[Oneaboveall]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'H')ow I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the OWS Protests:

...Occupy Wall Street was always about something much bigger than a movement against big banks and modern finance. It's about providing a forum for people to show how tired they are not just of Wall Street, but everything. This is a visceral, impassioned, deep-seated rejection of the entire direction of our society, a refusal to take even one more step forward into the shallow commercial abyss of phoniness, short-term calculation, withered idealism and intellectual bankruptcy that American mass society has become. If there is such a thing as going on strike from one's own culture, this is it. And by being so broad in scope and so elemental in its motivation, it's flown over the heads of many on both the right and the left.

We're all born wanting the freedom to imagine a better and more beautiful future. But modern America has become a place so drearily confining and predictable that it chokes the life out of that built-in desire. Everything from our pop culture to our economy to our politics feels oppressive and unresponsive. We see 10 million commercials a day, and every day is the same life-killing chase for money, money and more money; the only thing that changes from minute to minute is that every tick of the clock brings with it another space-age vendor dreaming up some new way to try to sell you something or reach into your pocket. The relentless sameness of the two-party political system is beginning to feel like a Jacob's Ladder nightmare with no end; we're entering another turn on the four-year merry-go-round, and the thought of having to try to get excited about yet another minor quadrennial shift in the direction of one or the other pole of alienating corporate full-of-shitness is enough to make anyone want to smash his own hand flat with a hammer.

If you think of it this way, Occupy Wall Street takes on another meaning. There's no better symbol of the gloom and psychological repression of modern America than the banking system, a huge heartless machine that attaches itself to you at an early age, and from which there is no escape. You fail to receive a few past-due notices about a $19 payment you missed on that TV you bought at Circuit City, and next thing you know a collector has filed a judgment against you for $3,000 in fees and interest. Or maybe you wake up one morning and your car is gone, legally repossessed by Vulture Inc., the debt-buying firm that bought your loan on the Internet from Chase for two cents on the dollar. This is why people hate Wall Street. They hate it because the banks have made life for ordinary people a vicious tightrope act; you slip anywhere along the way, it's 10,000 feet down into a vat of razor blades that you can never climb out of.

That, to me, is what Occupy Wall Street is addressing. People don't know exactly what they want, but as one friend of mine put it, they know one thing: F*** THIS S***! We want something different: a different life, with different values, or at least a chance at different values...

We're a nation that was built on a thousand different utopian ideas, from the Shakers to the Mormons to New Harmony, Indiana. It was possible, once, for communities to experiment with everything from free love to an end to private property. But nowadays even the palest federalism is swiftly crushed. If your state tries to place tariffs on companies doing business with some notorious human-rights-violator state – like Massachusetts did, when it sought to bar state contracts to firms doing business with Myanmar – the decision will be overturned by some distant global bureaucracy like the WTO. Even if 40 million Californians vote tomorrow to allow themselves to smoke a joint, the federal government will never permit it. And the economy is run almost entirely by an unaccountable oligarchy in Lower Manhattan that absolutely will not sanction any innovations in banking or debt forgiveness or anything else that might lessen its predatory influence...

[The Practician]

Pretty good assessment, I think. It seems a lot of the MSM can't really get a handle on the amount of contempt some people have for "the system" and the American Dream. They may be a minority at this point, but as any peak oil "doomer" should be aware, the writing is on the F##*@ing wall. Maybe not all the OWSers have as comprehensive a grasp of the hows and the whys as some might wish, but at least they understand that there is no brighter future for the status quo, and that it might be in their rational self interest to at least try and make some changes.

[Bruce_S]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('The Practician', ' ')It seems a lot of the MSM can't really get a handle on the amount of contempt some people have for "the system" and the American Dream.

[The Practician]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Bruce_S', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('The Practician', ' ')It seems a lot of the MSM can't really get a handle on the amount of contempt some people have for "the system" and the American Dream.

[Bruce_S]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('The Practician', '
') Since when is "health care and jobs" BAU in the USA?

[The Practician]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Bruce_S', '
')
I don't know about you, but last time I checked out the stats there are some hundreds of millions of employed Americans, and hundreds of millions with health care. While hundreds of millions might not be all that much in China, here in the US, its called "bunches".

