Occupy Wall Street

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

Continue...

[felice]

Altherion wrote:

And what would that accomplish? If you prevent US companies from outsourcing, European and/or Asian companies that are not subject to this restraint will be able to out-compete them and will eventually drive them out of business. To truly beat outsourcing, you would need to either institute high tariffs on goods produced in non-compliant countries or ban them altogether and that is a trade war the US has absolutely no desire to fight (among other things, it's not at all clear that we'd win).

Yeah, I think tariffs are sensible (and I'd dedicate all tariff revenue to foreign aid). Relying on virtual slave labour to produce cheap goods overseas is neither ethically acceptable nor sustainable in the long term. We shouldn't be producing any private goods that the producers of those goods couldn't afford for themselves. And with peak oil, international freight is going to become increasingly unaffordable anyway.

They can. Some people do cheat on their taxes, drive without insurance and so on and so forth. However, the penalty for getting caught is much higher. Unlike the illegal immigrants, they have no home to return to in case the US government gets tired of these shenanigans. Likewise, all of their assets are almost certainly in the US and thus can be confiscated.

So they're not "breaking American laws in ways that citizens and legal residents cannot." And is the average illegal immigrant really sitting on valuable assets back home that would be worth confiscating if they were in the same country? Does their local competition (the bottom 20%?) have any assets worth confiscating anyway? And is being sent back to a home so awful that it was worth risking illegal border crossings just to work crappy sub-minimum-wage jobs to get away from it really that much better than what happens to citizens who break the law? And being an illegal immigrant doesn't stop the US government from throwing you in prison anyway. I think it's just absurd to claim that illegal immigrants are in any way better off than citizens.

[Shryke]

Same charts as last time, cause charts are good:

http://www.businessinsider.com/what-wall-street-protesters-are-so-angry-about-2011-10?op=1

Also a look at the situation for new University Grads.

http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2011/05/19/business/19gradsGraphic.html?ref=economy

[Swift]

Median salary for computer science and math majors is a lot lower than I would have thought. I was thinking it was closer to 44,000.

I like those charts. Very informative.

[Shryke]

Here's apparently where the data is from: http://www.heldrich.rutgers.edu/sites/default/files/content/Work_Trends_May_2011.pdf

Even if it isn't, it's more interesting stuff.

[Shryke]

http://www.bloomberg...nkers-fret.html

Wall Street executives, facing demonstrators camped for a fourth week in New York’s financial district, say they’re anxious and angry for other reasons.

An era of decline and disappointment for bankers may not end for years, according to interviews with more than two dozen executives and investors. Blaming government interference and persecution, they say there isn’t enough global stability, leverage or risk appetite to triumph in the current slump.

“I don’t think it’s a time to make money -- this is a time to rig for survival,” said Charles Stevenson, 64, president of hedge fund Navigator Group Inc. and head of the co-op board at 740 Park Ave. The building, home to Blackstone Group LP Chairman Stephen Schwarzman and CIT Group Inc. Chief Executive Officer John Thain, was among those picketed by protesters yesterday. “The future is not going to be like a past we knew,” he said. “There’s no exit from this morass.”

An anemic global economy, the European sovereign debt crisis, U.S. unemployment stuck above 9 percent and swooning stock markets have sapped the euphoria that swept Wall Street in 2009 as it rebounded to record profits after the credit crisis. The benefits of a $700 billion taxpayer bailout and $1.2 trillion in emergency funding from the Federal Reserve have faded. Next week Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) may report its second quarterly loss per share since going public in 1999, according to the average estimate of 26 analysts surveyed by Bloomberg.

“There’s going to be some disillusionment, similar to physicians,” said Lane, 62. “The notion that somehow going to medical school would deliver you substantial wealth and prestige is no longer true.”...

Michael Karp, 42, CEO of New York-based recruitment firm Options Group Inc., said Wall Street pay will fall 30 percent this year, and more for executives. It will be flat or down even in businesses doing relatively well, such as emerging markets and commodities, he said.

That isn’t diminishing lobbying efforts to soften rules mandated by the Dodd-Frank Act, which would reduce risk, curtail proprietary trading and force more transparency in the $601 trillion derivatives market. Large financial institutions have been “exceedingly aggressive at trying to roll back reform” and have largely succeeded, said Greenlight Capital Inc. President David Einhorn, 42, who bet against Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. in the months before that firm’s collapse.

Leon Cooperman, the first Goldman Sachs Asset Management CEO and head of hedge fund Omega Advisors Inc. in New York, said Wall Street has been “excessively” blamed and President Barack Obama has “continued to project himself as anti-wealth, anti- business and socialist in his leanings.”

Phelan said he’s worried about “social unrest.”

