Occupy Wall Street protest

[lisaparadise]

Is this shit still going on?

yep what a bunch of retards,i think its a good demacratic move if they shoot them all so the unemployment numbers look alittle better lol.even better ship them all to africa and see how the other half lives.fuckin idiots.

[BellaBellucci]

yep what a bunch of retards,i think its a good demacratic move if they shoot them all so the unemployment numbers look alittle better lol.even better ship them all to africa and see how the other half lives.fuckin idiots.

Is that really your argument? 'The U.S. is still richer than Africa?' Interesting standard.

~BB~

[onmyknees]

Of course, they didn't need encouragement, they just needed someone to look the other way. In fact, without any regulations whatsoever, they could just steal your money outright, they wouldn't need any convoluted schemes. Glass-Steagall was repealed under Clinton a democratic president but with the encouragement of the GOP. With continued deregulation the offenses got more serious. You think you'd be safe without any banking regulations??

Helpless case indeed....


One from me, then it's over to the political boards...

The Real Culprits In This Meltdown By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY Obama in a statement yesterday blamed the shocking new round of subprime-related bankruptcies on the free-market system, and specifically the "trickle-down" economics of the Bush administration, which he tried to gig opponent John McCain for wanting to extend.
But it was the Clinton administration, obsessed with multiculturalism, that dictated where mortgage lenders could lend, and originally helped create the market for the high-risk subprime loans now infecting like a retrovirus the balance sheets of many of Wall Street's most revered institutions.
Tough new regulations forced lenders into high-risk areas where they had no choice but to lower lending standards to make the loans that sound business practices had previously guarded against making. It was either that or face stiff government penalties.
The untold story in this whole national crisis is that President Clinton put on steroids the Community Redevelopment Act, a well-intended Carter-era law designed to encourage minority homeownership. And in so doing, he helped create the market for the risky subprime loans that he and Democrats now decry as not only greedy but "predatory."
Yes, the market was fueled by greed and overleveraging in the secondary market for subprimes, vis-a-vis mortgaged-backed securities traded on Wall Street. But the seed was planted in the '90s by Clinton and his social engineers. They were the political catalyst behind this slow-motion financial train wreck.
And it was the Clinton administration that mismanaged the quasi-governmental agencies that over the decades have come to manage the real estate market in America.
As soon as Clinton crony Franklin Delano Raines took the helm in 1999 at Fannie Mae, for example, he used it as his personal piggy bank, looting it for a total of almost $100 million in compensation by the time he left in early 2005 under an ethical cloud.
Other Clinton cronies, including Janet Reno aide Jamie Gorelick, padded their pockets to the tune of another $75 million.
Raines was accused of overstating earnings and shifting losses so he and other senior executives could earn big bonuses.
In the end, Fannie had to pay a record $400 million civil fine for SEC and other violations, while also agreeing as part of a settlement to make changes in its accounting procedures and ways of managing risk.
But it was too little, too late. Raines had reportedly steered Fannie Mae business to subprime giant Countrywide Financial, which was saved from bankruptcy by Bank of America.
At the same time, the Clinton administration was pushing Fannie and her brother Freddie Mac to buy more mortgages from low-income households.
The Clinton-era corruption, combined with unprecedented catering to affordable-housing lobbyists, resulted in today's nationalization of both Fannie and Freddie, a move that is expected to cost taxpayers tens of billions of dollars.
And the worst is far from over. By the time it is, we'll all be paying for Clinton's social experiment, one that Obama hopes to trump with a whole new round of meddling in the housing and jobs markets. In fact, the social experiment Obama has planned could dwarf both the Great Society and New Deal in size and scope.
There's a political root cause to this mess that we ignore at our peril. If we blame the wrong culprits, we'll learn the wrong lessons. And taxpayers will be on the hook for even larger bailouts down the road.
But the government-can-do-no-wrong crowd just doesn't get it. They won't acknowledge the law of unintended consequences from well-meaning, if misguided, acts.
Obama and Democrats on the Hill think even more regulation and more interference in the market will solve the problem their policies helped cause. For now, unarmed by the historic record, conventional wisdom is buying into their blame-business-first rhetoric and bigger-government solutions.
While government arguably has a role in helping low-income folks buy a home, Clinton went overboard by strong-arming lenders with tougher and tougher regulations, which only led to lenders taking on hundreds of billions in subprime bilge.
Market failure? Hardly. Once again, this crisis has government's fingerprints all over it.

