Occupy Wall Street Movement

[ksst]

One I heard announced today was a demand to stop making corporations into people, especially the recent supreme court decision letting them dump all kinds of money into campaigns as "free speech".

[js207]

It has apparently been amusing to watch some of the OWS people's richer supporters dancing around trying to deny that their own fortunes put them firmly in the 1% they are complaining about - there's a rich left-wing journalist in the UK with three houses and a job with a (tax-dodging!) privately-owned newspaper who makes for a particularly absurd contradiction in this context.

As for children, Ksst has a point; we need to strike a balance here. Personally, I'd start by changing the generous tax and welfare incentives for having kids to count only one child at a time, and making it means-tested so only the poor receive them at all. China takes it to extremes, with forced abortions (and varying levels of enforcement, depending how connected you are and where you live: if you're in the countryside it's laxer, for example) but then they are a totalitarian regime prone to such things, and they do have an extreme problem with overpopulation right now - neither applies to us at present, and I hope neither ever does.

The government failed by relaxing regulations that allowed the investors/mortgage lenders to behave irresponsibly.

It's worse than that, in the US at least: the federal government actually mandated lenders lending to poor credit risks, on the rather dim basis that only lending to people who could actually afford the houses was "discrimination" and should be punished. On top of that, of course, they used Fannie and Freddie to channel taxpayers' money into making the problem worse still.

One I heard announced today was a demand to stop making corporations into people, especially the recent supreme court decision letting them dump all kinds of money into campaigns as "free speech".

Which shows that what they really need is some remedial education: the decision merely removed the discrimination between 'media' companies (CNN, MSNBC, NY Times etc) and other companies, that only companies in that first, privileged, category are permitted to express political views at certain times (the period leading up to each election) - it remains illegal for corporations to put money into politicians' campaigns. Remember the context of that ruling: the federal government had banned a movie for being critical of Senator Clinton, and the Obama administration's lawyer argued that it should have the authority to ban books containing political content. Are these protestors really protesting against the First Amendment and in support of censorship?! No doubt some have misunderstood the ruling, or been misled about its actual nature, but the reality is hard to dispute.