“My taxes are going up,” he said. “Everybody hates me. I have two friends who bought land in New Zealand. They’re trying to convince me to go.”

Options Group’s Karp said he met last month over tea at the Gramercy Park Hotel in New York with a trader who made $500,000 last year at one of the six largest U.S. banks.

The trader, a 27-year-old Ivy League graduate, complained that he has worked harder this year and will be paid less. The headhunter told him to stay put and collect his bonus.

“This is very demoralizing to people,” Karp said. “Especially young guys who have gone to college and wanted to come onto the Street, having dreams of becoming millionaires.”

I'm trying wipe away a sympathetic tear here, but my hand keeps coming back strangely dry.

[Crazydog7]

http://www.bloomberg...nkers-fret.html

I'm trying wipe away a sympathetic tear here, but my hand keeps coming back strangely dry.

27 years old and you make 500,000 a year? Ok guy you need a slap in the mouth and good solid kick in the ass. People don't hate the rich because they want to create disorder or social unrest or because the "liberal media" told them they just want a fighting chance. If these people are the "job producers" as they claim they would break up their personal fortunes to create jobs. Ok they might have to fire some of their household staff and cut it down to one private jet but I think they wouldn't starve to death.

If what the superrich say is true and they got to be that way not because of an accident of birth or sheer dumb luck (as is true in 70% of causes) but rather because they were the strongest toughest and most innovative (God bless Ayn Rand) then hypothetically if half their wealth were confiscated with the proviso the money not be used for "social welfare" but rather to fix the crumbling infrastructure of this country I'd be OK with that.

Fortunately the poor hated Hedge Fund managers looking to flee the United States happen to live in a country where on the one hand no politician even the ones who are independently wealthy themselves would ever consider true socialism because if he or she ever did guys like Leon Cooperman would pick another horse to give their campaign money to. Also no red blooded American will ever take to hard a stand on the wealthy because all look forward to a time when he or she to will be wealthy at some poorly defined ever changing point in the future.

[Relic]

Jeff/FLOW, i think we have reached a point of mutual understanding but i doubt we can find anything further to agree upon re: OWS.

I am far from being an expert on economics. I think ive proven that over the years (even tho i did tell mt parents to buy gold in 2002 but they didnt listen). My understanding is that a recession is, in part, a consolidation of wealth by the super rich. They pull they money our of the economy and bunker down while the mensch bear the brunt of economic stagnation.

I've also proven myself to be a hard core socialist so we have fundamental disagreements on the nature of all this shit. However, i enjoyed being able to discuss our POVs.

edit - a bit of silliness here but if the shit ever hit the fan in a big way (and i dont think it will baring a major natural catastrophe and massive global upheaval) i hope you dont shoot me =P

[Ormond]

http://www.bloomberg...nkers-fret.html

I guess the amazing thing to me here is the reference to "buying land in New Zealand."

My impression from posts by New Zealand boarders here is that NZ is a lot more "socialistic" than the USA is. Would taxes for millionaires actually be less in NZ than they are in the USA? That would be a big surprise to me.

[Horza]

NZ actually had a pretty similar Reaganite/Thatcherite deregulation period in the 80s-90s and has the heirs of that period in power now. I don't know the rates OTOH but I can see why some Wall Street types would figure it as a paradise.

[Altherion]

Yeah, I think tariffs are sensible

That ship sailed away about 20 years ago. The Chinese and others would take this to the WTO and even if we can somehow beat them there, if they're sufficiently pissed off, they can start selling off our debt (remember, we owe them a lot of money).

So they're not "breaking American laws in ways that citizens and legal residents cannot." And is the average illegal immigrant really sitting on valuable assets back home that would be worth confiscating if they were in the same country?

They're sending money back home which is not much in the US, but quite a bit where they come from. If this money is then used to buy things and the latter could somehow be teleported to the US, then yes, they would be worth confiscating.

And is being sent back to a home so awful that it was worth risking illegal border crossings just to work crappy sub-minimum-wage jobs to get away from it really that much better than what happens to citizens who break the law? And being an illegal immigrant doesn't stop the US government from throwing you in prison anyway.

Unless the crime is something serious (meaning, murder or rape), it's simply not worth keeping them in prison. They are deported and there is nothing stopping them from coming back, sometimes with new documents, sometimes without even bothering to go that far.

I think it's just absurd to claim that illegal immigrants are in any way better off than citizens.

They are not better off, but the lack of documentation makes it easier for them to break the law and the ones that come here have, by definition, demonstrated a penchant for doing so. This gives them an additional advantage as far as employment is concerned.

[mor2]

Mor,

Just cause.

?

