Its annoying how michael moore blames capitalism for all the problems instead of government an the fed, hes a hypocrite since hes made all his mony from capitalism. Atleast people are finally rebelling
Apparently, this is what they are after. Getting rid of the bankers and social transformation thereby. [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXpSqce2OdM[/youtube]
Here is an interesting perspective. With ill defined ambitions and lots of hippie looking, drum beating protestors, could the anonymous instigators of this movement just be co-opting the socialist discontents into a movement to disrupt bankers, without addressing at all the fundamental issue of personal sovereignty and individual liberty from an overbearing government. That is, to replace one bunch of pigs (ala Animal Farm) with another. Perhaps a psy-ops, to distract and entrench the wealth redistribution meme, while burying the priority of wealth creation . Very interesting indeed, IMO.
This was unanimously voted on by all members of Occupy Wall Street last night, around 8pm, Sept 29. It is our first official document for release. We have three more underway, that will likely be released in the upcoming days: 1) A declaration of demands. 2) Principles of Solidarity 3) Documentation on how to form your own Direct Democracy Occupation Group. This is a living document. you can receive an official press copy of the latest version by emailing [email protected]. Declaration of the Occupation of New York City As we gather together in solidarity to express a feeling of mass injustice, we must not lose sight of what brought us together. We write so that all people who feel wronged by the corporate forces of the world can know that we are your allies. As one people, united, we acknowledge the reality: that the future of the human race requires the cooperation of its members; that our system must protect our rights, and upon corruption of that system, it is up to the individuals to protect their own rights, and those of their neighbors; that a democratic government derives its just power from the people, but corporations do not seek consent to extract wealth from the people and the Earth; and that no true democracy is attainable when the process is determined by economic power. We come to you at a time when corporations, which place profit over people, self-interest over justice, and oppression over equality, run our governments. We have peaceably assembled here, as is our right, to let these facts be known. They have taken our houses through an illegal foreclosure process, despite not having the original mortgage. They have taken bailouts from taxpayers with impunity, and continue to give Executives exorbitant bonuses. They have perpetuated inequality and discrimination in the workplace based on age, the color of one's skin, sex, gender identity and sexual orientation. They have poisoned the food supply through negligence, and undermined the farming system through monopolization. They have profited off of the torture, confinement, and cruel treatment of countless nonhuman animals, and actively hide these practices. They have continuously sought to strip employees of the right to negotiate for better pay and safer working conditions. They have held students hostage with tens of thousands of dollars of debt on education, which is itself a human right. They have consistently outsourced labor and used that outsourcing as leverage to cut workers' healthcare and pay. They have influenced the courts to achieve the same rights as people, with none of the culpability or responsibility. They have spent millions of dollars on legal teams that look for ways to get them out of contracts in regards to health insurance. They have sold our privacy as a commodity. They have used the military and police force to prevent freedom of the press. They have deliberately declined to recall faulty products endangering lives in pursuit of profit. They determine economic policy, despite the catastrophic failures their policies have produced and continue to produce. They have donated large sums of money to politicians supposed to be regulating them. They continue to block alternate forms of energy to keep us dependent on oil. They continue to block generic forms of medicine that could save people's lives in order to protect investments that have already turned a substantive profit. They have purposely covered up oil spills, accidents, faulty bookkeeping, and inactive ingredients in pursuit of profit. They purposefully keep people misinformed and fearful through their control of the media. They have accepted private contracts to murder prisoners even when presented with serious doubts about their guilt. They have perpetuated colonialism at home and abroad. They have participated in the torture and murder of innocent civilians overseas. They continue to create weapons of mass destruction in order to receive government contracts. * To the people of the world, We, the New York City General Assembly occupying Wall Street in Liberty Square, urge you to assert your power. Exercise your right to peaceably assemble; occupy public space; create a process to address the problems we face, and generate solutions accessible to everyone. To all communities that take action and form groups in the spirit of direct democracy, we offer support, documentation, and all of the resources at our disposal. Join us and make your voices heard! *These grievances are not all-inclusive. https://occupywallst.org/forum/first-official-release-from-occupy-wall-street/
Because JP Morgan bought them for protection?? See, all the protestors need to do is raise a few million to "fund" the police and they will have nothing to worry about. :lol:
Yeah they don't seem to have an agenda and the main st media is picking up on that, Micheal Moore was down there and when someone stuck a camera under his nose he said something stupid like "end capitalism" and if that is the sentiment that gets picked up by the "The Mob" then it will be doomed, because what they need is free market capitalism to thrive and for Micheal Moore to sell his movies. It is known now that the JP Morgan CEO gave a donation to the New York police dept last week to the tune of 4.5 million dollars, so we know who's buttering their bread. Oh and that above I just read that , didn't see it before but it's a hodgepodge, I think if they simple state that they want prosecutions to the rule of law as it stands now for financial crimes, that would be a lot easier to focus on, rather than have that thing that they put up.
