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

@failures art,

Doesn't the OWS groups also have "centralized" leadership? How else would they know when and where to demonstrate?

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@failures art,

I'm not advising them.

I'm judging them.

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@cicerone imposter,

No complaint at all.

Merely a comparison that clearly indicates one movement has been effective while the other has not.

This debate has nothing to do with how one feels about the Tea Party or Occupy.

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@failures art,

Quote:

My proximity to those in the park and first hand experience talking to them versus your armchair quarterbacking, any day.

That's utter drivel fa. Only a small % of the population lives near enough to an OWS camp and most of them would find the smell odious. Are you saying that their opinions are invalid because you passed by a camp one day on the other side of the road and had a word with a protester who was on her way home to change her underwear?

Stalin thought like that.

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@spendius,

ART longs for authenticity, and smelling OWS feces and vomit comes close to it.

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@spendius,

I'm saying that much of the criticisms and claims from critics don't hold up to first hand investigation and experience. People are welcome to their opinions, but unless you'd like to advance the idiotic notion that all opinions are equally founded.

Would you like to advance that idiotic notion? I wouldn't dream of telling you what you can't do on rhetorical matters.

A
R
T

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@Finn dAbuzz,

Finn dAbuzz wrote:

ART longs for authenticity, and smelling OWS feces and vomit comes close to it.

What Wall Street reeks of is far worse, and it was that way before a single protester arrived. What offends your senses is rather trivial.

I'm sure you feel smug judging them, but then again you're not the type to do something and risk judgement.

A
R
T

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@Finn dAbuzz,

Effective in what way? Seems what they have accomplished are mostly negatives for this country. Blindly cutting government spending is a fool's goal; we've seen the destruction to employment, and the failure to keep up our infrastructure, schools, and the safety net for those who have lost jobs through no fault of their own. Yet, we continue to spend billions to help other countries.

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@cicerone imposter,

cicerone imposter wrote:

Effective in what way? Seems what they have accomplished are mostly negatives for this country. Blindly cutting government spending is a fool's goal; we've seen the destruction to employment, and the failure to keep up our infrastructure, schools, and the safety net for those who have lost jobs through no fault of their own. Yet, we continue to spend billions to help other countries.

We were not doing any of that stuff when we thought we were flush.....there is something wrong with your logic.

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@hawkeye10,

Could you expand on your thoughts. What you seem to think was a retort to ci's post was not understood by me.

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@RABEL222,

Nor me.

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@Finn dAbuzz,

Finn dAbuzz wrote:

By your reckoning they must be manipulated rabble because how else could anyone reach a conclusion with which you disagree?

Oh that's perfectly on par with most of what I read out of you. With which I disagree? Ok sure. Which is also fundamentally flawed and fiscally irresponsible, despite what their own 'mission statement' claims? That too.

As for my manipulated rabble declaration . . .I stand by it.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/opinion/29rich.html?pagewanted=all

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@Questioner,

I don't read the NYT anymore, Questioner, since I cannot send money. Well, we non subscribers get 20 looks at articles a month, chump change when I was a reader. I put those to previously saved art articles and recipes for copying to word.

So, I'm rabble.

I consider this probably smart for the NYT, financially, and incredibly decimating to colloquy across the lands.

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@Finn dAbuzz,

Quote:

And what rank do you hold hinge?

Lord of the cynical children of the affluent?

You flirt with anarchy as you probably flirted with heroin or cocaine.

Every now and then you show just how stupid you can be. I have never tried either - and I am of working class stock, my first bed was a draw in a tall boy. I worked as a factory hand for five years and then another five years in hospitality to pay for my tertiary education - I am state educated.

The hippie parents you disparage are also baby boomers - caught yet again on one of your own generalisations. Must be lovely to see the world in little boxes. Sorry - not lovely. Easy.

We've tet-a-teted before - and for me its always that you come across as the epitome of '**** you jack I'm OK'. And at this point in time you appear to be saying that because 'occupiers' (what a neat pigeonhole that is) don't have representatives beholden to them for their election then none their concerns are legitimate. You just brush it under the rug - because it doesn't affect you. Or maybe you are just quick to dismiss them to reassure yourself that nothing will change and your stuff will be safe.

I personally think that the Tea Party and Occupy movements have similar drivers: 'people who are unhappy with stuff'. The difference is in what they attribute the causes to. Tea Party blame illegal immigration and govt spending (although they are big on increased military spending) - whereas the occupiers blame the influence of an unregulated corporate sector, particularly on elected officials.

