You don’t care about money?
Ok then, $5000.
Hardly. Voting and petitions have long been used to change this country. If you want to stop getting screwed by your employees stop paying them, fire them , get new ones in to do the job and make sure they know they won’t get their money unless they do their job right. Its rather simple and with all of this technology today its even more simple. Social networking is a valuable tool for reform if used right. Protesting the way they are doing it is an archaic form it does nothing now except give the media something to jabber about. A few thousand people across the country protesting does not represent the millions sitting on their butts watching TV, playing with their puters , talking on twitter, facebook etc. If you want change do it right.
UPF, I mentioned Oppression because that is what the protesters had on their signs. They were claiming oppression and its just plain stupid.
sorry but the corporations already own the government entirely. We passed that point like 25 years ago. please try again.
Oh so when you elect your state representatives you have no say? or how about your state constitution have you read that? do you understand that you voluntarily become a US citizen by having a SS number, by using federally funded instutions? Did you know that you don’t have to? Did you know that the federal Gover’t can only be invited into your state they cannot enter without direct permission? The federal Govt’ is its own country for all intents and purposes. You become a citizen by their law when you uses their resources. Just how much Gov’t is taught in school these days? Obviously not enough. You and yours just have to use your state level govt’ to change things.
sorry but the population owns the government not the other way around. please try again.
edit: To distinguish from my last point. The population owns the government physically. The corporations own the government monetarily. Dead currency vs. Violence: see which one wins.
With that attitude and the obvious defeatist attitude of course there will be no change. Those corpororations depend upon your dollar, if you don’t give it to them , then what happens?
Well, the occupy movement is indeed about contradicting and sidestepping the corporate system and its enablers, the latest being that stupid chancellor at UC Davis… and of course, Michael Bloomberg… among many many others. OWS is about connectedness and community. That the 1%ers are so afraid of OWSers is interesting and irrational because the movement shows what happens when connectedness and humanity work to show us humans what we’re really all about.
I don’t see that they are afraid of anyone or anything. The protests are mere speed bumps. They are not hitting the 1% where they can feel it. where are the national boycotts? Where is the selling of their stocks from 401ks? Etc etc. you can’t hurt the corporations at all by saying they are bad, you have to stop using their products and owning a part of them.
Here here!
They’re crapping their pants right now. Most of the chaos factors are just waiting for something to trigger the actual insurgency. Meanwhile, we come and post here in patient anticipation and to divert ourselves.
Oops… hehehe
The hard issues of address are extremely complicated, yet in desperate need of neglected attention by the United States representatives.
United States Code, Title 12
Specifically:
Sec. 21 - Amend to require current National Banks which were previously facilitated under Sec. 21 to be thereafter reviewed by the Comptroller of the Currency into restructure which appeases the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System for acquisition into Chapter 3 of the same Title.
Sec. 321 - Amend to require all banking institutions to become members of the Federal Reserve System, and no longer an option. All National Banks subsequently become State Banks, Banking Associations, Federal Reserve Banks, or Trust Companies, and as such become regulated by Title 12, Chapter 3, Federal Reserve System.
Sec. 324 - Update penalty values for falsified or erroneous information.
Sec. 326 - Remove financial burden of bank to Federal Reserve for examinations and establish regular fiscal examination of all Banks (members of system) and conducted in regular rotation, not bound by fiscal rollover dates, by a new division of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System for exclusively such action and not to be tasked with any further responsibilities than those established in Sec. 326 alone.
Sec. 328 - Repeal
Sec. 329 - Amend to change requirement of capital stock to require either capital stock or that capital stock of party enterprising for membership as a bank to have been found as successful potential, by the Comptroller of Currency, in short term growth after start-up.
Sec. 341 - Amend to remove First and Second powers (permissions to become corporation) and amend Fourth power to only be permissible as a specific natural person or persons that is the direct representative, or representative board of directors on behalf of the shareholders, of rights , property, and identity of the bank in the given court of law or equity.