Well, at the risk of sounding like a heathen, let's try connecting a few dots here... Would society in general be happy if we had careful, risk averse bankers? It would mean credit would be far more restricted than it is today and as a result business activity would be less (less things being bought). Society demands access to credit. As a result the govt, which is the banks benefactor, will do everything they can to loosen up the bank's lending standards. They are the regulators, they are the ones with control. And this results in magnificent economic booms where the majority of people have jobs, unemployment is low, and people are generally happy. Of course, you get plenty of bankers happy to take the money that results from a massive expansion of debt. The implicit understanding between the banks and the govt is that if they get in trouble the govt will extract money from the taxpayer to bail them out. This allows the banks to charge forward recklessly. Is the problem here really the banks or are they a symptom of the problem? Is the real problem that we make unreasonable demands on the economic system, being a democracy where the majority mob essentially gets what they want and demands ever increasing credit until credit can be increased no more? How many times have we seen politicians and the press wanting to make it easier for people to borrow? And it seems to be what most people think they want. Putting everything on the banks always seemed to me a bit like prescribing morphine for appendicitis because it gets rid of the pain. Otoh, I don't think most people want to get to the true bottom of problems if they suspect it might lead to conclusions they don't like.
Is education really a right? If so, then who is obliged to provide said education? And what about their rights,
Now, because the credit you speak of is really Debt, lets try replacing the word credit with debt and see if it makes intuitive sense. Would society in general be happy if we had careful, risk averse bankers? It would mean DEBT would be far more restricted than it is today and as a result business activity would be less (less things being bought). Society demands access to DEBT. Not to me. Now because investment requires access to Capital lets replace DEBT with Capital and see if that works . . . Would society in general be happy if we had careful, risk averse bankers? It would mean Capital would be far more restricted than it is today and as a result business activity would be less (less things being bought). Society demands access to Capital. Again, not for me. I think the issue is the unnatural link between Bankers and Capital. See, Savers have the capital and bankers hold the savings. Neither Capital nor savings come from a printing press (physical or electronic) except when you have a corrupt kleptocracy that sees money printed for crony capitalists who then go out and buy up the world's resources and industry. This is the very root of the banking issue, that the investment bankers are able to leverage to infinity the savings of others and the money created from central banks to loan out and indebt the population at large into multi-generational poverty and financial slavery. Or so it seems to me.
Do I need to go through that one again? Banks borrow short and lend long. If you don't believe me, get a group of your friends, start with say $100 cash, call one of them the bank, and go through a few iterations of lending and re-lending that $100 and what you will see is that the amount of money increases. Except it doesn't because it's all just iou's. Most businesses accept iou's from banks (also known as eftpos or cheques or whatever) as payment these days rather than cash. Once an iou has been paid, it ceases to exist. This is debt deflation.
Most people require access to credit(debt) to buy a home. Yes, but that is a symptom. Large banks do build up over time. If you look at the long view, say the last 50, 60 years you see how the demand for credit can start slowly, then build and then go exponential. This allows the middlemen(banks) to grow to vast size and through that seize more political power. As more and more people get into debt, inflation becomes a boon to these people and most are quite happy to see money printed because it means they can pay their debts faster. Banks like it as well as long as it doesn't go too fast because they need to people to pay the debts. I think this is why we get these long cycles. Do you have an alternative system that you think people would accept?
By the time the money "ceases to exist" the damage (inflation) is already done. The bank also charges interest on money which it created out of thin air through no input of their own
Prior to banks being anything but an multi-user safe, things worked reasonably well without central banks printing fiat currencies and defining their rate of depreciation. There were housing co-ops, that provided very conservative housing finance to ensure participants had shelter. Capitalists invested and entrepreneurs created. Some succeeded through luck or good management, others failed and creative detruction played out daily, without this "too big to fail" concept. For really massive state based undertakings that need new sources of capital to finance, then the treasury used to expand the monetary base by the funding amount required, without debt or inflationary effects because the investment returned that value to the economy and more over time, e.g. the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric project. I do think there are solutions to these financing problems that do not demand Bankers having the role of Investment Partner, Money Printer, Savings Depreciation Rate Fixer, Government Financier, etc. To my way of thinking, they have simply risen beyond their level of competence and ability to add value to society and they have become, collectively, destroyers of freedoms (societal values) through the debt slavery that is their paradigm. One thing for sure, they are privileged in our "economic system" and will not give that up without a fierce fight and neither will those who have a stake in maintaining the financial status quo. Like police being well paid by those guardians of the economic system we call politicians, fighting ruthlessly against demonstrators and other members of the public that might question the privilege they all enjoy. But as we saw in Victoria earlier this year, if the police are not well paid and feel disaffected, then they will turn against their political masters and actually take the side of the public (pointing out speeding traps rather than fining people, in this instance). Ultimately, fiat currencies collapse under this weight of privilege and corruption. This is the classic Buddhist principle of impermance, that everything has within it the seed of its own destruction from its very conception. So it is with this form of globalised central banking and its associated fiat currencies. Lets hope that what follow is at least a little better than what preceded it, although it too will not last and will probably end up with protesters and fierce defenders.
Don't get me wrong - I think giving everybody access to a certain level of education is a good thing. I just think we should be very careful with saying something is a "right". That has a lot of implications that aren't always appropriate in my opinion.
yes - as long as that "giving" is not obtained through coercion and violence - which is the current system. In times gone by people looked after their own family and community through charity, because there was no parasitic government expropriating massive portions of their wealth.
