Wall Street protesters: We're in for the long haul

[Ed Anger]

Ide is creeping into Crunchy territory. Which makes me sad.

I'm the same as I've always ever been.

You've gotten slightly worse.

[Ed Anger]

What a bunch of reactionary old gits this forum has become. Do y'all get a giant boner from Law and Order or something?

You still realize that now? My only question would be how much of it is posturing and internet persona and how much a seriously held belief.

I'm forming a Freikorps of veterans and rich folk.

[garbon]

What a bunch of reactionary old gits this forum has become. Do y'all get a giant boner from Law and Order or something?

Where is sask when you need him?

Only that Special Victims Unit one.

SVU

[garbon]

I don't get the idea that the protestors aren't being clear about what they want. People get what they're protesting against, right?

Pulled a bunch of stuff. Best I can gather is general unhappiness with their lives/opportunities with a strong focus on how the financial system is screwing them over. What camping in a park has to do with that - I'm not sure.  Of course per that nymag poll, you're looking at a lot of the protesters being 20-somethings. That does little to make them...sympathetic.

From the OWS site: (I did a little cropping of explanatory text on that demand list)

Proposed List Of Demands For Occupy Wall St Movement! (User Submitted)
Admin note: This is not an official list of demands. This is a forum post submitted by a single user and hyped by irresponsible news/commentary agencies like Fox News and Mises.org. This content was not published by the OccupyWallSt.org collective, nor was it ever proposed or agreed to on a consensus basis with the NYC General Assembly. There is NO official list of demands.

Demand one: Restoration of the living wage.

Demand two: Institute a universal single payer healthcare system.

Demand three: Guaranteed living wage income regardless of employment.

Demand four: Free college education.

Demand five: Begin a fast track process to bring the fossil fuel economy to an end while at the same bringing the alternative energy economy up to energy demand.

Demand six: One trillion dollars in infrastructure (Water, Sewer, Rail, Roads and Bridges and Electrical Grid) spending now.

Demand seven: One trillion dollars in ecological restoration planting forests, reestablishing wetlands and the natural flow of river systems and decommissioning of all of America's nuclear power plants.

Demand eight: Racial and gender equal rights amendment.

Demand nine: Open borders migration. anyone can travel anywhere to work and live.

Demand ten: Bring American elections up to international standards of a paper ballot precinct counted and recounted in front of an independent and party observers system.

Demand eleven: Immediate across the board debt forgiveness for all.

Demand twelve: Outlaw all credit reporting agencies.

Demand thirteen: Allow all workers to sign a ballot at any time during a union organizing campaign or at any time that represents their yeah or nay to having a union represent them in collective bargaining or to form a union.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/occupy-dc-protester-says-movement-continues-to-grow-more-tents-going-up-in-mcpherson-square/2011/10/16/gIQAPey7oL_story.html

Participants are demonstrating against corporate greed and economic inequality.

Legba Carrefour has been part of Occupy D.C. since it started on Oct. 1 and says more tents are going up in the downtown square every night. He says the appeal of the movement is that participants don't have specific demands. He says people see their own lives and their own desires among the participants.

http://www.torontosun.com/2011/10/14/slogans-and-demands-wont-change-world

The Occupy protesters have a plethora of complaints including how profit is private but financial losses are socialized, the existence of pollution, stagnating wages and home foreclosures among others.

http://nymag.com/news/intelligencer/topic/occupy-wall-street-2011-10/

We polled 100 protesters who are in it for the long haul.

How old are you?
Under 20: 10
20–29: 50
30-39: 15
40-49: 9
Over 50: 2

The country with the best government in the world is ...
"Canada. It's most like the U.S. but more the way I want."
"Denmark."
"I don't accept the premises of this question.

Explain how you would fix Wall Street.
"A maximum-wage law."
"President Elizabeth Warren."
"Burn it down."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/demetria-irwin/occupy-wall-street_b_1004448.html

I'm not quite clear on what defines success for these protesters. What makes one decide to de-camp? A particular bill? A particular election? Is there anything that could be done right now-ish that would take the protests down a notch or in a different direction? Most of my friends could say the same save for a few who literally stopped by the protest. I am glad that people feel passionate enough to take a physical and theoretical/philosophical stance against what they believe to be unjust, but so far I haven't been moved to join in myself, not in a physical way anyway.

http://www.cnn.com/2011/10/05/opinion/rushkoff-occupy-wall-street/index.html

Yes, there are a wide array of complaints, demands, and goals from the Wall Street protesters: the collapsing environment, labor standards, housing policy, government corruption, World Bank lending practices, unemployment, increasing wealth disparity and so on. Different people have been affected by different aspects of the same system -- and they believe they are symptoms of the same core problem.

