Who are the protesters behind Occupy Wall Street–and what do they want?

[new_User1357246]

Which of the demands are not stupid?

Elections have consequences for sure.

yes, it was just a run of bad luck.

N
There is a reason though, and that reason is that Obama was elected.
Elections have consequences.

There is a the law of supply and demand at work here too. Encouraging everybody to get a post secondary education drives up the price of education as the deman outstrips the supply, but the product that is put out, namely vast numbers of people with advanced education, there is a glut in demand.
A good functioning economy would help use of some of the oversupply, but with energy prices rising and continuing to rise due to ‘green’ tape that effectively dries up supply, with class warfare talk of ‘making the rich pay’ making new entrepreneurs wary to invest in new jobs, and with a social climate that is overall quite hostile to the business class in general, to the point of marching against and denouncing it, and vandalism, business is getting the clear message that now is the time to lay low.

Surre. Younger generations are the ones getting shafted by the eat now, pay later agenda that Obama has become the herald of. Old fogies in the Tea party movement disagree with this, but young people by and large have bought into this system.
It is not too bright for those who have gone on to higher degrees to reject the movement that doesn’t want benefits today being financed with their children’s and grandchildren’s future, but this is very much what young people have chosen.
Elections have consequences.

Good jobs are inversely related to a bad economy, and for the economy to function, Wall St is an integral part of that. If jobs are the goal, then getting the economy functioning again is the means.

As far as I can tell all of their demands are stupid. They should demand a break up of the big banks. That should be their bigest/only demand, and I think people could get behind that.

I mostly agree with your post, though I don’t think all the blame rests on Obama.

 

[SamH]

An entry level job is not going to help our college students get out of debt - so they are screwed. A high school graduate is not going to get an entry level job, because they are all being taken by college graduates desperate for any kind of work - so they are screwed.

They should have thought of that before they borrowed $50K to get a degree in an area that would enable them to pay off a $50K loan. My first job out of college paid less than the job I held during college - I literally took a pay cut at graduation to work in my field of study. It took three years before I earned more in my “professional” career than had I have stayed working my hourly job. But because I was working I didn’t have time to go hang out at Wall Street to complain that the high paying job I was expecting hadn’t appeared at career day.

 

[He_Man]

What percentage of the OWS group could come up with that, if someone asked them?

I know, I know - “We are 0%”

There are legitimate points to be made regarding problems with lobbying, corporate interests in DC, and politicians skewing policies towards donors.

However, this unwashed amalgam of hippie sweat and dirt couldn’t likely tell you a single idea for how to solve their “problems.”

For some, it is a time to vent. Fine, though their anger seems misdirected.

For some, it is just an opportunity to get high and get ansgty for a cause they know little about.

For others, they are just liars and fools, like this guy: theblaze.com/blog/2011/09/26/video-liberal-protestor-chokes-on-silver-spoon/

"Robert Stephens graduated from Carleton College (average cost: $42,942/year) in 2010 and now studies law at The George Washington University Law School (average cost: $70,449/year). His father has a Ph.D. and two master’s degrees; his mother also has a master’s degree. Only in America could a kid have been blessed with so much… and only in America could he still claim to be a victim. America’s capitalist society has apparently leveled a grave injustice against his family and Robert will not stand for it."

These rallies are nothing new, and as always, thanks to the disorganization, ignorance, and general laziness of the “members”, this too will fade. Did Woodstock actually accomplish anything? Vietnam continued, a Republican stayed in the White House until Jan 77, and a bunch of drugged up liberals rolled around in their own filth. Very effective.

Groups that want to be taken seriously have to get organized, have an actual plan that is feasible, have a leader that is credible (and uses soap), and focuses their attention in the right place. The very fact that they are in Wall Street should tell everyone how ignorant and utterly useless they are. Like Wall Street is going to say “golly, they have a point.” Go to the center of lawmaking and policy, Einstein.

Not to mention, they are mostly made up of the historically least dependable voting block in the country, the “youth.” Ask John Kerry. A group of people who couldn’t drag themselves out of bed for a class before 11 AM and reaks of ramen and cheetos is somehow going to change America? Please. They are going to be a footnote in history like everyone one has become. At least Woodstock had what some people considered good music.

