What is Occupy Wallstreet?

[kandrathe]

Yeah, I think they should hire some spin-doctors, some specialized fund raisers and few people doing their pr.

They already risk being co-opted by issue groups interested in furthering campaign goals. Campaigns that frankly will probably result in more of the same. If they don't define what it is that takes them out into the streets, someone else will do it for them, and many are trying, including Obama. I think the worst case scenario would be a repeat of the 1999 WTO protests, which started out peacefully, and appealed to a broad group of liberal thinkers. In that case, a minority of anarchist trouble makers began what became a riot.

You are living in a fairy tale world....probably together with kandrathe.

Hey, there's not room in my fantasy world for another *guy*. Send in the ravishingly beautiful brunettes. Please!

The whole thing is that these banks don't play by the rules.

Well they do. To do otherwise would be illegal, and they'd be in trouble. So, what they do is actually play by the rules, and I think we can agree that the rules are not always fair. I actually don't think banks use their computers to buy and sell huge volumes of stocks in order to manipulate the market. Someone might do that, but I don't think it is the banks. What banks (and other unscrupulous companies) do to manipulate earnings is to drag their feet on paying what they owe, but ensure they get their money in advance if possible.

I think what people are feeling is a sense of injustice. Obama, and his predecessors all were convinced that in a down economy that stabilizing and favoring the employers will speed the recovery. I think they felt that if they could get the employers to be optimistic, then they'd return to employment as usual. This time it didn't work, and they even did more than that. They spent almost an additional trillion dollars on the everyday person too. The Obama tax cuts were secretly implemented, and have remained in place for three years.

I think college students are upset because their unemployment*(and underemployment) rate is more like 37%, and they face student loan hell once they graduate or drop out. Scholarships, and grants have not kept up with the inflation rate of tuition. They face an uncertain present, and future.

I think the elderly and the nearly elderly are upset, because Obamacare screwed them. Not in what it did, but in what it didn't do. During the Clinton years, they passed a bill that controlled the amount of money paid to physicians. Because of this, more and more physicians in expensive markets are refusing to take Medicare patients. For example, an office visit in Manhattan is about $110, while in outstate NY it is more like $40. Medicare will only pay up to $54. Seniors, and those about to become seniors are rightly worried about the sustainability and future of social security and Medicare. Yet, nothing happens to rework them. Issues like this are why I don't like federal "one size fits all" programs. What works in NYC may not work in Selma, Alabama and vice versa.

And, I think the biggest part of this is that in the US, we are drummed from birth with this idea that if you work hard you will succeed. I think most people, in the occupy wall street movement, and in the tea party movement believe that corporate failures should fail. However, since 2008, many people who worked hard saw their assets (retirement accounts and home) retrench to 50% of their value, while some corporations went hat in hand to the government for bailouts. Now, many of the corporations have recovered, many are profitable again, but they are still not investing their profits into job growing expansions. It's not that all these people want their handout too, but rather think that the last place the handouts should go should be into the hands of corporations and their record profits.

If you are semi-Keynesian, you would make the case that if all the money that was handed out by government went into consumer hands, the corporations would have recovered just from the economic activity. Giving it to corporations and banks risks exactly what we've seen, the hesitancy to invest or spend that money due to volatility in the world economy. I'm not a Keynesian, so I tend to think there is something more fundamentally wrong in how policy distorts markets.

* correction noted by Jester