Two weeks into Occupy Wall Street protests, movement is at a crossroads

Nation Waiting For Protesters To Clearly Articulate Demands Before Ignoring Them

NEW YORK—As the Occupy Wall Street protest expands and grows into a nationwide movement, Americans are eagerly awaiting a list of demands from the group so they can then systematically disregard them and continue going about their business, polls showed this week. "The protesters need to unify around a shared agenda with precise policy goals so I can begin paying no attention to them whatsoever," said Tulsa, OK poll respondent Kaye Petrachonis, echoing the thoughts of millions across the country. "If they don’t have a clear power structure organized around specific demands first, then I'll never be able to completely tune them out due to a political conflict of interest or an inability to comprehend complex, detailed economic concepts. These people really need to get their act together." Once Occupy Wall Street has a concrete set of objectives in place, the majority of Americans said they would go back to waiting for the sluggish economy to recover while blindly accepting things the way they are.

What began in early September as a modest protest through the streets of Manhattan, has grown and spread throughout America, finally landing on the streets of Grass Valley as Occupy Wall Street NC (Nevada County) kicked off Wednesday afternoon.

About 250 people gathered on all four corners of the intersection of Brunswick Road and Sutton Way to voice their displeasure about three main grievances: the wide disparity between the wealthy and the rest of Americans, the influence corporations have on government and corporate greed.

“We the people are tired of every sphere of our life being influenced negatively by corporate greed,” said Deborah Gutierrez of Grass Valley. “Whether it's our politicians, jobs, health care, environment or food production, it's not about what's good for us, but what serves corporate profits.”

Judy Fitanides of Nevada City said that many people may come to the protest rally with differing ideas about what caused the problems our how to fix them, but there is a unifying message.

“Big money has broken Washington,” she said. “One percent of the population gets control of the government, which hurts the other 99 percent.”

“That's it in a nutshell,” said Billi Vogan of Penn Valley, standing nearby during the interview.

I am not sure any of this will lead directly to any bills or legislature, in fact I seriously doubt it.

However, it does express a big frustration that many people have been feeling for a long time with respect to jobs and wages and many issues seeming to favor only the richest people in America.

Behind the rhetoric there is facts and figures to back it up and that is why probably it is growing.

Oh yeah. Like the recipients of the bailouts really give a phukk about anyone else. As if.

I'm sure there was some negligence, but the degree of absolutism you have about it surprises me because I know you know how poorly economic theory had prepared the financial industry for these events.

Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%
Americans have been watching protests against oppressive regimes that concentrate massive wealth in the hands of an elite few. Yet in our own democracy, 1 percent of the people take nearly a quarter of the nation’s income—an inequality even the wealthy will come to regret.


By Joseph E. Stiglitz Illustration by Stephen Doyle


It’s no use pretending that what has obviously happened has not in fact happened. The upper 1 percent of Americans are now taking in nearly a quarter of the nation’s income every year. In terms of wealth rather than income, the top 1 percent control 40 percent. Their lot in life has improved considerably. Twenty-five years ago, the corresponding figures were 12 percent and 33 percent. One response might be to celebrate the ingenuity and drive that brought good fortune to these people, and to contend that a rising tide lifts all boats. That response would be misguided. While the top 1 percent have seen their incomes rise 18 percent over the past decade, those in the middle have actually seen their incomes fall. For men with only high-school degrees, the decline has been precipitous—12 percent in the last quarter-century alone. All the growth in recent decades—and more—has gone to those at the top. In terms of income equality, America lags behind any country in the old, ossified Europe that President George W. Bush used to deride. Among our closest counterparts are Russia with its oligarchs and Iran. While many of the old centers of inequality in Latin America, such as Brazil, have been striving in recent years, rather successfully, to improve the plight of the poor and reduce gaps in income, America has allowed inequality to grow.

