Occupy this

[Lord Jim]

As long as they don't allow their message to be co-opted by either major party (unlike the tea baggers)

What about letting their message be co-opted by the flea baggers?

[dales]

Now, now Jim.

You're jealous because "Occupy SF" people are having fun outdoors in the glorious San Francisco fall weather and you're stuck inside with the kids and wife.

On a side note:

My older daughter is "conservative" with a capital "C" and my younger daughter "the artiste" workes at Trader Joes while going to school and is "too out there" even for me!

Where did I go wrong?

[rubato]

At least OWS got dialogue going in America and I predict they will morph into a force to be reckoned with.

As long as they don't allow their message to be co-opted by either major party (unlike the tea baggers) they seem to me the only bright spot on the political horizon.

I was visiting with a good friend of mine (a 68-year old ex Viet-Nam vet) and he has nothing but praise for the OWS message. Both of us are disgusted with the current political shennanigans and look to OWS as a step in the right direction.

Time will tell.

I agree. They are a huge sign of hope in electoral politics, along with the election of Obama.

The last 30+ years have seen the pie get bigger, most people got nothing but the top 5% got all of the increase. That's wrong.

And I can say that being well within the top 5%. The economic system has been perverted and the perverts control all of the access to power and nearly all of the media. They created the "tea party" to cement their position and confuse and confound the very people they are fucking in the ass. If your family income is less than $150k per year you are being fucked and don't know it.

yrs,
rubato

[Lord Jim]

You're jealous because "Occupy SF" people are having fun outdoors in the glorious San Francisco fall weather and you're stuck inside with the kids and wife.

Hey, I'll have you know we just got back from a couple of hours down at the beach, and I'm about to throw some shiskabob on the barby...

(We don't get a whole lot of weather like this; when we do, you have to get out and enjoy it)

[Liberty1]

See Dales, even Bloomberg gets it.

http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/c ... -not-banks

Banner Art by Trenton Duerksen Login / Register Capital New York Home About Us Capital Writers Advertise Contact Search this site: Twitter Facebook Flickr YouTube RSS Tumblr
Bloomberg: 'Plain and simple,' Congress caused the mortgage crisis, not the banks

Michael Bloomberg. Photo via British Prime Minister's Office flickr stream.

Tweet Related stories
Ed Koch: 'I love Wall Street', but some C.E.O. should go to jail
Quinn tells business leaders protesters shouldn't be ignored
Owners of the park at the center of the Occupy Wall Street protests are losing patience, but what can they do?
Michael Bloomberg as an unflappable father of teenagers, plus a pile of sexy
By Azi Paybarah
11:03 am Nov. 1, 20111Add a comment
Mayor Michael Bloomberg said this morning that if there is anyone to blame for the mortgage crisis that led the collapse of the financial industry, it's not the "big banks," but Congress.

Speaking at a business breakfast in midtown featuring Bloomberg and two former New York City mayors, Bloomberg was asked what he thought of the Occupy Wall Street protesters.

"I hear your complaints," Bloomberg said. "Some of them are totally unfounded. It was not the banks that created the mortgage crisis. It was, plain and simple, Congress who forced everybody to go and give mortgages to people who were on the cusp. Now, I'm not saying I'm sure that was terrible policy, because a lot of those people who got homes still have them and they wouldn't gave gotten them without that.

"But they were the ones who pushed Fannie and Freddie to make a bunch of loans that were imprudent, if you will. They were the ones that pushed the banks to loan to everybody. And now we want to go vilify the banks because it's one target, it's easy to blame them and congress certainly isn't going to blame themselves. At the same time, Congress is trying to pressure banks to loosen their lending standards to make more loans. This is exactly the same speech they criticized them for."

[Liberty1]

The last 30+ years have seen the pie get bigger, most people got nothing but the top 5% got all of the increase. That's wrong.

Here rude, I mean rube, educate yourself.

http://www.nber.org/papers/w15351.pdf

The rise in American inequality has been exaggerated both in magnitude and timing. Commentators lament the large gap between the growth rates of real median household income and of private sector productivity. This paper shows that a conceptually consistent measure of this growth gap over 1979 to 2007 is only one-tenth of the conventional measure. Further, the timing of the rise of inequality is often misunderstood. By some measures inequality stopped growing after 2000 and by others inequality has not grown since 1993. This cessation of inequality’s secular rise in 2000 is evident from the growth of Census mean vs. median income, and in the income share of the top one percent of the income distribution. The income share of the 91st to 95th percentile has not increased since 1983, and the income ratio of the 90th to 10th percentile has barely increased since 1986. Further, despite a transient decline in labor’s income share in 2000-06, by mid-2009 labor’s share had returned virtually to the same value as in 1983, 1991, and 2001.

http://www.minneapolisfed.org/publicati ... fm?id=4049


Too big and complex to copy everthing

[dales]

See Dales, even Bloomberg gets it.

http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/c ... -not-banks

Banner Art by Trenton Duerksen Login / Register Capital New York Home About Us Capital Writers Advertise Contact Search this site: Twitter Facebook Flickr YouTube RSS Tumblr
Bloomberg: 'Plain and simple,' Congress caused the mortgage crisis, not the banks

Michael Bloomberg. Photo via British Prime Minister's Office flickr stream.

