(May the court note that at no point in this thread have I actually expressed dislike
for wealthy people, but instead for the practices that have allowed them to receive nearly all of the gains from economic growth while every other wage-earner, including just about the entire middle class, has to make do with the tiny remaining scraps.)
Elimination of student loans, anti-corporationism, increased minimum wage (in many cases) to untenable levels, higher income tax levels for the mythical 1%.
Interesting that none of these things are actually
anti-capitalist; they're all anti-corporatist. All of these proposals are simply redistributive measures within the system, they aren't total upheavals.
Those kind of things, often embodied by their violent protests.
Those "violent protests" that comprised a handful of actions across dozens of cities in the past 15 months.
Don't quite get what you're saying here.
You never heard anything about proposals to jail bank CEOs and/or break up the TBTF banks?
It specifically highlights and criticises people simply for being wealthy (on the basis that if you're in the 1% you're part of the problem. It's tied directly to wealth).
It specifically highlights the people who've disproportionately benefited from economic growth for 30 years above and beyond what other macroeconomic factors would explain? Well damn, they're extremists on the scale of the Communists of old!
Are politicians in the 1%? Are the members of the general public who spent what they didn't have and took on mortgages they probably couldn't pay? Cos they're in there too. Laying the sole blame for the economic crisis at the hands of the bankers (who make up I think c.15% of the "1%", making them the 0.15%) is an exercise in hypocrisy
Politicians who were given generous campaign contributions by those same bankers to put favourable policy into place and then socialize their losses are in the 1%, yes.
And the bolded is rather disingenuous unless you pretend that every member of the general public had the necessary tools to be able to know if they were getting screwed on their mortgages, and that the investment banking practices that
specifically caused the crisis were not enabled by banker-lobbied laws such as CFMA-00.
The 1% pay masses of income tax. The 1% help fund hundreds of public sector bodies. Many of the 1% (indeed, probably the majority) lead productive and healthy lives whereby they seek to help and assist others.
In the former case, given current levels of income inequality being at their worst point since 1927, it clearly isn't enough; in the latter case, it's kind of disingenuous to say this while ignoring the fact that many of them just voted for someone committed to
defunding most of those same public-sector bodies.
Occupy are an embarrassment to political activism. A disparate (often violent) group with no real collective agenda shooting at random targets in the hope they might connect, whilst at the same time asking for more and more government to "help" us.
Please tell me how many US labour rights victories were won by groups who were not, at some point in the struggle for that victory, disparate and/or violent. (Hint: almost none of them.)
Please also tell me how they don't have a "real collective agenda" when you just named four supposed "real collective" policy goals.
Please also tell me why this nebulous "more and more government" is a problem, specifically, without referring to government debt.
I assume you don't support people who work hard to earn a respectable amount of cash?
I assume you aren't actually going to be intellectually honest at any point in this thread, so I'll only say this:
There's hard-working people, and then there's people gaining a disproportionate return relative to the amount of productivity they're actually responsible for, and most of these income and wealth gains over the last 30 years are concentrated among the latter group of people.
