Occupy LA in front of Bank of America, October 13.
Get out there and support the 99 percenters on Saturday.
"It's time for us to unite; it's time for them to listen; people of the world, rise up!" proclaims the Web site United for #GlobalChange.
"We are not goods in the hands of politicians and bankers who do not represent us ... We will peacefully demonstrate, talk and organize until we make it happen."
"ENOUGH IS ENOUGH"
"We have people from all walks of life joining us every day," said Spyro, one of those behind a Facebook page in London which has grown to have some 12,000 followers in a few weeks, enthused by Occupy Wall Street. Some 5,000 have posted that they will turn out, though even some activists expect fewer will.
Spyro, a 28-year-old graduate who has a well-paid job and did not want his family name published, summed up the main target of the global protests as "the financial system."
Angry at taxpayer bailouts of banks since crisis hit in 2008 and at big bonuses still paid to some who work in them while unemployment blights the lives of many young Britons, he said: "People all over the world, we are saying 'Enough is enough'."
Go here to understand why the 99 percenters are marching.
Occupy Boston stands in solidarity with our sisters and brothers in New York during their time of need, as they did in ours. We are the 99%, and we stand united.
MAYOR MENINO...
What in hell were you thinking when you said this:
Yep. It sure didn't work for the Boston Tea Party rebels. It didn't work for the U.S. labor movement. It didn't work for Gandhi.
And it certainly never worked for Rosa Parks, did it?"
h/t dailykos
From the Oh!pinion blog:
"Conservative Republican Herman Cain, a successful businessman, looks at the Occupy Wall Street protesters and sees only envious slackers who don’t have a job because they won’t go out and get one.
Cain, who’s running for president, freely admits he has no facts to back up his arrogant, blame-the-victims statements. That’s typical of conservative Republicans, except that most don’t so openly admit they’re just bloviating."
17 comments:
Cry, cry, cry
I wonder how many of these protesters got a home loan they knew they could not afford?
Bankers and politicians are mistreating us - wha, wha, wha
There's a complaint never heard from Americans before
How naive and stupid can you get
Lets have a sing-a-long, that will force them to do what we want
Anon,
Thanks for stopping by and illustrating your excruciating ignorance on what OWS is about.
If I had written something as dumb as that, I, too, would want to be anonymous.
A large majority of OWS are young people who probably could not afford to buy a home, saddled with student loans and the inability to find a decent paying job.
I personally met many young people who are struggling with those issues.A\
Also in attendance were many military veterans. They, too, are finding it difficult to maintain a decent middle class life in today's economy--an economy that the bankster and the Wall Street financial rapists manipulated and then walked off with a reward for their criminal acts.
And here you are, defending scum like that against students, the military, and other Americans.
Your stupidity is jaw dropping.
Mark Lux writing in Crooks and Liars tells us how the right always mistrusts democracy in action:
"These anti-democratic sentiments certainly did not cease in the modern era — all you have to do is look at all the Republican efforts to deny the right to vote to so many citizens to understand that. And their fears of demonstrators are vivid. Look at this quote, which certainly reflected the views of people in power like Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover, from conservative author Samuel Huntington in a report he wrote in the 1970s: “Some of the problems of governance in the United States today stem from an excess of democracy. ... A democratic political system usually requires some measure of apathy and non-involvement on the part of some individuals and groups.”
From the anti-American Revolution Tories of the 1770s to the Glenn Beck/Eric Cantor conservatives of today, conservatives always have been on the side of the wealthiest and most powerful in society, and always have been absolutely panic stricken when people get out in the streets to protest the abuses of the rest of us by the economic elites. Conservatives don’t like democracy; they don’t want the poor or the young or people of color to vote; they don’t like demonstrators raising hell about the powers that be. The panic by these conservatives is, as I said at the beginning of this post, as funny as can be: you can’t make up stuff as genuinely unhinged as Glenn Beck's reaction to Occupy, he is far funnier than any satire of him could be. More importantly, though, the reactions of these conservatives — so like the reactions of conservatives throughout American history who have been on the wrong side of every big issue — give reassurance that the folks at Occupy Wall Street are on the right side of history."
Anon~
Go to hell!
You probably were either handed everything to you, were born rich, and never had to put your kids to bed hungry!
Shaw said it better than I can.
Shut your ignorant mouth because you don't have a freaking clue as to what you are talking about!!
Do you honestly think all of the Crowds are dumber than you?
Get a life, and go help save one!
Auntie Shaw,
Was that a worm sandwich trying to make a comment?
