 3 years costing thousands in losses for my salary then listened to moron radio hosts bitch about how we got a one time reimbursement for $750 at the start of this school year), so they are increasingly hiring cheap non-phd adjunct lecturers, and having to charge more to go to school. Essentially the lessening of the tax burden on the rich has trickled down to the poor trying to get into schools that cost double, with less of an educational atmosphere, and little guarantee of employment after you get a degree. This whole thing is fucked, and, while violence may/may not be the answer, something's gotta happen.
violence is not a neutral terrain. it is the terrain of the state... and it is not an arena that those seriously seeking change can ever hope to compete in, nor do they wish to. when dealing with the state no excuse should be given to them to use force.. it is their way and it shores up the hierarchical system dominated by men.
This is what I was looking for a reasoned debate on the merits of what OWS is trying to do, and how they/we are going about doing it. I get that violence would not be fought on an equal playing field, and that alienation could and would occur, however, what is non-violence going to get us? Newer forms of civil rights legislation that future generations of demopuplicans and republicrats will spend years stripping of its power (see: Title IX, Civil Rights, etc.). Further, if the state doesn't actually know how to "act" non-violently, how then do we get them to speak our language? I would prefer that non-violence be the answer but is it possible to be non-violent and get long lasting structural change?
we dont. we go about our thing, in our way. we dont play by their rules.. we define the rules for ourselves and for the good of the kind of society we desire to live in. we wont overthrow the current system, not should we seek to. what we will do is force them to chase us... to follow our dance...to take note of our actions and to see we wont be tied down by their system.. a system that strips people of their dignity.
remember the state will use violence when they feel theyre losing the initiative. they will beat us into submission rather than lose control of their system... and that is to their disadvantage, not to mention disingenious. but it is how they work.. it is how theyve always worked. so we must show them another way... a humane way... a way where were all in this together and no one is our master.
hear my name
take a good look
this could be the day
hold my hand
lie beside me
i just need to say
violence is not a neutral terrain. it is the terrain of the state... and it is not an arena that those seriously seeking change can ever hope to compete in, nor do they wish to. when dealing with the state no excuse should be given to them to use force.. it is their way and it shores up the hierarchical system dominated by men.
This is what I was looking for a reasoned debate on the merits of what OWS is trying to do, and how they/we are going about doing it. I get that violence would not be fought on an equal playing field, and that alienation could and would occur, however, what is non-violence going to get us? Newer forms of civil rights legislation that future generations of demopuplicans and republicrats will spend years stripping of its power (see: Title IX, Civil Rights, etc.). Further, if the state doesn't actually know how to "act" non-violently, how then do we get them to speak our language? I would prefer that non-violence be the answer but is it possible to be non-violent and get long lasting structural change?
violence is not a neutral terrain. it is the terrain of the state... and it is not an arena that those seriously seeking change can ever hope to compete in, nor do they wish to. when dealing with the state no excuse should be given to them to use force.. it is their way and it shores up the hierarchical system dominated by men.
This is what I was looking for a reasoned debate on the merits of what OWS is trying to do, and how they/we are going about doing it. I get that violence would not be fought on an equal playing field, and that alienation could and would occur, however, what is non-violence going to get us? Newer forms of civil rights legislation that future generations of demopuplicans and republicrats will spend years stripping of its power (see: Title IX, Civil Rights, etc.). Further, if the state doesn't actually know how to "act" non-violently, how then do we get them to speak our language? I would prefer that non-violence be the answer but is it possible to be non-violent and get long lasting structural change?
But, Obama administration is not to blame at all? It seems as if OWS minds like to dodge that. Because of this, to me, it seems like OWS is an attempt to do what Obama did to Bush (perhaps rightly so), yet use a new scape goat: Wall Street. The irony, of course, is that almost every single economic indicator has worsened under this current administration. The guy came in promising unemployment would never go above 8.5%. It will almost certainly be above 8.5% four years later, it sure is now. Where's the anti-Obama signs at these protests?
but getting experience doing manufacturing jobs and trade positions is going to be tough since most of those positions have either been sent overseas or are being done by laborers working more cheaply.
As for your points, the truth is when the dollar weakened, U.S. manufacturing became more attractive. I'm not saying it immediately came back. It didn't and it won't. But, it did briefly improve. A weak dollar helps with that. The thing that really hurt was the housing market. All those housing-related jobs sank, not because of the Top 1% or some other scape goat.... because of the housing bubble. The question is why did that bubble exist? I argue that government programs (those enacted by Republicans and Democrats)... and mostly, the FED, fueled the bubble. Were consumers and banks also involved? Sure. Even Wall Street played a part, but I'd say it was mostly government. Yet, where are the signs holding government accountable at OWS? Oh yeh, is it because most there are pro-Obama and realize he's up for reelection? hmmm.
Also on trade,... people abroad are taking cheap jobs because they want to work. Screaming at corporations for moving overseas looking for people who will do exactly what someone in the states will do for cheaper is not going to do anything. Acting as though you "deserve" more money for a job you agree to, will also do nothing. The only thing that can change how corporations feel about people here or locating here is our government policies. For example, if we lowered the corporate tax rate from the highest in the industrialized world, maybe then we wouldn't have all these corporations seeking shelter abroad, hiring foreign employees in their tax shelters... and giving other governments money our government should be getting. We have a lot of great things here. We have highly productive population.... if we are willing to take slight cuts (only in times of recession) it will give us a competitive advantage because the truth is the average US worker is capable of producing more here than an average worker abroad. The price to benefit has to be right and the tax incentives have to be right for companies to come to the US though.
