Blaming Wall Street for the financial crisis is like blaming a guy if the government gave them their credit card, sent him to the casino and said "You keep what you win, we cover what you lose"

I like the protests but they need to be in Washington

Well Mexico is joining in on the fun. There has been a lot of protests but this saturday is the big one in a lot of cities.

Shack makes sense.

Wall Street is at fault, but what did they do. Sure some broke laws, however many stayed with in the law and used the law to their advantage.

When people use the law to act against society interest, who is really at fault for that?

The govt is for acting in incompetent, corrupt manner. For the govt created laws that do not benefit the public, and did not correct serious issues when they arose.

The problems of the US originate from many decades including Clinton, Bush and Obama.


I think yelling at corporations is appropriate but in the end serves no real purpose. They will not change their ways unless the govt makes them to do so.



Lol young people do not care, because they see the govt is useless and incompetent.

That's pretty naive of you to just blame Washington. If you look at the co-authors of the bills for the past few years, many of them have been corporate leaders. You can't just let them get off the hook so easily, that's been the repeated problem for years making Washington do everything and giving them all of the blame.

What is needed from Washington is an amendment that outlaws classifying corporations as individual people, leading to easily exploited loopholes in campaign funding that has negatively affected both political parties. Big Ag for the Dems, Big Oil for the GOP. This is why we still aren't investing into alternative energies (true story according to my father, a top executive for an oil company) and why ethanol is thus far our only substitute for oil and why gasoline is "enriched" with 10% ethanol (not to mention why we here in the US get the shitty version of Coke products and in the UK they have better tasting Coca-Cola, fuck corn syrup).

Yes. The film The Corporation showed brilliantly how a corporation is essentially a government mandated and protected psychopath.

By extension, Wall Street is infused with a great deal of psychopathy. If you want a psychopath investigated and brought to justice for his indiscretions (legal or ethical), you'll have better luck with the police than with the psychopath themself.

There is a chance that the police will side with the psychopath, however, therefore you want as many people to know about your case as possible. You usually need proof as well, so don't rely on people just accepting your grievances.

we are going in circles...

If the govt cannot create rules to police the corporations as the corporations control the govt...



However until govt changes, no way you are going to see corporations change.

I'm kind of tired of conservatives using the CRA as a way to deflect blame. No, the evil gubmint didn't force them to give out toxic loans to poor blacks and browns.

But yes, there does need to be a fundamental structural change in the next ten years or we're fucked for as long as we're alive.

I find it a bit worrying that some people think preferential tax treatment towards capital gains and dividends should be eliminated.

To me that would really hurt any normal person who invests money. For example, if your parents cash a mutual fund they would be taxed a ton more. So would the rich, but middle class people would lose out more.

Simply increase the tax rate on the very high tax brackets.

What about people like Steve Jobs who gained only one dollar in salary income per year and switched all of his cash flow into dividends? He paid on a capital gains rate which managed to push his taxable income down to 15-10% which he could have further avoided by not calling on his dividends more than he spent. There's potential of millions lost there from possible taxable revenue. You can't blame the guy for what he did, it was in his interest.

Why do we need the government to invest in alternative energy? Oil was developed as an energy source (for multiple products) without the governments' help. Same with natural gas. I suppose "Big Iron Lung" used to lobby constantly against Jonas Salk's research. Similar things must have happened with "Big Buggy Whip," "Big Typewriter," "Big Radio (against tv)," and "Big Landline Phone." And yet their products were all displaced by something more useful and beneficial without the aid of government or at least without the government playing a massively dominant role. Furthermore, it is not as if Citizens United is an old case, it is fairly recent.

To Caius

I would quote, but then the screens would get too repetitive.

Anyways, there are several reasons for this:

First off, there is no profit in highly useful renewable energy. The return rate is simply too low in the immediate years upon investment, that the whole process simply has too much risk. Why would any halfway intelligent business investor put money into that unless they could stand to lose money? The process needs to come from a source that can stand to lose money without going bankrupt. Admittedly the government does not have a lot of money itself to invest, and yes, the government needs to cut down its spending in other sectors of the government, namely the military, but it can stand to lose money in yes welfare. But the government is a great source of investment into higher risk ventures.

Oil on the other hand, is cheap and easy to access. The consequences is that it simply does not have a future. Eventually we will run dry. At that point everyone will want to start investing into another source, but by then it will hurt the economy greatly because again, wind turbines and such fields do not represent a profitable venture for individual investors. There's the possibility then that such alternative energies will not be discovered and the economy will collapse utterly without the amount of energy we are use to sustaining. There could be severe unemployment and possible mass amounts of starvation with most people completely oblivious to how to live without technology. I'm sure this then turns into a matter of opinion of rather or not it should be a concern that mass amount of people suffer while a select few prosper with the drastic change in the economy to being rural again.

That is a worst case scenario of course, but we should at least be prepared for it, investing into renewable energy needs to happen as soon as possible. There are estimates that we will have an oil shortage crisis in twenty or so years from now. Private investment simply is not happening, again, it is not profitable. In the past, unprofitable ventures are not what succeed without government help.

One alternative fuel brings me to my second point:

Oil companies have lobbied in the past against more profitable ventures. Namely the 1930s Dubant and his oil company lobbied against hemp, which was Henry Ford's original choice of fuel when he first created his automobiles. However, Dubant and WR Hearst felt it, hemp, was a threat to their respective Oil and Timber industries because hemp is so easily grown and yields so much for such a small amount. As I'm sure you're aware, hemp is still illegal.

