I caught the end of a report on the Occupy groups closing down of the docks in three west coast cities. Part of it included a girl explaining that they wanted to punish “exporters”. Can someone explain “why” they would want to do that?
Also, last I heard the union that they had been working with didn’t want to do this. Did they change their mind or did the occupiers do it on their own?
“Support is one thing,” wrote Robert McEllrath, president of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, in a letter to local union chapters. “Organization from outside groups attempting to co-opt our struggle in order to advance a broader agenda is quite another and one that is destructive to our democratic process.”
A statement on the Occupy Oakland website, www.occupyoakland.org, suggests that targeting ports serves another purpose besides hitting the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans in their pocketbooks. The action at West Coast ports is warranted by “nationally coordinated attacks on Occupy movements,” according to the statement.
In other words, the port actions were called in part as retribution when cities decided to clear camps around the Bay Area and many other cities in the country.
Growing public sentiment against local Occupy protesters should serve as a wake-up call to the faceless, nameless group. And the group’s misguided decisions to target public operations instead of the corporate marauders who benefited from the federal government’s failure to hold the people’s interest in trust are still confounding to many Americans.
If there is a second phase of operations, when Occupy protesters actually decide to occupy the offices of the corporate and financial institutions that benefited from our misery, maybe their message will wake America’s masses. Unfortunately, all Monday’s action did was take bread off the table of working people, and that’s nothing to be proud of.
There is no explaining it, at least in any rational way.
It’s hard to know exactly what the OWSers really want, because they either don’t know or won’t say. But one would assume that creating jobs in the US would be somewhere on the list. How punishing “exporters” could do that is anyone’s guess. I doubt we’ll ever hear any coherent explanation from the “movement.”
More likely, as the article suggests, this is just protest for the sake of protest - to show that the authorities can’t silence them. Fine. Point made.
Right. A deleted post doesn’t show up in the actual thread, but does still count towards the total post count that the page # list uses. So when there’s missing posts, the forum thinks there’s more pages than there actually are.
stusser can give the truly gory details, I’m sure, but the short version as I understand it is that letting it get out of sync like that helps forum performance.
Approximately one-third of younger voters following “Occupy” movement; less than one-in-four supportive. Thirty-two percent of 18-29 year-olds say they followed the “Occupy Wall Street” demonstrations either very (6%) or somewhat closely (26%), with 66% saying they were not following the demonstrations closely. Twenty-one percent (21%) of Millennials say they supported the “Occupy” movement with one-third (33%) not supportive and 46% either unsure or refused to answer.
All I have to say to those 18-29 years olds is “Vote”. Stop being ignored and start being a block. If 21% of elderly voters feel a certain way, politicians start listening because they know the elderly vote.
But if you want to get a true sense of what the “shadow budget” is all about, all you have to do is look closely at the taxpayer money handed over to a single company that goes by a seemingly innocuous name: Waterfall TALF Opportunity. At first glance, Waterfall’s haul doesn’t seem all that huge — just nine loans totaling some $220 million, made through a Fed bailout program. That doesn’t seem like a whole lot, considering that Goldman Sachs alone received roughly $800 billion in loans from the Fed. But upon closer inspection, Waterfall TALF Opportunity boasts a couple of interesting names among its chief investors: Christy Mack and Susan Karches.
Christy is the wife of John Mack, the chairman of Morgan Stanley. Susan is the widow of Peter Karches, a close friend of the Macks who served as president of Morgan Stanley’s investment-banking division. Neither woman appears to have any serious history in business, apart from a few philanthropic experiences. Yet the Federal Reserve handed them both low-interest loans of nearly a quarter of a billion dollars through a complicated bailout program that virtually guaranteed them millions in risk-free income.
Christy and her pal Susan launched their investment initiative called Waterfall TALF. Neither seems to have any experience whatsoever in finance, beyond Susan’s penchant for dabbling in thoroughbred racehorses. But with an upfront investment of $15 million, they quickly received $220 million in cash from the Fed, most of which they used to purchase student loans and commercial mortgages. The loans were set up so that Christy and Susan would keep 100 percent of any gains on the deals, while the Fed and the Treasury (read: the taxpayer) would eat 90 percent of the losses
Perhaps the most irritating facet of all of these transactions is the fact that hundreds of millions of Fed dollars were given out to hedge funds and other investors with addresses in the Cayman Islands. Many of those addresses belong to companies with American affiliations — including prominent Wall Street names like Pimco, Blackstone and . . . Christy Mack. Yes, even Waterfall TALF Opportunity is an offshore company. It’s one thing for the federal government to look the other way when Wall Street hotshots evade U.S. taxes by registering their investment companies in the Cayman Islands. But subsidizing tax evasion? Giving it a federal bailout? What the fuck?
Aaaah how do you guys NOT march on Washington, guns in hand? You wouldn’t let someone take $20 out of your pocket, but look at this. Your great-grandkids will be paying for this shit.
The key thing is in keeping that spending clean and honest as possible.
And even if you are a libertarian, one whose idea of the best government being no or minimal government:
Is there any chance that you’ll get closer to that dream while anyone in Congress - Republican, Democrat, Independent - has incentive to trade government power, money, and influence for campaign funds and a cushy job post-Congress?
If you think not, please, consider joining Humans Take Congress. Because right now neither the left, nor the right, nor libertarians are being listened to. And we can fix this. Lawrence Lessig: Republic Lost.
Watch that and tell me it doesn’t make sense.
BTW, the man has some fairly libertarian leanings himself. Hates all sort of economic subsidies and job protecting tarriffs.
