The End of America

Have you ever sat around and been fearful in regards to your future, your families future or even your future family for that matter? Not because you are incapable as a provider but because there are things outside of your control that have the potential to derail your train of dreams.
Well...if you are like me, this occupy Wall St situation should help confirm some of those fears. These clowns, and any of its supporters are so misinformend and misguided they should be embarrassed to claim completion of any formal level of education. Don't get me wrong I'm not knocking their right to protest, but protest something that makes sense. I mean seriously, get a fucking clue about the history and details of the system and country in which you live before pulling yourself off the couch in your parents basement, grabbing your sleeping bag from the closet, asking mom for a ride in her range rover and settling into the park to craft nonsensical and shitty poster board projects for a month.
These donkeys signal the rise of the entitled. The Obama generation. People who think they are owed something and lack the self reliance and responsibility to work for it themselves. What happened? These folks have failed, their parents failed and the the govt has failed all of us by instilling in people what they think are "rights". The right to other people's hard work is not in the "Bill of Rights," trust me I just checked. There are now more of these a$$holes in this country than you and me, America is no a nation of net takers and morons.
I heard they were protesting "corporate greed." What does that mean? I don't get it...what do you want. Corporations are greedy because they make money? That's the fucking point you half wit. What do you want them to do? Goldman: "ahhh yes we were on pace for a solid quarter but it looked to us as though we were going to make a profit so we gave away a couple billion dollars to the fiscally irresponsible protesters outside our office."
Honestly, its embarrassing that common sense has escaped so many people. We can only hope a meteor hits that park.

 

Calling it the "Obama generation" of entitlement is an oversimplification in itself. Income inequality and the subsequent push for the expansion of the welfare state didn't start in January 2009. Americans have been overextending themselves, both personally and corporately through the actions of government policy for decades under both Republican and Democratic regimes. The backlash we're seeing with OWS might be unwarranted and reflective of a misinformed demographic but it was also inevitable. America won't survive with current debt and spending trends, nor will it live ignoring the plight of the bourgeoisie. Like it or not, there WILL have to be some sort of functional compromise on tax/regulation to keep the liberal middle and the "south pole" if you will of Tea Partyists happy (or off the streets at least). This will need to happen whether through regime change in the POTUS or just congressional pressure. Altruism may be a myth of the bourgeoisie, but it's here to stay. We don't live in an Ayn Rand novel.

‎"Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your own destruction. When money ceases to become the means by which men deal with one another, then men become the tools of other men. Blood, whips and guns or dollars."
 

You know, I think we need another thread on this movement. I have an opinion and I can't figure out a way to fit it into the other 45 OWS threads' narratives.

By the way, your first paragraph sums up a lot of what these protesters are feeling.

"Quote from a book/movie about wall street" - Main character in that movie.
 

Its a mindset fellas...you gotta change the "i'm owed something" mindset. You can change all the taxes and policies to generate perceived equality amongst the people but it does nothing unless you change return personal responsibility, common sense and hard work to the equation. The plight of these people is not the fault of the wealthy.

Try a sports analogy. Why aren't we protesting Tiger Woods I mean geez its not really fair the guy made all that money from golf is it? Aren't I entitled to some of that? Why are physical or athletic achievements that bring welath not any more eggregious than intellectual accomplishments? Maybe A guy who works hard in an office is just more tangible to the guy who feels like he is entitled...Stop looking for excuses, stop blaming others and do something productive. Go take a golf lesson!

 
Rain_Maker:
Its a mindset fellas...you gotta change the "i'm owed something" mindset. You can change all the taxes and policies to generate perceived equality amongst the people but it does nothing unless you change return personal responsibility, common sense and hard work to the equation. The plight of these people is not the fault of the wealthy.

Try a sports analogy. Why aren't we protesting Tiger Woods I mean geez its not really fair the guy made all that money from golf is it? Aren't I entitled to some of that? Why are physical or athletic achievements that bring welath not any more eggregious than intellectual accomplishments? Maybe A guy who works hard in an office is just more tangible to the guy who feels like he is entitled...Stop looking for excuses, stop blaming others and do something productive. Go take a golf lesson!