Economists long ago tried to justify the vast inequalities that seemed so troubling in the mid-19th century—inequalities that are but a pale shadow of what we are seeing in America today. The justification they came up with was called “marginal-productivity theory.” In a nutshell, this theory associated higher incomes with higher productivity and a greater contribution to society. It is a theory that has always been cherished by the rich. Evidence for its validity, however, remains thin. The corporate executives who helped bring on the recession of the past three years—whose contribution to our society, and to their own companies, has been massively negative—went on to receive large bonuses. In some cases, companies were so embarrassed about calling such rewards “performance bonuses” that they felt compelled to change the name to “retention bonuses” (even if the only thing being retained was bad performance). Those who have contributed great positive innovations to our society, from the pioneers of genetic understanding to the pioneers of the Information Age, have received a pittance compared with those responsible for the financial innovations that brought our global economy to the brink of ruin.

Some people look at income inequality and shrug their shoulders. So what if this person gains and that person loses? What matters, they argue, is not how the pie is divided but the size of the pie. That argument is fundamentally wrong. An economy in which most citizens are doing worse year after year—an economy like America’s—is not likely to do well over the long haul. There are several reasons for this.

...

http://www.vanityfair.com/society/features/2011/05/top-one-percent-201105

How is this different from the case where I run you over with my car accidentally?

You just emerge out of left field in the middle of the street, I have no time to react, and so I run into you.

In a case like this, what should a court make of my defense if I said something like the following? "Suddenly I saw him in the street. I had no time to react, because Newton's theory of Classical Mechanics didn't warn me. And so I ran into him. I didn't do it on purpose, honest!" Should the judge give me a pass? Of course not!

He should tell me that I had a duty to drive defensively and I didn't, with dire consequences for you. Therefore, I have committed the tort of negligent killing. It doesn't matter what input, if any, Newtonian physics had into my driving.

The analogy between this and banking is exact.

What a bunch of BS. You won't discuss the specifics of anything because you can't do so.

That's all I need to see to decide the validity of your argument is bogus.

Re: the mortgage fraud thing, it's been so widely reported that I didn't think I needed to hold your hand and show you evidence. I mean, widely reported. Why don't you educate yourself a bit and come back?

http://www.npr.org/2011/09/01/140121091/goldman-agrees-to-halt-mortgage-robo-signing

Your argument that 'nobody knew' that they were taking gigantic risks is unbelievable on a variety of levels.

Your semantics games are uninteresting to me.

I gotta tell you, if you wonder why people think you're an apologist for the banks and financial industry, you oughta try reading your own posts and look at the lengths you'll go to in order to avoid discussing specific instances - and the assurances YOU make, with no knowledge, that people had no idea what the effects of their actions would be.

Indeed. I think intent matters in ethics and you seem to only care about effect.

I do not fault you for this at all, I just think you should understand that to take a more skeptical point of view is not necessarily "foolish". There is simply not very good evidence for your claim, which again is that the majority of the bankers intentionally ran their companies into the ground.

The fact that they were taking gigantic risks with their own companies - that their companies would collapse in the face of a market crisis - was so obvious to non-bankers that it is highly, highly unlikely that it wasn't also obvious to those who are specialists in their fields.

The skeptical point of view is one that views claims that these people didn't know what they were doing as farcical.

There's every reason to believe that many of them, if not most of them, knew exactly what they were doing.

The logical path to this conclusion is far more believable than your account that these supposed experts had no clue that the risks they were taking were perilous to their companies, a proposition that has absolutely no evidence to back it up at all.

It has become quite apparent to many Americans that Wall Street and the financial industry no longer serve a beneficial purpose for the vast majority of our citizens, and we owe them no benefit of the doubt whatsoever. In fact, many of us believe it's time that this industry is brought to heel - no matter what the false cries from the wealthy bankers are as to how this will harm the economy. What you are seeing now is the beginning of this process, and it's something I've cheered on for years.

I dearly hope that the protestors and activists are successful at forcing our society to re-evaluate the structure of our financial system, and hopefully end the process of putting unlimited profits above all other concerns - a corrosive moral set which is destroying our nation, cheered on by those who don't care about the consequences, as long as they have a chance to join that group eventually.