Your thoughts on the Occupy Movement?

[Nicole]

I'm sure you've seen the articles, the videos, and FB pages -

 MSNBC - Occupy Wall Street supporters demonstrate in cities from co...

Occupy Voting Booths 2012.

 

Click to here to join the Wall Street occupiers and demand real dem...

 

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-08-21/wall-street-aristocracy-go...

 

Occupy Toronto

 

 Occupy Philly protesters march to Liberty Bell | Deseret News

 

What do you think about it all?

[Balder]

The Nomi Prins blog is pretty disturbing.  Are any of you taking any steps to insulate or protect yourselves in the coming (what looks like increasingly inevitable) crash?  I'm thinking I might be better off eking out a living on my wife's family farm in the Himalayas than sticking around here...

[Balder]

 

[Mary W.]

Some fractal-ish pepper-spray humor: Sgt. Metapepperspray --

[kelamuni]

Pizza is a vegetable now. http://www.realchangenews.org/index.php/site/archives/6084/

 

[kelamuni]

Pepper spray is also a vegetable. http://campusprogress.org/articles/fox_news_pepper_spray_is_a_food_...

 

[kelamuni]

I have a two comments: one incredibly shallow, gratuitous and meaningless, and the other also shallow but consisting of a equally meaningless string of speculative self-indulgent terms I picked up while reading books on 20th century physics. 1. The implications of the pepper spray incident were actually foretold in an episode of Duck Dodgers in the 24th and a half century. 2. The fractal string theory ramifications of the implicate order contingencies/necessities of the pepper spraying incident were actually implied by Schrodinger's cat which stated, while attempting to choose between a bowl of Meow Mix cat food and a bowl of Whiskas cat food, that the students are actually sprayed and not sprayed at the same time, though not necessarily in a manner that is ontologically symmetrical. What does this have to do with politics and social theory? Fuck all. I just like to masturbate to the sound of my own voice.

[James Barrow]

Hi Bruce and Thomas,

Bruce, I'm not exactly planning on moving to Nepal, but I am going out this afternoon to stock up canned food - seriously. Thinking about barbed wire, shotguns, protection for my family, y'know, in case we lose the rule of law over here like we did for a few days in the summer, and that was when people still could get their cash out of the ATMs. God knows what's gonna happen when we can't.

 

Thomas, I just want to thank you for all the high quality info you've been linking us to. There is so much out there that I really appreciate you sifting through it!

I saw this earlier today. Bill Gross and Larry Fink, who are, apparently, respectively "the World’s Largest Bond Mutual Fund Manager and World’s Largest Asset Manager". It was remarkable to hear them both sympathising with OWS and seeming to really mean it. They both talked about how Capital has triumphed over Labour in the last few decades. They said they would vote for neither Rep or Dem as they are dissatisfied with both of them. They both said how they feel the financial community let a lot of people down, they said to expect a great anger coming from the younger generations and directed at the current generation "in power" as pensions are squeezed and retirement ages extended....Geez, they should be manning the OWS website!

[Mary W.]

I look forward to going through all the videos and links on this thread when my computer is in better shape and when I have fewer looming deadlines! For now: thanks, everyone, for all the information, disquieting though it be. (I'm especially loving the image of the credit card as butter-spreading utensil in the Adbuster's ad, Tom).

[Balder]

Absurd.  Elsewhere in the U.S. today, a woman pepper sprayed other shoppers (including children) in order to get them to back off and to preserve her place in line, apparently.

[Edward theurj Berge]

Speaking of risk, as some of you may know my employment is as an insurance underwriter, i.e., a risk analyst. What is happening in our company is that they too are hiding risk behind ever more cancerous growth models. We must grow at any cost, the back side being we are accepting poor risks for the sake of such growth. When I in my role say we should not write that bad piece of business, that maintaining a trend of so doing will ultimately cause us to go out of business (and I've lived through this with other insurance companies), the response is that I'm not getting with the program, I'm not being flexible enough, (I'm not drinking the Kool Aid). I see it in our loss ratio, ever increasing due to poor risk selection, which when over 100% means the end is near. The very profitable short-term gains in this approach are indeed self-destructive and leaves the insureds holding the bag when the end comes, in that no other company will write retroactive coverage over a failed company and they are left exposed. But a killing was made for the investors while it lasted and to hell with the insureds who invested in our trust.

[Balder]

That's disturbing, Ed.  Good on you for speaking out against this, though I expect it will lead (unfortunately) to the same unsatisfactory conditions (for you) that you left here in CA.

 

This story is also quite disturbing.

[Mary W.]

Re: The Naomi Wolf article linked to in Balder's above post:

Yeah. I have been wondering why Obama has said -- little? -- or nothing? -- about the Occupy protests.