Are they ready to articulate exactly what that problem is and how to address it? No, not yet. But neither are Congress or the president who, in thrall to corporate America and Wall Street, respectively, have consistently failed to engage in anything resembling a conversation as cogent as the many I witnessed as I strolled by Occupy Wall Street's many teach-ins this morning. There were young people teaching one another about, among other things, how the economy works, about the disconnection of investment banking from the economy of goods and services, the history of centralized interest-bearing currency, the creation and growth of the derivatives industry, and about the Obama administration deciding to settle with, rather than investigate and prosecute the investment banking industry for housing fraud.

[garbon]

Oh and then this:

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/dannywestneat/2016514915_danny16.html

There was an awkward moment last week in our local Wall Street protest that crystallized why this movement, like the Tea Party a year before, makes me squirm.

The Occupy Seattle folks issued a list of demands to the mayor, asking for tents and a free, 24-hour parking space. My first thought when I heard this was: Free parking? Is it too late for me to join Occupy Seattle?

But seriously: What's intriguing is what happened next. A few protesters objected, saying: Where do we get off making demands?

"This is not the way to garner more support from the general public," wrote a protester named Heather Joy on the Occupy Seattle website. "Really, it's embarrassing ... Why not supply our own needs, not ask or 'demand' that the gov't supply it for us — isn't that part of the problem?"

Why, yes, it is. I would go further than Heather Joy (who should be put in charge of Occupy Seattle immediately). Excessive demand-making is not just part of the problem in our politics. It is the problem.

I got a lot of blowback from readers last week for writing "I am not the 99 percent." I said protesters were right about the rise of corporate power. But wrong to suggest the solution to our economic and government problems is to tax or regulate only somebody else — the rich.

I picked the same nits with the Tea Party last year. Their boogeyman was big government and runaway deficits. But their demands — lower taxes, but don't you dare touch my Medicare or Social Security — not only made no mathematical sense but conveniently involved zero sacrifice on their parts.

Of course that platform triumphed at the polls. Buoyed, presumably, by at least a few of the 99 percent.

Many readers said I was too glib in dismissing the latest protests. And also too obsessed with math (I wrote that the proposed millionaires' tax, while fun to shout about through a bullhorn, would raise only $40 billion a year, such a small slice of our deficit that broader taxes on the 99 percent were inevitable).

"You miss the point entirely," wrote Bill Daugaard of Kirkland. "The 'we are the 99 percent' slogan is to decry the ever-growing concentration of wealth in the nation's oligarchy, and the obscene gap between it and the rest of the nation's citizens. The issues you raise are details."

Guilty! To me, math matters. The math says the hole's so deep it'll take all of us to climb out. The Occupy protests are in denial of that math, just as the Tea Party was.

But OK, forget the math. What should be done about the wealth in the nation's oligarchy? I agree corporations and the wealthy have too much power in politics, and also that both owe the nation more financial support in a time of crisis.

But it's not the government's business to regulate pay or somehow cap wealth. My income is stagnant or dropping, too. It's not government's job to fix that — we shouldn't be demanding that it try.

"You are making too much out of a simple slogan," wrote reader Kathy Harris. "Maybe the protesters should have said the 90 percenters instead of 99ers."

Now this gets to the nub of the matter. Who really needs help right now? We all rely on basics like roads and defense. But one reason we're in so deep is that everyone — the poor to the middle-class homeowner on up to supremely rich companies such as Microsoft — all keep making increasing demands on the public sphere.

Some truly need it — maybe it should be "we are the 25 percent"? The vast majority don't.

Take Obama's jobs bill, which was to be paid for with that millionaires' tax. More than half the money was to give the rest of us yet another tax cut. That's insane. I don't need that any more than I need a tent or free parking from the city.

So, to channel Heather Joy: When will there be a movement that makes offers instead of demands? That says: Here's how we can do it. Not: You do it, and by the way, what can I expect to get out of it?

I will say this: The Occupy movement has won one huge victory already. They've certainly changed the topic of conversation around here.

[Neil]

What a bunch of reactionary old gits this forum has become.

