Occupy Wall Street? Nutbars.

[The Old Fogducker]

Well, this exchange will no doubt get Kevin O'Leary fired from the State-Owned Broadcaster as O'Leary takes an "Occupy Wall Street" participant to task after he quotes Karl Marx ..... Senior Managers of the Communist Broadcasting Corporation will never stand for a quoter of Karl Marx being denigrated on the public funded airwaves. Even the janitorial staff of the cafeteria will likely snub the Capitalist Pig O'Leary and spit in his food.

http://www.cbc.ca/video/#/News/TV_Shows ... 2149202610

I say ..... "Well done Kevin .... Bravo .... Bravo! Encore, encore!"

The Old Fogducker

[azimuthaviation]

Did you watch the same interview I did? O'Leary just dished out some cheap insult and didnt respond to Hedges well made points. Then suggested that America would not be able to function, people will not have cars to drive without Goldman Sachs, Citibank, Wells Fargo??

How much have you had to drink tonight? He didnt quote Karl Marx. You just heard the word Karl Marx coming from one side, and nutbar coming from the other and filled in the rest?

[. ._]

OFD, I say watch the movie "Inside Job", and get back to us.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1645089/

[niss]

So protesting is only a good thing if you are an oppressed Arab, or a Tea Partier.....got it..

[The Old Fogducker]

No need to consider your viewpoints gentlemen ..... as Stephan Dion said in the House of Commons .... "The debate is over." The clown being interviewed was an out of touch with reality Bozo who only made sense if you're a disgruntled, bomb-making anarchist that has voluntarily checked himself out of any possiblity of riding the train of opportunity that departs hourly from the station in mainstream society for the counter-culture, and have not yet snapped back to functioning in the real world.

They can protest all they want Niss .... hundreds of thousands of "our people" died for that right. This particular group of professional protestors just look, act, and smell like losers following an ideology that will always ensure they are on the outside of success.

OFD

[Sulako]

OFD: Very little of what you said is accurate, and I find it hard to have a discussion with someone who creates things to suit their opinion. However, I will try to pass a quick point along:

It's a grass-roots movement with no real ideology other than "How come nobody from Wall St. is in jail 3 years after they stole hundreds of billions of dollars from our economy".

I happen to think they have a pretty valid point.

Oh, and buddy didn't quote Marx. So there's that.

[The Old Fogducker]

So what was that "As Karl Marx understood ..... " drivel at approximately 2:50 into the interview as he is trashing capitalism, ... the need to break the backs of corporations ... etc. Sounds like the same type of crud I used to hear for hours and hours on end broadcast by Radio Moscow, Radio Peking, and Radio Havanna Cuba. The only effect listening to peasants describing how wonderful life was on the collective while they were using an adze to hand carve a hoe handle, was to cause me to turn the other way from their desired direction, and laugh myself silly at them and anyone who thought like them.

I rejected that viewpoint then, and have not heard anything sufficiently compelling to cause me to reconsider my position ever since.

So let me add a little info from none other than John Lennon as espoused in "Revolution" from The White Album ...

http://youtu.be/KrkwgTBrW78

You say you want a revolution,

well, you know,

We all want to change the world

You tell me that it's evolution,

well, you know,

We all want to change the world

But when you talk about destruction,

Don't you know that you can count me out (in)

Don't you know it's gonna be all right,

Don't you know it's gonna be all right

Don't you know it's gonna be all right, Ah

You say you got a real solution,

well, you know,

We'd all love to see the plan

You ask me for a contribution,

well, you know,

We're doing what we can

But when you want money for people with minds that hate

All I can tell is brother you have to wait

Don't you know it's gonna be all right,

Don't you know it's gonna be all right

Don't you know it's gonna be all right, Ah

You say you'll change the constitution,

well, you know,

We all want to change your head

You tell me it's the institution,

well, you know,

You better free you mind instead

But if you go carrying pictures of chairman Mao,

You ain't going to make it with anyone anyhow

Don't you know it's gonna be all right,

Don't you know it's gonna be all right

Don't you know it's gonna be all right,

Ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah

All right, all right, all right, all right, all right,

All right, all right, all right, all right

Ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah,

all right,

all right



Oh, and a final point ... I didn't post to have a discussion with you Sulako, I posted to express my point of view. For greater clarity on that position, you may think of me as being John Cleese in "The Argument Sketch." http://youtu.be/teMlv3ripSM