But what they are complaining about are symptoms of the seismic shifts in the US economy - labour has been offshored, risk has been systematically transferred from employers to employees* (through reduced health and pension benefits), credit has supplanted federal benefits, a college education is as likely to secure a huge debt as a good job, courts favour insurance companies in the Employee Retirement Income Security Act. Unemployment benefits are replace significantly less income than 25 years ago, losing a job today has a much greater chance of starting a wage loss spiral (college graduates in the 2000s who lost a job suffered quadruple the percentage loss of income on the subsequent job compared to same in the 1990s.

*These thoughts well presented in Peter Gosselin's High Wire : the precarious financial lives of American families

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@hingehead,

Pretty well stated, hinge; the wealth have been transferring to the top 1% while the middle class' wages and benefits have been shrinking for the past 30 some odd years. The Tea Partiers believe they're part of the 1%, and continue to believe their lives will improve just as long as the 1% get more tax breaks and greater wealth. They now control over 42% of the country's wealth, and the Tea Partiers want them to own more. Go figure; the 99% are getting poorer, and they're part of the 99%.

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@spendius,

spendius wrote:

Quote:
. One man's gain is a loss to another, and the gain of a few is a loss to the whole nation...

Yes--but concentrating wealth allows investment to be made in large enterprises which is to the profit of the majority which, if it had it all divided up, would blow it in the shops. And the investment can be made without officialdom being involved.

The alternative is the government deciding what to invest in. Which might or might not be for the best. Or not investing past profits at all.

You are answering the question of why the richest nations have the poorest people, and why the poorest of nations have few who are poor compared to others objectively... In an economy that is working, that does not require vaporous foreign markets, that has good wages and much employment, there is also a strong domestic market... It is possible for one dollar in movement to make many wealthy while every dollar in the bank serves to make only one person rich and all others poor... Money invested, which must earn interest, as very much of the money in our economy does acts as a drain on wealth that fair wages and income would not...From a strict view of efficiency, it is better that all factories producing like objects should be combined into one great factory hiring half as many and prducing fewer models for higher profits... Who then will buy the greater produce if half the people are unemployed??? It would also be cheaper to keep many sitting at home, and for the employers to pay greater tax to support the idle life... The vast majority of our work force is already engaged in service for the few rich and dwindling productive work force... Believe it or not, every machine, and every computer driven robot that reduces the work force also reduces the profit while loading the unemployed onto the government already in danger of breaking under the strain...

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@Finn dAbuzz,

Finn dAbuzz wrote:

We agree...we won't see any Occupy candidates, and why do you think that is the case? No one could possibly measure up to their lofty ideals?

First one must obtain political power before one is judged on outcomes. If a movement has no political power it can't possibly effect political change. I appreciate your desire to demand miracles of the Tea Party, but no movement has achieved all of it's ends in a single year. How many have obtained political power in so short a time?

By and large, my generation (The Baby Boomers) have been less mindless than selfish. While I am by no means the only BB conservative, I have hardly been crowned king of my generation.

While I fault my generation (including myself) for helping to create a number of our current problems, at least we tilted at creatures that approximated dragons rather than windmills.

Today's revolutionaries are a pathetic lot who simply have bought the bullshit of their developmentally arrested, hippie parents and long to reproduce it.

And what rank do you hold hinge?

Lord of the cynical children of the affluent?

You flirt with anarchy as you probably flirted with heroin or cocaine.

My "American Dream" is to return to a time of limited government wherein personal achievement and responsibility determined one's lot in life. A time when those experiencing hard times were grateful for the generosity of their neighbors but never demanded it.

If you look at revolutionaries, they first talked, then organized, and finally, when the time was ripe; Acted... I do not think they will put a candidate forward because they have not exacly given up on the democrats, and they are not organized, because it is hard to organize for a good purpose because political evil takes many forms, and no single position can confront all the forms... Hitler was, like many great leaders were- A Simplifier... Political evil can be much more easily simplified than political virtue, and the organization for a bad purpose requires no great philosophy of justification... People rally to a cause like the tea party because of their malignancy that has long be bred into them and justified for many years...The OWS could only make a party position out of what they think, and they think much and many things... The tea party is built on who people are, and at their most simple, uneducated, and unquestioning, and on all the frustration and failure such people have had to endure for working for nothing, and giving much of what they earn to God whose value lies in offering them nothing in return but an empty promise of tomorrow...

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@ossobuco,

ossobuco wrote:

I don't read the NYT anymore, Questioner, since I cannot send money. Well, we non subscribers get 20 looks at articles a month, chump change when I was a reader. I put those to previously saved art articles and recipes for copying to word.

So, I'm rabble.

I consider this probably smart for the NYT, financially, and incredibly decimating to colloquy across the lands.

Actually, it was the names mentioned in that Times article I was referring to, not so much the paper itself.

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@Questioner,

How could I see the article, much less the names?

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@ossobuco,

What we have is people like me and others in worse doo doo cut off.
Decimating to me.
This all works as a prototype.

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

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