 

[empacae]

I think this protest is more about a happening, an event, something that people want to be a part of. It is a festival atmosphere about it, and the lines drawn between the haves and the have-nots are askewed at best, delusional most certainly.

This civil unrest (and God bless them for exercising their freedom to gather and voice their opinion) will accomplish absolutely nothing.

They complain about the rich getting richer… but in truth the rich are losing money too, it’s just that they have a deeper pool than most. They are petty, jealous entitled brats that don’t know enough to get out into the real world and work their butts off to make it or to sustain themselves.

Geeze-o, want a story? Read about Steve Jobs (God rest his soul) and how he pulled himself out of poverty to become one of the world’s most weathiest men.

This protest will peter put on it’s own, and the only thing it will accomplish is traffic disruptions, workers in the area threatened, and a big headache as this spreads to other cities, and when the thugs hide in their midst and start their brand of civil disobedience, then maybe the cops will step in and whack-em and stack-em.

emp

 

[iamrefreshed]

Only a liberal press could turn this ‘demonstration’ into a national ‘event’.

A 12 year-old kid break-dancing on a NYC street corner could attract more of a crowd in 5 minutes!

 

[empacae]

Post Script on this:

The enemy as they might want to indentify is government corpartism, not captalism.

If these people had their way they’d march us down the same path as Greece.

SHEESH!

 

[bellasbane]

Greed, corruption, and avarice have nothing to do with conservatism or properly functioning capitalism. There is no perfect economic system, but capitalism (properly functioning) is the only system that allows an individual to have dignity. Crony capitalism (also called corporatism, or fascism) is what we have now do to governmental overinvolvement in the market. The government is supposed to be the “referee” by ensuring that all sides play fair as a neutral observer. However, under Bush and even more so under Obama, the government is picking sides, picking winners, and bending regulations to favor certain companies and certain industries, giving very favorable loans and grants to certain industries and companies. Go ahead and blame capitalism if you want, but Republican and Democrat politicians both have been reprehensibly guilty in causing the mess that we are in. There are no clean hands in this. For the Democrats to come out and “favor” the OWS crowd as if they had nothing to do with it is petty and naive. They are just as guilty as causing the mess on Wall Street as the Republicans are.

I’m not blaming capitalism, I’m blaming unregulated greed and stupidity. Placing bets that the housing market will go down is NOT capitalism. The people who did that were not making money on any sort of real investment or asset.

To me, the OWS crowd is like a person hollering in pain who doesn’t really understand what caused it. I can understand being impatient with folks like that, but the pain is real and hollering does serve the function of getting people to pay attention.

 

[SamH]

I’m not blaming capitalism, I’m blaming unregulated greed and stupidity. Placing bets that the housing market will go down is NOT capitalism. The people who did that were not making money on any sort of real investment or asset.
.

Lots of people lost money or had their oppurtunities limited because of the rising housing market, not many tears were shed for them.

The market goes up and down. People play it both ways. Some people recently made a lot of money in the decline in oil prices, should they have been prevented from doing so?

 

[JimG]

The housing bubble was going to crash whether anyone on Wall Street placed bets on it or not. When a bubble bursts, inflated value disappears. People lose money.

Yes, I do blame Wall Street for helping to enable the bubble, but not for causing it to crash.
Credit derivatives are nothing new. Who ever lost money buying GNMA securities? But GNMA securities contain mortgages that meet qualifying income and credit standards.

The collateralized debt obligations being issued by many wall street firms as the housing bubble progressed contained not good loans, but bad loans. Somehow the wall streeters and the rating agencies thought that by combining a variety of bad loans from different areas the risk was somehow reduced. That’s how securitization is supposed to work. But when it’s all bad loans, the resulting instrument is still doomed, no matter that S&P rates it triple A!

No. Wall Street didn’t cause the housing bubble to burst. But it did help to inflate the bubble by making money available to securitize bad loans.

But that was not the only, or even the most blatant, enabler of the housing bubble. The Fed enabled it by keeping rates artificially low. The government enabled it by promoting home ownership at any cost, and its willingness to guarantee or insure bad loans. And of course, ordinary people undergirded it by their willingness to buy homes that they had to know they couldn’t afford! There was no way for them NOT to know they couldn’t afford those homes.

