Occupy wall street is a good movement run by people who were hurt badly by the recession.

If the movement is young, it's because the young, lacking the positions of influence, were hurt the most.

People are starting to realize that the system is designed to maintain its structure, not to provide "merit opportunities" to all.  Capitalism as meritocracy is a sham.  The two party system is a swindle.

Scientific (Marxist) revolution is the only solution.

By the way, the days of racially based populism in the USA are over.

In today's corporate environment, if you are suspected of being "racist," you lose your job. It is a fact that now minorities benefit from affirmative action. While some whites may benefit from networking connections with other whites, ALL minorities benefit from affirmative action.

Capitalism has progressed to globalization. Now the white man is getting screwed.

Yeah, because white upper middle class college graduates were the hardest hit by the recession ...

Correct.

The stats do confirm exactly that. That college students face the same unemployment but they have debt and people who do not have degrees don't have debt.

20% of 2011 college graduates have NO job, and debt.

47% of employed people are underemployed, working part time or out of their field.

So yes, college people were hit the worst, and young people were hit the worse, because older people are often managers and they can shift the blame downwards to absolve themselves from the responsibility of their own mistake.

So yes, no sarcasm, that is correct.

Regarding the protesters being white, first of all not everywhere, in Philadelphia there are more black protestors, but Whites are perhaps more driven to succeed than other races.

The Occupy Movement IS working. It's done something that nothing else has been able to do: shift the news media away from the deficit and onto real, current, pressing problems like income inequality. The media typically ignores these things. Heck, they ignored the Occupy Wall Street protests until the police started pepper spraying people on video. Anyone remember the 100,000+ Union march that happened last year in New York? Yeah, me neither, because it was completely ignored.

The Occupy movement has been unwilling to go away, and by its very nature it can be very difficult to ignore, because it's not only constantly present in cities across the world, but it's gotten bigger.

The "Day of Action" that happened after the Zucotti Park eviction proved as much that this movement isn't going anywhere. It's preaching popular ideas. Frankly, I think the evictions may be for the best, because as they are the "Occupations" began to cause problems. Police began placing vagrants and drunks in the protest, a few shootings that had nothing to do with Occupy happened near a few and got connected to the protests, we have police pepper spraying and beating people, and we have provacatuers and violent elements manifesting themselves within the movement. The Occupation needs to move out of the streets and into office spaces, and start using the streets for planned, co-ordinated protests.Much like the day of action that happened after the Zucotti eviction.

<table class="mceItemTable" style="width: 90%;" border="0"><tbody><tr><td><b>austin2359 said:</b><br><p>
<p>Scientific (Marxist) revolution is the only solution.</p></td></tr></tbody></table><p><br><br></p>

Its this kind of talk that only hurts the movement. Marxism isn't the solution. We just need to make our capitalistic system a more balanced play field, like it was before the 80s.

How is the deficit not a real problem. Your country has one of the highest debt loads in history, the highest since WW2... The big difference is that there will be no 1-2 decades of strong economic growth in the future (50's and 60's).
We will have to physically start reducing the deficit and frankly the US is not politically mature enough for that to ever happen.

Frankly you know what is going to happen, all of these issues about spending more about the poor will never happen, when the shit hits the fan in the future as we never adressed the problem.

In Canada, we did and it frankly altered the history of the country forever.

Why is it that the people who like to claim that money isn't everything, are so obsessed with getting equal pay?

Why is it that many on the left, who say they stand for equality, only care about one element of equality - monetary. Why, to them, is everything about money?

If I have a close family, good friends, a fulfilling job or hobby, and make enough money to survive (and usually, a little more), why do I care that the man down the road should have 6 BMWs on their drive? Sure, I can aspire to be like him, but at no point should I want to take that away from him, or be jealous of him.

And, you know, it's usually the people like that who end up doing better in this world. My parents had it hard at the start - for many years my dad worked in a factory, for less than minimum wage (before minimum wage laws were introduced in 1998, the job was paying less than that law specified), for 10 hours a day, 6 days a week.

I grew up on clothes bought from charity shops, and my dad drove a car that the Trotter brothers would be ashamed of. At no point were my parents angry with the system, at no point did they resent the rich, and (despite being tired), they were happy and loving. They always refused any help from family, and never owed any debt (except a mortgage - which were always within reasonable bounds of income).

Of course, my dad's hard work and good attitude was recognised, and he slowly got promoted up through the company. It got to the point where his income was high enough for him to start buying shares in the company. He now is in the highest position within the company, and owns 66% of it. He also has joint investments in products with various other companies. As me and my brothers grew older, my mum also moved into the work place. My dad usually works 4 days a week, and finishes early at least once or twice. We spend a month+ a year on holiday in different countries. My parents have tens of thousands of pounds in savings, and my dad has recently set up his pension so that, when he comes to retirement, he'll have at least £1m pension.

The point of this story is - capitalism works best for those who expect nothing from it, those who don't think they are entitled to anything, those who don't try to have more than they earned (either through welfare, or excessive debts). Also, that wealth isn't all that important, as long as you have security. Honestly, in the latter years of growing up, the best thing about my parent's position, was that I essentially had two parents that worked part time. That mattered far more than the money.

It's telling that many of my dad's employees were already working there when my dad started. Why were they not promoted over him? Attitude and work ethic.

My parents story is like that.

Instead of sulking and never doing anything with their lives like the OWS people, they worked hard as they had a family that depended on them.

I do agree times have changed, before you could work hard and get a better life, but it is harder in today's world.

Upward mobility is way down from the past.

The deficit is a real problem. But its not a CURRENT problem.

Every economist under is telling the government to spend money NOW, and worry about paying down the deficit later once we're out of the recession. The government is one of the single biggest spenders in the US economy. When the government spends money, like any entity that spends money, it creates demand and jobs. Its not like we don't have things to spend money on either. Doing things like improving our infrastructure and making investments in green energy (reminder: Solyndra was funded under Bush's watch and supported by many Republicans as well as democrats. It also made up only one percent of the total funds going to Green Energy) WILL create jobs, and in the case of certain infrastructure projects such as a railway system, would create permanent jobs such as railway maintinence, etc.

We will have to pay down our deficit. But a good way of doing that is by getting out of this recession (which would increase consumer spending and thus increase government revenue), ending two trillion dollar ways (ones already ending, though Republican are refusing to count that as savings), and ending the Bush tax cuts. These three things I just listed are the cause of half of our deficit. Of course, we can't end the tax cuts in the middle of a recession, just like we shouldn't cut spending in the middle of a recession, because both would hurt the economy. We also need to cut discretionary spending and military spending (just cutting that down to 2007 levels would save us a trillion over a decade) and fix medicare (purposefully vague on this because this is a whole issue in and of itself. Needless to say I don't support vouchers, I do support medicare for all, which would be cheaper by virtue of having a much larger, more healthy group of people to draw money from).

There's more I'd like to say, but I've things to do. I am actually fairly well off, I might add. You don't have to be poor or lazy to support this movement. You just have to have the perspective that the system is screwed up. Oddly I didn't even touch on that here.


"
Regarding the protesters being white, first of all not everywhere, in Philadelphia there are more black protestors, but Whites are perhaps more driven to succeed than other races."


And dude, please. This is racist. Whites are no more "driven to suceed" than other races. I know some pretty lazy whites.

Old dirty hippies talking.