Shaw - I must admit that while supportive of all efforts to end crony capitalism, corporatism, bailouts, lobbyists, and corporate as well as all forms of special interest money {including unions} from influencing our government I am somewhat wary of the real agenda that some of the OWS appear to have.
As I observe some of the more radical individuals in the movement it gives me concern.
I am hoping the level headed are the ones who ultimately gain leadership of the movement. Ideally that would include a cross section of political and economic thought. And hopefully it preserves our already mixed economy with a healthy amount of capitalism.
I've now read Anon at least ten times. I've been able to find only one, partially cogent comment.
It too has bothered me that some people could be led down a prim rose path by the mortgage lenders to take on a mortgage they could barely afford.
Then after the interest went up and their monthly payments ballooned they were unable to afford their albatross. Had they understood their own financial situation better, and perhaps sought advice they might have avoided their unfortunate situation.
Beyond that the rest of ANON's non comment is just hyperbolic drivel. Is it possible that the "How naive and stupid can you get" segment was but a mere projection on himself? Methinks it very possible.
RN,
If you recall the demonstrations of the 60s and early 70s, the stereotypes used to discredit the movement were of so-called "unwashed, high-on-drugs, flower child hippies." Once a stereotype enters the culture, it tends to get recycled, or you invent new ones along similar lines. If you recall, the anti-Vietnam war movement eventually reached mainstream America as more and more people became fed up with the war.
The OWS movement is still in the early stages, but the "unwashed, jobless" stereotype has already become a misnomer. Yes, there are students among the demonstrators, but there are also Nobel Prize winning economists, teachers, professors, and middle-class working Americans who joined the movement ... much more grassroots than the Tea Party movement.
About the TP movement, if you recall, this got started as "astroturf" events during the summer of 2009, and the cost of organizing them was originally borne by PR firms and lobbyists from K Street ... driven basically by corporatists advancing corporatist messages. For example, the Koch brothers and Don Blankenship (the West Virginia coal mine owner of catastrophe fame) funded Memorial Day and July 4th Day picnics and music events to rally the first TPers to their cause. Thus, the first TP events were hardly grassroots.
I believe a good many TP folks will eventually realize where their REAL economic interests lie - with the OWS folks - and this has the corporatists scared.
Well said, (O)CT(O). I'm on my way to Boston Common to meet up with Occupy Boston again today.
And I can testify to the fact that the people in this movement come from all strata of society. I met veterans, students, parents, grandparents, business people, off-duty cops, construction people, musicians, teachers, during the march last week. No one was smoking weed or was unwashed.
The conservative media is spreading this sterotype and it's a lie.
As for people's concern for the "radical types" in the movement, I take that as something overblown and an excuse to dismiss what the mainstream majority of marchers are. They are not radical, they are the 99%.
The radicals are the banksters, Wall Street financial rapists, greedy corporatists, and lobbyist-bought politicians. Once we accept those facts--that this small percentage of radicals ruined our country, we can begin to set it on the correct course again.
Auntie Shaw,
Perhaps the 1% can be subdivided even further. At the bottom end of this range, you have doctors, lawyers, high-earning professionals, and small to mid-size business owners who earn upward of $300K but not over $1M per year and have a net worth of, say, $1 to $2M. This segment is only one stock market crash away from joining the rest of the 99%.
For the lower end of the 1%, social security and Medicare still represent up to a third of their retirement, and this group is not friendly towards the assault on earned benefits, just like the rest of the 99%.
The real criminals are the upper one tenth of one percent (0.1%) who earn over $10M per year and have a total net worth of over $50M. This is the segment that has the means to hide their money in overseas accounts (illegally) or legally under corporate umbrella accounts in tax haven states such the Cayman Islands. This is the group that pays virtually no income tax - yet demands total deregulation so they can repatriate their money with zero tax consequences, the group that can manipulate commodity markets for profit while driving up the cost of food, the group that can hedge against market losses while the 99% suffer real losses ... losing jobs, homes, savings, and retirement accounts.
The "class warfare" trope is a demagogic invention to discredit the OWS movement. More accurately, this 0.1% segment has been waging class war against the rest of the 99.9% segment for years.
Too bad the Tea Party folks were indoctrinated early by their corporatist sponsors and co-opted by them; but I think this will change once the facts are known. Chicanery and corruption of this magnitude cannot remain hidden forever.
Even Paul Denninger, a co-founder of the Tea Party, supports OWS and says that the TPers should be a part of it.
“The problem with protests and the political process is that it is very easy, no matter how big the protest is, for the politicians to simply wait until the people go home,” financial blogger Karl Denninger observed. “And then they can ignore you.”
