Better than the Tea Party at identifying a proximate target, but just as inarticulate, and far less effective at making an impact. Unless they can have an impact on the choice of candidates, party platform, or proposed legislation, they’re a blip.
A majority of these protestors don’t even know what they are protesting. The ones with extreme debt loads and no job opportunities should take a long hard look at why these chose the programs they did.
Instead of blaming Wall Street, they should be blaming that marketing person at the public university that convinced them that a Gender Studies degree would be high in demand!! 
I thought the original TP rant about not paying for other people’s mortgages was great. What happened later, when the money came in…well, we shall soon see. Got that 2 trillion in cuts yet? 
Right. Old people wearing the flag and Colonial costumes vs youngsters sleeping in the park, pooping on cop cars. Not gonna get a whole lot of middle of the roaders there.
Yup. But we have to wait for the money to come in. Oblahblah is supporting them on the one hand and jerking off bankers with the other. Be interesting to see how this plays out.
Maybe Barry learned that from living in Indonesia and reading books on Sukarno 
Do you have a source on that?
[quote=“Cornpone Hercules”]
The ones with extreme debt loads and no job opportunities should take a long hard look at why these chose the programs they did.
Instead of blaming Wall Street, they should be blaming that marketing person at the public university that convinced them that a Gender Studies degree would be high in demand!! [/quote]
Really? Is that the cause of the financial crisis and high unemployment? I never knew!
A Canadian perspective:
http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/story/2011/10/17/f-rfa-macdonald.html
Howard Stern. These interviews with protesters are pretty funny!!!
:roflmao: :roflmao:
youtube.com/watch?v=4uM9uQ-6G3o
[quote]
Really? Is that the cause of the financial crisis and high unemployment? I never knew![/quote]
I blame Clinton and the Congressional Black Caucus. In the late 90s, Clinton repealed Glass-Steagall legislation at the behest of the Congressional Black Caucus. This opened up mortgage loans to poor and lower class people—people that probably shouldn’t have qualified for any mortgage. But the Democrats wanted every person to own a home. It was this repeal that laid the groundwork for the 2008 crisis.
So yes, whether government or universities, they deserve more of the blame than Wall Street!!!
Talk about revisionist history!
[quote=“Cornpone Hercules”][quote=“BigJohn”]
Do you have a source on that?
[/quote]
Howard Stern. These interviews with protestors are pretty funny!!!
:roflmao: :roflmao:
youtube.com/watch?v=4uM9uQ-6G3o
[quote]
Really? Is that the cause of the financial crisis and high unemployment? I never knew![/quote]
I blame Clinton and the Black Congressional Caucus. In the late 90s, Clinton repealed Glass-Steagall legislation at the behest of the Congressional Black Caucus. This opened up mortgage loans to poor and lower class people—people that probably shouldn’t have qualified for any mortgage. But the Democrats wanted every person to own a home. It was this repeal that laid the groundwork for the 2008 crisis.
So yes, whether government or universities, they deserve more than the blame than Wall Street!!![/quote]
To believe that Glass-Steagall was somehow related to getting mortgage loans to unqualified buyers is to have no idea what Glass-Steagall was all about.
The ‘banking’ activity that Glass-Steagall prohibited was the process of packaging mortgages into securities that could be sold to raise more mortgage money and so on. The effect was to generate very large profits for the banks while transferring the risk to public agencies backing the banks. It also makes it nearly impossible to accurately rate those securities or to even understand just how much risk any holder of those securities was exposed to. The ‘securitizing’ was done and redone such that banks were selling mortgages with one hand and buying parts of them back again with the other-and not even knowing this. Sometimes it even made it impossible to know who ‘owned’ the actual mortgage; because only the ‘owner’ can legally foreclose.
A complete waste of time. Even leaving out the rights or wrongs of whatever they’re asking for, no one is going to vote for anyone but one of the two major parties because a vote for a third party is perceived as a wasted vote. This was reinforced after Bush got elected the first time when people on the left actually made the absurd argument that those voting for Nader cost the left the election (while missing that a similar percentage of people on the “right” voted for Harry Browne of the LP). The following election, no one wanted to risk it again. This is going to be more of the same: if these guys were able to really get their shit together and form their own party, their greatest opponents would be the Democrats, not the Republicans. The Democrats would either seek to co-opt or destroy these guys. As such, the major parties know all they really need to do is appear to be pandering to the people, but then it’s back to business as usual.
But certainly such pandering can lead to changes in legislation? If this turns our to be the case, would the OWS thing still be a waste of time?
I don’t think it will. Here’s why. The kind of people who are involved in this kind of thing are never going to be Republican voters. So, there’s absolutely no incentive for the Democrats to reward them. Political parties fight battles over the swing voters in swing areas/states. That’s where the pork goes (and it also goes to the party elite). It makes no sense really giving your party faithful anything unless they’re part of the elite because those are resources you could use (and that your opposition will use) to secure someone who is in doubt. Besides which, does anyone actually know where these protestors come from? If the party polling machine can’t put enough of these guys into any one electorate, then they’re certainly not going to throw any pork their way.
OK, but isn’t it true that Obama - heading into next year’s election - will try and consolidate his dem voters, many of which are somewhat leftist, and a few pieces of legislation that tighten things up in Wall Street a bit and would never come from the GOP might help him? That’s a theory, anyway.
You’re saying he needs to make sure his Democrat voters get out there and actually vote by giving them something?
