Nationswide protests-will they spread?

[svelte]

[quote=briansd1][quote=svelte][quote=sdduuuude]I think it will die on the vine as well – simply because there is nothing to actually do. I support their right to protest and I don’t hate their list of demands, but I just don’t think it will accomplish anything tangible.
[/quote]

Agree with that. Plus when the cold weather hits, the protesters will be outta there!!![/quote]

I agree that when the weather gets cold, the protesters will thin out.

But if the Occupy movement awakens American civic conscience and gets people who don’t normally vote to the polls, then that would be a great achievement in democracy building.

I hope that the Occupy movement grows in California and in warm weather states.
[/quote]

Another thing that may happen: the participants may use the cold wet winter months to regroup and show up in the spring better organized with stated goals and demands. Heading into the election season, that is a very real possibility.

[jpinpb]

[quote=svelte]Another thing that may happen: the participants may use the cold wet winter months to regroup and show up in the spring better organized with stated goals and demands. Heading into the election season, that is a very real possibility.[/quote]

I can see that happening. OWS seems pretty determined. Sure they’ll thin out in the winter. Everyone is counting on that. I can see government in general saying, “Eh, in a month it’ll be cold and they’ll be gone so let them protest while they can. It’ll be over soon.”

I can see them come back stronger in the spring. That may surprise some people.

[scaredyclassic]

Oh jeez it took me a while to figure out ows was occupy wall street. I kept thinking it was an acronym for something else. One world system? Now I see OWS equals occupy wall st. Got it.

[NotCranky]

[quote=walterwhite]Oh jeez it took me a while to figure out ows was occupy wall street. I kept thinking it was an acronym for something else. One world system? Now I see OWS equals occupy wall st. Got it.[/quote]
You sure now how to make something sound insignificant.

[briansd1]

[quote=walterwhite]Oh jeez it took me a while to figure out ows was occupy wall street. I kept thinking it was an acronym for something else. One world system? Now I see OWS equals occupy wall st. Got it.[/quote]

One World System? Careful, Tea Party members are seeing black helicopters descending on America.

[Coronita]

[quote=jpinpb][quote=svelte]Another thing that may happen: the participants may use the cold wet winter months to regroup and show up in the spring better organized with stated goals and demands. Heading into the election season, that is a very real possibility.[/quote]

I can see that happening. OWS seems pretty determined. Sure they’ll thin out in the winter. Everyone is counting on that. I can see government in general saying, “Eh, in a month it’ll be cold and they’ll be gone so let them protest while they can. It’ll be over soon.”

I can see them come back stronger in the spring. That may surprise some people.[/quote]

I disagree. By spring, our government would have already figured out how to turn back on the lax-credit-spigot (albeit for a short time)….What that will do allow people to spend on credit again…Dollars will start to flow again, and companies will raise guidance based on credit spending, which will cause companies to blow away dismal earning estimates that our wall street analysts have already set to be a lowered bar of a lowered bar, which in turn will cause the stock markets to rise (albeit temporary), which in turn will allow all these protesters that ironically have 401k, Roth, and IRA accounts that are very much heavily dependent on Wall Street to see those account values start to trickle up again…so that they can “feel” richer and can “feel” they can spend more (on credit of course)…….And that’s it…

Come on, do you really think people who are protesting against corporate greed, rich people’s excesses are really protesting FOR financial frugality??? Financial austerity is the last thing on people’s mind in this country.. Maybe a handful, but the majority…absolutely not…They just want the credit spigots to be turned on again…. so that we can resume spending $4 dollars for every $1 earned…That’s why you see so many damn euro-cars these days in socal….Those lease deals are around 300-400/month to get inside a bimmer/mercedes/audi…And that’s all people care about…I want to be able to afford my lease payments….