Sec. 352 - Amend to state that the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System will…rather than “may”.
Sec. 374a - Update penalty for violation
United States Code, Title 1
Sec. 1 - Amend to remove corporations, companies, associations, firms, partnerships, and joint stock companies from the inclusion of “person” or “whoever”, and replace with a requirement that such identities must list natural persons or person of whom is the direct identity and holder of natural rights of the entity corporation, company, association, firm, partnership, or joint stock company.
If you translate the protests into applicable action within legislation, then this is what it would translate to in essence.
It is a task of which no simple address is achievable by the imagination.
Instead, it would consume the senate and congress alike for considerable time and likely be the subject of debate and readdress for the better part of the coming decade should such actions be taken.
It was a given that the committee was going to fail it was set up to do so. No one is crapping their pants because the wealthiest still have their products being bought by us. Paying taxes won’t even dent their fortune. all can live in the height of luxury for the rest of their lives as can their kids and grandkids and great grandkids. Oh my they might lose a billion or two, such a shame when they have 10 times that much in future revenue and in accounts. If the Gov’t were to come to me and say that they were taking half of my 8 billion dollars i would be fine it might hurt a tad but, really? seriously I still have 4 billion dollars… How could i really be hurt?? Noone is crapping their pants, as long as we are there to purchase things from them. period.
online.wsj.com/article/AP72d08a2 … 8f471.html
youtube.com/watch?v=DJIx-khmKJ0
Oh my!
Who said people are waking up?
read… the… OP…
goddamnit
By the way, anybody interested in a Karl Marx pin for $3?
Good way to get funding
These guys wouldnt give a homeless kid a nickel for his grandma
To get slightly back on track here Pezer, here is a nice short article written by Slavoj Žižek with regard to the occupy protests and to what they are protesting:
Democracy is the enemy
Slavoj Žižek 28 October 2011 .Tags: protests
The protests on Wall Street and at St Paul’s Cathedral are similar, Anne Applebaum wrote in the Washington Post, ‘in their lack of focus, in their inchoate nature, and above all in their refusal to engage with existing democratic institutions’. ‘Unlike the Egyptians in Tahrir Square,’ she went on, ‘to whom the London and New York protesters openly (and ridiculously) compare themselves, we have democratic institutions.’
Once you have reduced the Tahrir Square protests to a call for Western-style democracy, as Applebaum does, of course it becomes ridiculous to compare the Wall Street protests with the events in Egypt: how can protesters in the West demand what they already have? What she blocks from view is the possibility of a general discontent with the global capitalist system which takes on different forms here or there.
‘Yet in one sense,’ she conceded, ‘the international Occupy movement’s failure to produce sound legislative proposals is understandable: both the sources of the global economic crisis and the solutions to it lie, by definition, outside the competence of local and national politicians.’ She is forced to the conclusion that ‘globalisation has clearly begun to undermine the legitimacy of Western democracies.’ This is precisely what the protesters are drawing attention to: that global capitalism undermines democracy. The logical further conclusion is that we should start thinking about how to expand democracy beyond its current form, based on multi-party nation-states, which has proved incapable of managing the destructive consequences of economic life. Instead of making this step, however, Applebaum shifts the blame onto the protesters themselves for raising these issues:
[list]‘Global’ activists, if they are not careful, will accelerate that decline. Protesters in London shout: ‘We need to have a process!’ Well, they already have a process: it’s called the British political system. And if they don’t figure out how to use it, they’ll simply weaken it further.
So, Applebaum’s argument appears to be that since the global economy is outside the scope of democratic politics, any attempt to expand democracy to manage it will accelerate the decline of democracy. What, then, are we supposed to do? Continue engaging, it seems, in a political system which, according to her own account, cannot do the job.
