I think they represent the 99% far more than the representatives of the 1% who currently govern us do. I don’t think they’d come up with a perfectly just society but obviously any society that is more equitable than the current one (in a global league the US comes just behind banana republic Costa Rica in terms of top 1%/everybody else inequality) would be a good thing, and that’s what they’d inevitably come up with.
But that 1% doesn’t publicly claim to speak with one voice, and it doesn’t publicly claim to represent me.
I didn’t say they did.
They hardly speak at all, they have people for that. Keep your distance.
neither does the 99%.
Then on whose behalf are their complaints and demands being made, if not the 99% of the population that has 1% of the wealth?
Pretty good list. Loved the part about removing “personhood” from corporations.
President Clinton had it set so that everyone who applied themselves to good grades could get a college education paid for. George Bush scuttled all that.
I don’t see why we should remove student debt. This country has never had enough quality white collar jobs to employ everyone who is qualified. In the end there are a lot of young people out there who thought that their college education was the ticket to success. College education is only the ticket to apply for the better jobs. It is still up to an individual to apply people skills to make the most out of opportunities.
At this time I believe the 99% is correct, there are almost no jobs for recent college grads who carry a lot of debt. This is very unfair.
I think back to my college days fifteen years ago when an economics professor announced to our class. “You will be the first generation of Americans to have a lower standard of living than your parents.”
Again, the seeds were out there 15 years ago, and now it is full blown reality. I really empathize with the first time job hunter out of college or high school. Some major changes need to be made quickly - cross your fingers that the 99% will bring that change. We are running out of options.
Matt Taiibi has come up with a list of five demands they should make. pretty good ones too:
1. Break up the monopolies. The so-called “Too Big to Fail” financial companies – now sometimes called by the more accurate term “Systemically Dangerous Institutions” – are a direct threat to national security. They are above the law and above market consequence, making them more dangerous and unaccountable than a thousand mafias combined. There are about 20 such firms in America, and they need to be dismantled; a good start would be to repeal the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act and mandate the separation of insurance companies, investment banks and commercial banks.
2. Pay for your own bailouts. A tax of 0.1 percent on all trades of stocks and bonds and a 0.01 percent tax on all trades of derivatives would generate enough revenue to pay us back for the bailouts, and still have plenty left over to fight the deficits the banks claim to be so worried about. It would also deter the endless chase for instant profits through computerized insider-trading schemes like High Frequency Trading, and force Wall Street to go back to the job it’s supposed to be doing, i.e., making sober investments in job-creating businesses and watching them grow.
3. No public money for private lobbying. A company that receives a public bailout should not be allowed to use the taxpayer’s own money to lobby against him. You can either suck on the public teat or influence the next presidential race, but you can’t do both. Butt out for once and let the people choose the next president and Congress.
4. Tax hedge-fund gamblers. For starters, we need an immediate repeal of the preposterous and indefensible carried-interest tax break, which allows hedge-fund titans like Stevie Cohen and John Paulson to pay taxes of only 15 percent on their billions in gambling income, while ordinary Americans pay twice that for teaching kids and putting out fires. I defy any politician to stand up and defend that loophole during an election year.
5. Change the way bankers get paid. We need new laws preventing Wall Street executives from getting bonuses upfront for deals that might blow up in all of our faces later. It should be: You make a deal today, you get company stock you can redeem two or three years from now. That forces everyone to be invested in his own company’s long-term health – no more Joe Cassanos pocketing multimillion-dollar bonuses for destroying the AIGs of the world.
One demand I have not seen so far:
End private prisons!
I have a whole rant to go with that but not the time to write it up at this time. In a nutshell, we should not be farming out aspects of the justice system to private interests who then turn around and lobby for laws motivated solely by a desire for more prisoners.
I understand the fight-the-power thinking, but I just don’t think most people understand how disruptive would be the economic and legal consequences of actually doing that.
You misunderstand me. The superwealthy can afford to send their kids to Harvard and Yale and expect them to emerge expressing themselves in perfect MLA English (Bush family excluded). But that should not be a requirement for paying attention to someone. My point was to forget technical errors and look at the content.
Not taking people seriously is a part of the problem that led to these protests. Does the law demand that a person cite law and statute before anyone takes them seriously that a crime has been committed? No.