According to Wiki, some 85% of people are covered under some form of health care or another.

[Bruce_S]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('The Practician', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Bruce_S', '
')According to Wiki, some 85% of people are covered under some form of health care or another.

[Keith_McClary]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Bruce_S', 'A')ccording to Wiki, some 85% of people are covered under some form of health care or another.

[The Practician]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Bruce_S', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('The Practician', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Bruce_S', '
')According to Wiki, some 85% of people are covered under some form of health care or another.

[pup55]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'e')very tick of the clock brings with it another space-age vendor dreaming up some new way to try to sell you something or reach into your pocket

[dorlomin]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('pup55', 'T')he Canadian system works in large part because there is no permanent legacy minority underclass

[pup55]

ah, thank you for reminding me about the indigenous population. But, unlike mississippi, it's a small fraction. This article from wikipedia says that in Canada it's 4%.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Canada

The population of the descendants of the indigenous people in Australia is 0.58%.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographi ... population

The population of slave-descendants in Massachusetts is 8%

The population of slave descendants in Mississippi is 37%.

in Mississippi, only 20 percent of the locals have graduated from college, and one must assume that many of them were graduates of the two cow colleges in the state, or should I say "chicken colleges", Ole Miss, and MSU who are more famous for their football teams than for their nobel prize winners, and the football has not been all that great.

In Massachusetts, 37% of the adult population graduated from college, and although there is some doubt in my mind whether several of them should be bulldozed and have salt plowed into the soil to prevent anyone from trying to restart them because of their insufficient of teaching of ethics, particularly as it applies to business and government, presumably some of its academic brilliance rubs off on the shoe shiners and the place tends to be pretty sophisticated.

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/11/06/ashe

Over half of Canadians are college educated.

In Mississippi, the infant mortality rate is 11%, in Massachusetts it's 5%. in Canada it's 5.2%.

Unemployment: Massachusetts 7.3%, Mississippi 11%, among the slave descendants in the US it's 16% nationwide, Canada 7.3%.

I don't think I need to go on. All I'm saying is it's easier to set up a system where people are responsible in places like Massachusetts and Canada than it is in Mississippi, with a poor, stupid population.

Those OWS types: I dunno who they are, I suppose I should go down to where they are camping out locally and look, but I think they're young, white, bright, and all have ipods. Do they have a point? Sure. They have a nice, friendly version of the future, so more power to them. But, how do you get from here to there? That is the question.

[Bruce_S]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('The Practician', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Bruce_S', ' ')But us being "bad" means that Canada can continue a national policy of being irrelevant on the world stage because lets face it, with an 800# gorilla protecting your land borders, as a nation you certainly won't ever be required to grow a spine, collectively or individually speaking.

You are welcome.

[Loki]

I particularly liked this paragraph from Taibbi's piece:

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'W')hat happened on Wall Street over the past decade was an unparalleled crime wave. Yet at most, maybe 1,500 federal agents were policing that beat – and that little group of financial cops barely made any cases at all. Yet when thousands of ordinary people hit the streets with the express purpose of obeying the law and demonstrating their patriotism through peaceful protest, the police response is immediate and massive. There have already been hundreds of arrests, which is hundreds more than we ever saw during the years when Wall Street bankers were stealing billions of dollars from retirees and mutual-fund holders and carpenters unions through the mass sales of fraudulent mortgage-backed securities.

[Oneaboveall]

Good point Loki. It makes me wonder why law enforcement obeys these orders in the first place.

[Outcast_Searcher]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Loki', 'I') particularly liked this paragraph from Taibbi's piece:

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', '.').. Yet when thousands of ordinary people hit the streets with the express purpose of obeying the law and demonstrating their patriotism through peaceful protest, the police response is immediate and massive. ...

[vision-master]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'N')ice distortion field. We've had hundreds of people camping out in PRIVATE parks ILLEGALLY for WEEKS to MONTHS in cities across the U.S.

[Bruce_S]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Outcast_Searcher', '
')The OWS is nothing more than the left's Tea Party.

[vision-master]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', ' ')Tea Partiers and their banners are found within Occupier marches