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Re: Occupy Wallstreet
Old 11-25-2011, 05:37 PM   #57
Dylflon
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Default Re: Occupy Wallstreet

Quote:
I was trying to show that alleviating some laws because some people think it is right to do so is a slippery slope. The reason why Professor alluded to tyranny is because history is riddled with examples where this happens (often with original good intentions). I agree the prospect of the United States falling into tyranny is basically zero, but it is an important historical point that we shouldn't forget.

I also was trying to understand the crux of what you're saying. These discussions tend to get rather confusing and difficult to follow, so I only wanted to focus on a few points.
I just got annoyed by the tyranny bit because the invasion of corporate property by protesters couldn't lead to tyranny. It's only the circumvention of laws by the government that can do that.


Quote:
I would generally agree with that, but I would add the caveat that I think the government is also culpable in addition to Wall Street, and that just blaming "Wall Street" is probably an unfair generalization (it was more so likely the malicious intent of a few, and the ignorance of many). The core problem is that who was responsible and what exactly happened is extremely complicated (this is also why it happened in the first place). Loans that homeowners had no chance of paying back were treated as AAA bonds, and were then re-packaged, packaged again, even sometimes once more, into pools of mortgage loans (mortgage-backed securities). When you have so many financial layers of re-packaging (aka. a creative way of hiding what the underlying asset infact is, and its risk-level), things simply become way too complicated to understand what is truly going on any more. When you couple this with the fact that the majority of these securities resided in major commercial banks, you have an extremely dangerous consolidation risk.
The government is responsible in that it deregulated the banks. While I believe that this was a horrifying and reckless mistake, more blame does fall to the financial institutions. The guy who gave the crazy person the gun is partially responsible; just not as responsible as the crazy guy who did the shooting.

However, I will agree that more focus should be put on the political system that allowed this to happen.


Quote:
See, I think this is maybe the crux of what we're trying to talk about. I'm not disagreeing over the message of the movement (I agree that increasing inequality is a very serious and major systemic issue that needs to be dealt with), but the method of the movement -- I just don't think it's effective. The problem with these kinds of protests is that they rarely convert anyone. The protest eventually becomes more concerned and focused on the preservation of the protest over the actual message. This ends in the protest re-empowering itself and converting hardly anyone to its message.
When you have to go into survival mode to keep your protest from being disbanded, that should tell you a lot about the current situation.

People need to be publicly upset in a way that forces politicians to take notice. I think we know that it doesn't matter what party is in power. The system is broken in a way that we can't trust politicians to fix on their own. Especially since at the heart of the problem is the greed and short-sightedness of the very politicians we rely on to make things better.
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