Occupy Wall Street

I worked in retail and then at a computer store for years during high school and college. I have seen many kids come into those establishments looking for work. They would walk in off the street with their hair covering half of their face, multiple piercings, dirty looking jeans, and ask if we were hiring. They wouldn't look me in the eye half of the time either. I would say no but we are accepting resumes. The kids typically didn't have a resume.
The number of times someone came in looking like someone we could put in front of a customer were few and far between.
I wonder where these kids dads were? If I had a son that needed a job I'd make sure he shaved, pressed his slacks, put on a tie, printed his resume nicely and had his pitch ready.
I don't feel that bad for people when they are out of work because its basically the same as feeling bad for someone when they can't sell their car or house.
They just need to lower the price of the car until the market is willing to pay for it.
The same goes for getting a job.

Now if you say, "but I was looking for minimum wage and I still couldn't find it" then I'd say exactly, thats why we need to repeal minimum wage laws.
Elementary economics teaches us that minimum wage laws create unemployment by raising the cost of labor above market clearing rate, which creates a surplus of labor.

 

Really, I hear what you're saying. But I'd also bet not one single one of these people is now an Occupy protester or a liberal activist or has even given these causes much thought. If this was in a red enough part of the country I'd even pretty confidently bet they would have followed prevailing patterns and broken Republican in voting since then. If they've bothered to vote, which, yeah, maybe they haven't so much.

An argument that lazy and disheveled young people shouldn't expect jobs to be handed to them in the marketplace isn't hard to win.

I'm pretty sure that's not what the Occupy movement is about. Disheveled young people are among the protesters - as they usually are among protesters, jobs are among the top concerns - as they usually are when unemployment is high. Come on, conservatives have a sense of history, and know these two things are always so! But pulling jobs out of a hat for these disheveled young protesters specifically really isn't the argument of the thing, and there is much more to its argument, and much more diversity to its supporters.

 

I'd like to see a breakdown of the protestors. I bet there are some unwashed hippie types in there but there are a lot of affluent people too.

These guys are definitely having an effect. Local businesses are having to lay off staff and their actions are certainly going to be a problem for those of us who work in the banking industry this year when bonuses come out. My personal performance or the company's financial performance will be fine but due to OWS, I will probably see very little bonus.

For each of the 984 Occupy Wall Street protesters arrested in New York City between September 18 and October 15, police collected and filed an information sheet recording the arrestee’s name, age, sex, criminal charge, home address and — in most cases — race. The Daily Caller has obtained all of this information from a source in the New York City government.
Among addresses for which information is available, single-family homes listed on those police intake forms have a median value of $305,000 — a far higher number than the $185,400 median value of owner-occupied housing units in the United States.

NYC arrest records: Many Occupy Wall Street protesters live in luxury - Yahoo! News

 

Agreed.

Abner :smile:

 

The first few pages of stories I could find on +OWS +layoffs mostly seem to be about the Milk Street Cafe on Wall Street.

Protesters force cafe layoffs as biz drops (Kevin Fasick, Sally Goldenberg and Bob Fredericks, New York Post, November 2, 2011)

Causality is complicated, as it usually is:

The cafe had also just opened in June, and still has a staff of about 80.

I think there's a widespread objection to massive bonuses, like in the seven figures, maybe six figures in some cases, for top executives of bailed-out businesses especially.

However, I think if your employer even hinted that public opinion is an excuse to be shy with previously industry standard bonuses for mid-level managers and line professionals, even up to the five figures, you'd find a lot of feeling on the centre-left that this was an excuse that you were getting a raw deal from your employer. Yes, you'd also find some hostility especially the farther left you went, but you'd probably also find some hostility about five-figure bonuses from rural poor conservative voters too.

I'm probably more of a free marketer than many on the left on all this. Excluding cases where there's been a bailout, I tend to think that if there's a concern about disproportionate bonuses in a company, shareholders should be the ones to take it up, not the government. Maybe we should look at reforms in corporate governance that would strengthen outside shareholder rights. In cases where there has been been a bailout, maybe the government is a shareholder for now and can work from there, maybe it should have been, maybe it should have set terms of the bailout to avoid such unintended consequences, or maybe it shouldn't have instituted the bailout in the first place.

 

For Free Markets and the Rule of Law

Occupy movement not the real disgrace (Lorrie Goldstein, The Toronto Sun, November 6, 2011)

 

Stephn King weighs in................

Stephen and Tabitha King released the following statement to the Occupy Bangor Media Working Group:

“It’s time for the wealthy to pay their fair share before the middle class becomes the forgotten class. And it’s time for the banks to give back what they were given. There are those in politics, particularly those on the conservative side, who can’t get enough of telling people that the wealthy one per cent must not be taxed because doing so kills jobs. The real job-killers are corporate greed and political expediency. It’s time for working people in Maine and all across the country to take back the American dream.”

Abner

 

Nice Mormon man, who with his hobby of answering test questions is clearly one of us, is the 99%.

 

While I might sympathize with some of the basic (unexpressed) central points of the Occupy movement I must say that at this point, that movement is dead. The American public has lost interest. Not a single politician has jumped on that bandwagon. Not a single labor union has made an endorsement. It's dead.