EDIT: NM, you mean the title, well the title fits well with some of the rhetoric here, that been forming here since part 1. Personally I cant feel that most of the people here and the protest are student with to much time on their hands.(unlike most of us who have to work).

Also I want to mention that I was poor, I dont mean 'dont own an Ipad' poor but putting food on the table, no bath only cold showers and sometimes two at time poor. I worked since I was old enough and financed myself into university, there I got scholarship for helping the community and worked with kids struggling kids whose parents were day and night at work and even managed to work in hospital ward caring for old people who was left to die alone. all of which doesnt give my point of view any points but at least I know what I am talking about.

while most of those students, are just like most of students back in my university, for whom poor people were just those who live in that bad neighbourhood, who never really struggle in life or came home shivering from exhaustion. students who were coming off, from repeating those noble ideas they heard in some lecture and after playing halo at home are going out to protest, felling the "romance" of revolution and change in the air, from their moral high ground vantage point against the evil capitalism. when in fact they are not fighting for the poor, it's just an idea when the main point is that they are just as greedy as they claim capitalist are and think that they deserve more and that they are entitled to what those who have more, because *insert reason*

this how some people here watering down capitalism to people with capital and socialism into the social thing or the right thing todo.

[Relic]

That entire post is a load of horseshit. You have absolutely zero idea what the medium age in misc is. I'm 33, far from a student, with experience in the third world. Coco is married and out of school for years. You're just miffed that others dont see the world as you do. Fair enough. Maybe you dont have enough time.on your hands to think about the plight of other people?

[Lord of Oop North]

I'll echo that. If you think you're the only special snowflake on this board who escaped from a ghetto and poverty, then you're fucking delusional.

[mor2]

I never said everyone... nor did I said anything about average age or anyone specific credentials or ideas, I am sure that there many people with good ideas here. still this how I feel about some posts and the general direction the conversation is taking, in a nice loop of blame that feeds on it self.

[Lord of Oop North]

You basically said that you believe that the majority of protesters and boarders who are protesting are people with "too much time on their hands", who don't understand what it actually means to be poor and see "romance" in it, and are basically full of shit. That's what you said. You said that you "know what you're talking about" because you were actually poor, whereas no one else on the other side was. You can prattle on about how that isn't what you meant, but that's what comes across, and frankly, it makes you look like an idiot.

[KAH]

Yeah, I think tariffs are sensible (and I'd dedicate all tariff revenue to foreign aid). Relying on virtual slave labour to produce cheap goods overseas is neither ethically acceptable nor sustainable in the long term. We shouldn't be producing any private goods that the producers of those goods couldn't afford for themselves. And with peak oil, international freight is going to become increasingly unaffordable anyway.

If those tariffs are supposed to be high enough to keep out goods produced elsewhere, how are they supposed to also generate any revenue to foreign aid (or anything else, for that matter)?

[Altherion]

So, back to the original topic: it seems the protests have spread to multiple European cities as well as Australia, Canada and even Japan. They appear to be most severe in Rome right now. I'm still fairly confident that nothing significant will happen before winter and the protesters in the Northern hemisphere will go home, but the economy had better improve by spring...

[mor2]

Maybe you dont have enough time.on your hands to think about the plight of other people?

plight of other people? today we are not talking of food as basic human right we are talking about internet as basic human right. thus the plight is because people dont have enough, it's about standarts of living, because someone can afford X,Y,Z and they cant, thus it's about providing those needs regardless of the person effort/ability i.e. ~communism.

My problems is that this discussion is turning into "capitalism" vs "socialism" , 'rich' vs 'poor', 'us' vs 'them' blame game. that is based on ad hominem arguments, dehumanising the rich portraying them as evil, thus make your arguments more compelling, and allow "us" to make it right for the good of "society"('us').

You basically said that you believe that the majority of protesters and boarders who are protesting are people with "too much time on their hands", who don't understand what it actually means to be poor and see "romance" in it, and are basically full of shit. That's what you said. You said that you "know what you're talking about" because you were actually poor, whereas no one else on the other side was. You can prattle on about how that isn't what you meant, but that's what comes across, and frankly, it makes you look like an idiot.

yes, that is very close to how I feel about many of the protesters. after all I been to similar protest in the past and I dont know anyone who has still go, especially to protest of empty slogans devote of any real solutions. (plus I seen other post by other posters here)

[felice]

If those tariffs are supposed to be high enough to keep out goods produced elsewhere, how are they supposed to also generate any revenue to foreign aid (or anything else, for that matter)?

They're supposed to be high enough to allow goods produced locally with decent wages and conditions to be able to compete fairly. It would lead to a reduction in imports, but wouldn't eliminate them entirely.