Don't get me wrong, I appreciate your Herman Cain-ish rhetoric and I can't say I disagree with your hermeneutic but I don't think you understand (or want to) that we don't, and never will, live in a world where ambition/self-interest is the status quo. Too many people, limited resources and a diverse gene pool leave us with a given percentage of hard-working and ambitious creative thinkers, and a larger majority resisting their entrepreneurial push.

Even Schumpeter, the big daddy of the theories you're implicitly acknowledging, knew that this would happen; "Capitalism inevitably and by virtue of the very logic of its civilization creates, educates and subsidizes a vested interest in social unrest. "

Capitalism breeds, by nature, both wealth/creativity and a polar resistance to this change by the "luddites". When we recognize this, as small "c" conservatives, we can get a jump on realistic policy and get the compass to tip slightly our way rather than going for a complete swing and only breeding widespread resentment.

‎"Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your own destruction. When money ceases to become the means by which men deal with one another, then men become the tools of other men. Blood, whips and guns or dollars."
 
Rain_Man:
Try a sports analogy. Why aren't we protesting Tiger Woods I mean geez its not really fair the guy made all that money from golf is it? Aren't I entitled to some of that? Why are physical or athletic achievements that bring welath not any more eggregious than intellectual accomplishments? Maybe A guy who works hard in an office is just more tangible to the guy who feels like he is entitled...Stop looking for excuses, stop blaming others and do something productive. Go take a golf lesson!

That is a good analogy. When Tiger got all of his sponsors pulled for making a big mistake and the government bailed him out with tax-payer dollars, it stablized the entire golfing sector. I can see where you are coming from.

"Quote from a book/movie about wall street" - Main character in that movie.
 
__________:
Rain_Man:
Try a sports analogy. Why aren't we protesting Tiger Woods I mean geez its not really fair the guy made all that money from golf is it? Aren't I entitled to some of that? Why are physical or athletic achievements that bring welath not any more eggregious than intellectual accomplishments? Maybe A guy who works hard in an office is just more tangible to the guy who feels like he is entitled...Stop looking for excuses, stop blaming others and do something productive. Go take a golf lesson!

That is a good analogy. When Tiger got all of his sponsors pulled for making a big mistake and the government bailed him out with tax-payer dollars, it stablized the entire golfing sector. I can see where you are coming from.

Rain_Man your sarcasm implies that the protesters are protesting the bailout (paid back by the way with interest) but they're not, or maybe they are it doesn't matter. They are wailing against perceived greed and success achieved through hardwork and the opportunity that hardwork presents. Also any public union protesters down there better check themselves because their entire subsistence relies on govt bailouts in one form or another.Golf by the way is worse off without Tiger. Can't wait to rush home and watch Lee Westwood, please. The analogy, as I assume you understood, was meant to draw attention to how misplaced attacking someone for being succesful is. I refuse to accept the status quo chief.
 
Best Response

even if 99% of the OWsers are idiots and lunatics, let's focus on the 1% that isn't, because their anger is a better reflection of the anger of the middle class who is trying to get by and aren't in the streets.

ross perot was right. the huge sucking sound from nafta was the sound of all the middle class jobs leaving the country. strangely, we feared it would be mexico taking all the jobs (we went from a net exporter to importer of autos from mexico post nafta), where it was china, indonesia and vietnam after all.

american companies making stuff for americans worked for 30 years after wwii. big american middle class + financial success for wall street and corporations. but then some CEOs decided that they could make just a little bit more using cheap foreign labor, selling it back to americans who could tap into home equity or cheap credit funded by our trade deficit and guns pointed at the heads of oil majors to ensure that they only take USD for their crude, assuring that countries would continue to run trade surpluses against us without end. it was a race to the bottom. the few firms that wanted to make it in the USA either had to move their operations overseas to not get annihilated on labor costs, or just fold up shop.

so first it was the manufacturing jobs that vanished, that path to middle class status of the high school educated. then it started hitting the white collar guys as well. once the factory shuts down it's not just the line operators that lose their job. draftsmen, engineers, technicians -- all gone. and the know-how goes with them. back to economics: now the young are in a bind because leaving high school, they've got nothing but mcjobs to look at, and leaving college, they can't find that middle class office job anymore. and forget about buying a house.

