Occupy
 

It's been forever since anything new came up in here. I'm kind of terrified to make a thread, but I'm curious to see what everyone here thinks of this new Occupy Wall St. movement.

It seems the response is kind of polarized on the whole thing.

I'm curious to see if maybe we could talk about it here, since there's nothing better going on in the Palace. I doubt the responses will be too varied on Gamingforce, but you never know.

What do you think of the movement? Dirty hippies pooping in NYC, Boston, Chicago, etc? Would you go to one of the protests? Do you think the kids should shut up and deal with their decisions already?

I'm pretty ambivalent about it. I feel like on the one hand there are legitimate grievances to be aired, and protest has been effective in the past? It also balances out the tea party kind of nicely, except that I'm not sure the media coverage has been the same. I think it highlights the various hypocrisies all of us bring to political discourse in general. I guess ultimately, I don't really believe it'll go anywhere. Elections aren't until next year, and who has the attention span to continue to care for that long? I also don't know how the demographic of the protesters breaks down and I feel like that's important to the legitimacy of the movement. Is it really all just kids who are upset that basket-weaving won't pay off their debts like they thought it would? Or is it the guys that lost their blue-collar jobs and have legit tried to get re-hired for a year and a half and now benefits are running out and they have three kids and no idea how to provide?

Also, Menino had a point. It's all well and good to be all :mad: at Wall St. But punishing everyone else, most of who are also just trying to get by, is not cool. So I guess they need to target better.

Man, I keep seeing this talking point being dragged out and I straight up don't get it. Who is being "punished" by a bunch of down-on-their-luck folks camping out somewhere? Geez, did their crushing poverty and hopelessness fucking inconvenience somebody?

Wasn't it some goon in New York complaining that people "scraping by on $50,000 a year" were the ones really being hurt by the occupation? These people are so divorced from the reality of common people that they have no idea how to even appear sympathetic outside their own little subculture.

Also, why are kids who tried to get an education automatically less sympathetic? Would it somehow be a BETTER sign for the future of the nation if a generation of young people could not find some way to be productive? Oh, it's JUST THE YOUTH that are hopeless. Well that's okay then.

As one of the only people with a job near Detroit, I volunteered to cosplay as one of those smarmy asshole banker fucks, so we'd have somebody to occupy against.

But no seriously, the only way anything is gonna change is if the people with problems stop being invisible. So eat the rich, &c.

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add'l

I think that it's fair to point out that the blue-collar jobs that those guys above have lost, it's not just they're not getting them back, but nobody is. So if you're a kid, and you're not rich enough or lucky enough to go to the American Institute of Basket-Weaving, what are you going to do?

I think it's one of those things that will pass. I know it's a pretty big thing in the US, it's like the media's new celebrity gossip. Sure, it's making a lot of noise now, and is still making noise after Steve Jobs' death. But I think in a few wekks it'll all quiet down. I also don't see that much coverage on international media, it's pretty big in Reddit though. And being in Asia, much of the news we have now are of the floods and typhoons and the countries affected by it. Some of the people I know haven't even heard of "Occupy".

It's not just "kids trying to get an education." It's the whole follow your dream mentality, which feeds a sense of entitlement in turn supported by heavy collegiate marketing that has kids making bad investments and getting screwed. It's sympathetic, but tangentially related? Related to a lesser degree than people who lost houses and jobs and so forth?

Re: being inconvenienced, some guy who's trying to get to his job and has to suffer through 3 hours of a traffic jam because protesters shut down a bridge has very little to do with investment bankers ruining the economy. Also re: crushing poverty, that was why I asked the question about the demographics. It matters a lot who's actually doing the protesting.

But yes, I totally concede that when the protesters are all impoverished and everyone who is negatively impacted by the protests are complicit in or directly responsible for everything going to shit then sure, behind them 100%.

So, literally, you're ok with protestors provided all of them are already starving and they don't actually bring any attention to themselves. Hypothetically, where should these protests be held such that they will only inconvenience multimillionaires specifically?

Actually I would argue that if certain people actually paid their taxes then state and fed governments might actually have enough money to do upkeep on road infrastructure and um theoretically build new roads and relieve traffic congestion which has increased as a problem nationwide over the course of decades regardless of the presence or absence of filthy hippie rabblerousers?

Painting these people as entitled or "basket-weavers" is the worst kind of shameful victim-blaming. People with law degrees can't find work. Is law school suddenly one of the frou-frou joke educational paths along with comparative lit and art history now? There are, in pure numbers, far more unemployed people than there are job openings. No amount of WELL MAYBE YOU SHOULD HAVE BEEN A PLUMBER will make that go away. There are literally millions of people who are chronically unemployed because a job in which they might theoretically be placed does not exist. People seem not to be aware of this. No potential series of Correctly Made Decisions would have employed these people; there are, straight up, not enough seats for all these butts.