Riots, asking for higher wages during recessions, etc.... won't help there.
So kids are now compelled to go to college...only colleges are feeling the pinch from a reduction in state funding (I had to take furloughs for the last 3 years costing thousands in losses for my salary then listened to moron radio hosts bitch about how we got a one time reimbursement for $750 at the start of this school year), so they are increasingly hiring cheap non-phd adjunct lecturers, and having to charge more to go to school. Essentially the lessening of the tax burden on the rich has trickled down to the poor trying to get into schools that cost double, with less of an educational atmosphere, and little guarantee of employment after you get a degree. This whole thing is fucked, and, while violence may/may not be the answer, something's gotta happen.
The issue with Universities is due to government incentives, simple supply and demand, the overall economy and our government debt. The government provides incentives for higher education and has for years. There may be merit for that, they may not be. Regardless, the overall economy is shit, so MORE people than normal are looking to go back to school. Both of the above cause demand increases and demand increase mean prices rise. Since, government is broke, they can't help with the bill, and since the housing market crashed (in my opinion, due to government involvement) loans are tougher to get, and if you do land one, you may pay higher interest rates. All increasing prices.
If you give it time, however, and demand for University falls (because some realize the price is too high and some aren't getting anything out of it), prices will improve. If you scream about it to government and expect them to do anything to help the situation, you're screaming to an organization that has created all these problems to begin with.
Violence is not the answer.... and, I'll ask again... why is government not getting any blame?
yes I saw that...there is hope, especially as the cops start realizing they are a part of us. i'm excited at the possibilities that OWS has given us, but I really want it to be a longstanding part of the discussion in the year's ahead. I don't want to look back at this the way older people look back at '68 as a missed opportunity. We can't miss this opportunity, and I'm concerned.
the government doesn't get the blame because they are basically a shill for corporations at this point. it's not worth blaming people who don't have the power to change things.
Edit: In essence then blaming Wall Street and Corporations is blaming the government, because they are the ruling class @ present.
the government doesn't get the blame because they are basically a shill for corporations at this point. it's not worth blaming people who don't have the power to change things.
Edit: In essence then blaming Wall Street and Corporations is blaming the government, because they are the ruling class @ present.
How can you say that the government doesn't have the power to change things? I'll bet you that the people protesting didn't believe that when Bush was in office. And if they really believe that now, then why are they asking for higher taxes on the rich and what exactly changed from 2008 to January 2009 to take away the government's power that existed when Bush was President? If the government has no power, then how can the protesters waste time asking for taxes to be raised? And if the government is really just shilling for corporations, then why bother voting? After all, the debates and platforms are all meaningless. Who cares what Cain's economic plan is? Who cares what Romney thinks about health care? Who cares what Obama promises? Why distinguish between candidates at all?
the government doesn't get the blame because they are basically a shill for corporations at this point. it's not worth blaming people who don't have the power to change things.
Edit: In essence then blaming Wall Street and Corporations is blaming the government, because they are the ruling class @ present.
How can you say that the government doesn't have the power to change things? I'll bet you that the people protesting didn't believe that when Bush was in office. And if they really believe that now, then why are they asking for higher taxes on the rich and what exactly changed from 2008 to January 2009 to take away the government's power that existed when Bush was President? If the government has no power, then how can the protesters waste time asking for taxes to be raised? And if the government is really just shilling for corporations, then why bother voting? After all, the debates and platforms are all meaningless. Who cares what Cain's economic plan is? Who cares what Romney thinks about health care? Who cares what Obama promises? Why distinguish between candidates at all?
the government doesn't get the blame because they are basically a shill for corporations at this point. it's not worth blaming people who don't have the power to change things.
Edit: In essence then blaming Wall Street and Corporations is blaming the government, because they are the ruling class @ present.
I think in broad terms the government is just shilling for corporations. that's how many of the officials get voted in corporate campaign contributions. they are going to do things to stay in office for the next time rather than do things for the people. of course i'd like to believe that they would care for the people, but, at present there is little evidence to the contrary.
the government doesn't get the blame because they are basically a shill for corporations at this point. it's not worth blaming people who don't have the power to change things.
Edit: In essence then blaming Wall Street and Corporations is blaming the government, because they are the ruling class @ present.
Obama's a shill for corporations?
YES...as soon as he started taking corporate campaign funding and championed lowering taxes for GE (even though they didn't pay taxes in america in the first place) he effectively sold out his campaign for change. Is he better than say W, yes, but he's still controlled by corporations.
the government doesn't get the blame because they are basically a shill for corporations at this point. it's not worth blaming people who don't have the power to change things.
Edit: In essence then blaming Wall Street and Corporations is blaming the government, because they are the ruling class @ present.
Obama's a shill for corporations?
YES...as soon as he started taking corporate campaign funding and championed lowering taxes for GE (even though they didn't pay taxes in america in the first place) he effectively sold out his campaign for change. Is he better than say W, yes, but he's still controlled by corporations.
All politician accept lobbyist's dollars. It's part of the game.
the government doesn't get the blame because they are basically a shill for corporations at this point. it's not worth blaming people who don't have the power to change things.
Edit: In essence then blaming Wall Street and Corporations is blaming the government, because they are the ruling class @ present.
Obama's a shill for corporations?
YES...as soon as he started taking corporate campaign funding and championed lowering taxes for GE (even though they didn't pay taxes in america in the first place) he effectively sold out his campaign for change. Is he better than say W, yes, but he's still controlled by corporations.
