Occupy Wall Street protest

[ohioguy13]

what a joke read these posts after a month no one still has any clue why the person next to them are protesting or what they are about. I think its a bunch of people who could have used a good 4h program when they were growing up. Im not right or left or even political but ive never seen a more goofy protest about nothing in my life. Well see how serious they are when the first snows come and they camp out in 20 degree weather then we'll know if your serious. Until then its just like a big line waiting for concert tickets to go on sale.

[trish]

I think 99% sums it up rather nicely. What don't you understand about that?? They don't want a flat tax. They don't want corporate rule. They don't want their country to be ruled by those who are so rich their political influence cannot be denied. They do want a free market with reasonable regulative protections. They do want their fair share of the commons.

[Stavros]

You conveniently omit the part about the 3 wars the Arabs waged on Israel, and lost all 3. Israelis spilled blood in the deserting defeating the Arabs....why the fuck should they give it back? Did we give back Texas? lol You also have a selective sense of history. Google the Oslo accords when Arafat had it all....and walked away from the negoiations

Get your facts right, onmyknees: 1948, 1956, 1967, 1973: that makes four wars, not three (cf Sydney Bailey, Four Arab-Israeli Wars and the Peace Process, 1990). Of those wars, most of the fighting was done in urban areas, not the 'deserting'. The notion of to the victor goes the spoils is a curious one, and a political dead end, almost literally.

When Hussein ibn Ali, the Hashemite ruler of Mecca and Medina in 1918 complained that the British had reneged on the 1915 agreement to grant the Arabs independence in the Arab lands of the Ottoman Empire, Churchill exploded in a rage: HE DIDN'T THE WAR WE DID! and conveniently ignored that sideshow known as The Arab Revolt. When the King-Crane Commission from the USA visited Syria in 1919 the Arabs told them they wanted to determine their own future, instead they got the French, who marched in at the point of a gun, BUT: winning the war doesn't mean winning the peace: the French Mandate fought one insurrection after another; Iraq exploded in 1919; Palestine became a nightmare for the British.

And Israel: Maxim Ghilan (in How Israel Lost its Soul, 1974) was one of the first Jews to argue that by taking over the West Bank and Gaza and with it nearly a million hostile Arabs Israel was creating a relationship of violence that was a mockery of the essentially humanitarian principles he believed had informed zionism in its early years, and particularly the Labour Zionism that saw Israel as one giant Kibbutz.

The programme of enforced settlement that followed 1967 offered nothing to the Arabs who lived on either the West Bank or Gaza, in fact all investment in those areas has been motivated by 'facts on the ground' as long as they were not Arab, ie settlements at beneficial rates to mostly foreign and proportionately a lot of Americans, reminiscent of Chaim Weizmann's claim earlier on in the 20th century: if they give us land the size of a tablecloth, we will take it, and build on it.

Politics, when it succeeds, is about compromise this goes for Republicand Democrats, Occupy Wall Street and Capitalism; and which in Israel/Palestine must mean Land and Immigration, the two cardinal issues that shaped the modern state. Arafat was indeed a selfish man, and a disaster for the Palestinians, but even Mr Palestine could not sign away what few rights the Arabs had left, and both the Israelis and Bill Clinton knew this. Had Israel just won those wars -three of which it started- and everyone else just gone away, you might be right, but wars have legacies, and the four wars have not dealt with a fundamental issue: nationalism, and its poisonous destruction of human rights. It is not about anti-Semitism, or God and the Bible; it is not about David and Solomon, or Jesus, Mary, Joseph and the Donkey, it is about politics, and the politics that doesn't work.

[onmyknees]

I think 99% sums it up rather nicely. What don't you understand about that?? They don't want a flat tax. They don't want corporate rule. They don't want their country to be ruled by those who are so rich their political influence cannot be denied. They do want a free market with reasonable regulative protections. They do want their fair share of the commons.

See that's the problem...."FAIR" ! Who promises life is going to be fair? Please tell me what entity does that. What you and these folks want is equal outcomes...not equal opportunities....thus your use of the word "fair". That's precisely what Greece attempted to do. Level the playing field for those who just couldn't make it for whatever their tale of whoa was. Greece may turn into Libya before it's over. For the vast majority of us, you make your own breaks and carve our life out of the pie, and have no beef with the government looking after those that can't do that for themselves. I never really looked at friends who were trust fund babies with envy or felt that some of what they have should be given to me out of some arbitration of fairness, but apparently most of these protestors do. That greatest generation thing....that's in the rear view mirror. I've heard you tell of your grandfather in the CCC back in the 30's. Did he spend his day whining about some rich guys and how he wanted his share of their spoils? I doubt it. He worked his ass off and provided as best he could for his family is my guess, just as my grandfather dug the NYC sewers with a shovel. Ours has become a nation of slackers, whiners ,wanters, I phone toting, envy ridden fools. I admire their ambition to protest, but they're not foolin' me for a second. The vast majority of these folks want something much closer to Greece (including the anarchy) than they do a free market democracy. Small wonder why every guy with a landscaping truck and lawn mower has brown skin, cause he's the only one who's going to do that job.

[Ben]

American author and journalist Chris Hedges:

[trish]

The entity that promises fair treatment is government of, by and for the people. A principle function of government is to provide justice, just laws, just regulation and just application of the law. Justice in paraphrase is fairness.

[Heather Moorland]

I thought Jehovah, Jesus' Dad and Allah got together 1947 and flipped a coin for Palestine ...

You mean God and Yahoova fliped coins? I always expectet him to have a serious personality disorder but that he is also scitzofrenic thats interesting.

[Heather Moorland]

So you are dismissing the genocidal, organised murder of 6,000,000 people as an "excuse"? That's obscene.

No I don't dismiss or deni the nazi camps. What I find obscene is that the Zionists have abused the death of 6,000,000 people in their propaganda to legitimise their own crimes against humanity.

[BigDF]

The entity that promises fair treatment is government of, by and for the people. A principle function of government is to provide justice, just laws, just regulation and just application of the law. Justice in paraphrase is fairness.

This I believe was the founders' intent, but before the ink was dry (maybe even before it was applied) people with money were trying to buy favors and use money to influence things. It is that problem which is motivating much of the protesting going on right now. The wealth concentrated in Wall Street is being used to prevent stronger regulation of our financial sector so that the nitwits might stop their gambling with this country's economy. And at this point it doesn't matter which party is in power, since Wall Street can afford to pay great sums to both.

[trish]

I think we agree, BigDF. I see no peaceful fix other than grassroots pressure to reinstate regulations on banks and corporations, reinstate the inheritance tax and elect judges and/or officials who will appoint judges who will reverse in effect the supreme court decision to treat corporations as people in relation to campaign financing.