Tweet Related stories
Ed Koch: 'I love Wall Street', but some C.E.O. should go to jail
Quinn tells business leaders protesters shouldn't be ignored
Owners of the park at the center of the Occupy Wall Street protests are losing patience, but what can they do?
Michael Bloomberg as an unflappable father of teenagers, plus a pile of sexy
By Azi Paybarah
11:03 am Nov. 1, 20111Add a comment
Mayor Michael Bloomberg said this morning that if there is anyone to blame for the mortgage crisis that led the collapse of the financial industry, it's not the "big banks," but Congress.

Speaking at a business breakfast in midtown featuring Bloomberg and two former New York City mayors, Bloomberg was asked what he thought of the Occupy Wall Street protesters.

"I hear your complaints," Bloomberg said. "Some of them are totally unfounded. It was not the banks that created the mortgage crisis. It was, plain and simple, Congress who forced everybody to go and give mortgages to people who were on the cusp. Now, I'm not saying I'm sure that was terrible policy, because a lot of those people who got homes still have them and they wouldn't gave gotten them without that.

"But they were the ones who pushed Fannie and Freddie to make a bunch of loans that were imprudent, if you will. They were the ones that pushed the banks to loan to everybody. And now we want to go vilify the banks because it's one target, it's easy to blame them and congress certainly isn't going to blame themselves. At the same time, Congress is trying to pressure banks to loosen their lending standards to make more loans. This is exactly the same speech they criticized them for."

Simplistic thinking at best, lying like a rug at its worst.

What cannot be debated is the economic morass in which we find ourselves in.

Only a tool would believe otherwise.

[rubato]

<<Households>> saw income gains because more women entered the workforce and women's wages increased (due to the feminist movement). Men's income did not increase from 1973 to the present when adjusted for inflation.

http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/income/d ... W_2010.xls

year ..... annual income in 2010 dollars:
1973 ...... $50,302.00
2010 ...... $50,063.00




yrs,
rubato

[dgs49]

The wailing about "income inequality" is really quite sophomoric and illogical.

They talk about the top X percent as though this were a group of Landed Gentry, fixed and unmoving atop the economic pyramid of American life. But that's largely false. Regardless of the percentage you pick (1%, 5%, 10%, "Quintile"), most of them are different people from one decade to the next. Many of the top 10% today were in the bottom half of income distribution 10-15 years ago, and many who were at the top at that time are down in the middle now.

There are two reasons for an increase in "inequality": one is good and one has little to do with government policies. The top earners in every field are better compensated now than ever before because companies are recognizing that their value to the enterprise is greater than they had realized before. The top doctors, lawyers, engineers, salesmen, and managers (just like the top athletes) used to make just a percentage more than their peers who were merely "good," but now they make multiples of what their peers make.

But no one is holding a gun to the heads of the employers; it's simply a matter of recognizing the value of the top performers. This occurs even in the public sector. Look at how many school districts are paying superintendents multiples of the pay that a top HS Principal receives. And look a foundations, hospitals, private universities and such - the top fundraisers ("rainmakers") are making tons more than they did a generation ago because the Boards recognize their value.

There are certainly abuses in the corporate world, where hand-picked corporate directors approve outlandish compensation packages, and compensation arrangements for some other executives are poorly thought-out and result in hyper-compensation for some, but this is only a tiny fraction of the corporate payroll. And frankly, if it's a private company, what business is it of anybody's except the shareholders?

At the other end of the spectrum, the bottom of the economic ladder is populated mainly (but not entirely) by people who have made disastrous life-choices (mainly with respect to having children without being married), dropped out of school, refused to apply themselves diligently to their own wellbeing, failed at marriage and/or work, and so forth. What kind of government policies can uplift people such as these? A law requiring that you get your head out of your ass?

The current lousy economy has skewed a lot of peoples' perspective, as we all see hard-working, intelligent people who are struggling through no fault of their own. But I don't see much of that in the faces on the OWS demonstrators. I see people who have not really been alive long enough to understand how life's rewards and punishments work, people who have lived in one or another counterculture all their lives and are pissed off that it has result in their own economic misery, and anarchists, socialists, and other misfits who simply have nothing better to do.

Would somebody care to guess at what the Occupiers ought to do during the next election cycle to promote whatever it is that they want? On the one hand, we have an incumbent president who is totally in hock to "Wall Street," and on the other we have the Evil Republicans.

Nobody is offering a free lunch, although Barry is doing his best. I just don't think any significant number of people believe him anymore.

[Grim Reaper]

The top earners in every field are better compensated now than ever before because companies are recognizing that their value to the enterprise is greater than they had realized before.

Care to explain how a CEO can do poorly at his job and still earn many times more money than the common workers?