Why are there rarely any anti-Obama signs at these protests then?
Why are there rarely any anti-Obama signs at these protests then?
Well they wouldn't want to seem racist.
(and then David Duke shows up)
"The really important thing is not to live, but to live well. And to live well meant, along with more enjoyable things in life, to live according to your principles."
— Socrates
IMO it's because he's a symptom of the problem, not THE problem. Why does it matter so much if these people are for/against Obama? I think he ran on a campaign that promised a change in the system, and, even if he has been a corporate shill, that branding of him as President has probably shielded from some of the criticism he deserves. The focus is corporations and those helping them most (Obama is helping but not at the level of some others).
OWS's Beef: Wall Street Isn't Winning – It's Cheating
I was at an event on the Upper East Side last Friday night when I got to talking with a salesman in the media business. The subject turned to Zucotti Park and Occupy Wall Street, and he was chuckling about something he'd heard on the news.
"I hear [Occupy Wall Street] has a CFO," he said. "I think that's funny."
"Okay, I'll bite," I said. "Why is that funny?"
"Well, I heard they're trying to decide what back to put their money in," he said, munching on hors d'oeuvres. "It's just kind of ironic."
Oh, Christ, I thought. He’s saying the protesters are hypocrites because they’re using banks. I sighed.
"Listen," I said, "where else are you going to put three hundred thousand dollars? A shopping bag?"
"Well," he said, "it's just, they're protests are all about... You know..."
"Dude," I said. "These people aren't protesting money. They're not protesting banking. They're protesting corruption on Wall Street."
"Whatever," he said, shrugging.
These nutty criticisms of the protests are spreading like cancer. Earlier that same day, I'd taped a TV segment on CNN with Will Cain from the National Review, and we got into an argument on the air. Cain and I agreed about a lot of the problems on Wall Street, but when it came to the protesters, we disagreed on one big thing.
Cain said he believed that the protesters are driven by envy of the rich.
"I find the one thing [the protesters] have in common revolves around the human emotions of envy and entitlement," he said. "What you have is more than what I have, and I'm not happy with my situation."
Cain seems like a nice enough guy, but I nearly blew my stack when I heard this. When you take into consideration all the theft and fraud and market manipulation and other evil shit Wall Street bankers have been guilty of in the last ten-fifteen years, you have to have balls like church bells to trot out a propaganda line that says the protesters are just jealous of their hard-earned money.
Think about it: there have always been rich and poor people in America, so if this is about jealousy, why the protests now? The idea that masses of people suddenly discovered a deep-seated animus/envy toward the rich – after keeping it strategically hidden for decades – is crazy.
Where was all that class hatred in the Reagan years, when openly dumping on the poor became fashionable? Where was it in the last two decades, when unions disappeared and CEO pay relative to median incomes started to triple and quadruple?
The answer is, it was never there. If anything, just the opposite has been true. Americans for the most part love the rich, even the obnoxious rich. And in recent years, the harder things got, the more we've obsessed over the wealth dream. As unemployment skyrocketed, people tuned in in droves to gawk at Evrémonde-heiresses like Paris Hilton, or watch bullies like Donald Trump fire people on TV.
Moreover, the worse the economy got, the more being a millionaire or a billionaire somehow became a qualification for high office, as people flocked to voting booths to support politicians with names like Bloomberg and Rockefeller and Corzine, names that to voters symbolized success and expertise at a time when few people seemed to have answers. At last count, there were 245 millionaires in congress, including 66 in the Senate.
And we hate the rich? Come on. Success is the national religion, and almost everyone is a believer. Americans love winners. But that's just the problem. These guys on Wall Street are not winning – they're cheating. And as much as we love the self-made success story, we hate the cheater that much more.
We cheer for people who hit their own home runs in this country– not shortcut-chasing juicers like Bonds and McGwire, Blankfein and Dimon.
That's why it's so obnoxious when people say the protesters are just sore losers who are jealous of these smart guys in suits who beat them at the game of life. This isn't disappointment at having lost. It's anger because those other guys didn't really win. And people now want the score overturned.
All weekend I was thinking about this “jealousy” question, and I just kept coming back to all the different ways the game is rigged. People aren't jealous and they don’t want privileges. They just want a level playing field, and they want Wall Street to give up its cheat codes, things like:
FREE MONEY. Ordinary people have to borrow their money at market rates. Lloyd Blankfein and Jamie Dimon get billions of dollars for free, from the Federal Reserve. They borrow at zero and lend the same money back to the government at two or three percent, a valuable public service otherwise known as "standing in the middle and taking a gigantic cut when the government decides to lend money to itself."
Or the banks borrow billions at zero and lend mortgages to us at four percent, or credit cards at twenty or twenty-five percent. This is essentially an official government license to be rich, handed out at the expense of prudent ordinary citizens, who now no longer receive much interest on their CDs or other saved income. It is virtually impossible to not make money in banking when you have unlimited access to free money, especially when the government keeps buying its own cash back from you at market rates.
Your average chimpanzee couldn't fuck up that business plan, which makes it all the more incredible that most of the too-big-to-fail banks are nonetheless still functionally insolvent, and dependent upon bailouts and phony accounting to stay above water. Where do the protesters go to sign up for their interest-free billion-dollar loans?
CREDIT AMNESTY. If you or I miss a $7 payment on a Gap card or, heaven forbid, a mortgage payment, you can forget about the great computer in the sky ever overlooking your mistake. But serial financial fuckups like Citigroup and Bank of America overextended themselves by the hundreds of billions and pumped trillions of dollars of deadly leverage into the system -- and got rewarded with things like the Temporary Liquidity Guarantee Program, an FDIC plan that allowed irresponsible banks to borrow against the government's credit rating.