now do we "owe" these guys anything? are the people "owed" jobs? no more than you owe a crackhead who breaks into your house, kills your family, and loots grandma's jewelry box. but the crackhead can do that do you because he CAN, much like the general population in a democracy can dispossess the wealthy quite easily. FDR is called a traitor to his class even to this day and the grand project of the GOP since even his times was to roll back the social safety net, the "spirit of the dole" as hoover called it. most college kids are not taught about the business plot and how fucking close we came to either a fascist or communist revolution in the '30s, but we were. and then, as now, you had a bunch of people who, rightly or wrongly, saw themselves as having gotten fucked by an indifferent elite.

like george bush, the motivations and justifications of the OWSers are completely irrelevant. if they get big enough, they make their own reality.

 

Actually these people are complaining about the end of the age of entitlement. There are also some liberal libertarians in the mix who wonder why we had to bail out a bunch of too-dumb-to-succeed banks while primary education is at a low ebb in this country. Also some of the anti-corporate anarchist types.

Some of the messages they are coming out with are sensible, and the fact is that we have it pretty darned good in this industry. Also money and power should not be at the top of life's priorities.

Here's hoping cooler heads prevail but that we remain a fairly capitalist country.

Capitalism breeds, by nature, both wealth/creativity and a polar resistance to this change by the "luddites". When we recognize this, as small "c" conservatives, we can get a jump on realistic policy and get the compass to tip slightly our way rather than going for a complete swing and only breeding widespread resentment.
I think we're three years too late. The country swung from socialism to libertarianism in 1980. I would argue it swung from libertarianism into the opposite of socialism (the term starts with an f but I don't think it's fair to connote that this is the same as pre-WWII Europe) with the bailouts.

You do realize that 10% of the country is as driven and intelligent as the top 1%, and every 70-80 years, folks get rotated out of that 1% and back in by some combination of economic collapse and revolution. The last two times were 1933 and 1848.

So if you are in the top 10% and do not mind a middle-class lifestyle, you have nothing to worry about. The problem is if you're in the top 1% and are not prepared to buy a rusty honda. :D

 

I've been saying it for a while. Just give these losers a token hand out and get rid of them. The poor will always be poor, they just want more free shit. This is the price the rich pay for living in a Democracy.

Easier to just pay them off and make them go away then to actually try and help them. An extra case of beer and smokes will make the "people" happy.

 
ANT:
I've been saying it for a while. Just give these losers a token hand out and get rid of them. The poor will always be poor, they just want more free shit. This is the price the rich pay for living in a Democracy.

Easier to just pay them off and make them go away then to actually try and help them. An extra case of beer and smokes will make the "people" happy.

You have been saying it for a while, everyone has seen you say it. You can stop saying it. Your horse has been dead for weeks and yet, you continued to smack it like it owes you money (and we all know how much you love your money)

"Quote from a book/movie about wall street" - Main character in that movie.
 
__________:
ANT:
I've been saying it for a while. Just give these losers a token hand out and get rid of them. The poor will always be poor, they just want more free shit. This is the price the rich pay for living in a Democracy.

Easier to just pay them off and make them go away then to actually try and help them. An extra case of beer and smokes will make the "people" happy.

You have been saying it for a while, everyone has seen you say it. You can stop saying it. Your horse has been dead for weeks and yet, you continued to smack it like it owes you money (and we all know how much you love your money)

I will take that under consideration.

Let me say, once again, just give these losers a token hand out and get rid of them. The poor will always be poor, they just want more free shit. This is the price the rich pay for living in a Democracy.

Easier to just pay them off and make them go away then to actually try and help them. An extra case of beer and smokes will make the "people" happy.

Can we just bring back Glass Steagal so I can stop hearing about how I cannot be against the protesters because some banks needed a bailout and now everyone that was forced to take money is to be blamed.