So when the bubble finally burst, as it had to, it wasn’t wall street that caused the bursting. But it was a lot of dumb investment houses who willingly took on bets that the housing bubble would last forever. Only a few bet against the housing bubble. Why blame them? They didn’t cause it to crash; they just saw it coming.

 

[SVP]

Most of the young protesters seem to be college student with heavy student loan debt.

Liberals have long touted the education model of getting ahead in life while downplaying the trades jobs. Now we have a nation of well educated but unemployed people and no trades jobs due to them being outsourced overseas.

If all the “wealth” of the “rich” were perfectly redistributed immediately, yes there would be “equity” in the short term.

A year later, without manufacturing, investment in new companies, (corporations), and no real energy policy plan, we as a country will still have the same problems, only no money this time to redistribute from the now “unwealthy”. Since through redistribution, everyone becomes equal, there is no longer a concept of rich or wealth.

A flat income society like this is typified by the communist ideal of shared “wealth”. In practice Communism never fully worked that way and often became another form of dictatorial oligarchy. The ruling few control all of the money and are now the"rich" which the masses had advocated against in the first place.

 

[bellasbane]

You’re witchhunting. That is never intellectually honest and never, ever productive. There are a lot of Americans who need to step up and take responsibility for where we are now and they don’t all work on Wall Street.

Besides, this isn’t a revolution. It’s a re-election campaign.

Wall Street shares part of the blame, but has not had to suffer any of the consequences. Is there more blame to go around? Sure, but that doesn’t make going after one of the main culprits a “witch-hunt”.

Democrats didn’t create the populist uprising we are now witnessing - remember what happened in Wisconsin? I believe Scott Walker, backed by the Koch Brothers, can be credited for creating that one.

People are angry on both the left and the right. Republicans capitalized on populist anger coming from their base in the form of the Tea Party in the 2010 election. Didn’t the Tea Party Republicans claim they were going to Congress to revolutionize the way business is done in Washington?

Is that is OK or do you take issue with them as well?

 

[Darryl1958]

As far as I can tell all of their demands are stupid. They should demand a break up of the big banks. That should be their bigest/only demand, and I think people could get behind that.

I mostly agree with your post, though I don’t think all the blame rests on Obama.

No, elections have consequences, but the culture of voting for governments to fulfill the highest of expectations started long before Obama.
That doesn’t change the fact that these would have been the same people rallying around Obama and rallying against the tea party message as racist and xenophobic.

 

[SamH]

The collateralized debt obligations being issued by many wall street firms as the housing bubble progressed contained not good loans, but bad loans. Somehow the wall streeters and the rating agencies thought that by combining a variety of bad loans from different areas the risk was somehow reduced. That’s how securitization is supposed to work. But when it’s all bad loans, the resulting instrument is still doomed, no matter that S&P rates it triple A!.

Actually the dollar amount of bad loans is not especially large in comparison to the “bundled” value. The issue was the market perception of their value. No one wanted them because of the uncertainty in their value. That was where the “mark to market” issue came up. Had the government allowed the banks to carry these bundled notes on their books at present value instead of market value the entire credit crisis would have been avoided - without spending trillions of taxpayer money. A simple rewrite of a regulation in the FDIC could have avoided the entire problem.

The issue of the credit crisis is that banks have to be capitalized at a certain level. If they held Mortgage Backed Securities in any amount they suddenly found themselves under capitalized as the MBS went to near “0” in market value. The problem is they were not worth “0”; they were truly worth at least 90-95% of face value if you held them to maturity or until the market came back. Had the FDIC allowed the banks to “except” those securities from GAAP accounting there would not have been any banking bailouts - but who profits from the government not spending trillions of dollars?

The same issue happened to Municipal Auction Rate Bonds in February 2008. Our company held several of these, the auctions failed and their “market” value was “0”, even though if you held them to maturity they were still worth face value. The municipalities backing the bonds were still sound and had every intention of paying off their liabilities and a $100,000 face value bond was still going to pay the $100,000 plus interest. If you had large investments in them you had to carry them on your books as having no value even though they were going to pay off.

 

[SamH]

Democrats didn’t create the populist uprising we are now witnessing - remember what happened in Wisconsin? I believe Scott Walker, backed by the Koch Brothers, can be credited for creating that one.

I’m sure the Koch Brothers and the Scott Walker would be surprised to learn that was actually the case. It’s a baseless claim but it sounds good to those that don’t want to recognize how unpopular their cause has become.

