7 ms·

The question I can't find an answer to is, what do they actually want? I feel like "change" isn't specific enough. They need a single, obtainable goal, and focu

The question I can't find an answer to is, what do they actually want? I feel like "change" isn't specific enough. They need a single, obtainable goal, and focus on getting the media to say that goal with every report.

Andrew_Quentin 15y ago
People asked, well the media asked, what do the Egyptians want, or the Tunisians, when the protests first started there. Of course, we all found out what they wanted.
- rimantas 15y ago
  Egyptians and Tunisians knew very well what they wanted. What do these people want is indeed unclear to me. Abolish the banks and give all the money to them? Hang all the rich people? Equality of the income? How would that look like? And how many of them are just too lazy to do something and would prefer not to do anything but will still be entitled to some benefits? A lot of those "99%" posters can be summarized by "I took a bunch of dumb decisions, then I took some credit for stuff I did not need, and now I am screwed". Who knew!
  - Andrew_Quentin 15y ago
    The protesters know very well what they want also. It is only the media who is unclear for very understandable reasons because this has only started. They are not asking to abolish the banks, but the Glass ceiling to be re-instated, they are asking for more equality of course, the graph for example that was posted here on HN a while ago showed clearly that while the country grew, wages did not, after 1970s, or, after the Regan Thatcer market prevails let the jungle rule. I do not know how many of them are lazy. I would not think many since it takes quite a lot of work to organize what they have and keep pushing forward. Many of them simply can not find a job and find themselves in a spiral without any help because of temporary difficulties. We have had plenty of posts here on HN just how poor people are trapped into poverty. Banks get money, little people get kicked out. Anyway, maybe you should visit their websites and read what they want.
    - rimantas 15y ago
      Thanks for the reply. I must admit, I am not from the USA so I did not follow all this really closely, but if there was a clear representation of the demands, I surely missed it.
    - gwright 15y ago
      I assume you mean the Glass–Steagall Act. I keep seeing this idea of 'asking for more equality' and I have no idea what that means. Equality of what? pay? opportunity? Forced redistribution of money to equalize incomes would be an unmitigated disaster so I can only hope that isn't their actual demand. Anyway, the protesters and their supporters need to refine their message a bit.
      - CWuestefeld 15y ago
        I see those attractive young people protesting, and I can't help but wish for equality of appearance. Why should I be stuck with this body, when all of those people flaunt -- or worse, ignore -- their beauty? Seriously, it's ironic that the same set of people who claim that "material possessions aren't important, it's the people that matter" are the ones who find money so important that they've got to redistribute what others have earned. But they don't give attention to the myriad other ways in which some people are better-advantaged than others.
      - hxa7241 15y ago
        > Forced redistribution of money to equalize incomes would be an unmitigated disaster Not really. A different balance of taxation would be a form of redistribution of income (and indeed would be interpreted as 'forced' by some). Would that be an unmitigated disaster? Well, it needs checking in the detail, but one suspects that such different tax profiles and hence 'redistribution' existed at various times in the USA's past: the 1960s probably, for example. That is unlikely to be called a period of disaster: it was one of growth and creativity, was it not? If all that happened was going to the moon and inventing the internet, you would have to call it pretty good.
        gwright 15y ago
  - jeffool 15y ago
    Well, when you're raised and told you HAVE to go to college, a lot of will she loans for it. Or they'll assume they'll have their job for a long time, and buy a car/house, or have a kid. A bunch of dumb decisions? Not necessarily. Sometimes life just happens. As for what they want, they want to feel like they have opportunities. I genuinely do think it's a discontent that's risen from feeling like their voice carries little/no weight in society, politics included, and that the control is in the hands of those with wealth. It's your garden variety populist uprising, only from the American middle class, so expect to see less blood and more coffee.