 
IlliniProgrammer:
ivoteforthatguy:
^ we are far past that. they won't be happy until Lloyd Blankfein is driving to work in a Kia, wearing JC Penney suits, and dining at Red Lobster with his non-trophy wife.
If I may ask, how is that so bad? Buffett eats at Dairy Queen on a regular basis.

it's not bad at all, but i was trying to think of the 21st century american analogue to the self-debasements that the elites had to suffer in the chinese cultural revolution. pushing a kia to olive garden with your fat wife and screaming brats, for a goldman magnate, seems like the equivalent to wearing a dunce cap with a sign around your neck saying "i am a counter-revolutionary roader and a capitalist running dog" while red guards shout at you.

 

Haha even the staunchest of the staunch conservatives and Republicans would laugh at some of the overly extreme dogma on this site. There isn't some libertarian Valhalla that some GOP president is going to unlock where we all don't pay tax, we're all bankers and there are no poor people. The world is a kaleidoscope of socio-political principles, we're never all going to be on the same page. The nutjobs among the OWS protestors aren't bringing down GS or anyone else, nor are we going to live in some wonderful tax haven we dreamed up. The US will continue to have abundant Social Services and gov't expenditure, let's just hope it's marginally less than now and significantly more effective on the jobs side. Unemployed people make for alot of unrest, and they can push pretty hard when they start representing 10+ % of the population.

‎"Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your own destruction. When money ceases to become the means by which men deal with one another, then men become the tools of other men. Blood, whips and guns or dollars."
 
Rain_Maker:
haha there really are some educated people on here huh....unreal!

Fixed that for you.

‎"Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your own destruction. When money ceases to become the means by which men deal with one another, then men become the tools of other men. Blood, whips and guns or dollars."
 

Rain_Maker:

Yes, many of the protesters are misguided morons. However, defending bailed out "too big to fail" institutions is a disgrace. We need to eliminate TBTF through the reinstatement of Glass-Steagall. I don't see how anyone could disagree iwth this (unless they like $1 trillion+ bailouts).

 

Simple solution.......society needs to get rid of the bottom 10% just as most firms and corporations do.

Okay, I am kind of joking, but not really. Human compassion is a curse

"One should recognize reality even when one doesn't like it, indeed, especially when one doesn't like it." - Charlie Munger
 
cplpayne:
Simple solution.......society needs to get rid of the bottom 10% just as most firms and corporations do.

Okay, I am kind of joking, but not really. Human compassion is a curse

+1

"Every major horror of history was committed in the name of an altruistic motive. Has any act of selfishness ever equaled the carnage perpetrated by disciples of altruism?" -Ayn Rand

Since we all love a soundbyte.

‎"Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your own destruction. When money ceases to become the means by which men deal with one another, then men become the tools of other men. Blood, whips and guns or dollars."
 
Independent Gestion:
cplpayne:
Simple solution.......society needs to get rid of the bottom 10% just as most firms and corporations do.

Okay, I am kind of joking, but not really. Human compassion is a curse

+1

"Every major horror of history was committed in the name of an altruistic motive. Has any act of selfishness ever equaled the carnage perpetrated by disciples of altruism?" -Ayn Rand

Since we all love a soundbyte.

rand is being a massive hypocrite herself for pimping the vietnam war so hard. all her libertarian bona fides were lost when she started deep throating militarist schlong.

 
IlliniProgrammer:
cplpayne:
Simple solution.......society needs to get rid of the bottom 10% just as most firms and corporations do.

Okay, I am kind of joking, but not really. Human compassion is a curse

My suggestion is to offer them cash and a case of beer for a vasectomy.

Bravo. I 100% support the President offering free birth control. I think every inner city school should have endless safe sex messages, as well as condoms and birth control handed out.

 

I'm not defending it, I never agreed with it when it happened. I am just saying if you are going to criticize the past actions of the banks then you also have to acknowledge that they paid back TARP funds as well. But who am I to judge, perhaps systemic failure was the right option, we'll never know.

 

I'm not defending it, I never agreed with it when it happened. I am just saying if you are going to criticize the past actions of the banks then you also have to acknowledge that they paid back TARP funds as well. But who am I to judge, perhaps systemic failure was the right option, we'll never know.

 
Rain_Maker:
I'm not defending it, I never agreed with it when it happened. I am just saying if you are going to criticize the past actions of the banks then you also have to acknowledge that they paid back TARP funds as well. But who am I to judge, perhaps systemic failure was the right option, we'll never know.