That’s how things have so much been instilled into american people. To forever be tied down to debt…From day one, that’s the crux of american personal financial education…Since there really isn’t one formally taught in our education system, banks and corporations took it upon themselves to teach us their version of financial education…. which was to dumb down the concept interest/cost of borrowing/debt into something that can be easily understood by one number…Monthly payment….And along the way, to shovel a bunch of complex rules, IOU terms that no one reads or for that matter cares about, since again ,it’s all about instant gratification these days……To expect the average american joe to change and break from this sort of thinking is like asking average joe to completely get retrained and put on a completely different mindset…..And who is going to do this??? The only way this break in thinking would ever occur, is in severe economic calamity, and probably would take a generation or two…. I mean, do you folks really think these protestors probably wouldn’t mind seeing their cheerished 401k/IRA/roth accounts obliterated, inventions from these so called “Wall Street” demons that these protestors are protesting?

[scaredyclassic]

What do we want?

MONEY

when do we want it?

NOW

(proposed protest chant)

[Arraya]

http://www.realitysandwich.com/occupy_wall_street_no_demand_big_enoughLooking out upon the withered American Dream, many of us feel a deep sense of betrayal. Unemployment, financial insecurity, and lifelong enslavement to debt are just the tip of the iceberg. We don’t want to merely fix the growth machine and bring profit and product to every corner of the earth. We want to fundamentally change the course of civilization. For the American Dream betrayed even those who achieved it, lonely in their overtime careers and their McMansions, narcotized to the ongoing ruination of nature and culture but aching because of it, endlessly consuming and accumulating to quell the insistent voice, “I wasn’t put here on earth to sell product.” “I wasn’t put here on earth to increase market share.” “I wasn’t put here on earth to make numbers grow.”

We protest not only at our exclusion from the American Dream; we protest at its bleakness. If it cannot include everyone on earth, every ecosystem and bioregion, every people and culture in its richness; if the wealth of one must be the debt of another; if it entails sweatshops and underclasses and fracking and all the rest of the ugliness our system has created, then we want none of it.

No one deserves to live in a world built upon the degradation of human beings, forests, waters, and the rest of our living planet. Speaking to our brethren on Wall Street, no one deserves to spend their lives playing with numbers while the world burns. Ultimately, we are protesting not only on behalf of the 99% left behind, but on behalf of the 1% as well. We have no enemies. We want everyone to wake up to the beauty of what we can create.

Occupy Wall Street has been criticized for its lack of clear demands, but how do we issue demands, when what we really want is nothing less than the more beautiful world our hearts tell us is possible? No demand is big enough. We could make lists of demands for new public policies: tax the wealthy, raise the minimum wage, protect the environment, end the wars, regulate the banks. While we know these are positive steps, they aren’t quite what motivated people to occupy Wall Street. What needs attention is something deeper: the power structures, ideologies, and institutions that prevented these steps from being taken years ago; indeed, that made these steps even necessary. Our leaders are beholden to impersonal forces, such as that of money, that compel them to do what no sane human being would choose. Disconnected from the actual effects of their policies, they live in a world of insincerity and pretense. It is time to bring a countervailing force to bear, and not just a force but a call. Our message is, “Stop pretending. You know what to do. Start doing it.” Occupy Wall Street is about exposing the truth. We can trust its power. When a policeman pepper sprays helpless women, we don’t beat him up and scare him into not doing it again; we show the world. Much worse than pepper spray is being perpetrated on our planet in service of money. Let us allow nothing happening on earth to be hidden.

If politicians are disconnected from the real world of human suffering and ecosystem collapse, all the more disconnected are the financial wizards of Wall Street. Behind their computer screens, they occupy a world of pure symbol, manipulating numbers and computer bits. Occupy Wall Street punctures their bubble of pretense as well, reconnects them with the human consequences of the god they serve, and perhaps with their own consciences and humanity too. Only in a hallucination could someone imagine that the unsustainable can last forever; in puncturing their bubble, we remind them that the money game is nearing its end. It can be perpetuated for a while longer, perhaps, but only at great and growing cost. We, the 99%, are paying that cost right now, and as the environment and the social fabric decay, the 1% will soon feel it too. We want those who operate and serve the financial system to wake up and see before it is too late.

