The Silver Lining of the Occupy Wall Street Movement

[jordan179]

Yesterday the Occupy San Francisco Movement attempted to block shoppers from going to sales on Black Friday. This worked about as well as one would expect -- the naivete they demonstrated in trying to prevent Black Friday sales from happening is hilarious in and of itself. But they did manage to get Union Square, and by extension the upscale

Comments

[tara_li]

Funny thing is - these Occupy people are acting closer to what the original Boston Tea Party people did, than anything the Tea Party has done so far. Admitted, they're not dressing up as Indians, and they're doing it for different reasons in many ways, but they're using direct interference in trade, unlike the current Tea Party which is mostly propaganda moves. But when you get down to the core - it's not such a different reason, really - they just don't think it through and realize that it's a centralized fiat currency and the federal bank itself that's allowing the BigWig bankers & stock brokers to cause problems

[jordan179]

It's the stockbrokers, the stock & bond instruments bankers, and their CEOs who are the problem - they commit fraud every time they make claims on how risky an investment is. And it needs to be treated as fraud - no fancy names for the charges, put them in the same cells as you put the three-card monty players, and make their sentences proportional to the amount stolen. Three-card monty player makes a few hundred dollars by fraud - and gets a few months. CEO makes $50M by fraud - going to be in there a long long time!

Historically, stocks are a good long-term investment -- if you put your money in a randomly-selected portfolio of stocks over any 30-year period (even the one starting right before the Crash of 1929) you would enjoy greater profits than you would in (say) a bank account or purchase of bonds. The caveat, of course, is that if a company collapses completely, its stock is generally worthless. Are you saying that most investors don't get this last point?

[tara_li]

In a lot of ways - yes, investors don't get that point

[jordan179]

And the people *MOST* responsible? The same parents who decided they could put that TV on the credit card, or that vacation trip, or whatever - and pay it back later. The same parents who looked at that variable mortgage, and never dreamed that the payments on it could double or triple, even if they acknowledged that the initial rate was lower than it really should be.

Actually, the people most responsible for our national debt, both public and private, are those who decided that "government money" came from some magic fairyland source and that therefore voting for any and all amounts to be spent on any purpose of any merit whatsoever constituted "generosity," while refusing to spend constituted "stinginess." This gave politicians absolutely no reason not to push for as much spending as possible, save insofar as in said politicians retained contact with reality and loved their country more than themselves -- and such intelligent patriots will always be a minority, in all times and places

[polaris93]

This will also be a good test of just how intelligent liberals are. If they don't switch sides and vote Republican because of things like this, they are truly brainless.

[melvin_udall]

True. And immoral.

The sins, crimes and abuse of power of this administration and the rest of the Democrats are long.

[polaris93]

Yeah, but the sheer stupidity of them is their Achilles' heel, and it just may make for bringing them down in 2012. By themselves, immorality, crime, and abuse of power aren't necessarily weaknesses. Stupidity is -- and in this case is so ENORMOUS that it's like something out of a science fiction movie, one about The People With No Brains! or the like. That they are still able to vote is an infernal miracle of some kind.

[melvin_udall]

LOL!

Get on bus. Pull lever next to "D". Get free stuff. The Hamster party.

[silentrogue47]

All I had to mention to my friends today was, "The Occupy movement tried to block Black Friday shoppers" and they started roaring in laughter... and proceeded to observe what idiots they are.

[tara_li]

Another post I caught somewhere was about Alan Moore and the internal moral problems Time-Warner is having from selling insane numbers of Guy Fawkes masks to all of these Occupiers.

On the one hand, they're sort of supporting a group who wants to destroy them. On the other hand, MONEY!

AHh, yes - here's the link: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/nov/27/alan-moore-v-vendetta-mask-protest

[jordan179]

I don't think that big corporations take the Occupiers seriously, and I think that they are correct not to do so. Unless the Occupier movement coalesces around a leadership which issues clear and at least partially-appeasable demands, they will remain politically-ineffectual for the Left -- and useful to the Right, as I explained in the original post, because the Right can use them as examples of pointless and random Left protest, and the Left's weak response to them as ammunition against Left candidates.

[jordan179]

Yes. Their chance of actually-succeeding in this goal was minimal -- note that the Occupy SF movement, one of the biggest around, only managed to block a single shopping center in a fairly-large city. On the other hand, the level of annoyance, anger and outrage raised against them, by people whom one would assume are not on the Right -- is a priceless gift to the Republicans in the 2012 elections.