This is equivalent to a trust fund teenager who trashes six consecutive off-campus apartments and gets rewarded by having Daddy co-sign his next lease. The banks needed programs like TLGP because without them, the market rightly would have started charging more to lend to these idiots. Apparently, though, we can’t trust the free market when it comes to Bank of America, Goldman, Sachs, Citigroup, etc.
In a larger sense, the TBTF banks all have the implicit guarantee of the federal government, so investors know it's relatively safe to lend to them -- which means it's now cheaper for them to borrow money than it is for, say, a responsible regional bank that didn't jack its debt-to-equity levels above 35-1 before the crash and didn't dabble in toxic mortgages. In other words, the TBTF banks got better credit for being less responsible. Click on freecreditscore.com to see if you got the same deal.
STUPIDITY INSURANCE. Defenders of the banks like to talk a lot about how we shouldn't feel sorry for people who've been foreclosed upon, because it's their own fault for borrowing more than they can pay back, buying more house than they can afford, etc. And critics of OWS have assailed protesters for complaining about things like foreclosure by claiming these folks want “something for nothing.”
This is ironic because, as one of the Rolling Stone editors put it last week, “something for nothing is Wall Street’s official policy." In fact, getting bailed out for bad investment decisions has been de rigeur on Wall Street not just since 2008, but for decades.
Time after time, when big banks screw up and make irresponsible bets that blow up in their faces, they've scored bailouts. It doesn't matter whether it was the Mexican currency bailout of 1994 (when the state bailed out speculators who gambled on the peso) or the IMF/World Bank bailout of Russia in 1998 (a bailout of speculators in the "emerging markets") or the Long-Term Capital Management Bailout of the same year (in which the rescue of investors in a harebrained hedge-fund trading scheme was deemed a matter of international urgency by the Federal Reserve), Wall Street has long grown accustomed to getting bailed out for its mistakes.
The 2008 crash, of course, birthed a whole generation of new bailout schemes. Banks placed billions in bets with AIG and should have lost their shirts when the firm went under -- AIG went under, after all, in large part because of all the huge mortgage bets the banks laid with the firm -- but instead got the state to pony up $180 billion or so to rescue the banks from their own bad decisions.
This sort of thing seems to happen every time the banks do something dumb with their money. Just recently, the French and Belgian authorities cooked up a massive bailout of the French bank Dexia, whose biggest trading partners included, surprise, surprise, Goldman, Sachs and Morgan Stanley. Here's how the New York Times explained the bailout:
To limit damage from Dexia’s collapse, the bailout fashioned by the French and Belgian governments may make these banks and other creditors whole — that is, paid in full for potentially tens of billions of euros they are owed. This would enable Dexia’s creditors and trading partners to avoid losses they might otherwise suffer...
When was the last time the government stepped into help you "avoid losses you might otherwise suffer?" But that's the reality we live in. When Joe Homeowner bought too much house, essentially betting that home prices would go up, and losing his bet when they dropped, he was an irresponsible putz who shouldn’t whine about being put on the street.
But when banks bet billions on a firm like AIG that was heavily invested in mortgages, they were making the same bet that Joe Homeowner made, leaving themselves hugely exposed to a sudden drop in home prices. But instead of being asked to "suck it in and cope" when that bet failed, the banks instead went straight to Washington for a bailout -- and got it.
UNGRADUATED TAXES. I've already gone off on this more than once, but it bears repeating. Bankers on Wall Street pay lower tax rates than most car mechanics. When Warren Buffet released his tax information, we learned that with taxable income of $39 million, he paid $6.9 million in taxes last year, a tax rate of about 17.4%.
Most of Buffet’s income, it seems, was taxed as either "carried interest" (i.e. hedge-fund income) or long-term capital gains, both of which carry 15% tax rates, half of what many of the Zucotti park protesters will pay.
As for the banks, as companies, we've all heard the stories. Goldman, Sachs in 2008 – this was the same year the bank reported $2.9 billion in profits, and paid out over $10 billion in compensation -- paid just $14 million in taxes, a 1% tax rate.
Bank of America last year paid not a single dollar in taxes -- in fact, it received a "tax credit" of $1 billion. There are a slew of troubled companies that will not be paying taxes for years, including Citigroup and CIT.
When GM bought the finance company AmeriCredit, it was able to marry its long-term losses to AmeriCredit's revenue stream, creating a tax windfall worth as much as $5 billion. So even though AmeriCredit is expected to post earnings of $8-$12 billion in the next decade or so, it likely won't pay any taxes during that time, because its revenue will be offset by GM's losses.
Thank God our government decided to pledge $50 billion of your tax dollars to a rescue of General Motors! You just paid for one of the world's biggest tax breaks.
And last but not least, there is:
GET OUT OF JAIL FREE. One thing we can still be proud of is that America hasn't yet managed to achieve the highest incarceration rate in history -- that honor still goes to the Soviets in the Stalin/Gulag era. But we do still have about 2.3 million people in jail in America.
Virtually all 2.3 million of those prisoners come from "the 99%." Here is the number of bankers who have gone to jail for crimes related to the financial crisis: 0.
Millions of people have been foreclosed upon in the last three years. In most all of those foreclosures, a regional law enforcement office -- typically a sheriff's office -- was awarded fees by the court as part of the foreclosure settlement, settlements which of course were often rubber-stamped by a judge despite mountains of perjurious robosigned evidence.