Wait, before TheKing says it:

TARP was only a small part of the bailout. Banks received trillions. TARP is nothing.

 
ANT:
Rain_Maker:
I'm not defending it, I never agreed with it when it happened. I am just saying if you are going to criticize the past actions of the banks then you also have to acknowledge that they paid back TARP funds as well. But who am I to judge, perhaps systemic failure was the right option, we'll never know.

Wait, before TheKing says it:

TARP was only a small part of the bailout. Banks received trillions. TARP is nothing.

ANT, thanks for saying it for me. It seems as though you've learned something!

It's true, though. And to be honest, it shocks me how little people on this site (and in general) know about the bailouts. Fuck, I'm mad as hell over the backdoor AIG bailout, let alone the rest of the horse shit that went down. Just pisses me off to hear some little cuntrag blab on and on without knowing what the fuck he is talking about.

 

We are in a fucking recession. Of course more people are struggling. We dropped a trillion bucks on stimulus and nothing.

Housing and consumer spending are main drivers of the economy. People spent 10 years worth of spending in 3-4 years. We are tapped out. We have a massive and lop sided over supply of housing. Plus, we have a massive backlog of foreclosures.

Stimulus is not going to do anything. We need to clear this backlog out.

This idea that increasing taxes and penalties is somehow going to increase funds for stimulus, without any negative repercussion is moronic.

Companies will lay people off. Investments will shrink. You will send a clear message that we are in an anti business environment and you will simply grow government (which will require increased funding going forward).

How about we fix corporate tax policy and reduce unneeded and useless regulation. Allow businesses to re-repatriate cash and invest or pay dividends.

 

Few people understand that we live in a corpocracy. Corporatism has been the US for a little over 100 years. Corporations are the ones that dictate rules and regulation. Ask any big corporation, they love regulations because they can hire a floor of tax accountants/compliance specialist to sort it out the new codes and it keeps from new competition from emerging. Just look at your Fortune 500 firms, the originators of their respective industry are still the leaders. Why? One might say well they're able to remain competitive and dominant. Before coming to that conclusion I'd suggest evaluating where Congressional members obtain their funding and the type of legislation that's initiated by them.

That being said I think the OP is trying to allude that a lot of folks are willfully ignorant and don't want to work hard to improve their situation. Of course now there are greater barriers to entry than in the past but its still doable with some patience and willpower.

Also another option for people is to work overseas and actually as a US citizen if your out of country for more than 331 days a year, you dont have to pay income tax up to around 90K. Not a bad deal if you ask me.

 
itillc123:
Ask any big corporation, they love regulations because they can hire a floor of tax accountants/compliance specialist to sort it out the new codes

Yea, they love that.

"One should recognize reality even when one doesn't like it, indeed, especially when one doesn't like it." - Charlie Munger
 

And I thought I wasn't gonna see these kinds protests in my lifetime...the 70's are coming back. Replace Acid with X...

These sort of things happen all the time in France, Italy, and Latin America...it isn't because of rights or entitlements it's about something fundamentally wrong in the system.

I heard people from Columbia and Harvard were there protesting...and they weren't from the Liberal Arts college

 

1.) 20 years is a short time relative to the fact that we get 70-80 years. 2.) The Columbia and Harvard grads SHOULD be protesting. They are spending $250K on a degree to get into an industry that no longer has the room for everyone and does not have enough money for those who do to pay off their debt. But they should be protesting their boards of directors, not Wall Street. Or they can vote with their feet and go to SUNY and Rutgers.

 

Rain_maker, I gave you a silver banana, and I pressed it repeatedly when I saw "The Obama Generation."

I just spent 3 hours of my day trollin their Facebook page (and even got my profile stalked, and them pointing out my "HOES&CEOS" party in Beijing that I forgot about).

Some bright individuals--others, woefully entitled and ignorant. But you can't just keep saying shit here, you gotta say shit OVER THERE.

http://www.facebook.com/OccupyWallSt

And by the way, they deleted all my statistics, data, and mini-lessons on Macroeconomics 101.

 

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