[trish]

Helpless case. Apparently the better argument is the bigger argument. Okay then: The Bush Housing and Banking Collapse has Greed, Tax Cuts, Deregulation and Two off-the-book Wars written all over it.

[Stavros]

On the one hand both the Tea Party clusters and the OWS people are all alienated from the top tiers of finance and government, critical of central government policy either because it does too much, or too little; yet the Tea Party has powerful backers whose interests are actually top end finance; they are not capitalists interested in the little guy, and small to medium enterprises. Tea Party clusters are oriented to electoral politics; OWS as I see it, is a ragged bunch with no coherent alternative programme, it is primarily the ventilation of rage and frustration, which in the current situation is not suprising, but it can also alienate the general public who don't like seeing public spaces become alternative, if temporary housing estates.

But with more than 1 million people under the age of 25 unemployed in the UK, a figure that is worse in Spain and will get worse in Greece, we are facing a world in which young people will not be in work for most of their 20s. Or, it could just be that they are sitting at home waiting for a job, when they should be taking off on an experimental journey to see what's out there -but it doesn't suit everyone, even if there are times when taking risks pays dividends. And it doesn't rely on machine politicians to open the opportunity. With so much energy, it is a pity the younger people in the OWS whichever country it is in, don't use it for something more creative. And its not like the people being shouted at care one way or the other.

[BluegrassCat]

Helpless case indeed....


One from me, then it's over to the political boards...

I'm embarrassed for you that you thought that screed was evidence of anything except how flimsy and twisted your history of the crisis is. So the repeal of Glass-Steagall is somehow more and stricter regulations? Dear god, that's fucking stupid.

Helpless case is putting it mildly.

[BluegrassCat]

Clearly an appropriate response to violating the sacrosanct CITY ORDINANCE.

[fred41]

Clearly an appropriate response to violating the sacrosanct CITY ORDINANCE.

...must've accidentally fallen out of the "Occupy UC Davis" thread...lol

[hard4janira]

It's a wonderful response and a terrific lesson in civics for those students. Rarely are students afforded the opportunity to get a hands-on, real-life lab assignment such as this. Pepper spray not only clears the nasal passage, it also gives the student some quality down-time where he can contemplate on the events at hand and possibly consider alternate strategies for future engagements. It would behoove all of us not to underestimate just how rewarding and enriching these educational opportunities are for our precious youth.

[hard4janira]

yet the Tea Party has powerful backers whose interests are actually top end finance; they are not capitalists interested in the little guy, and small to medium enterprises.

I don't agree with this statement. I am a conservative and I STRONGLY identify with the Tea Party movement, yet I am very aware of how large corporations and lobbyists influence the system at the expense of the little guy and small business. Many Republicans are pro-business. I'm not pro-busienss, I'm pro-markets. That is a big difference. I believe that the market should be picking winners and losers, not government. What we have is a government that has allowed select businesses (and unions) to influence the system to the point where the odds are stacked in thier favor at the expense of small and medium business. It's a corrupt system through and through. Government policies actually favor the few and reward them when they fail by using taxpayer dollars to bail them out or subsidzie them. It's government that encourages all of this behavior though, if they just allowed the markets to operate freely then capitalism would punish the losers are reward the winners, and we wouldn't have any of this bailout baloney.

OWS as I see it, is a ragged bunch with no coherent alternative programme, it is primarily the ventilation of rage and frustration, which in the current situation is not suprising, but it can also alienate the general public who don't like seeing public spaces become alternative, if temporary housing estates.

I agree. I think OWS is a rag-tag bunch: Some are protesting capitalism, some are protesting nebulous things like 'corporate greed', some are protesting the 1%, some are just happy to be protesting anything, and some (a very small % I think) actually have thier finger on pulse of what happenned in 2008 and why, and I agree with them.