Meanwhile many of the available seats that do exist remain empty because hiring departments are staffed with risk-averse cockfucks even when the economy isn't circling the drain.

Yeah, started my original post with ambivalence for a reason. Trying to illustrate that it's not so easy to take an all or nothing approach to this. Essentially yeah, if the world were extremely simple, then making a moral judgment on this shit would be easy. It isn't.

Law degrees are actually a good example of the victimization of prospective students by aggressive recruitment. Look at proliferation of law schools in recent years, graduating ever increasing numbers of JD's at an exorbitant profit margin. I feel really bad for those kids. I feel like that is an entirely different kind of exploitation than what is being protested.

Yes, there are kids who feel entitled to have everything they ever dreamed while working whatever job is going to fulfill their souls. I'm not saying they're representative of these protesters. I was asking. There were competing narratives re: privileged white kids vs. actually disenfranchised people.

All I'm saying regarding the situation that happened in Boston was that I'm not prepared to say that everyone with a job who is trying to continue working is complicit in this ruination of the economy, and yet people in just that situation are being negatively impacted by the protests. The only other example which springs to mind is sit-ins in the civil rights movement, but in that case, everyone who was impacted WAS complicit in racial segregation. Maybe other protests, say, anti-war for Vietnam were equally a pain in the ass for everyone whether or not they were involved. Don't know. I'm working from the perspective that the dude who keeps his head down and just tries to do his job doesn't deserve the hassle for being lucky.

The venn diagram of young folks who are poor and young folks who use college as Adolescence 2: Electric Boogaloo actually has very little overlap :-/

I would argue that people "scraping by" on $50,000 a year are absolutely complicit in the machine that has sold off entire industries and left 15% of the citizens of the richest country in the world in absolute destitution.

My issue with it is that it is woefully scattered in what it's trying to accomplish. I love the idea, I love the approach, I dislike the narrative being everywhere. "Occupy for a while and eventually we might distill our message down to something maybe, but until then we're anti-big farm, anti-government, pro-government, pro-feeding the world, anti-science doing things to feed the world etc..."

They don't have a real mission outside of "we're unhappy." Which is all well and good, but please come up with a mission statement before you expect me to stand behind you.

I mean I don't really understand what's so absolutist about "maybe we should have jobs" or at least "maybe we shouldn't treat poverty as a sin"

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alternately: are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?

What I'm seeing more than anything is that the lack of a clear message simply underscores how many grievances are actually being put out in the open in one fell swoop. The main point seems to be about the wealth disparity, but the manners in which this is affecting people isn't as simple as one single issue. As such it can't really be boiled down to a clear-cut message.

The biggest victory that has been achieved so far is the amount of attention the protests have been getting, which precisely serves to get people to focus on something besides the mainstream media's regurgitating of politicians' and bigwig types' diversionary tactics. Though it took a while before people started paying attention, it's happening now, and the people who have benefited from the mess the US (and by extension many parts of the world) is in are actually beginning to pay attention. The best thing that could happen is that this movement doesn't go away until some major changes take place, and judging by the amount of effort that is going into making sure everyone is as comfortable as they can be, that might just end up being the case.

It would be nice, sure, if Paulites, hemp experts, and nuclear chicken littles weren't trying to co-opt this thing for themselves but that's kind of their deal. You can no more drive them away than you can get rid of Lyndon LaRouche, and buying into the media narrative that the whole thing is scatterbrained and totally aimless just because the usual suspects are present is silly. Yes, it's somewhat chaotic and headless, but this is by design. Nobody's in charge of this thing (officially, anyway) so how is anybody supposed to issue Official Demands?

By all means, why not hang out until they hash out something concrete? They have nothing better to do; that's the essence of their malaise. They've got plenty of time to work it through. The Big Tent is a strength.

Honestly, I'm not hearing much positive from any media outlet, and this includes my beloved NPR (although they're a little less hateful about it than the mainstream media).

The way I heard about everything was via Facebook, blogs, and people talking about it. At first, I was like a lot of you and I was all "well this is kind of stupid."

But then I saw union pilots occupying alongside with the kids. And then nurses joined up, too. Sure, they're union, and the union has it's own (often greedy) agenda, but it's interesting to see more than "just unemployed kids without a message" show up and protest. Say whatever you want, but these trained professionals who actually had experience out there are standing alongside the youth.

I think the message is pretty clear. "The other 99%" hits it home for me.

I wanted to go to our local protests, but I won't go alone, and after asking Chris about it, I'm pretty sure we won't go. I'm curious at the very least. I want to see just what kind of people are down there and how they're conveying a very important message.