Because most of us do not have Masters’ degrees in quantitave financial analysis, does that mean that those who do should be free to just stick it to us any old way? Not if the protesters have anything to say about it.
And so on. I was making the opposite of the elitist point you are accusing me of. Let’s not go down this road of ‘not taking people seriously’ unless their points are debunked first. I’d hate to see the protesters reduced to the status of a Strauss-Khan victim, “Sorry, looks like we found some holes in your resume, therefore I am afraid you actually are fair game for rape and we have to let your attacker go shrug”.
They are claiming that they are part of the 99% that is being screwed, a pretty credible claim just on statistical grounds. If you disagree with the notion that Wall Street needs a good, swift kick in the nuts, well that’s fine with me and presumably them. I think they are on to something.
They seem to be on to a whole bunch of things. How many different lists are out there so far, and what demands, if any, are common to pretty much all of them?
- Assert control over Wall Street.
Ways to do that:
Reinstate Gramm Rudman, getting backs out of the high-risk investment business
Outlaw CDOs or at least regulate them so there’s SOME kind of cap requirement
Implement election finance reforms to reduce/eliminate Wall Street’s control over the elections process.
But you just claimed they are making demands and pretending to be representing you. If there are no specific demands, you can’t claim that.
And, anyways, none of the stuff they’ve said isn’t stuff you’ve said before. Last I checked, you were a liberal. And these are the liberal positions. The idea of the left has always been that corporations have too much power. And they have always participated in peaceful protests against what they consider wrong.
Finally, while this doesn’t apply to you, I would like to ask people to stop using hippie as a thought terminating cliche. I don’t know where you got this idea that 1960s terminology is somehow current, but the idea that hippies are horrible people is not one shared by the people at large. Using it makes you seem like the conservatives of yesteryear.
There’s a reason I linked that South Park episode in the Pit. The hatred of hippies is such a ridiculous position that even they made fun of it. A Hippie is just a person who wants to live in more natural environs, wants to be able to do certain nonaddictive drugs, and basically wants to be left alone by society. And they fought for most of the societal freedoms you feel today, like, gosh, premarital sex and acceptance of homosexuality. [cite] [cite] OMG, what horrible people.
Stop sullying the name of the fathers of modern progressivism by using it as an insult, like their ignorant parents did. Hippie is not a dirty word.
is not just about corporations. It is about wealth inequality too. The top 1 percent have wealth equal to the bottom 150 million. They gain a lot of it by having congress pass tax breaks for them.
Large income disparity is dangerous for a country. Especially one in which a lot of people can see what has happened.
I’d say the idea shared nowadays (fairly or unfairly) is that hippies are largely irrelevant people, “lost in the '60s” and all that.
Hmmm… I don’t find this strange at all, then of course I am an Eagle Scout, but I believe many in the military would agree with me. You always have a chance at more money, but you only get one native country.
Since the industrial age of the 1800s American corporations have obtained legal positions to protect corporations and give them the rights of people. This is not good because unlike people they never die, and corporations just keep passing on wealth and power. However, government could still pull a corporate charter and prohibit a corporation from doing business in the United States. Looking at our corrupt Congress, I doubt it could ever happen.
However, our Declaration of Independence gives the people the ‘right to alter or abolish’ our form of government. None of our founding documents say a word about our economic system. We could go totally into socialism, and be well within American law. Wall Street is pushing their luck, people are angry, everyday people are in the streets demanding change.
How long do you think it will be before someone enters the New York Stock Exchange or Goldman Sacs and sprays bullets around? These demonstrators have lost their homes, and jobs through no fault of their own. Taxpayers bailed out Wall Street, and Wall Street has done nothing for Main Street.
Now Wall Street is back on a roll with multimillion dollar bonuses. We have all seen enough movies to know, if you are going down, take a few of the bad guys with you. I am glad I live on the west coast. New York, Washington, D. C., not the place to be at this time.
I’d change that to citizen funded elections. No more PACs and Super PACs hiding money. Candidates get donations directly from citizens only. The decision to let corporations donate directly to candidates and secretly fund political drives, is disgusting.
Also huge changes in Lobbying , which I suppose the above would already start.