An Encinitas version, called Occupy North County, is scheduled to begin at 1 p.m. Saturday at Encinitas Boulevard and Coast Highway 101. For more information on that event, go to Facebook.com and search for Occupy North County.
The overall movement’s slogan is “We are the 99,” as a reference to the discrepancy of wealth between the top 1 percent of wage earners in the country compared to the rest. The demonstrators are demanding financial reform that deals with rising student loan debt, high unemployment, and tax rates.
…Pssss. Careful sdrealtor…They are coming to get you…..Better not break out the bubblies and sip them fine bottles of wine on the rooftop while you watch the protesters…Otherwise they might paint you as a target….
I have a better question. How is THIS not considered class warfare?
“Here are some dramatic facts that sum up how the wealth distribution became even more concentrated between 1983 and 2004, in good part due to the tax cuts for the wealthy and the defeat of labor unions: Of all the new financial wealth created by the American economy in that 21-year-period, fully 42% of it went to the top 1%. A whopping 94% went to the top 20%, which of course means that the bottom 80% received only 6% of all the new financial wealth generated in the United States during the ’80s, ’90s, and early 2000s (Wolff, 2007).
You just quoted a SOCIOLOGY professor from UCSC.[/quote]
And…?
There are all kinds of sources out there that show these same trends. What exactly are you trying to insiunate? That the middle and working classes have done as well as the top 1-5% in the past ~30 years? Show me a single piece of evidence that proves that assertion (if that’s what you’re trying to assert).[/quote]
“There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics” You can spin a web based on selective stats, but let us deal with the real question here. There is no debating that there is a difference in the rich and poor, that much is obvious.
Why/how is it that ALL rich people have gotten all their money off the backs of the 99? Did all rich people get that way through ill gotten gains?
Furthermore, even if you can show that some rich people have screwed over the lower classes, how do you then justify government confiscation and redistribution as a moral solution? Do you not think that many rich people have provided an incredible service to their employees and deserve the money they have made, by providing gainful and productive employment for many? By what grounds do you justify confiscating money from those with proper earned gains? Because they simply have more money then you? That is hardly a moral justification.
If you steal from the rich to give to the poor, you are still a thief (even if you are blanketed in the authority of the government). Just because inequality exists does not logically lead to class warfare by the rich on the poor.[/quote]
Many of the richest people have NOT provided jobs for the masses, but have made it easier and cheaper to decimate our job base and reduce us all to “big box” greeters and cashiers.
One can make the argument that all profit is made on the backs of those who created the goods or performed the services that are being sold. One can easily make the argument that large profit margins exist at the expense of the workers (who are not paid the full value of their labor) and the customers (who pay too much for the goods/services). And that’s just addressing the wealth that goes to those who arguably “create” jobs.
There is also a tremendous amount of our national wealth being directed to those who gamble on asset price movements. They aren’t producing anything. Why is the financial industry taking so much from the productive part of the economy? Do you not see a problem with that?
————— “Financial companies accounted for 29.3 percent of U.S. corporate profits over the 12 months ended Mar. 31, well off the record high of 41.7 percent set in the 12 months ended Sept. 30, 2002.”
“But there’s a deeper and more disturbing similarity: elite business interests—financiers, in the case of the U.S.—played a central role in creating the crisis, making ever-larger gambles, with the implicit backing of the government, until the inevitable collapse. More alarming, they are now using their influence to prevent precisely the sorts of reforms that are needed, and fast, to pull the economy out of its nosedive. The government seems helpless, or unwilling, to act against them.
Top investment bankers and government officials like to lay the blame for the current crisis on the lowering of U.S. interest rates after the dotcom bust or, even better—in a “buck stops somewhere else” sort of way—on the flow of savings out of China. Some on the right like to complain about Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, or even about longer-standing efforts to promote broader homeownership. And, of course, it is axiomatic to everyone that the regulators responsible for “safety and soundness” were fast asleep at the wheel.
But these various policies—lightweight regulation, cheap money, the unwritten Chinese-American economic alliance, the promotion of homeownership—had something in common. Even though some are traditionally associated with Democrats and some with Republicans, they all benefited the financial sector. Policy changes that might have forestalled the crisis but would have limited the financial sector’s profits—such as Brooksley Born’s now-famous attempts to regulate credit-default swaps at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, in 1998—were ignored or swept aside.”