 

[irishpatrick]

Does anyone else see the amazing irony in the visual evidence that many protesters appear to have come from a wealthy (or at least comfortable background), while using their expensive IPHONES (to spread the protest word) that were built by a company steeped in our capitalistic system?

In other words, everything the protesters hold dear (cell phones, ipods, ipads, twitter, facebook, laptops, etc.) comes to them from the very system that they are protesting. I’d be willing to guess that none of them would give-up their technology. Yet, somehow, they seem to think that new techonologies, and new modern advances come to us without any research and development and without and leaning about banks for business loans, etc. They seem to be saying that profit is bad, yet they live their lives using products that could only be built because companies and banks make a profit.

Now, wow, those people are really getting a great education!

 

[JimG]

Maturity on a CDO might have been 30 years, but the underlying loans had an average life of 6 years before being refinanced, paid off, or defaulting. And when a significant percentage of loans begin to default in an instrument full of subprime loans, the value goes to zero pretty quickly.

And credit default swaps required a monthly accounting. If loans began to default within the pool, the CDS holder was entitled to a monthly payout of losses from the pool.

I suppose that if the CDS had been structured differently, the holders of the CDO’s–mortgage backed securities–could have just held on to them until maturity, with no accounting required, and no mark to market.

But that wouldn’t have prevented the housing crash. When the bubble bursts, prices are going down no matter what wall street does with its derivatives. And when prices go down, and unemployment goes up, defaults increase. In any pool of subprime loans, that drastically reduces the value of the pool.

If the holders of the CDO’s had been simply able to hold on to them indefinitely, at then end they still would have held a lot of worthless paper. Unless those subprime loans had somehow resurrected themselves. But that wasn’t going to happen. The problem for wall street was in securitizing pools which consisted of 80% or 90% subprime loans.

 

[bellasbane]

I’m sure the Koch Brothers and the Scott Walker would be surprised to learn that was actually the case. It’s a baseless claim but it sounds good to those that don’t want to recognize how unpopular their cause has become.

I didn’t say they intended to start a populist uprising on the left - but it was a direct result of their actions & policies, so yes they should get the credit in the same way that the policies of the Democratic administration can be credited for inspiring the Tea Party.

“It’s a baseless claim but it sounds good to those that don’t want to recognize how unpopular their cause has become.”

How insightful given the topic of this thread.

 

[new_User1357246]

Does anyone else see the amazing irony in the visual evidence that many protesters appear to have come from a wealthy (or at least comfortable background), while using their expensive IPHONES (to spread the protest word) that were built by a company steeped in our capitalistic system?

In other words, everything the protesters hold dear (cell phones, ipods, ipads, twitter, facebook, laptops, etc.) comes to them from the very system that they are protesting. I’d be willing to guess that none of them would give-up their technology. Yet, somehow, they seem to think that new techonologies, and new modern advances come to us without any research and development and without and leaning about banks for business loans, etc. They seem to be saying that profit is bad, yet they live their lives using products that could only be built because companies and banks make a profit.

Now, wow, those people are really getting a great education!

They are right though that presently there isa massive wealth disparity in this country. The 400 wealthiest Americans have accumulated HALF of all the wealth.me might say, "they earned it. They did, to an extent. By why was the wealth not consolidates like this before? Have the rich just gotten that much smarter and hard-working? Or is there some problem with the system that we have mow that allowed it to happen?

 

[SamH]

If the holders of the CDO’s had been simply able to hold on to them indefinitely, at then end they still would have held a lot of worthless paper. Unless those subprime loans had somehow resurrected themselves. But that wasn’t going to happen. The problem for wall street was in securitizing pools which consisted of 80% or 90% subprime loans.

You seem more informed about the actual mechanics of this than me, what happened to all the guarentees made by Freddie MAC Fannie MAE and all the mortgages with PMI covering part of the value?

Looking at it from my position it would seem that most of the losses would have been born by those institutions.

 

[SamH]

They are right though that presently there isa massive wealth disparity in this country. The 400 wealthiest Americans have accumulated HALF of all the wealth.me might say, "they earned it. They did, to an extent. By why was the wealth not consolidates like this before? Have the rich just gotten that much smarter and hard-working? Or is there some problem with the system that we have mow that allowed it to happen?

Source?