Wall Street Protests

[Kasz216]

HappySqurriel said:

forest-spirit said:
I'm not surprised to see these protests around the world. People have had enough. Many have lost their savings, jobs or even homes and unemployment has skyrocketed making it tough to get a new job quickly enough. It's not like all of them lost their jobs because they were doing a bad job, it's just that their companies no longer could afford them so they had to go. That may feel unfair but that's not the biggest issue here.
The problem is that while they struggle to get their lives back on track they see how CEO's and other higher-ups gets millions in bonuses even when their companies is making losses and have to fire people! People who have run their companies into the ground or have abused their positions for own gain is getting millions in parachutes! Unlike most people they get rewarded for failing!

Sometimes the government steps in and injects money into the companies but where does that money go? On several occasions companies in that situation has later paid out millions in bonuses to the higher-ups, even though they were recently saved by the government! If an individual did that you'd call him an unresponsible idiot. But the big guys gets away with it, and that pisses people off.

Why people are upset is perfectly reasonable (and it is shared by people of all political affiliations), what and how they complain about is somewhat moronic and ironic (posting an angry message about corporate greed and poverty on Twitter on your $600 tablet created by Apple that is tethered to your $500 iPhone created by Apple using your $50+/month cell phone plan from Verizon while wearing $1,000+ in designer clothing), and their solutions seem to be the one thing that will ensure that the problem will get worse.

Corporations and unions spend so much money lobbying the government to buy influence with it because the government has become so large and powerful. If the government didn’t have the means to bailout these companies, to subsidize these companies through poorly thought out stimulus packages, to offer wavers to poorly thought out laws, or to create regulations specifically to limit competition the corporations would see no value in buying influence from the government. By expanding the role of government and making it more powerful all these protestors would be doing is increasing the necessity for corporations to buy influence from the government and making it more likely that corporations will be bailed out in the future.

Espiecally bad when you consider just how unethical Apple is compaired to most companies. They're one of the worst.