So how big are these protests actually getting? The major media outlets aren’t mentioning it at all, but the information from Twitter & various streaming video sources shows some large crowds (~5000?) and significant police presence. Arrests are definitely happening, as shown on smartphone videos that are coming out. The folks trying to stream video say they are being specifically targeted by NYPD, but arrestees are being released the next day.
http://anonops.blogspot.com/ has a video stream going, but it can be hard to follow as they switch back & forth from live to recorded when they lose cameras. The #OCCUPYWALLSTREET hashtag has been flying, anywhere from 3-10 tweets per second all morning.
Some reports of protests being organized at large bank buildings in other cities, but haven’t seen any video of those.
You know, just the very fact that mainstream media would rather cover MISSING BLONDE IRL or some other garbage rather than this makes it so obvious in my mind of the link between corporations and media (and thus, by extension, Wall Street.)
People are rightly upset. Globalization is making the world labour situation a race to the bottom. How is anyone to compete with some company in China that has no environmental regulations to worry about, no standards to obey, no labour laws worth contemplating, a pool of workers 300 million deep. Oh, and if they demand higher wages and jump out of their giant industrial-city-complex in suicide because they can’t leave, they just move the damn giant industrial-city-complex deeper inside China.
So how big are these protests actually getting? The major media outlets aren’t mentioning it at all, but the information from Twitter & various streaming video sources shows some large crowds (~5000?)
I defy you to find a place on Wallstreet where there are less than 5 thousand people at any given time.
It’s a blatantly populist, anti-elitist move - with no mention of the tea party or their support/tacit approval/anything.
What’s more, is that comments on the articles on digg, cnn, huffpost, etc. keep mentioning those “hippie students” that “need to find a shower and a job” who “probably smell better after the macing” and “should grow up.” It’s not the comments I care about, per se, other than the focus for the trolling. When did anyone think Wall street needed defending? And why do I have a sinking feeling those comments are made by the same people that rah-rah the tea party?
I find insteresting that the unwashed masses may not know this, but still somehow know something is wrong.
Anyway the pure numbers make this pointless. For every angry people in one of this demostration theres about 1.000 or 10.000 watching TV or posting on the Internet. In a democracy this mean that this people opinion is soo small, will not get any political power. It may take years for this people to figure out that are a minority, very small, and that most people are only interested in MISSING BLONDE IRL and the “ecomomic crysis” (a undetailed blob of minor numbers smoke mirror ).
Other points:
Not everyone is cynic. Some people think real change is possible, this people, and are willing to work (Work) to do it.
The lumpenproletariat is somewhat divided into this tiny people, and the rest that don’t care about anything. It will be easy to make the people that are watching MISSING BLONDE IRL to hate the people in Operaration Occupy Wall Street. For people like Fox News It will take a very small effort to do so. So is a movement very very very weak, is really easy to destroy/marginalize it.
This movement has not solutions, or have “all” solutions.
I think that if all low level jobs move to china, having a society will turn too expensive, since we will have a lot of unemployed people, and unemployeeds workers are very expensive. This mean higuer taxes. So corporations may run away from this type of country. The thing is… do USA, Europe or these countries want to exist in 20 / 30 years? His current role seems “consumers”, but you can’t be consumer if you don’t have a job.
This is a big ugly part of globalization, and people is starting to realize that we have built a castle in a beach.
Really? What is the ‘real change’, exactly? It is going to be replacing a vastly complicated system, I hope it isn’t simply the usual.
I don’t understand, exactly. I thought that globalization was good in that it was lifting crushingly poor people out of poverty. Many people posit that this has the side effect of moving some people in the wealthy nations somewhat lower on the economic scale (note that not all economists agree with this theory … at all). Even if that is true is it not a worthwhile cost to pay?
You’re a bread earner for your spouse and 2 children (one boy, one girl). The American dream some might say.
You work at Wall Street Steel works, a manufacturing job that your father worked for and then you worked for your entire adult life.
Recently though, your boss called you in and told you they were moving the plant to china. He then asked you to train your replacement in china, someone in crushing poverty who can earn $1/day in a very risky, regulation free work environment.
After you finish training your replacement, you’re fired and the plant closes, the jobs never to return.
Your spouse leaves you for a professional starcraft player and your children embrace an incestuous relationship because you lost your job.
Now, after all that happens are you:
A) Happy that someone in China got out of crushing poverty, even if it cost you your job?
B) Happy to be rid of your damned, nagging spouse, no matter what the cost?
C) DEY DOOK ER JERBS!