 

This is an interesting article on our financial problems and OWS. The breakdown factors listed amplify some of my opinions in an earlier post. (NO, I am not a regular reader of this news outlet so don’t pelt me with stones for pointing to other opinions!)
Wall Street Protestors

“End of Separation
Ekelund says he opposed much of the banking deregulation that occurred in the 1990s, “especially the repeal of Glass-Steagall” in 1999 and 2000. Glass-Steagall was a 1933 banking law which, among other things, separated investment banks from commercial banks that accept deposits from consumers.
“This created the institutional conditions for an increase in leverage,” Ekelund said. “Wild West banking ensued, granted at the encouragement of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac,” government-sponsored entities deeply involved in the mortgage market.
Ekelund said eliminating the separation of banking and finance “enabled the construction of the kind of instruments that created so much uncertainty that issuers had to provide insurance against their default.” Then with the collapse, “the average Joe helps bail them out, after which the biggest malfeasors give themselves raises and the banking system hoards trillions in capital.”

Misidentifying Causes
Attorney and author Peter J. Wallison, a senior fellow in financial policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, says he believes the OWS protestors have embraced wrongheaded notions of the causes of the financial collapse and economic recession, which he blames largely on a “credulous” news media. Wallison served on the federal Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission and issued a dissent to its January 2011 report.
“To be as favorable as possible to the media, reporters don't have the time or the experience to question what they are told by government officials on matters where expertise rather than politics are involved,” Wallison said. “The government told them the private sector and especially Wall Street were involved, and they believed it and propagated it.”

Government’s Blame
Instead, said Wallison, OWS protestors should blame requirements that forced government agencies and private lenders to steer money into loans for lower-income people. With millions more people of dubious means able to obtain loans, housing prices became inflated until the bubble burst.
The Crisis Inquiry Commission’s majority concluded the crisis was caused by factors including “widespread failures in financial regulation,” “breakdowns in corporate governance,” “an explosive mix of excessive borrowing and risk by households and Wall Street,” “key policy makers ill prepared for the crisis,” and “systemic breaches in accountability and ethics at all levels.”
Wallison said the majority’s report was a foregone conclusion because commission chairman Phil Angelides “started out with the idea that the private sector was not regulated enough, and wouldn't consider any other ideas or views. The Democratic commissioners let him do whatever he wanted, and the Republicans didn't have the votes.”

Crony Capitalism
Some of the findings have made their way into the chants of OWS protestors. While disagreeing with the protestors’ overall anti-market tone, Wallison agrees with the attacks on cronyism.
“The original sin was rescuing Bear Stearns” in March 2008, Wallison said, because it sent a message that big financial firms would be rescued. A few months later the government let Lehman Brothers fail, and the apparent flip-flop caused panic to ensue. “If [the Bear Stearns rescue] hadn't been done we might not have had the freeze-up in lending that was the financial crisis.” “

 

Maybe a merger with the T.E.A. Party?:saevil:

 

IMHO the political ideology of these protesters is juvenile, but their problems and fears are real and very serious.

 

Did you guys see that Fannie and Freddie are paying their top execs 7 million in bonuses this year while asking for billions in bailout money? Fannie and Freddie are staffed by career democrat politicians and its basically a pet project of the democrat party in my opinion. They created the housing bubble by lowering underwriting standards for loans.

 

Our tax $$$ down the drains.

 

Occupy the atom

Occupy the Atom - Imgur

 

You make a lot of sense Jonathan. I tend to agree. Look at Fannie and Freddie and Government Motors. As a taxpayer, I do not want to see high bonuses paid to these guys. We bailed them out and now they are being rewarded. I am against almost all bailouts in general but if a company is bailed out, there are strings attached, and those strings are that the people are now shareholders.
If we were to do it right, the actual citizens of the country would get shares in the corporation based on their tax rates. So if I pay zero taxes, then I get nothing from the GM bailout. But if I am Obama and make millions per year and pay millions in taxes, I should get a bigger chunk of GM stock when they are bailed out.
Pay for play. Everyone has some skin in the game and those with more skin get more game time. Its only fair.

 

Interesting little content analysis from a libertarian perspective, finding much to agree with in the Occupy movement:
Occupy movement shows significant pro-freedom leanings (Independent Political Report, October 14, 2011)

 

Which of these things, as put forth by the OWS people in SF, do libertarians agree with?

—————————————
(+) end the federal reserve
(-) equality
2nd biggest type size (red ink)
—————————–
(+) anarchy
(+) end corporate personhood
(+) police brutality
2nd biggest type size (black ink)
——————————————-
(-) economic inequality
(+) end the drug war
love
(+) gold standard
(-) social security
solidarity
3rd biggest type size (black ink)
——————————————
(-) 1% lies
(+) anti monopoly
(+) bart police
change
(-) class warfare
direct action
economics
(+) fractional reserve banking
justice
keep it leaderless
killing children
(+) medical marijuana
(-) medicare
mobilizing people
(+) stop the war in afghanistan
(-) tax the rich
unity
(+) we are anonymous
4th biggest type size (black ink)
——————————————
american autumn
(+) arab spring
comfort
consciousness
consensus
education
democracy
dollar
(+) empire
(+) end tax slavery
global harmony
(+) liberty
(+) military industrial complex
nipples [evidently someone being funny!]
organic food
organized protest
political awakening
recovery
(-) redistribution of wealth
restore the commons
revolution
sustainability
(+) true freedom
truth

Is that ALL they are after? Nice coordinated and concise message

 

Organic food is a joke. You have to check out Penn and Teller's bullshit video on organic food and the hoax that it truly is.
Penn and Teller BS: Organic Food Myths Debunked (Excerpt) - YouTube