That means that every single time a bank kicked someone out of his home, a local police department got a cut. Local sheriff's offices also get cuts of almost all credit card judgments, and other bank settlements. If you're wondering how it is that so many regional police departments have the money for fancy new vehicles and SWAT teams and other accoutrements, this is one of your answers.
What this amounts to is the banks having, as allies, a massive armed police force who are always on call, ready to help them evict homeowners and safeguard the repossession of property. But just see what happens when you try to call the police to prevent an improper foreclosure. Then, suddenly, the police will not get involved. It will be a "civil matter" and they won't intervene.
The point being: if you miss a few home payments, you have a very high likelihood of colliding with a police officer in the near future. But if you defraud a pair of European banks out of a billion dollars -- that's a billion, with a b -- you will never be arrested, never see a policeman, never see the inside of a jail cell.
Your settlement will be worked out not with armed police, but with regulators in suits who used to work for your company or one like it. And you'll have, defending you, a former head of that regulator's agency. In the end, a fine will be paid to the government, but it won't come out of your pocket personally; it will be paid by your company's shareholders. And there will be no admission of criminal wrongdoing.
The Abacus case, in which Goldman helped a hedge fund guy named John Paulson beat a pair of European banks for a billion dollars, tells you everything you need to know about the difference between our two criminal justice systems. The settlement was $550 million -- just over half of the damage.
Can anyone imagine a common thief being caught by police and sentenced to pay back half of what he took? Just one low-ranking individual in that case was charged (case pending), and no individual had to reach into his pocket to help cover the fine. The settlement Goldman paid to to the government was about 1/24th of what Goldman received from the government just in the AIG bailout. And that was the toughest "punishment" the government dished out to a bank in the wake of 2008.
The point being: we have a massive police force in America that outside of lower Manhattan prosecutes crime and imprisons citizens with record-setting, factory-level efficiency, eclipsing the incarceration rates of most of history's more notorious police states and communist countries.
But the bankers on Wall Street don't live in that heavily-policed country. There are maybe 1000 SEC agents policing that sector of the economy, plus a handful of FBI agents. There are nearly that many police officers stationed around the polite crowd at Zucotti park.
These inequities are what drive the OWS protests. People don't want handouts. It's not a class uprising and they don't want civil war -- they want just the opposite. They want everyone to live in the same country, and live by the same rules. It's amazing that some people think that that's asking a lot.
Based on comments, OWS sympathizers are beginning to understand that our federal government has been corrupted by money and outside influences.
The only viable way to decrease the corruption is to decrease the amount of power the politicians / corporations have. Money is power.
If the American people demand that our government balances a budget, that is a lot of lost power (money). If we reduce the amount of control the government has over our lives, we are also decreasing the amount of power that corporations have over us as well.
Right now, the needle if favoring government / corporations over the people. A happy-medium needs to be found. I think a balanced budget is a good start.
Comments
:roll:
Are you really NOT going to condemn those who advocate violence in this thread then? Seems a bit strange that none of the pro-occupy board members condemn those who come in these threads and advocate violence. It's almost as if.... nah, no way.... yeh... it's almost as if... you're fine with these movements becoming violent. Otherwise, I'd think you'd condemn those who want these protests to turn violent.
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Quit advocating violence!
Ok... but you also said...
Call me crazy, but that appears to be advocating violence. Whoops.... pardon me, that appears to be advocating ultraviolence.
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without permits, this past weekend
Police present markedly increased with the Mayor saying he will clear the park at
his choosing.
First, I'd say, the movement would need to know what it wants and be able to push for that in non-violent means. The messages coming out of this movement are all over the place. Sure, people have reason to be upset, but to direct all the anger in the direction the White House wants you too, is naive, atleast in my opinion. If OWS people don't see that they are doing exactly what the Obama administration wants, they are misguided. Mr. Obama is our President, yet I see no (to very very little) blame coming his way at these protests. Which is interesting considering the multitudes of issues put forth at these protests.
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"Well, you tell him that I don't talk to suckas."
As for the story the author went off on, it is B.S., that I'll agree with. Tuition has increased 100% at the state university I attended in just over a decade ago. I was able to meet ends meet working part time, but tuition was around $5K. I can't understand how every university has doubled their price. I think kids today would be better off going to college online or getting experience as a welder.
take a good look
this could be the day
hold my hand
lie beside me
i just need to say
Where I'm not ugly and you're lookin' at me
we dont. we go about our thing, in our way. we dont play by their rules.. we define the rules for ourselves and for the good of the kind of society we desire to live in. we wont overthrow the current system, not should we seek to. what we will do is force them to chase us... to follow our dance...to take note of our actions and to see we wont be tied down by their system.. a system that strips people of their dignity.
remember the state will use violence when they feel theyre losing the initiative. they will beat us into submission rather than lose control of their system... and that is to their disadvantage, not to mention disingenious. but it is how they work.. it is how theyve always worked. so we must show them another way... a humane way... a way where were all in this together and no one is our master.
take a good look
this could be the day
hold my hand
lie beside me
i just need to say
I don't know but have you heard this story? This brings some hope that, slowly, from the bottom up, the hierarchy has some chance of acting civilly.
http://www.timesunion.com/local/article ... z1bhYjL6xj
and there you have it. *shakes head*
take a good look
this could be the day
hold my hand
lie beside me
i just need to say
But, Obama administration is not to blame at all? It seems as if OWS minds like to dodge that. Because of this, to me, it seems like OWS is an attempt to do what Obama did to Bush (perhaps rightly so), yet use a new scape goat: Wall Street. The irony, of course, is that almost every single economic indicator has worsened under this current administration. The guy came in promising unemployment would never go above 8.5%. It will almost certainly be above 8.5% four years later, it sure is now. Where's the anti-Obama signs at these protests?
