Clue for Mayor Bloomberg? Clue for Mayor Bloomberg?

[thewayne]

"The protesters are protesting against people who make $40,000 - $50,000 a year and are struggling to make ends meet. That's the bottom line."
— NYC mayor Michael Bloomberg criticizing Occupy Wall Street

No, they're not. They're protesting against corporations who pay people to gamble with other people's money, and they make half a million and more in salaries, their executives many times that in bonuses, and they almost single-handedly destroyed the world economy in the previous decade and pretty much skated away unpunished. They are wanting to see more social equality for the middle class, which is rapidly being destroyed. They are people making, probably in most cases, no more than $40-50,000. They are protesting our company rapidly becoming a plutocracy instead of a government "of the people, by the people, and for the people."

Case in point of someone getting wrecked: my employer had hired a guy from California, I believe for a GIS position, a classification that we need badly. It was contingent upon his wife, a teacher, being able to retire. Her retirement fund was wiped out and they decided they could not afford for her to retire and then move two states away, and we lost the guy.

I'm not saying the people comprising Occupy Wall Street are lily-white saints, according to some footage that I saw last night some are being rectal haberdashers to a lot of merchants in the area, and we're talking privately-owned, non-corporate merchants. That's a type of mixed message that won't sit well with the middle class that they're trying to improve things for.

Comments

[silveradept]

Clue-by-four for Mayor Bloomberg, stat.

The protestors in the core are probably good people, but movements attract both agents provocateur and people who will feed off the energy for their own personal gain. Of course, if we were a socialist paradise where everyone had what they needed, we might not have the protests or the people who feed off of them. (Or we might have different protests).

[keleos.livejournal.com]

Hi. Uh. My husband works on Wall Street. We don't make half a million or more in salaries. We are, in fact, on a seriously tight budget. We make our mortgage payments, pay our taxes and our bills, and what's left over is not a whole hell of a lot. (I shop at Salvation Army a lot.) We aren't struggling, but we are certainly not well off, and we do not make half a million, believe me. Not even close. We ARE middle class, and we make due by living within our means, but our means are certainly not that high, thank you.

Here's a clue for the protesters: Wall Street is not comprised only of evil corporate overlords. It's made up of hard working people, a lot of whom fall into that middle-class category in a city with a very high standard of living. They paint Wall Street, and corporations, with a very broad brush. There are a LOT of good, upstanding, upright companies out there that don't deserve to be lumped in to a pile of shit being hyped-up by people who haven't done a lick of research into what they're complaining about. A good deal of what these people SAY they are protesting is not corporate at all, but governmental.

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

I'm reminded of an old joke: 99% of all lawyers give the rest a bad name. I've known quite a few lawyers, realtors, all sorts of professional people, and they've run the gamut of ethics. The ones who did not behave in an ethical manner I did not work for for long. I know there are some ethical brokerage/investment houses, but people like Goldman Sachs and Lehman make it hard to recognize the decent ones.

I'm sorry if I offended you, which clearly I did.

The problem is not Wall Street per se, it's rampant capitalism and the ultimate realization of the Golden Rule: those with the gold make the rules. A couple of decades ago a tax law went through Congress and was passed and signed in to law. It was amazingly arcane. Someone sat down and analyzed who it actually benefited, and it came down to one person: H. Ross Perot.