    - rimantas 15y ago
      > A bunch of dumb decisions? Not necessarily. > Sometimes life just happens. No doubt about that. However I'd argue, that some of those 99% could have it differently if they wished so.
      - jeffool 15y ago
        Oh absolutely! And I'm sure many are the lazy freeloaders that are easily imagined. But I think honest mistakes count for much of it. Of course, that could well be wishful thinking!
      - ordinary 15y ago
        I think the people now in Wall Street are doing exactly that. :) Not all change for the better comes about by buckling down and getting a second job.
    - uriel 15y ago
      > A bunch of dumb decisions? Not necessarily. Sometimes life just happens. "If you wind up with a boring, miserable life because you listened to your mom, your dad, your teacher, your priest, or some guy on TV telling you how to do your shit, then YOU DESERVE IT." — Frank Zappa
  - nhaehnle 15y ago
    This seems a bit too condescending to me. It's very easy to point to a dictator and lay the blame on him. The violence and injustice perpetrated by a dictator is easy to identify. If you have a complex system where injustice is not generated by a single individual, but rather by the interplay of many different actions, or even generated by the structure of the system itself, this is much harder to identify. You'll note that people in Egypt got rid of Mubarak, but they're not entirely happy about the current state of affairs either. The problem with economic violence is that while the issues are understandable and can be explained, they are hard to boil down to a short slogan.
    - sudonim 15y ago
      The hardest thing with the united states is we've built a system that is complex and there is no one person who screwed everything up. Example: People have high student loans because college is expensive because more people want to go and can get loans from the government so colleges can charge higher prices
      - ctdonath 15y ago
        The greatest thing with the United States is we've built a system that is complex and there is no one way things have to be done. Example: free Ivy-League education available at http://ocw.mit.edu http://ocw.mit.edu for the self-motivated. My wife & I have 5 nontrivial degrees between us, at a cost of under $100k and no debt. A little creativity and flexibility got us a long way. Supply and demand. People are willing to pay high prices for education in exchange for credit-card-easy access, so colleges are willing to charge it. Dig & negotiate a bit, be flexible, and the price comes in a lot lower.
        wh-uws 15y ago
        Its not about the knowledge. Its about the fact that many decent jobs won't accept any applicants without a degree. Yes you can get all of that knowledge but what proof do you have? By the way im a CS grad with a job Im just saying this as someone who is frustrated with people all ways using the strawmen of free online education which only recently became prevalent and the fact that they fell into circumstances that allowed them to either not need college or go for cheap. The story my generation was sold as kids is that you go to college and then you get a good job. Somewhere along the way that contract was broken... that is part of what this protest is about
_delirium 15y ago
It's a loose coalition of people rather than a protest led by a political party with good message discipline, so what they want tends to vary. Depending on which people you ask, a few common goals: a Tobin tax, return of Glass-Steagall, increased progressivity of the tax code, abolition of the Federal Reserve, ending favorable tax treatment for capital-gains versus earned income, breakup of too-big-to-fail banks, freeze on foreclosure proceedings, etc. I see it as somewhat similar to the Tea Party in that sense, which was an amorphous sense of dislike for "big government" and a feeling that something should be done about it (tax cuts, spending cuts, etc.); this is an amorphous sense of dislike for "big finance", and a feeling that something should be done about it.
nhebb 15y ago