As for your points, the truth is when the dollar weakened, U.S. manufacturing became more attractive. I'm not saying it immediately came back. It didn't and it won't. But, it did briefly improve. A weak dollar helps with that. The thing that really hurt was the housing market. All those housing-related jobs sank, not because of the Top 1% or some other scape goat.... because of the housing bubble. The question is why did that bubble exist? I argue that government programs (those enacted by Republicans and Democrats)... and mostly, the FED, fueled the bubble. Were consumers and banks also involved? Sure. Even Wall Street played a part, but I'd say it was mostly government. Yet, where are the signs holding government accountable at OWS? Oh yeh, is it because most there are pro-Obama and realize he's up for reelection? hmmm.
Also on trade,... people abroad are taking cheap jobs because they want to work. Screaming at corporations for moving overseas looking for people who will do exactly what someone in the states will do for cheaper is not going to do anything. Acting as though you "deserve" more money for a job you agree to, will also do nothing. The only thing that can change how corporations feel about people here or locating here is our government policies. For example, if we lowered the corporate tax rate from the highest in the industrialized world, maybe then we wouldn't have all these corporations seeking shelter abroad, hiring foreign employees in their tax shelters... and giving other governments money our government should be getting. We have a lot of great things here. We have highly productive population.... if we are willing to take slight cuts (only in times of recession) it will give us a competitive advantage because the truth is the average US worker is capable of producing more here than an average worker abroad. The price to benefit has to be right and the tax incentives have to be right for companies to come to the US though.
Riots, asking for higher wages during recessions, etc.... won't help there.
The issue with Universities is due to government incentives, simple supply and demand, the overall economy and our government debt. The government provides incentives for higher education and has for years. There may be merit for that, they may not be. Regardless, the overall economy is shit, so MORE people than normal are looking to go back to school. Both of the above cause demand increases and demand increase mean prices rise. Since, government is broke, they can't help with the bill, and since the housing market crashed (in my opinion, due to government involvement) loans are tougher to get, and if you do land one, you may pay higher interest rates. All increasing prices.
If you give it time, however, and demand for University falls (because some realize the price is too high and some aren't getting anything out of it), prices will improve. If you scream about it to government and expect them to do anything to help the situation, you're screaming to an organization that has created all these problems to begin with.
Violence is not the answer.... and, I'll ask again... why is government not getting any blame?
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Edit: In essence then blaming Wall Street and Corporations is blaming the government, because they are the ruling class @ present.
Obama's a shill for corporations?
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All politician accept lobbyist's dollars. It's part of the game.
Why are there rarely any anti-Obama signs at these protests then?
<object height="81" width="100%"> <param name="movie" value="https://player.soundcloud.com/player.swf?url=http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/28998869"></param> <param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param> <embed allowscriptaccess="always" height="81" src="https://player.soundcloud.com/player.swf?url=http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/28998869" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="100%"></embed> </object> <span><a href=" - In the Fire (demo)</a> by <a href="
Well they wouldn't want to seem racist.
(and then David Duke shows up)
— Socrates
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/bl ... g-20111025
OWS's Beef: Wall Street Isn't Winning – It's Cheating
I was at an event on the Upper East Side last Friday night when I got to talking with a salesman in the media business. The subject turned to Zucotti Park and Occupy Wall Street, and he was chuckling about something he'd heard on the news.
"I hear [Occupy Wall Street] has a CFO," he said. "I think that's funny."
"Okay, I'll bite," I said. "Why is that funny?"
"Well, I heard they're trying to decide what back to put their money in," he said, munching on hors d'oeuvres. "It's just kind of ironic."
Oh, Christ, I thought. He’s saying the protesters are hypocrites because they’re using banks. I sighed.
"Listen," I said, "where else are you going to put three hundred thousand dollars? A shopping bag?"
"Well," he said, "it's just, they're protests are all about... You know..."
"Dude," I said. "These people aren't protesting money. They're not protesting banking. They're protesting corruption on Wall Street."
"Whatever," he said, shrugging.
These nutty criticisms of the protests are spreading like cancer. Earlier that same day, I'd taped a TV segment on CNN with Will Cain from the National Review, and we got into an argument on the air. Cain and I agreed about a lot of the problems on Wall Street, but when it came to the protesters, we disagreed on one big thing.
Cain said he believed that the protesters are driven by envy of the rich.
"I find the one thing [the protesters] have in common revolves around the human emotions of envy and entitlement," he said. "What you have is more than what I have, and I'm not happy with my situation."
Cain seems like a nice enough guy, but I nearly blew my stack when I heard this. When you take into consideration all the theft and fraud and market manipulation and other evil shit Wall Street bankers have been guilty of in the last ten-fifteen years, you have to have balls like church bells to trot out a propaganda line that says the protesters are just jealous of their hard-earned money.
Think about it: there have always been rich and poor people in America, so if this is about jealousy, why the protests now? The idea that masses of people suddenly discovered a deep-seated animus/envy toward the rich – after keeping it strategically hidden for decades – is crazy.
Where was all that class hatred in the Reagan years, when openly dumping on the poor became fashionable? Where was it in the last two decades, when unions disappeared and CEO pay relative to median incomes started to triple and quadruple?