We can also point out to them that they sooner or later they will have no choice. The god they serve, the financial system, is a dying god. Reading various insider financial websites, I perceive that the authorities are flailing, panicking, desperately implementing solutions they themselves know are temporary just to kick the problem down the road a few years or a few months. The strategy of lending even more money to a debtor who cannot pay his debts is doomed, its eventual failure a mathematical certainty. Like all our institutions of exponential growth, it is unsustainable. Once you have stripped the debtor of all assets – home equity, savings, pension – and turned every last dollar of his or her disposable income toward debt service, once you have forced the debtor into austerity and laid claim even to his future income (or in the case of nations, tax revenues), then there is nothing left to take. We are nearing that point, the point of peak debt. The money machine, ever hungry, seeks to liquidate whatever scraps remain of the natural commons and social equity to reignite economic growth. If GDP rises, so does our ability to service debt. But is growth really what we want? Can we really cheer an increase in housing starts, when there are 19 million vacant housing units on the market already? Can we really applaud a new oil field, when the atmosphere is past the limit of how much waste it can absorb? Is more stuff really what the world needs right now? Or can we envision a world instead with more play and less work, more sharing and less buying, more public space and less indoors, more nature and less product?

So far, government policy has been to try somehow to keep the debts on the books, but every debt bubble in history ultimately collapses; ours is no different. The question is, how much misery will we endure, and how much will we inflict, before we succumb to the inevitable? And secondly, how can we make a gentle, non-violent transition to a steady-state or degrowth world? Too many revolutions before us have succeeded only to institute a different but more horrible version of the very thing they overthrew. We look to a different kind of revolution. At risk of revealing the stars in my eyes, let me call it a revolution of love.

[briansd1]

[quote=flu]
Come on, do you really think people who are protesting against corporate greed, rich people’s excesses are really protesting FOR financial frugality??? [/quote]

How about some regulations to prevent banks from dumping toxic products on the American people at usurious rates, regulations championed by Elizabeth Warren. If those regulations result in less credit available to those who can’t afford the credit, then all the better. We would then end up with more frugality.

[UCGal]

[quote=pri_dk][quote=CA renter]Hogwash. Most of the richest people today do nothing to increase domestic production or create jobs.[/quote]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_members_of_the_Forbes_400_(2010)

Funny, I found the facts that demonstrate how wrong you are on Google, using a Dell computer running a Microsoft OS.

Now I’m off to Wal Mart, where I can buy tonight’s dinner for my family for under $10…[/quote]

Hmmm – most of those companies haven’t added significantly to US jobs, once you account for acquisitions.
I just dove through the 10-k filings for 2009-2011 to see the employee head counts.

Microsoft has lost 2000 jobs in the US since end of FY2009

Google added just under 5000 jobs between FY2009 and FY2010 (10k for FY2011 not out yet). I assume some of the headcount is due to the acquisitions they made in that time frame. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Google)

Dell gained 24,400 employees between FY2009 and FY2011 – but 23,800 were from the acquisition of Perot. And when you do the math on domestic employees, they’ve “gained” 7000 employees domestically, but most of the Perot employees were domestic – so domestically they’ve shed jobs.
One more thing on Dell – if you look at their 2008 employment (88,200) and add in the Perot jobs, they’re down 8700 jobs.

Walmart has stayed flat domestically and internationally on employment for the past 3 years. 2.1M employees worldwide, 1.4 here in the US. And they talk of the high percentage of part time workers, and high turnover of employeees in their 10-K’s.

I wouldn’t hold those companies’ CEOs out as shining examples of rich CEOs hiring lots of US workers. The data doesn’t show it.

Company CEOs look at employee headcount as an expense. They don’t want to ADD expenses, they want to CUT expenses.