I don’t think so actually. I think what he needs to do is two things simultaneously. Firstly, he has to court the middle (just as the Republicans will need to). Secondly, he merely needs to suggest that letting the Republicans back in would be very bad. This is not the same thing as actually giving them anything. He merely has to present himself as better than the Republican candidate. If I say (in a roundabout way) that I’m not going to give you anything, but that my opponent is going to take something from you or make something worse, then in the world of politics, that is giving you something. So, I spin it such that me not giving you anything actually becomes me giving you a lot. That’s a relatively easy sell because the party faithful are already pre-disposed to believe that the opposition are out to get them. This is true of any political process anywhere in the world where parties and their followers line up along partisan lines, which is very much the case with the guys in these protests. That’s why, despite Bush running America into the ground economically, the Tea Party didn’t arise during the Bush years. They aren’t/weren’t looking to protest America’s financial woes, they’re looking to protest a Democrat in the Whitehouse.
You’re being too sincere in this. You need to think like a politician and his lackeys.
[quote=“GuyInTaiwan”]
You’re being too sincere in this. You need to think like a politician.[/quote]
I’m trying to think like a voter. And I think US voters gave Obama the benefit of the doubt based on aversion to the other guys + a promise of change. I think if he can’t show that he has changed Wall Street in some way, that’s a liability for him for the left in his own party, which could reduce voter turnout and lead to more support for more radical lefties from within dem ranks.
Anyway, I look forward to seeing if there will be any legislation from all this.
If, as a left wing voter or politician, a person were to desert Obama, such that he lost, how would that prove to be of benefit to that person? Would having the other guy in power be of benefit? Surely no one on the left actually believes (rightly or wrongly) that the Republicans will be more antagonistic to Wall Street and force it to change, so what’s the end game?
Maybe in the long term sense it would be a benefit in that a few years in the wilderness might actually allow the Democrats to reinvent themselves, but is politics actually played like that? No one really wants that short term pain, do they?
[quote=“GuyInTaiwan”]If, as a left wing voter or politician, a person were to desert Obama, such that he lost, how would that prove to be of benefit to that person? Would having the other guy in power be of benefit? Surely no one on the left actually believes (rightly or wrongly) that the Republicans will be more antagonistic to Wall Street and force it to change, so what’s the end game?
Maybe in the long term sense it would be a benefit in that a few years in the wilderness might actually allow the Democrats to reinvent themselves, but is politics actually played like that? No one really wants that short term pain, do they?[/quote]
On a personal level, I totally agree with you. And yet, I have met many many “lefties” - feminists, gender activists, eco-voters, union activists, conspiracy theorists and dye-in-the-wool social democrats - who will not vote form someone who they perceived as a “suit” from the “establishment” who has no demonstrated legislative or executive commitment to the causes they seem to espouse.
@ BigJohn:
Jaboney stated the following:
Then Cornpone Hercules stated:
You then asked CH:
I’m just curious… why didn’t you ask Jaboney for a source for his statement?
PAAAAAAAARTTAY time, dude!
[quote=“Tigerman”]@ BigJohn:
Jaboney stated the following:
Then Cornpone Hercules stated:
You then asked CH:
I’m just curious… why didn’t you ask Jaboney for a source for his statement?[/quote]
one was an opinion and the other was chewy?
BIg John: They basically make themselves irrelevant then unless they form a large enough bloc (i.e. a new party) that can hold the Democrats to ransom.
To be honest, I always figured Obama was not going to live up to the expectations. Firstly, the expectations were ridiculously unrealistic. Back in 2009, I worked with a black woman who declared in about April that Obama should be allowed to run for a third term. Maybe she was a little wacky, but I don’t think she was that far out at the fringes. As if one man could be all things to all people all by himself without the pesky question of dealing with Congress amongst other things. Secondly, he inherited a poisoned chalice, by which I am partly referring to Bush’s economic train wreck, two wars, etc., but more importantly, he came to the Whitehouse after decades of structual decline in the U.S. To think anyone was really going to solve all of that was beyond wishful thinking.
I actually predicted, and still do, that other than being the first black president, history won’t remember him for much at all. He’ll be a one paragraph president in textbooks, and that paragraph will be about his race. I suspect that if the Republicans play this right, they’ll get Romney in the Whitehouse, though he won’t be the panacea they’re hoping for either. Either way – Romney or Obama, it’s going to be a fairly dull man at the helm while the train goes further over the cliff. What is going to be really interesting is to see the 2016 election, and especially the 2020 election. If the U.S. doesn’t get out of its hole by 2016, we’re going to see some really crazy politics going on – on both sides of politics – the kind that will make people like Michele Bachmann look moderate. Obviously, economics is front and centre in all of this, but it’s part of a much deeper cultural issue going on right now. All the predictions are towards waning American economic (and hence, geopolitical and cultural) power within the next decade or so. When that reality check catches up with the American populace, coupled with the fact that their standard of living is not going to be like it was back before 2007, shit is going to get really interesting, really fast. Empires that have gone into decline have suffered massive cultural hangovers for a long time afterwards.
As a non-American, but still a Westerner, it’s both fascinating and horrifying to watch all of this taking place. I don’t think the world is going to be a better place as America declines (and I especially don’t like the prospect of having to decide between living in “China” or leaving Taiwan), and I think I’m not alone in thinking that America’s current state is a great moral failing at every level of society. The whole culture has been asleep at the wheel for at least a decade.