The answer is, it was never there. If anything, just the opposite has been true. Americans for the most part love the rich, even the obnoxious rich. And in recent years, the harder things got, the more we've obsessed over the wealth dream. As unemployment skyrocketed, people tuned in in droves to gawk at Evrémonde-heiresses like Paris Hilton, or watch bullies like Donald Trump fire people on TV.
Moreover, the worse the economy got, the more being a millionaire or a billionaire somehow became a qualification for high office, as people flocked to voting booths to support politicians with names like Bloomberg and Rockefeller and Corzine, names that to voters symbolized success and expertise at a time when few people seemed to have answers. At last count, there were 245 millionaires in congress, including 66 in the Senate.
And we hate the rich? Come on. Success is the national religion, and almost everyone is a believer. Americans love winners. But that's just the problem. These guys on Wall Street are not winning – they're cheating. And as much as we love the self-made success story, we hate the cheater that much more.
We cheer for people who hit their own home runs in this country– not shortcut-chasing juicers like Bonds and McGwire, Blankfein and Dimon.
That's why it's so obnoxious when people say the protesters are just sore losers who are jealous of these smart guys in suits who beat them at the game of life. This isn't disappointment at having lost. It's anger because those other guys didn't really win. And people now want the score overturned.
All weekend I was thinking about this “jealousy” question, and I just kept coming back to all the different ways the game is rigged. People aren't jealous and they don’t want privileges. They just want a level playing field, and they want Wall Street to give up its cheat codes, things like:
FREE MONEY. Ordinary people have to borrow their money at market rates. Lloyd Blankfein and Jamie Dimon get billions of dollars for free, from the Federal Reserve. They borrow at zero and lend the same money back to the government at two or three percent, a valuable public service otherwise known as "standing in the middle and taking a gigantic cut when the government decides to lend money to itself."
Or the banks borrow billions at zero and lend mortgages to us at four percent, or credit cards at twenty or twenty-five percent. This is essentially an official government license to be rich, handed out at the expense of prudent ordinary citizens, who now no longer receive much interest on their CDs or other saved income. It is virtually impossible to not make money in banking when you have unlimited access to free money, especially when the government keeps buying its own cash back from you at market rates.
Your average chimpanzee couldn't fuck up that business plan, which makes it all the more incredible that most of the too-big-to-fail banks are nonetheless still functionally insolvent, and dependent upon bailouts and phony accounting to stay above water. Where do the protesters go to sign up for their interest-free billion-dollar loans?
CREDIT AMNESTY. If you or I miss a $7 payment on a Gap card or, heaven forbid, a mortgage payment, you can forget about the great computer in the sky ever overlooking your mistake. But serial financial fuckups like Citigroup and Bank of America overextended themselves by the hundreds of billions and pumped trillions of dollars of deadly leverage into the system -- and got rewarded with things like the Temporary Liquidity Guarantee Program, an FDIC plan that allowed irresponsible banks to borrow against the government's credit rating.
This is equivalent to a trust fund teenager who trashes six consecutive off-campus apartments and gets rewarded by having Daddy co-sign his next lease. The banks needed programs like TLGP because without them, the market rightly would have started charging more to lend to these idiots. Apparently, though, we can’t trust the free market when it comes to Bank of America, Goldman, Sachs, Citigroup, etc.
In a larger sense, the TBTF banks all have the implicit guarantee of the federal government, so investors know it's relatively safe to lend to them -- which means it's now cheaper for them to borrow money than it is for, say, a responsible regional bank that didn't jack its debt-to-equity levels above 35-1 before the crash and didn't dabble in toxic mortgages. In other words, the TBTF banks got better credit for being less responsible. Click on freecreditscore.com to see if you got the same deal.
STUPIDITY INSURANCE. Defenders of the banks like to talk a lot about how we shouldn't feel sorry for people who've been foreclosed upon, because it's their own fault for borrowing more than they can pay back, buying more house than they can afford, etc. And critics of OWS have assailed protesters for complaining about things like foreclosure by claiming these folks want “something for nothing.”
This is ironic because, as one of the Rolling Stone editors put it last week, “something for nothing is Wall Street’s official policy." In fact, getting bailed out for bad investment decisions has been de rigeur on Wall Street not just since 2008, but for decades.
Time after time, when big banks screw up and make irresponsible bets that blow up in their faces, they've scored bailouts. It doesn't matter whether it was the Mexican currency bailout of 1994 (when the state bailed out speculators who gambled on the peso) or the IMF/World Bank bailout of Russia in 1998 (a bailout of speculators in the "emerging markets") or the Long-Term Capital Management Bailout of the same year (in which the rescue of investors in a harebrained hedge-fund trading scheme was deemed a matter of international urgency by the Federal Reserve), Wall Street has long grown accustomed to getting bailed out for its mistakes.
The 2008 crash, of course, birthed a whole generation of new bailout schemes. Banks placed billions in bets with AIG and should have lost their shirts when the firm went under -- AIG went under, after all, in large part because of all the huge mortgage bets the banks laid with the firm -- but instead got the state to pony up $180 billion or so to rescue the banks from their own bad decisions.
This sort of thing seems to happen every time the banks do something dumb with their money. Just recently, the French and Belgian authorities cooked up a massive bailout of the French bank Dexia, whose biggest trading partners included, surprise, surprise, Goldman, Sachs and Morgan Stanley. Here's how the New York Times explained the bailout:
To limit damage from Dexia’s collapse, the bailout fashioned by the French and Belgian governments may make these banks and other creditors whole — that is, paid in full for potentially tens of billions of euros they are owed. This would enable Dexia’s creditors and trading partners to avoid losses they might otherwise suffer...