[Arraya]

[quote=briansd1][quote=flu]
Come on, do you really think people who are protesting against corporate greed, rich people’s excesses are really protesting FOR financial frugality??? [/quote]

How about some regulations to prevent banks from dumping toxic products on the American people at usurious rates, regulations championed by Elizabeth Warren. If those regulations result in less credit available to those who can’t afford the credit, then all the better. We would then end up with more frugality.[/quote]

Frugality increases unemployment and decreases profits. We can’t have that in a consumption growth based system because of it’s economic consequences.

[Coronita]

[quote=briansd1][quote=flu]
Come on, do you really think people who are protesting against corporate greed, rich people’s excesses are really protesting FOR financial frugality??? [/quote]

How about some regulations to prevent banks from dumping toxic products on the American people at usurious rates, regulations championed by Elizabeth Warren. If those regulations result in less credit available to those who can’t afford the credit, then all the better. We would then end up with more frugality.[/quote]

Won’t work…Because Wall Street is always smarter than Government….

Example:

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Goldman-Morgan-Stanley-May-cnbc-3569095254.html?x=0&sec=topStories&pos=1&asset=&ccode=

Goldman, Morgan Stanley May Shed ‘Bank’ Status: Analyst

Goldman Sachs (NYSE:GS – News) and Morgan Stanley (NYSE:MS – News) may shed the “bank holding company” classification in order to skirt the Volcker rule banning propriety trading with the firm’s own capital, according to Susquehanna Financial Group analyst David Hilder.

Goldman and Morgan Stanley both became bank-holding companies during the 2008 financial crisis in order to be eligible for emergency Fed lending. But the new rule, which would limit trading when the bank’s own money is a risk, would deal a major blow to one of Wall Street’s most profitable businesses.

“The regulators have proposed a massive new compliance burden on banks to prove that their market-making activities are just that and not proprietary trading in disguise,” wrote Hilder in a note to clients. “There will be large additional costs imposed on banks as market-makers that will not apply to market-makers not owned by banks. We would expect that to draw capital to non-bank market-makers, and cause Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley to examine whether it makes sense for them to exit the banking system.”

The Dodd-Frank act provision named for former Fed Chief Paul Volcker was released Tuesday in a rather lengthy form by the Fed and the FDIC for public comment. The Securities and Exchange also agreed Wednesday to put the new rules out for public comment.

“Only in Washington could a simple idea-ban banks that accept insured deposits from short term trading for their own account-become a proposal that runs to 298 pages and asks for comments on 394 specific questions,” wrote Hilder. “We would add to positions in positive-rated names that could potentially exit the banking system, GS and MS.”

This exit may draw the ire of everyone from legislators to the Occupy Wall Street crowd as Goldman and Morgan Stanley changed their status during the height of the financial crisis following the collapse of Lehman Brothers in Sept. 2008 in order to get access to emergency funds not provided for non-commercial banks.

As always,
Banks 1: Government 0 : American People 0

I’m laughing out of my ass because some folks in our government think they can control the banks…The banks are the ones hustling the government, not the other way around…..

[UCGal]

Goldman was never really a commercial bank anyway – except on paper so they could get that tasty, virtually free, money.

This might be an indication that the spigot of money to the banks from the fed is going to dry up.

The giant squid will always come out ahead of the game.

[briansd1]

[quote=flu]

As always,
Banks 1: Government 0 : American People 0

I’m laughing out of my ass because some folks in our government think they can control the banks…The banks are the ones hustling the government, not the other way around…..[/quote]

So what? Give up? Or keep on trying as Elizabeth Warren is trying?

Either that or side with the banks as the Tea Party has and call it quits.

Democracy is a work in progress.

[Anonymous]

[quote=UCGal]I wouldn’t hold those companies’ CEOs out as shining examples of rich CEOs hiring lots of US workers. The data doesn’t show it.[/quote]

Gates, Buffet, Ellison, Page, Walton founded the companies. They started with ZERO employees.

Your “analysis” is utterly ridiculous.

Try again. Here’s a hint: Time did not start in 2008.

[Author]

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