At the other end of the spectrum, the bottom of the economic ladder is populated mainly (but not entirely) by people who have made disastrous life-choices (mainly with respect to having children without being married), dropped out of school, refused to apply themselves diligently to their own wellbeing, failed at marriage and/or work, and so forth. What kind of government policies can uplift people such as these? A law requiring that you get your head out of your ass?

Remember, if you do poorly, it's your own fault. Nothing else could possibly be taken into account. Like, say, a business deciding it's more profitable to ship your job somewhere else. Nope. Nosiree. Businesses are sacred entities incapable of doing anything bad. Only the little people are capable of fucking up.

[Liberty1]

No business screw up all the time, and if they screw up bad enough they should go out of business and not get bailed out. The government has created a false business environment with bailouts and loan guarantees

[Liberty1]

Apparently most of these folks are mad about nothing. Most must really be trust fund professional protesters like those couple turned out to be a few weeks ago.

http://dailycaller.com/2011/11/02/nyc-a ... in-luxury/

Some of the homes where “Occupy” arrestees reside, viewed through Google Maps and the Multiple Listing Service real estate database, are the definition of opulence.

Using county assessors and online resources such as Zillow.com, TheDC estimated property values and rents for 87 percent of the homes and 59 percent of the apartments listed in the arrest records.

Even in the nation’s currently depressed housing market, at least 95 of the protesters’ residences are worth approximately $500,000 or more

The median monthly rent for those living in apartments whose information is readily available is $1,850


It also reinforces the persistent critique of protesters as entitled, upper-class agitators with few legitimate grievances.

London’s Daily Mail newspaper, for example, recently highlighted signs of wealth among the throngs in Zuccotti Park

[Scooter]

They live in big cities. What do they imagine $500,000 will buy in NYC? A broom closet?

And the twist in tactics is classic. Last week they were not worth listening to because they were losers who never put in enough effort in their lives to rub two nickels together. This week they are not worth listening to because they have been industrious enough to purchase their own homes.

[dales]

lib is a tool.

[Sue U]

They live in big cities. What do they imagine $500,000 will buy in NYC? A broom closet?

Ha. My neice (who works for a Wall Street regulatory agency and is an OWS supporter) recently bought an apartment in Brooklyn, which she describes as "a $600,000 dishwasher with two small bedrooms."

All this says to me is that OWS is pretty representative of the broad middle class, which has long been screwed by the 1%.

Apparently most of these folks are mad about nothing.

How long are you going to keep licking those boots? They've got to be nice and shiny by now, even the heels.

[dales]

Um, they aren't boots, Sue.

[Scooter]

Something rounder that opens into an internal passage, maybe?

[BoSoxGal]

Geez, since they're in the 1%, I hope it's at very least bleached.

[rubato]

Apparently most of these folks are mad about nothing. Most must really be trust fund professional protesters like those couple turned out to be a few weeks ago.

http://dailycaller.com/2011/11/02/nyc-a ... in-luxury/

Some of the homes where “Occupy” arrestees reside, viewed through Google Maps and the Multiple Listing Service real estate database, are the definition of opulence.

Using county assessors and online resources such as Zillow.com, TheDC estimated property values and rents for 87 percent of the homes and 59 percent of the apartments listed in the arrest records.

Even in the nation’s currently depressed housing market, at least 95 of the protesters’ residences are worth approximately $500,000 or more

The median monthly rent for those living in apartments whose information is readily available is $1,850


It also reinforces the persistent critique of protesters as entitled, upper-class agitators with few legitimate grievances.

London’s Daily Mail newspaper, for example, recently highlighted signs of wealth among the throngs in Zuccotti Park

How many of those are their parents addresses?

And around here $500,000.00 is a median home price. 3/2 1,400 sq ft.

yrs,
rubato

[Econoline]

As I've said, the purpose of capitalism is to make profits and making more profits puts people first. More jobs, higher wages, better benefits, attract higher quality employees, more productivity, higher stock prices ------------->more capital.

I believe the OWS movement recognizes that there is nothing INHERENT in capitalism which requires that the wealth it creates be spread around to benefit employees, society as a whole, or anyone other than the owners of the capital. Laissez-faire capitalism allows the owners of capital to keep all they want and does not require them to share any of it with anyone. Encouraging them to do anything else is the function of religion; forcing them to do anything else is the function of legislation, regulation, and taxation: i.e., government.

If those who have the most wealth are able to use that wealth to manipulate the law so that the wealth continues to concentrate rather than spread around, this is a moral failure, not an economic failure. Like many other moral failures which cause harm to other people, if this cannot be corrected by appeals to morality or ethics (and since corporations are inherently neither moral nor immoral, but rather amoral, it inherently CANNOT be corrected this way) then it must be corrected by government action.

The purpose of capitalism is profit; the purpose of government is to promote the general welfare.*


*(Arguably, everything else in the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution--forming a more perfect Union, establishing Justice, insuring domestic Tranquility, providing for the common defence, and securing the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity--could be described as merely providing specific examples of ways to "promote the general Welfare.")