Occupy Wall Street, London and Evereywhere Else

Occupy Sacramento is a bit smaller now with the "colder" weather, but they're still camping out in the park across from City Hall.

Im not sure, but I'd put the "three" down as:Buz
Artemis
CoyoteBut I think we have others, don't we? I don't remember if I've ever seen a political opinion from ICANT...

Often it's not even bad advice, AE. A person graduating with a Bachelor of Science degree any time in the past 3 years or so would have had a lot of trouble finding employment - millions of people, many of them with the same degrees and experience were being laid off from their existing positions and even they haven't all been able to find work yet.Those who have found work have often found it working minimum-wage jobs where their degrees are irrelevant in food service, retail, etc.Sometimes you really can do everything right and still get screwed over.And what happens? More and more people without jobs. Without jobs, those people apply for unemployment insurance, food stamps, and other government assistance, draining public coffers. Without jobs, they pay less taxes as they buy less (local and state governments often rely heavily on sales tax) and make less money (meaning they often won;t pay any income tax because they literally can't afford to pay any more tax and still eat). Lower tax revenue means less money for the unemployment insurance and food stamp programs that are keeping those people fed and housed (even if barely). The state and local governments then need to lay off their own workers because they don;t have the tax revenue to pay them. With even more unemployed people out hunting for very, very few jobs, competition becomes even worse. Local businesses see revenue drop because a significant portion of their customers lost their jobs. Many of them close. More unemployed, less tax revenue, more unemployed... Now the state can't afford to pay all the teachers, so many of them get laid off and children get pushed into more and more overloaded classrooms. The schools can't afford to pay for supplies, either. More unemployed, less tax revenue, kids set up for less success in the future. Now the state can;t afford to fix roads or pay all the firefighters...It's a vicious cycle. When your neighbor gets screwed, eventually his problems become your problems.I live in Sacramento, CA. The above (and more) is happening right now, and has been for years. As the capitol of the state, Sacramento employs (or did) many state workers to run all of the programs necessary for state government (CALPRS, CALTRANS, and other state agencies have large buildings just a few blocks from where I sit). In 2008, the state started getting hit with the housing crash. I was working for an employer who was directly tied to new home construction at the time, and they shrunk from 1200 to 600 employees in about 6 months. I was about to be laid off when I found my current job. The state didn't manage very well either - huge layoffs, and state employees endured multiple furlough days and pay cuts. Local businesses relied on all those state workers for their business...they closed down, and haven't reopened. Downtown Sacramento has never been as prosperous as San Francisco or other large cities...but now driving down the streets you see vacant space after vacant space.That's the nature of a society. We can make our own decisions and suffer or prosper for them...but when enough of your neighbors are suffering, you'll start to suffer too, regardless of how much better your choices may or may not have been. How long could you live in a your home if you were laid off because your employer suffered in the down economy? A year? Six months? Six weeks? How long do you think it would take you to find a new job if that happened?Many of the people defaulting on their mortgages could afford them just fine...until their pay was cut or they were just outright laid off. You don't need to have purchased a bad mortgage to suffer.This is runaway capitalism, they type we had to stamp down 100 years ago because the "robber barons" were hoarding all the wealth and making it impossible for their employees to improve their lives.Capitalism works great as long as it's controlled with reasonable rules. Rules like a minimum wage - your society won't do well if you don't pay your employees enough to buy anything. Rules like separating investment banking from savings - investment carries risk, and combining the two puts everyday peoples' savings (and the taxpayer, through the FDIC) on the hook for the risk.We've dismantled many of those rules over the past few decades, and now we're paying the price. These are lessons we learned a century ago - the exact same mistakes that have led to other financial crises, including the Great Depression. We know exactly how to fix the problem, because these problems were fixed before!But for some reason our society as a whole seems to want to ignore the lessons of the past. People claim that "government is bad" and use that axiom as reasoning to limit or even dismantle regulations that have protected us for years, regulations that gave us the most prosperous economy in the world for two generations.How is it "good" that Bank of America can take my savings and use that money to make risky investments, where I and others can lose everything if those investments go south, and where I and others don;t see a dime if the investments do well?How is it "good" that a top-level executive can get a bonus at the end of the year that's more than ten times the yearly salary of their lowest paid employee, in addition to their own salary?How is it good that our elected officials on both sides of the aisle nearly to a man are owned in fee simple by the financial industry and other special interest groups? Why do the people who are supposed to represent us work against our interest at every turn? Why do banks get bailouts and we get pink slips and evictions? Why do the executives who caused the entire mess walk free and get multimillion dollar bonuses while the rest of us see our wages stagnate (or worse) while the cost of living continues to rise? If we know that there are banks that are "too big to fail," why on Earth haven't we broken them up and set limits on their size so that we don;t need to play the bailout game again?Hard work used to pay off. Now, exploiting your neighbors pays off, and hard work gets you a wage that stagnates while your cost of living rises, slowly drowning you in expenses.When did that ever become s good thing?

That's the thing - he didn't.His employees did.How much of that 10 million would he have brought in alone? With no employees? With a dirty office because there was no janitor?There's this myth that top executives are solely responsible for the success of their companies, as if the captain of a ship actually does all the work and therefore deserves all the credit. You won't sail very far with only a captain.It used to be that, when a company did well, the employees who contributed to cause that success were rewarded for their efforts with bonuses and raises.Now...now you get notice that your healthcare costs are rising by another $1000 a year, and if you even get a raise, it'll only be $500.

Which means it's fine for him to get more, but not for him to get everything.Part of what he had to build on wasn't just a bunch of bodies occupying jobs, but people who do their jobs well enough to produce a product that's good and cheap enough for him to be able to broker that deal.It sounds like your company did give some raises and promotions to others, and hired a bunch more people. That's great, I applaud them.But my anger is directed more to other companies. Ones who ignore the efforts of their employees and only pay attention to the executives.I've never gotten a bonus. Ever. At any job. At my current employer, I;ve gotten exactly one raise. I have personally saved my current company (and previous employers) at minimum hundreds of thousands of dollars (one recent project we projected to save over $200,000 per year, and I was one of two people who worked on that project, and I did all of the planning and documentation and half of the implementation). I was the "single key" person in many of those cases, largely because I work in IT and I'm often the only person working on a given project. I consistently get stellar performance reviews from my management.We estimate that every dollar saved on our end is the equivalent of $10 won in a project. But when some project manager or executive wins a job worth a few hundred grand or a few million in fees for the company, they get bonuses and raises. Including the very, very large win we recently got where I provided all of the IT support for all of our employees and subcontractors and basically made it possible for them to make their proposal.I get notified that my yearly healthcare costs are going up by $1000 out of my pocket, and that I'll be lucky to see a $500 raise. I work hard and get results, but the only people getting rewarded are the people who are already making six figures or more.I don't think my experience is particularly unique.

That's an amusing little myth.Is the government "very bad" at running the military?Is the government "very bad" at running Medicare/Medicaid?Is the government "very bad" at building roads and highways?Is the government "very bad" at running the fire department?Was the government "very bad" when it solved the problems that caused the Great Depression?Hell, just answer the first one. Congress is pretty terrible because they politicize everything and respond more to bribes and lobbyists than they do to the people who elect them. They appropriate funds to build bridges to nowhere, after all.But when they set up real programs like the FDIC or the FDA or Medicare/Medicaid or the military, for some reason publicly run institutions do pretty damned well.