Occupy Wall Street Thread Reposted

Between 7AM and 10PM they can protest all they want, more power to them. Between 10:01PM and 6:59AM they should be tooled ruthlessly.

prove it

fattrad, just remember what Hitler did to his brownshirts. You'll get the same treatment when they no longer need you.

My point about Republicans giving more to Charity than Democrats what not to get into who gives more.

Get a clue: The Republican do more, pay more and work more for the poor
than the Dems ever do. I know I do a hell of a lot for charity.

Oh, and here you go:

Liberals show tremendous compassion in pushing for generous government
spending to help the neediest people at home and abroad. Yet when it
comes to individual contributions to charitable causes, liberals are
cheapskates.

"Liberals are cheapskates."

If liberals and moderates donated blood at the level conservatives do, the blood supply in the U.S. would increase 45%.

...promote the general Welfare...

In colonial times "welfare" could mean communities auctioning off needy families...

St. Peter's Square, meet Zuccotti Park.

The Vatican today elaborated on Pope Benedict XVI's call for a global entity to bring justice and compassion to the world economy.

"The economy needs ethics," says the new document released today by the Vatican's Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace.

According to the Associated Press, the Vatican suggests "the reform process begin with the United Nations as its point of reference."

The Rev. Thomas Reese, senior fellow at the Woodstock Theological Center, Georgetown University, calls the Vatican view...

closer to views of the "Occupy Wall Street" movement than anyone in the U.S. Congress.

Echoing the pope's 2009 encyclical on the economy, it calls for the redistribution of wealth and the regulation of the world economy by international agencies.

Reese says it's not only to the left of President Obama, it's "to the left of Nancy Pelosi."

Reese revisited the encyclical to get a sense of the pope's thinking that shapes the new document. The pope called for more, not less, government regulation, saying:

The conviction that the economy must be autonomous, that it must be shielded from 'influences' of a moral character, has led man to abuse the economic process in a thoroughly destructive way... In the long term, these convictions have led to economic, social and political systems that trample upon personal and social freedom, and are therefore unable to deliver the justice that they promise.

Reese noted Benedict's support for a new world authority ...

To manage the global economy; to revive economies hit by the crisis; to avoid any deterioration of the present crisis and the greater imbalances that would result; to bring about integral and timely disarmament, food security and peace; to guarantee the protection of the environment and to regulate migration...

And he concludes,

On economic issues, the pope is to the left of Obama. He is even to the left of liberal Democrats like Nancy Pelosi.

Catholic News Service has more details of the document, Toward Reforming the International Financial and Monetary Systems in the Context of Global Public Authority.

The document said the current global financial crisis has revealed "selfishness, collective greed and the hoarding of goods on a great scale."

...The current economic crisis, which has seen growing inequality between the rich and poor of the world, underlines the necessity to take concrete steps toward creating (a global) authority, it said.

Heads up, Wall Street. According to John Thavis' Catholic News Service report:

One major step ... should be reform of the international monetary system in a way that involves developing countries. The document foresaw creation of a "central world bank" that would regulate the flow of monetary exchanges; it said the International Monetary Fund had lost the ability to control the amount of credit risk taken on by the system.

The study that shows why Occupy Wall Street struck a nerve

By Eugene Robinson, Thursday, October 27, 4:53 PM

The hard-right conservatives who dominate the Republican Party claim to despise the redistribution of wealth, but secretly they love it — as long as the process involves depriving the poor and middle class to benefit the rich, not the other way around.

That is precisely what has been happening, as a jaw-dropping new report by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office demonstrates. Three decades of trickle-down economic theory, see-no-evil deregulation and tax-cutting fervor have led to massive redistribution. Another word for what’s been happening might be theft.

The gist of the CBO study, titled “Trends in the Distribution of Household Income Between 1979 and 2007,” is that while we’ve become wealthier overall, these new riches have largely bypassed many Americans and instead flowed mostly to the affluent. Perhaps my memory is faulty, but I don’t remember voting to turn the United States into a nation starkly divided between haves and have-nots. Yet that’s where we’ve been led.

Overall, in inflation-adjusted dollars, average after-tax household income grew by 62 percent during the period under study, according to the CBO. This sounds great — but only until you look a little closer.

For those at the bottom — the one-fifth of households with the lowest incomes — the increase was just 18 percent. For the middle three-fifths, the average increase was 40 percent. Spread over nearly 30 years, these gains are modest, not meteoric.

By contrast, look at the top 1 percent of earners. Their after-tax household income increased by an astonishing 275 percent. For those keeping track, this means it nearly quadrupled. Nice work, if you can get it.

This is not what Republicans want you to think of when you hear the word redistribution. You’re supposed to imagine the evil masterminds as Bolsheviks, not bankers. You’re supposed to envision the lazy free-riders who benefit from redistribution as the “poor,” and the industrious job-creators who get robbed as the “wealthy” — not the other way around.

If Americans were to realize they’ve been the victims of Republican-style redistribution — stealing from the poor to give to the rich — the whole political atmosphere might change. I believe that’s one reason why the Occupy Wall Street protests have struck such a nerve. The far-right and its media mouthpieces have worked themselves into a frenzy trying to disregard, dismiss or discredit the demonstrations. Thus far, fortunately, all this effort has been to no avail.

The right maintains that inequality is the wrong measure. To argue about how the income pie should be sliced is “class warfare,” and what we should do instead is give the private sector the right incentives to make the pie bigger. This way, according to conservative doctrine, everyone’s slice gets bigger — even if some slices grow faster than others.

Indeed, the CBO report says that even the poorest households saw at least a little income growth. Why is it any of their business that the high-earners in the top 1 percent saw astronomical income growth? Isn’t this just sour grapes?

No, for two reasons. First, the system is rigged. Wealthy individuals and corporations have disproportionate influence over public policy because of the often decisive role that money plays in elections. If the rich and powerful act in their self-interest, as conservative ideologues believe we all should do, then the rich and powerful’s share of income will continue to soar.

Second, and more broadly, the real issue is what kind of nation we want to be. Thomas Jefferson’s “All men are created equal” is properly understood as calling for equality of opportunity, not equality of outcomes. But the more we become a nation of rich and poor, the less we can pretend to be offering the same opportunities to every American. As polarization increases, mobility declines. The whole point of the American Dream is that it is available to everyone, not just those who awaken from their slumbers on down-filled pillows and 800-thread-count sheets.

So it does matter that as the pie grows, the various slices do not grow in proportion. We’re not characters in one of those lumbering, interminable, nonsensical Ayn Rand novels. We believe in individual initiative and the free market, but we also believe that nationhood necessarily involves a commitment to our fellow citizens, an acknowledgment that we’re engaged in a common enterprise. We believe that opportunity should be more than just an empty word.

eugenerobinson@washpost.com