I really don't have much of an opinion about the occupy events, except when it comes to this. You see, Wall St isn't the only place this is happening. There are Occupy events happening all over the US, including in Portland, where I live. There are two problems with this:

1) Portland is already a pretty liberal 'mom and pop' 'no corporations' kinda town. There's some big companies here, but they're all community friendly (NIKE donates a lot). We also have a ton of credit unions here and the big banks are actually quite outnumbered.

2) I have no problem with protests in and of themselves, until they block traffic for people who are just trying to get by and live their lives. This is why I quoted Pang, because the people who get punished are the ones who are just going about day to day life. I'm fine if the protesters want to block the parking structure for the people they're protesting, but in Portland, they decided to block off Main St, preventing traffic from getting through at all. Kudos to Portland Police for not taking action until they got word from City Hall about it, but still.

Ideologically, I am totally in support of the major tenets of the Occupy movement.

Personally though, I have no reasonable way to lend my support for these people. I have a job, I've never been unemployed for more than a few months since getting out of high school, I am in no threat of losing my job or being without one long term, I work for a Fortune 500 company that operates in two of the fields (retail pharmacy and prescription insurance) that take advantage of the 99%, I don't have a degree and thus no outstanding student loans, and the main reason I don't have a better paying job is because the one I have doesn't pay very well, but that's mostly my fault.

I haven't done "all the right things" as they say and I'm no more than a 27-year-old who is tired of politics-as-usual and corporate America feeding those politics. I realize that being there to show solidarity is really all the protesters would want, and that my grievances are sufficient for me to be involved, but I can't really consider myself a member of their ranks. And maybe that's my problem.

You're seriously going to use NIKE as an example of "one of the good ones"? Yeah, they donate. Most corporations throw donations at things a few times a year at the expense of .00000001% of their profits for the express reason that people then buy into the notion that they're a good corporation. Then they go back to paying some kid in China 3 cents an hour.

Look, I'm sorry that people that don't consider themselves villains are being inconvenienced, but as Lurker pointed out we're all effectively complicit in the way things have gone up to this point. I'm sorry if some people end up being late to work a few times, but it's necessary to present an inconvenience if you want people to pay attention. Fenced-in free speech zones in the park aren't going to cut it.

I agree. Which is why I said I wouldn't be lending my specific support, not that I thought they should fuck off back to the commune.

Nike has provided a ton of jobs and has given a ton of donations and community service to the Portland area. They're one of the biggest helpers of the community out here. They're also one of the few who have listened to people's complaints about horrible work environments for overseas workers in their shops and tend to provide better environments for said workers than other companies.

It isn't just 'some' people who are inconvenienced by this. Main street is a major hub road for the downtown area. The protesters putting up barricades prevents people who are just scraping by from getting to their jobs. The very people the protesters are fighting for are getting screwed by it. Not only that, but it forces our mass transit system, a system these protesters rely on quite heavily, to reroute, cause delays, etc.

Once again, they don't have to remain in a fenced in area, but blocking a major artery in a downtown metro area that, to be quite honest, is almost on par with what they're fighting for in the first place seems pretty silly. On top of that, out of all the occupy groups, Portland has one of the highest concentration of people. Most Occupy groups are ~1000 people. We're ranging about ~5-6k. Thats crazy for a town that is more set towards what the protesters want than nearly any other town in the country.

On one hand, I am for it because I agree that the government is a puppet for the companies that pay them in lobby machinations. It all comes down to "follow the money" and everything wrong started with Reagan busting up the airline control tower unions in 1983 or so. Since then, the continued minimization of union power, the increase in fat-cat donations to party lines and the hand-shaking going on between corporation and elected officials has been way out of hand. My political history is a little sketchy but didn't Roosevelt dismiss all elected officials in the House for exactly this issue we're dealing with today?

On the other hand, I'm worried because self-serving agenda assholes like Michael Moore are walking into the crowd and attempting to sway them toward his private war-mongering instead of actually doing something *people* want.

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The above link came from a great blog by ZeroHedge, which everyone should read - http://www.zerohedge.com/news/mike-k...-useful-idiots

Wait what?!

While the powers of the presidency grew tremendously under Roosevelt, and continued growing from then to the present day, I'm pretty sure they haven't gotten to the tyrannical level represented by the ability to dismiss the House.

Are there asians attending the protests? I'm thinking their parents will be like "Occupy Wallstreet? Why not occupy your homework!"

http://i.imgur.com/zP3T5.jpg

Like I said, my memory is a little sketchy but Roosevelt was known as the trust-buster and part of that mantra was from cleaning out Washington by dismissing people in office who were corrupt or taking bribes from corporations.

(Again, its not even 8 in the morning and my memory of Progressive Party history is nil. When I get home, I'll check the one book I have on Teddy to see what the fuck I half-remember.)

I don`t know but some thing like this would`not be possible in ??????? [Moscow] due to friendly police forces