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[irked_indeed]

I got to thinking this morning (inspired by jordan179's recent blog post) about the "Occupy Wall Street" movement - particularly in light of President Biden's comments that it it has "a lot in common with the Tea Party."

Comments

[whirlwindmonk]

Thanks for the link, I've been wondering just what exactly they're protesting about aside from "Teh corpurashuns are EEEEVIIIILLL!!!" Good to see that they're bringing up some grievances I can agree with. As Jordan pointed out, I would rather see them marching for an actual solution rather than just trying to annoy people into listening to the problems, but hey, I suppose it's better than nothing. Maybe.

I do find it amusing that at least a few of their complaints are directly tied to government expansion of power. Yeah, that's not the "focus" of their movement, but it seems to me that if you are going to protest the wrongs done by these companies, you ought to call out the people in, and sections of, the government that allowed it to happen, either due to negligence or bribes. Problems aren't fixed by whining about them, they're fixed by making sure they can't happen again.

I also find it extraordinarily irritating that they refer to these accusations as "facts" despite not having a single citation to show that any one of them has ever happened, let alone showing that they're widespread enough to be considered a problem worth protesting rather than an isolated incident. Yeah, I do know that some of them have happened, but it would be nice to see if "They have continuously sought to strip employees of the right to negotiate for better pay and safer working conditions." is actually true, or if they're just doing the standard pro-union/collective-bargaining fact twisting.

Anyway, now that I'm completely off topic from the point of your post...um...good post! I agree!

[irked_indeed]

Thanks!

Yeah, I wouldn't say all their objections are indefensible. Some of them are bad thing - but what, exactly, are we going to do about them without causing worse problems? (As an analogy: mugging is bad, lobotomizing the population so they can't mug anymore is worse.)

I'm open to finding out they've got some great solutions, but... so far, they haven't presented anything like that that I'm aware of.

Contrast the Tea Party, which had some very concrete objections and at least a general solution: stop the bailouts, cut taxes, cut spending on basically everything.