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watch some of them squirm through their cognitive dissonance. If you are protesting wall street then how the hell do you support Obama when his presidential cam
by r4vik 15y ago
watch some of them squirm through their cognitive dissonance. If you are protesting wall street then how the hell do you support Obama when his presidential campaign was bankrolled by Goldman Sachs? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bFVR9Nv43J4&feature=share http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bFVR9Nv43J4&feature=share
- Andrew_Quentin 15y agoThey are in fact also protesting against the merger of big business and politics. They are thus demanding an end to big money like the example you gave into politics. I do not think this is necessarily a democrat's protest. This is a people's protest, the 99%.
- Shivetya 15y agoYet now they are being co-opted by a larger group, which many of us watching this unfold fully expected to happen. What makes it more galling is that many of those from the unions are in no shape or form middle class with very high incomes and high retirement payouts. The protesters we see now will have a difficult time not getting pushed aside by the machine. What the unions/DNC could not create they certainly can take.
- r4vik 15y agofunny thing is that the same thing happened to the Tea Party, who got taken over by RNC community organisers. So out whet the pro-drugs, pro-immagration and pro-choice, and in comes the Christian Taliban under a new banner.
- srdev 15y agoThe motto of OWD is "We are the 99%." Despite having good benefits, I doubt very much that union members are in the top 1%.
- r4vik 15y agoThis reminds me of a quote: “A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been 200 years.” ― Alexis de Tocqueville
- tokenadult 15y agoThe quotation you mention was not said by de Tocqueville: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Alexis_de_Tocqueville#Misattributed http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Alexis_de_Tocqueville#Misattrib... http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Alexander_Fraser_Tytler#Unsourced http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Alexander_Fraser_Tytler#Unsourc...
- roc 15y agoWhich sounds nice, but doesn't seem to account for all the voting for austerity and smaller government that we've seen in Western democracies.
- tripzilch 15y agoWhat? Pretty sure they don't support Obama :-/ And the ones that still do aren't disillusioned enough yet.
- CWuestefeld 15y agoThe article quotes protesters chanting "Banks got bailed out - we got sold out". The odd thing is the labor unions are participating in this. But the unions themselves were beneficiaries of bailouts (see GM's bankruptcy). I can't help feeling that at least some of these protesters are really only in it for handouts.
- roc 15y agoSome unions were incidental beneficiaries, sure. But consider that the GM/Chrysler bailouts almost included a gutting of the UAW. (They had to fight to retain their collective bargaining power in the deal) And you may have noticed the spate of anti-union legislation proposed, and in some cases passed, across the nation. The unions have (rightly) seen any benefit they did get as incidental and temporary at best. And perceiving a movement through possible positions of a minority is a pretty intellectually dishonest way to tar the group. It's as disappointing as dismissing the concerns of the Tea Party for their racists.
- mseebach 15y agoGo skim the calendar on OccupyWallStreet.org. The movement may well have started without the unions, but they've been pretty much co-opted by now. In that sense, unions are more like the Sarah Palin of OWS. > [UAW] had to fight to retain their collective bargaining power in the deal. A deal which, had it not been struck, had meant their total annihilation. > The unions have (rightly) seen any benefit they did get as incidental and temporary at best. Unions, like banks, don't have an inherent right to exist. They are clinging to political favors to keep boyant.
- roc 15y ago> "unions are more like the Sarah Palin of OWS." And? Sarah Palin didn't invalidate the Tea Party. > "A deal which, had it not been struck, had meant their total annihilation." It would have meant GM and Chrysler's annihilation, along with many UAW members losing their jobs. But every other car maker in North America has union plants. The UAW itself wasn't going anywhere if GM and Chrysler failed. > "Unions, like banks, don't have an inherent right to exist." A specific union or bank doesn't. But the right to form a union or bank does. And the very right to organize is what union struggles are increasingly about. Just look to Ohio and Wisconsin.
- Roboprog 15y agoI don't recall the 2008 election being between Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich. We had two sucky choices, and people on either side voted for what they thought was the lessor evil, relative to their particular value weightings. Part of the problem is that we do not have instant runoff elections, so big money need only promote 4 candidates for each position, and FUD all of the others. That way, one of their 4 is almost always chosen (2 "sides" in each D/R primary). Barring instant runoff, perhaps we would be better off with proportional representation in Congress: if Green or Libertarian parties received 10% of the vote each, at least they would have some members present.
- CWuestefeld 15y agoI seem to remember voting for Ron Paul in the 2008 primaries. And for the general election, there were more choices than the two you mention. Instant runoffs are only marginally better than the American "first-past-the-post" system. In particular, they suffer from the perverse effect where voting for your favorite candidate can actually cause him to lose. There's a mathematical proof (Ken Arrows, maybe? I'm getting forgetful) showing that it's impossible for any voting system to have all the handful of qualities one wants in a democratic process. This is actually a pretty decent branch of mathematics. There exist better options, but none that are perfect.
- bartonfink 15y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrows_theorem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrows_theorem This is what you had in mind.
- Roboprog 15y agoI'd be happy to have "marginally better", at least as a start.
- mseebach 15y agoThe utter euphoria over the election of Obama in 2008 hides very well the fact that 99% apparently voted for the lesser of two evils.