> what do they actually want? This Jimmy Kimmel video answers that question: http://www.hulu.com/watch/285456/jimmy-kimmel-live-occupy-wall-street-protest http://www.hulu.com/watch/285456/jimmy-kimmel-live-occupy-wa... Megaphone: What do we want? Crowd: We're not really sure! Megaphone: When do we want it? Crowd: Now! Like most Americans, the economic collapse has left me with the sour taste of injustice. But the OWS protesters seem like a disparate bunch of interest groups with no unified purpose.
Hisoka 15y ago
They just want the world to be filled with a billion less people, first starting with people who are useless to society such as anyone associated with Wall Street. Of course, none of them will say this, and none of them know they want this, so you get all this incoherent blabber.
dhume 15y ago
From what I've heard from them, I think "better safeguards against regulatory capture" would cover a lot of it, though I have yet to hear that term specifically.
- mortenjorck 15y ago
  The best five words for Occupy Wall Street that I've heard. I'd bet a vast majority of people there would get behind this.
- nick_urban 15y ago
  Thank's for introducing "regulatory capture" to my vocabulary. It does seem to capture much of what people are angry about (bailouts, etc.). I'm guessing you haven't heard it used by the protesters, it's because it sounds so academic. If they read the definition, though, I expect many would agree. For the lazy: "when a state regulatory agency created to act in the public interest instead advances the commercial or special interests that dominate the industry or sector it is charged with regulating" (Wikipedia)
roc 15y ago
Beyond the problem of "not everyone is there for the same exact reason", the problems facing our society and economy are far too complex to boil down to a specific list of bullet-points. [1] I'd frankly be more surprised, and suspicious, if they did have a cohesive list of solutions. [2] Their current single obtainable goal, whether it's their intent or not, seems to be forcing the media to at least acknowledge that the economy really really sucks and the government has done basically nothing about it for the 99%, even if they dismiss the protestors as unserious hippies. [1] Abstracting the arguments to an umbrella term or position makes it vague almost by definition. Would a cohesive chant against "regulatory capture" satisfy the morning news crowd? It's somewhat more precise, but I get this feeling that it wouldn't change the press perception. [2] The common defense of the fractured nature of Tea Party groups was that a lack of cohesive voice was seen as a sign of authenticity amongst grass-roots movements. And that does honestly ring quite true to me.
CodeMage 15y ago
It's a funny world. I'm not from United States, so I don't know the details of the situation there, but I guess the protesters are feeling the same kind of rage and frustration a lot of people in the rest of the world feel on the daily basis. I guess "change" is the best most of us can do to formulate what we want. Imagine being a user of a set of a suite of applications (Democracy 12.5, Free Market 6.7, etc) that have been sold to you as The Best Thing Since Sliced Bread and The Solution To All Your Problems. Yet the applications are performing increasingly worse, they keep crashing and not doing what you need them to do. You try to do something about it, but the customer service channels are horrible and even when you manage to log a bug, a complaint or any other feedback, the best you can hope for is that it's ignored; the worst you can hope for it that a patch comes out that doesn't really fix your problems and creates several new ones. At this point, you start complaining loudly and publicly about it. What's the most infuriating reaction you can imagine? I don't know about you, but I've got one that's pretty close to the top of my list is "Well, how would you solve the problem, then?" Remember, we're talking about an average user, not a programmer. By all rights, the answer to such a question should be "How the fuck am I supposed to know that?" Of course, what's going on in the world is a lot worse than this hypothetical situation. If you're using apps that don't work, you can "vote with your wallet" and use something else. If you're forced to use them at work as part of company policy, you can ultimately decide to change jobs, if you want to. But this? You have no choice but to go out and protest and ask for "change".
- michaelchisari 15y ago
  I'm not usually one for tech analogies in politics, and I'm not even sure I completely agree with it, but at the very least, this one made me smile. :)