Finally, most of the markets you listed never had the power that others have gained, such as Oil, Tobacco, Agriculture, Pharmacy, Railroads, etc that, at least some, have undergone reactions from the government. There was never a cornering of the Typewriter market, or of the Buggy Whip market, of radio market.

In recent years, banks have been fusing together, as have oil companies (Conoco-Phillips (and Texaco and socrs of other small companies), Amaco-BP, Exxon-Mobile, these markets are getting more and more concentrated and their voices in the government are getting stronger and stronger, sort of like if unions were more like how the IWW use to be. A few big voices are louder and more efficient at getting heard than several small voices.

Additionally, homophobes are fucked in hell for all eternity.

Well you can go ahead and change it, but who is going to hurt?

The rich will pay more taxes, however any middle class or any person with money to invest will then paying way way way more tax.

For example, if your parents put 50,000 of their savings in a mutual fund and it increased to 80,000. Here in Canada (not sure about rates in the US), only half of the $30,000 gain is taxable. Now imagine, how hard it would hit them if the full $30,000 is taxable.

Now many of the protestors assume, if your investing your a millionaire, however tens of millions of people have investments. Its the people with 5,000-500,000 invested that would get hurt badly.

I suggest simply increasing the marginal tax rate on the higher tax brackets.

Education is key. Democracy is nice, but the truth is not decided by democracy, nor are optimal solutions. Even in a perfect democracy, a bunch of dummies will frequently vote wrong. Nothing scares the ultra-rich more than a smart population.

The Problem is with all this is no real solutions are being brought in place and I am quite certain if the US govt goes on an anti-business crusade, the developing world and countries like Australia and Canada would benefit tremendously.

Anyways the protest is coming to Canada (Toronto) tomorrow where I live and it should be interesting. It will interesting to see what they will be denouncing. I assume the focus will more towards the Conservative govt on the federal level then at the Big 5 banks in downtown Toronto or at Bay Street (our version of Wall Street).

Corporate greed exists here but its small potatoes compared to the us.
The tax system is quite progressive and fair.
Also the economic situation in Canada is pretty okay, and the unemployment situation is only bad for young people and laid off blue collar workers.

Anyways, I bring up Canada but here is an article that shows how small differences in regulation saved made a huge difference.

http://www.american.com/archive/2010/fe ... ing-system

The big fault in the US govt, is they encouraged polices to allow poor people to buy homes. This created the sub-prime mortgage and then the banks came in and acted like bigger idiots.
Frankly if the US govt wanted to provide housing to poor people, it should have done it through social housing.

So, that is a perfect example of the stupidity of the US govt.

Not really, no. Education isn't the first stepping stone of social mobility, steady employment is.

I'd suggest the return of tariffs and capital gains taxes.

I agree on education and I agree on parts of the latter half of your post. The whole home thing is one of the most inefficient aspects of our welfare system. Regardless, I completely disagree with this paragraph...er...well, the first sentence as I have already provided a clear plan with the needed added amendment.

Well I meant that the protestors have no real solution.

Your idea makes sense as well and I think most people would support it.


Anyways, this always happens in history.

We go to far in one direction and then go to far in the other direction and just end up getting more hurt.

I do not think going from exploitative capitalism to socialism is a good idea.

I think Capitalism works, and people must realize they are many forms of Capitalism. The current form is not the only form that has existed. Imo no other economic system has been shown to work well in the modern world.
What happened was that it was the role of govt ito blunt the harsh nature of Capitalism on society. The US govt failed at this.

You have it assbackwards: an information economy is not sustainable without an industry worth a damn. And there's a ton of overqualified, underemployed young people from middle-class backgrounds. But from the chronically poor...you want to know why the ghettos of America are in the shape they are in, it is because of a lack of jobs. Real, steady employment. Having a trade. Not employing people to create exports. A huge, resource-rich country like this that's been in a trade deficit for thirty years has some serious structural problems. They've tried injecting as much as they could into education and it doesn't fucking work, for cultural reasons yes, for psychosocial reasons that are completely disregarded in the theories of do-gooders yes (I'll get to that in the third paragraph), but also because not everybody can get work in an almost completely information-driven society. Humans and society are not cut out for it, not now anyway.

Plus, education is misunderstood in terms of its problems. Education is shitty for the poor, yes, but that's another issue altogether. For the middle class, the "information age" benefactors in theory, you now have more people going into college than not, diluting the usefulness of degrees while making them more and more expensive. Education being turned into a commodity is a seriously bad idea.

Back to the poor, though, look at it this way: you start training kids in the ghetto at 12 for a trade (hell, even get them cash as they are able to create/fix stuff) that won't get further shipped off to India or Mexico or China and you got productive kids that have an authority figure and productive thing to do that is giving them, their society and the people around them immediate benefits, while distracting them from dope-slinging or knocking girls up.

They do, but as a movement it is capable of far more nuance than, say, the Tea Party. That's because it as a movement has embraced a lot of tenets of direct democracy, while in the last three years I've heard a ton of "republic, not a democracy" quotes from the right.

Actually that is how England has been running their education system for years. I could have some aspects wrong, but from what I have been told, at around that age, schools determine your best areas in school and give you a few options for class courses to pursuit from there.

Fair point

I tend to ramble in these sorts of posts, but I really didn't mean for it to sound like that. What I do think is that people are missing a step, and that college education means little when there are no jobs. You need a culture built around steady employment being around before pushing college. Especially in poorer communities that are totally decimated socially, but now that even the middle class is in shabby shape...

So you suggest there should be more recall elections, electoral reform and plebiscites

Many have called for plebiscites here in Canada, but we have seen a lot of stupidity occur with such things in the US. Major reason why many do not want it here.