“Well, Occupy Wall Street was a little different,” he continued. “And back in 2008, I wrote that when we will actually see change is when the people come, they set up camp, and they refuse to go home. That appears to be happening now.”
Denninger has been complaining for some time that the Tea Party was hijacked by the Republican establishment and used to protect the very prople it had originally opposed. A year ago, he wrote, “Tea Party my ass. This was nothing other than the Republican Party stealing the anger of a population that was fed up with the Republican Party’s own theft of their tax money at gunpoint to bail out the robbers of Wall Street and fraudulently redirecting it back toward electing the very people who stole all the ****ing money!”
Now he advises Occupy Wall Street, “Don’t let it happen.”
“One of the things that the Occupy movement seems to have going for it is it has not turned around and issued a set of formal demands,” he explains. “This is a good thing, not a bad thing. Everyone is looking for a set of demands. The problem is that as soon as you pipe up with a list of four or five things — and you’ve got to keep it simple and short — then somebody’s going to say, ‘Well, we gave you 70 percent of it, now go home.’ And the fact is, that’s exactly the sort of thing that happened with the Tea Party.”
“Stay on message, which is that the corruption is not a singular event,” Denninger urged. “You can’t focus in one place. You have to get the money out of politics, which is very difficult to do, but at the same time you can’t silence people’s voice.”
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/10/14/tea-party-co-founded-expresses-support-for-occupy-wall-street/
Amazing statement coming from a co-founder of the Tea Party. He's right, too. The TP has evolved into a party of half-crazed know-nothings, Anonymous being a prime example.
“Stay on message, which is that the corruption is not a singular event,” Denninger urged. “You can’t focus in one place. You have to get the money out of politics, which is very difficult to do, but at the same time you can’t silence people’s voice.”
Excellent! I've discussed this idea with many people at the two Occupy Boston demonstrations I've been to--October 10 and today, October 15. The folks I spoke with, veterans, teachers, artists, carpenters, etc., all agree that we need to make a coalition with the true TPers, not the astroturf, bought-by-Koch TPers.
They and we have been hurt by the plundering of our national treasure and birthright by a tiny percentage of the population. There are more of us than them.
But we need to unite, not be divided because we cannot achieve anything while we're at each others' throats.
Here's what conservative David Frum says about our economic situation:
"This is not a moment for government to be cutting back. … Right now we’re watching state governments try to balance all of their budgets at the same time in the middle of this crisis. We’ve seen half a million public sector jobs disappear. Now, if these were good times, I would applaud that. We need to see a thinner public sector — especially at the state and local level. But we’re seeing what happens when you do that as an anti-recession measure and you make the recession worse. And even though we’re in a technical recovery, incomes and employment — all of that remains lagging for people — I think that we’ve rediscovered in this crisis something that I think we all knew. Which is, there’s a reason why the people of the 1930s built some kind of minimum guarantee — unemployment insurance, health care coverage and things like that. And it’s not because they wanted to be nice. It’s because in a crisis when people lose their jobs, if there is no social safety net they loose 100 percent of their purchasing power."
We need to make common cause with conservatives like Frum.
in our fair city, vancouver, the protesters are talking of setting up a tent city on the art gallery lawn. of course the cops are monitoring it very closely after the stanley cup riots.
turning the art gallery into a slum is not a good idea in my opinion.
"... turning the art gallery into a slum is not a good idea in my opinion ..."
Billy,
If the demonstrators stand absolutely motionless, what you have is a sculpture garden.
Leslie,
I think the ragtag Tea Baggers are not a cohesive and homogeneous group, and it would be within our interests to open a dialogue and invite at least some of them to join. To dismiss all of them as half-crazed would be counter productive and turn off the Denningers among them.
I have often commented on the function of 'wedge" politics and the effect of "atomizing" large voting blocs. When people with common economic interests no longer talk to each other (because the GOP has used fear tactics to polarize the electorate), we lose every time. OWS offers an antidote to this kind of "divide and conquer" politics; hence our need to reach out to some of the TP folks.
Octo - Hear, Hear!!
RN,
If there were larger coalitions built on common economic self-interest, I'll bet it will help break the impasse in Washington ... maybe not right away, but eventually.
Octo- There is a time and a place for partisanship, and there is a time and place for true bipartisanship and working to correct the failings brought on by past and present policies. It seems reasonable to chose now as the time for the later. DOING OTHERWISE MAY RESULT IN TOTAL COLLAPSE.
I suspect you are right. I am certainly hoping so.
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