Andrew_Quentin 15y ago

People asked, well the media asked, what do the Egyptians want, or the Tunisians, when the protests first started there. Of course, we all found out what they wanted.

rimantas 15y ago
Egyptians and Tunisians knew very well what they wanted. What do these people want is indeed unclear to me. Abolish the banks and give all the money to them? Hang all the rich people? Equality of the income? How would that look like? And how many of them are just too lazy to do something and would prefer not to do anything but will still be entitled to some benefits? A lot of those "99%" posters can be summarized by "I took a bunch of dumb decisions, then I took some credit for stuff I did not need, and now I am screwed". Who knew!
- Andrew_Quentin 15y ago
  The protesters know very well what they want also. It is only the media who is unclear for very understandable reasons because this has only started. They are not asking to abolish the banks, but the Glass ceiling to be re-instated, they are asking for more equality of course, the graph for example that was posted here on HN a while ago showed clearly that while the country grew, wages did not, after 1970s, or, after the Regan Thatcer market prevails let the jungle rule. I do not know how many of them are lazy. I would not think many since it takes quite a lot of work to organize what they have and keep pushing forward. Many of them simply can not find a job and find themselves in a spiral without any help because of temporary difficulties. We have had plenty of posts here on HN just how poor people are trapped into poverty. Banks get money, little people get kicked out. Anyway, maybe you should visit their websites and read what they want.
  - rimantas 15y ago
    Thanks for the reply. I must admit, I am not from the USA so I did not follow all this really closely, but if there was a clear representation of the demands, I surely missed it.
  - gwright 15y ago
    I assume you mean the Glass–Steagall Act. I keep seeing this idea of 'asking for more equality' and I have no idea what that means. Equality of what? pay? opportunity? Forced redistribution of money to equalize incomes would be an unmitigated disaster so I can only hope that isn't their actual demand. Anyway, the protesters and their supporters need to refine their message a bit.
    - CWuestefeld 15y ago
      I see those attractive young people protesting, and I can't help but wish for equality of appearance. Why should I be stuck with this body, when all of those people flaunt -- or worse, ignore -- their beauty? Seriously, it's ironic that the same set of people who claim that "material possessions aren't important, it's the people that matter" are the ones who find money so important that they've got to redistribute what others have earned. But they don't give attention to the myriad other ways in which some people are better-advantaged than others.
    - hxa7241 15y ago
      > Forced redistribution of money to equalize incomes would be an unmitigated disaster Not really. A different balance of taxation would be a form of redistribution of income (and indeed would be interpreted as 'forced' by some). Would that be an unmitigated disaster? Well, it needs checking in the detail, but one suspects that such different tax profiles and hence 'redistribution' existed at various times in the USA's past: the 1960s probably, for example. That is unlikely to be called a period of disaster: it was one of growth and creativity, was it not? If all that happened was going to the moon and inventing the internet, you would have to call it pretty good.
      - gwright 15y ago
- jeffool 15y ago
  Well, when you're raised and told you HAVE to go to college, a lot of will she loans for it. Or they'll assume they'll have their job for a long time, and buy a car/house, or have a kid. A bunch of dumb decisions? Not necessarily. Sometimes life just happens. As for what they want, they want to feel like they have opportunities. I genuinely do think it's a discontent that's risen from feeling like their voice carries little/no weight in society, politics included, and that the control is in the hands of those with wealth. It's your garden variety populist uprising, only from the American middle class, so expect to see less blood and more coffee.
  - rimantas 15y ago
    > A bunch of dumb decisions? Not necessarily. > Sometimes life just happens. No doubt about that. However I'd argue, that some of those 99% could have it differently if they wished so.
    - jeffool 15y ago
      Oh absolutely! And I'm sure many are the lazy freeloaders that are easily imagined. But I think honest mistakes count for much of it. Of course, that could well be wishful thinking!
    - ordinary 15y ago
      I think the people now in Wall Street are doing exactly that. :) Not all change for the better comes about by buckling down and getting a second job.
  - uriel 15y ago
    > A bunch of dumb decisions? Not necessarily. Sometimes life just happens. "If you wind up with a boring, miserable life because you listened to your mom, your dad, your teacher, your priest, or some guy on TV telling you how to do your shit, then YOU DESERVE IT." — Frank Zappa
- nhaehnle 15y ago
  This seems a bit too condescending to me. It's very easy to point to a dictator and lay the blame on him. The violence and injustice perpetrated by a dictator is easy to identify. If you have a complex system where injustice is not generated by a single individual, but rather by the interplay of many different actions, or even generated by the structure of the system itself, this is much harder to identify. You'll note that people in Egypt got rid of Mubarak, but they're not entirely happy about the current state of affairs either. The problem with economic violence is that while the issues are understandable and can be explained, they are hard to boil down to a short slogan.
  - sudonim 15y ago
    The hardest thing with the united states is we've built a system that is complex and there is no one person who screwed everything up. Example: People have high student loans because college is expensive because more people want to go and can get loans from the government so colleges can charge higher prices
    - ctdonath 15y ago
      The greatest thing with the United States is we've built a system that is complex and there is no one way things have to be done. Example: free Ivy-League education available at http://ocw.mit.edu http://ocw.mit.edu for the self-motivated. My wife & I have 5 nontrivial degrees between us, at a cost of under $100k and no debt. A little creativity and flexibility got us a long way. Supply and demand. People are willing to pay high prices for education in exchange for credit-card-easy access, so colleges are willing to charge it. Dig & negotiate a bit, be flexible, and the price comes in a lot lower.
      - wh-uws 15y ago
        Its not about the knowledge. Its about the fact that many decent jobs won't accept any applicants without a degree. Yes you can get all of that knowledge but what proof do you have? By the way im a CS grad with a job Im just saying this as someone who is frustrated with people all ways using the strawmen of free online education which only recently became prevalent and the fact that they fell into circumstances that allowed them to either not need college or go for cheap. The story my generation was sold as kids is that you go to college and then you get a good job. Somewhere along the way that contract was broken... that is part of what this protest is about