OFD

[Rockie]

*self-edited because it would only further enrage Foggy.*

[Sulako]

This is 40 years later, with different people under different circumstances. These aren't just hippies protesting, in fact it's mostly regular people who can't find work as a result of the Wall St-induced recession, or who find themselves broke after having their savings stolen by Wall Street.

The guy wasn't trashing capitalism, he's saying that the current system has clearly been perverted by a very few super-rich elites, and it's time for a reboot. Nobody is suggesting communism as an alternative, they are suggesting that the current system is broken and it's time to fix it, this time with appropriate checks and balances so that people in Wall Street can't trash 20% of the entire wealth of the country again.

Wall Street adds nothing - they don't create anything, they just gamble with other people's money. With one US political party entirely owned by Wall Street and the other one pandering to them anyway, rich bankers have had too much influence for too long, and we are left paying the bills for their irresponsible behavior and greed.

And again, why haven't any corporate execs from Goldman Sachs etc gone to jail? If you are poor and you steal $100 from a bank you can get 15 years in jail...

[altiplano]

Nutbar.

[photofly]

Wall Street adds nothing - they don't create anything, they just gamble with other people's money.

You clearly don't understand the point of Wall Street.

Let's say you want to build a factory to make something, that you can sell. Where are you going to get the money to build that factory?

[Rockie]

Wall Street exists to enrich Wall Street, not build factories. They do that in part by occasionally providing capital to build factories which provides jobs and economic activity, but they aren't doing much of that these days. The economic disaster that's been plaguing this planet for the last few years took a long time to create, and they created it by getting far too clever with their risky derivatives and mortgage lending in order to enrich themselves even faster. The house of cards inevitably crumbled, tax payers the world over bailed them out, and the same clowns are still in charge preventing any substantial change to the way they do things.

[. ._]

That's not totally true. They also facilitate cocaine smuggling thus creating more flying jobs.

Anyone need some DC-9 time?

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-06-2 ... -deal.html

And for laundering $378 BILLION, they get fined $160 MILLION.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142 ... 84290.html

The new capitalist in me tells me Wachovia/Wells Fargo would be a great stock to buy if they can pull returns like this, but my old social justice self tells me this can't be good for society.

[photofly]

Wall Street exists to enrich Wall Street, not build factories.

By the same token you have a job only to enrich yourself. How self-obsessed and selfish you are to want to earn money. You should fly (or do whatever else you do) for free, for the benefit of humanity. If you won't I am going to have a thousand people come to camp on your lawn and shut your operation down for good.

Moving on the from the neo-marxist claptrap, if wall street didn't exist, factories wouldn't get built. That is why Wall Street exists, and that is its purpose.

[Rockie]

By the same token you have a job only to enrich yourself

If I wanted to enrich myself what the heck am I doing flying for a living?

[photofly]

Take a voluntary salary cut then tell me you're not there for self-enrichment. You just don't happen to be very good at it.

[Siddley Hawker]

[Rockie]

Take a voluntary salary cut then tell me you're not there for self-enrichment. You just don't happen to be very good at it.

Air Canada pilots reluctantly agreed to a large pay cut almost 10 years ago and haven't seen a penny of it back since. They've also given up their pension indexing, and were on the brink of giving up their pension altogether until saner heads prevailed.

Corporate management has been doing quite well though.

I like your signature by the way. Made me laugh.

[iflyforpie]

I don't have any problem with capitalism. I don't have a problem with large corporations. I don't mind making somebody rich if they can provide a product or service that enriches my life.

So yes, I've given a fair share of my paycheque to large corporations like Nikon, Apple, Nintendo, Ford, Air Canada, WestJet, and the evil empire of WalMart over the years.