There is no shortage of anti-capitalist critique at the moment: we are awash with stories about the companies ruthlessly polluting our environment, the bankers raking in fat bonuses while their banks are saved by public money, the sweatshops where children work overtime making cheap clothes for high-street outlets. There is a catch, however. The assumption is that the fight against these excesses should take place in the familiar liberal-democratic frame. The (explicit or implied) goal is to democratise capitalism, to extend democratic control over the global economy, through the pressure of media exposure, parliamentary inquiries, harsher laws, police investigations etc. What goes unquestioned is the institutional framework of the bourgeois democratic state. This remains sacrosanct even in the most radical forms of ‘ethical anti-capitalism’ – the Porto Allegre forum, the Seattle movement and so on.
Here, Marx’s key insight remains as pertinent today as it ever was: the question of freedom should not be located primarily in the political sphere – i.e. in such things as free elections, an independent judiciary, a free press, respect for human rights. Real freedom resides in the ‘apolitical’ network of social relations, from the market to the family, where the change needed in order to make improvements is not political reform, but a change in the social relations of production. We do not vote concerning who owns what, or about the relations between workers in a factory. Such things are left to processes outside the sphere of the political, and it is an illusion that one can change them by ‘extending’ democracy: say, by setting up ‘democratic’ banks under the people’s control. Radical changes in this domain should be made outside the sphere of such democratic devices as legal rights etc. They have a positive role to play, of course, but it must be borne in mind that democratic mechanisms are part of a bourgeois-state apparatus that is designed to ensure the undisturbed functioning of capitalist reproduction. Badiou was right to say that the name of the ultimate enemy today is not capitalism, empire, exploitation or anything of the kind, but democracy: it is the ‘democratic illusion’, the acceptance of democratic mechanisms as the only legitimate means of change, which prevents a genuine transformation in capitalist relations.
The Wall Street protests are just a beginning, but one has to begin this way, with a formal gesture of rejection which is more important than its positive content, for only such a gesture can open up the space for new content. So we should not be distracted by the question: ‘But what do you want?’ This is the question addressed by male authority to the hysterical woman: ‘All your whining and complaining – do you have any idea what you really want?’ In psychoanalytic terms, the protests are a hysterical outburst that provokes the master, undermining his authority, and the master’s question – ‘But what do you want?’ – disguises its subtext: ‘Answer me in my own terms or shut up!’ So far, the protesters have done well to avoid exposing themselves to the criticism that Lacan levelled at the students of 1968: ‘As revolutionaries, you are hysterics who demand a new master. You will get one.’
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This then is sort of contra your point here with respect to Guattari, if I may lift out a line from the above article: ‘…but one has to begin this way, with a formal gesture of rejection which is more important than its positive content, for only such a gesture can open up the space for new content.’
System’s reappropriate, marginalize and diffuse potentials for change, revolutionary or less extreme - yet this is no argument against these potentials themselves. The extent of their potentials being made to be largely ineffective is a less than significant point when it comes to the question of whether or not these acts of resistance are justified and/or necessary in themselves.
that Lacan levelled at the students of 1968: ‘As revolutionaries, you are hysterics who demand a new master. You will get one.’
*Jaw drops. I’ve gotta get me some Lacan.
I think this is where I agree with your disagreement, but only in the very long run. And in the long run, it won’t be the “Occupy Movement” that will be remembered as the trigger, if it is even part of the larger movement that leads to the amount of change you, me and Zizek are talking about. What will be remembered is the historical turning point of which the “Occupy Movement” is one of the subtler and more subdued simptoms. The dip in the global economy combined with a previously begun global political overhaul in the face of the even previous melt-down of the Cold War scheme, which was very rigid, is what will likely be remembered.
The reason the “Occupy Wall Street” movement obviously disgusts me beyond all of what I just said is that it is a protest framed in the same frame as the Egyptian and other, less globaly pertinent protests, but it is being carried out by a society that is well beyond the capacity to deeply question its masters, let alone the concept of having masters. And even those other protests are talking way bigger in ideology than in reality.