Reactionary?  I rather think not.  Just because people don't go along with whatever nonsensical hippie bullshit is going on at any given moment doesn't make one a reactionary.

[Ed Anger]

I'm fascist. Machinegun the hippies.

[Ed Anger]

To be serious, I'd be a hell of a lot more sympathetic if they was protesting the shitty job congress and Barry was doing. Instead, we have fuckheads singing 'Fuck the USA' in Portland, fuckheads occupying private property in New York, and a bunch of faggot Mac users demanding free stuff.

Fuck 'em.

[alfred russel]

Just because people don't go along with whatever nonsensical hippie bullshit is going on at any given moment doesn't make one a reactionary.

Fair enough, but...

I'm fascist. Machinegun the hippies.

Could be considered reactionary.

[Darth Wagtaros]

What a bunch of reactionary old gits this forum has become. Do y'all get a giant boner from Law and Order or something?

Where is sask when you need him?

WHen it started Occupy Wall Street at least made a bit of sense.  Something went wrong with the system and we have to fix it.  Then it careened into crazyville very quickly. 

[Caliga]

Demand one: Restoration of the living wage.

No.  Stop buying so much Apple shit and Starbucks, and you'll be able to afford necessary stuff.

Demand two: Institute a universal single payer healthcare system.

Hmmm, maybe, but don't put the federal government in charge if you want it to have a chance of actually working.

Demand three: Guaranteed living wage income regardless of employment.

See my point re: demand one.

Demand four: Free college education.

Lollercoasters.

Demand five: Begin a fast track process to bring the fossil fuel economy to an end while at the same bringing the alternative energy economy up to energy demand.

Let's revisit in like fifty years or so when we might have the tech to pursue this.

Demand six: One trillion dollars in infrastructure (Water, Sewer, Rail, Roads and Bridges and Electrical Grid) spending now.

Sounds good.  Who's going to pay for that, though?

Demand seven: One trillion dollars in ecological restoration planting forests, reestablishing wetlands and the natural flow of river systems and decommissioning of all of America's nuclear power plants.

LOL!  Let's get off fossil fuels, but decommision nuclear power plants?   Also, we have plenty of forests and wetlands.  Try leaving the city and you'll see.

Demand eight: Racial and gender equal rights amendment.

Ok, sounds good and (more importantly) doesn't cost an insane amount of money like these other demands.

Demand nine: Open borders migration. anyone can travel anywhere to work and live.

I'd prefer a Hippy Emigration Policy to this.

Demand ten: Bring American elections up to international standards of a paper ballot precinct counted and recounted in front of an independent and party observers system.

Wait, you love the environment, but want to switch all voting back to paper ballots?  Ok, now I see why you wanted to plant all those forests.

Demand eleven: Immediate across the board debt forgiveness for all.

Hilarious.  Nein.

Demand twelve: Outlaw all credit reporting agencies.

Nope, I like having low interest loan access.

Demand thirteen: Allow all workers to sign a ballot at any time during a union organizing campaign or at any time that represents their yeah or nay to having a union represent them in collective bargaining or to form a union.

Doesn't the NLRA already allow this?

[Neil]

So these guys are idiots then.  It's official.

[garbon]

http://news.yahoo.com/occupy-wall-street-shows-muscle-raises-300k-223255806.html

The Occupy Wall Street movement has close to $300,000, as well as storage space loaded with donated supplies in lower Manhattan.

There are signs of confidence, but also signs of tension among the demonstrators at Zuccotti Park, the epicenter of the movement that began a month ago Monday. They have trouble agreeing on things like whether someone can bring in a sleeping bag, and show little sign of uniting on any policy issues. Some protesters eventually want the movement to rally around a goal, while others insist that isn't the point.

"... Egos are clashing, but this is participatory democracy in a little park."

Strekal said the donated goods are being stored "for a long-term occupation."

"We are unstoppable! Another world is possible!" Kara Segal and other volunteers chanted in the building lobby as they arrived to help unpack and sort items, preparing them to be rolled out to the park.

While on the streets, moments of madness occasionally erupt in the protest crowd — accompanied by whiffs of marijuana, grungy clothing and disarray — order prevails at the storage site.

[Caliga]

I'm fascist. Machinegun the hippies.

Your avatar is making me hungry.

[Darth Wagtaros]

So really it doesn't stand for anything except that they are pissed at something.  Their contempt for the Tea Party is all the more ironic for this.