But the thing is these guys are contributing to society. They provide jobs, they increase the quality of life, they purchase things from other companies whether it be raw materials, components, products, or services.

There are the people with lots of money too. The venture capitalists and investors. How many great and wonderful companies have been formed with help from people with large amounts of money who lent them some venture capital or jumped on an IPO? I don't have any problem with people who have lots of money.

But there are a whole pile of people who don't contribute anything to society. On the surface they do, sure. A stock broker might be a little more market savvy than me. A real estate agent might by more 'market' savvy than me as well. But recent events have proved that their guesses were worse than mine primarily because their well being required people to give them large amounts of money while the people's well being might have been better to hang on to it. For the most part these people have none of their own worth on the line and very little accountability to what they do.

All of these middle men need to go away. You don't need a real estate agent to buy and sell a house. You shouldn't need a middle man to invest. These are people who are using a system and FUD to at best make a buck off the unwary and at worst to rob them blind.

[Colonel Sanders]

Democracy and capitalism isn't working very well for an awful lot of people. You might choose to ridicule them, but that won't make them go away.

I might be wrong, but we are possibly witnessing the disappearance of the middle class. You're either at the top of the heap, or the bottom. The people on Wall St are pretty happy with their life at the top, but don't expect that to make the people at the bottom very pleased.

[Rockie]

For a society and its economy to work money has to flow both up and down. Of course the industrialists and financial industry that deals with big sums are going to get rich and that's natural. But money has to flow down as well or the whole system eventually crumbles.

Money hasn't been flowing down in recent years, only up. Incomes have stagnated or gone down unless you are in the top percentile where they have skyrocketed. The disparity between top and bottom has never been higher, and has never before been diverging at a faster rate. The current economy is built on debt as more money that the bottom 90% doesn't have is borrowed to pass up the line.

It is unsustainable as we are finally finding out.

That's the root cause of the Occupy Wall Street movement, they just haven't been very coherent in making their point. But it has legs obviously and they're getting better.

[photofly]

You don't need a real estate agent to buy and sell a house.

No, you don't. Which means that they must offer a valuable service for people who choose to use them. The last real estate agent I used spent nine months researching properties, alerting me to ones that she thought were suitable, then many hours of her time (and her husband's time) driving out to meet me at them and show me around.

If I were she, and you suggested to me that I "have none of [my] own worth" I would be rather pissed at you.

[iflyforpie]

If I were she, and you suggested to me that I "have none of [my] own worth" I would be rather pissed at you.

It is entirely different when you are buying a house vs selling one. I have done both numerous times. $10,000 or $15,000 for somebody to answer a phone and show a property, and list a property (which can be done on the internet) is ridiculous. What is showing half a dozen properties for a few minutes each time compared to half a real-estate commission?

Instead, you could do like people buy everything else and go on Property Guys or Kijiji, go yourself to see a property, and probably save yourself several thousand dollars because the place can be listed for less.

I am not saying all realtors are not nice people or just trying to rip you off. I am saying that they are a vocation who's time has passed and certainly where I live they were a large part of the collapse of the real estate market because they were too greedy.

[crazy_aviator]

In a democratic society, we, the people are the "government" We elect folks to rule in our behalf , or so we would like to think of this utopian thought process as real life !! Reality check folks. Mostly today, politicians get elected on a popolar vote, and you need to feed the masses to get relected. Consider the real estate fiasco and the american way of every man their own home and car out front. When the people demand these things, they get them. Want a house without a good job or money in the bank ,you can have it! Want a cradle to grave health care system and STILL pollute your bodies and minds with shitty food, drugs and anxiety? you can have them! Want to make the eauivalent of 74.00/hr at GM and incredible benefits for LESS work ? you can have it !! FOLKS, wake up, the greed at the top is ALSO at the bottom !!

[iflyforpie]

FOLKS, wake up, the greed at the top is ALSO at the bottom !!

Yes, this is also true. Just look at the British Unions back in the 1970s that basically held corporations hostage with labour disputes until they were either nationalized or bankrupted.