_delirium 15y ago

It's a loose coalition of people rather than a protest led by a political party with good message discipline, so what they want tends to vary. Depending on which people you ask, a few common goals: a Tobin tax, return of Glass-Steagall, increased progressivity of the tax code, abolition of the Federal Reserve, ending favorable tax treatment for capital-gains versus earned income, breakup of too-big-to-fail banks, freeze on foreclosure proceedings, etc. I see it as somewhat similar to the Tea Party in that sense, which was an amorphous sense of dislike for "big government" and a feeling that something should be done about it (tax cuts, spending cuts, etc.); this is an amorphous sense of dislike for "big finance", and a feeling that something should be done about it.

nhebb 15y ago

> what do they actually want? This Jimmy Kimmel video answers that question: http://www.hulu.com/watch/285456/jimmy-kimmel-live-occupy-wall-street-protest http://www.hulu.com/watch/285456/jimmy-kimmel-live-occupy-wa... Megaphone: What do we want? Crowd: We're not really sure! Megaphone: When do we want it? Crowd: Now! Like most Americans, the economic collapse has left me with the sour taste of injustice. But the OWS protesters seem like a disparate bunch of interest groups with no unified purpose.

Hisoka 15y ago

They just want the world to be filled with a billion less people, first starting with people who are useless to society such as anyone associated with Wall Street. Of course, none of them will say this, and none of them know they want this, so you get all this incoherent blabber.

dhume 15y ago

From what I've heard from them, I think "better safeguards against regulatory capture" would cover a lot of it, though I have yet to hear that term specifically.

mortenjorck 15y ago
The best five words for Occupy Wall Street that I've heard. I'd bet a vast majority of people there would get behind this.
nick_urban 15y ago
Thank's for introducing "regulatory capture" to my vocabulary. It does seem to capture much of what people are angry about (bailouts, etc.). I'm guessing you haven't heard it used by the protesters, it's because it sounds so academic. If they read the definition, though, I expect many would agree. For the lazy: "when a state regulatory agency created to act in the public interest instead advances the commercial or special interests that dominate the industry or sector it is charged with regulating" (Wikipedia)

roc 15y ago

Beyond the problem of "not everyone is there for the same exact reason", the problems facing our society and economy are far too complex to boil down to a specific list of bullet-points. [1] I'd frankly be more surprised, and suspicious, if they did have a cohesive list of solutions. [2] Their current single obtainable goal, whether it's their intent or not, seems to be forcing the media to at least acknowledge that the economy really really sucks and the government has done basically nothing about it for the 99%, even if they dismiss the protestors as unserious hippies. [1] Abstracting the arguments to an umbrella term or position makes it vague almost by definition. Would a cohesive chant against "regulatory capture" satisfy the morning news crowd? It's somewhat more precise, but I get this feeling that it wouldn't change the press perception. [2] The common defense of the fractured nature of Tea Party groups was that a lack of cohesive voice was seen as a sign of authenticity amongst grass-roots movements. And that does honestly ring quite true to me.

CodeMage 15y ago

It's a funny world. I'm not from United States, so I don't know the details of the situation there, but I guess the protesters are feeling the same kind of rage and frustration a lot of people in the rest of the world feel on the daily basis. I guess "change" is the best most of us can do to formulate what we want. Imagine being a user of a set of a suite of applications (Democracy 12.5, Free Market 6.7, etc) that have been sold to you as The Best Thing Since Sliced Bread and The Solution To All Your Problems. Yet the applications are performing increasingly worse, they keep crashing and not doing what you need them to do. You try to do something about it, but the customer service channels are horrible and even when you manage to log a bug, a complaint or any other feedback, the best you can hope for is that it's ignored; the worst you can hope for it that a patch comes out that doesn't really fix your problems and creates several new ones. At this point, you start complaining loudly and publicly about it. What's the most infuriating reaction you can imagine? I don't know about you, but I've got one that's pretty close to the top of my list is "Well, how would you solve the problem, then?" Remember, we're talking about an average user, not a programmer. By all rights, the answer to such a question should be "How the fuck am I supposed to know that?" Of course, what's going on in the world is a lot worse than this hypothetical situation. If you're using apps that don't work, you can "vote with your wallet" and use something else. If you're forced to use them at work as part of company policy, you can ultimately decide to change jobs, if you want to. But this? You have no choice but to go out and protest and ask for "change".

michaelchisari 15y ago
I'm not usually one for tech analogies in politics, and I'm not even sure I completely agree with it, but at the very least, this one made me smile. :)