When was the last time the government stepped into help you "avoid losses you might otherwise suffer?" But that's the reality we live in. When Joe Homeowner bought too much house, essentially betting that home prices would go up, and losing his bet when they dropped, he was an irresponsible putz who shouldn’t whine about being put on the street.
But when banks bet billions on a firm like AIG that was heavily invested in mortgages, they were making the same bet that Joe Homeowner made, leaving themselves hugely exposed to a sudden drop in home prices. But instead of being asked to "suck it in and cope" when that bet failed, the banks instead went straight to Washington for a bailout -- and got it.
UNGRADUATED TAXES. I've already gone off on this more than once, but it bears repeating. Bankers on Wall Street pay lower tax rates than most car mechanics. When Warren Buffet released his tax information, we learned that with taxable income of $39 million, he paid $6.9 million in taxes last year, a tax rate of about 17.4%.
Most of Buffet’s income, it seems, was taxed as either "carried interest" (i.e. hedge-fund income) or long-term capital gains, both of which carry 15% tax rates, half of what many of the Zucotti park protesters will pay.
As for the banks, as companies, we've all heard the stories. Goldman, Sachs in 2008 – this was the same year the bank reported $2.9 billion in profits, and paid out over $10 billion in compensation -- paid just $14 million in taxes, a 1% tax rate.
Bank of America last year paid not a single dollar in taxes -- in fact, it received a "tax credit" of $1 billion. There are a slew of troubled companies that will not be paying taxes for years, including Citigroup and CIT.
When GM bought the finance company AmeriCredit, it was able to marry its long-term losses to AmeriCredit's revenue stream, creating a tax windfall worth as much as $5 billion. So even though AmeriCredit is expected to post earnings of $8-$12 billion in the next decade or so, it likely won't pay any taxes during that time, because its revenue will be offset by GM's losses.
Thank God our government decided to pledge $50 billion of your tax dollars to a rescue of General Motors! You just paid for one of the world's biggest tax breaks.
And last but not least, there is:
GET OUT OF JAIL FREE. One thing we can still be proud of is that America hasn't yet managed to achieve the highest incarceration rate in history -- that honor still goes to the Soviets in the Stalin/Gulag era. But we do still have about 2.3 million people in jail in America.
Virtually all 2.3 million of those prisoners come from "the 99%." Here is the number of bankers who have gone to jail for crimes related to the financial crisis: 0.
Millions of people have been foreclosed upon in the last three years. In most all of those foreclosures, a regional law enforcement office -- typically a sheriff's office -- was awarded fees by the court as part of the foreclosure settlement, settlements which of course were often rubber-stamped by a judge despite mountains of perjurious robosigned evidence.
That means that every single time a bank kicked someone out of his home, a local police department got a cut. Local sheriff's offices also get cuts of almost all credit card judgments, and other bank settlements. If you're wondering how it is that so many regional police departments have the money for fancy new vehicles and SWAT teams and other accoutrements, this is one of your answers.
What this amounts to is the banks having, as allies, a massive armed police force who are always on call, ready to help them evict homeowners and safeguard the repossession of property. But just see what happens when you try to call the police to prevent an improper foreclosure. Then, suddenly, the police will not get involved. It will be a "civil matter" and they won't intervene.
The point being: if you miss a few home payments, you have a very high likelihood of colliding with a police officer in the near future. But if you defraud a pair of European banks out of a billion dollars -- that's a billion, with a b -- you will never be arrested, never see a policeman, never see the inside of a jail cell.
Your settlement will be worked out not with armed police, but with regulators in suits who used to work for your company or one like it. And you'll have, defending you, a former head of that regulator's agency. In the end, a fine will be paid to the government, but it won't come out of your pocket personally; it will be paid by your company's shareholders. And there will be no admission of criminal wrongdoing.
The Abacus case, in which Goldman helped a hedge fund guy named John Paulson beat a pair of European banks for a billion dollars, tells you everything you need to know about the difference between our two criminal justice systems. The settlement was $550 million -- just over half of the damage.
Can anyone imagine a common thief being caught by police and sentenced to pay back half of what he took? Just one low-ranking individual in that case was charged (case pending), and no individual had to reach into his pocket to help cover the fine. The settlement Goldman paid to to the government was about 1/24th of what Goldman received from the government just in the AIG bailout. And that was the toughest "punishment" the government dished out to a bank in the wake of 2008.
The point being: we have a massive police force in America that outside of lower Manhattan prosecutes crime and imprisons citizens with record-setting, factory-level efficiency, eclipsing the incarceration rates of most of history's more notorious police states and communist countries.
But the bankers on Wall Street don't live in that heavily-policed country. There are maybe 1000 SEC agents policing that sector of the economy, plus a handful of FBI agents. There are nearly that many police officers stationed around the polite crowd at Zucotti park.
These inequities are what drive the OWS protests. People don't want handouts. It's not a class uprising and they don't want civil war -- they want just the opposite. They want everyone to live in the same country, and live by the same rules. It's amazing that some people think that that's asking a lot.
The only viable way to decrease the corruption is to decrease the amount of power the politicians / corporations have. Money is power.
If the American people demand that our government balances a budget, that is a lot of lost power (money). If we reduce the amount of control the government has over our lives, we are also decreasing the amount of power that corporations have over us as well.
Right now, the needle if favoring government / corporations over the people. A happy-medium needs to be found. I think a balanced budget is a good start.