Cena_mark
I'm not represented here. I hate the music and I don't like occupiers.

baleen
The only reason you're here is so we can laugh at you. You're finally figuring this out?

HarrietTubmanPI
Everyone who opposes OWS and who is conservative can never provide a better course of action or a better idea than what OWS is doing. It's almost as if they enjoy being fucked in the ass repeatedly by the top 1%.

What's your answer to the widening gap of wealth in america between the top and the bottom Cena? What's your answer to the banks controlling the government? What's your answer to wall street controlling the price of commodities just so they can make money out of thin air? What's your answer to massive corporations buying out the government?

baleen
And while this is shit music, it was a shit rapper from Tunisia that started the Arab Spring.

Cena_mark
I don't have the answers to those questions. I just don't like the fact that goddamn hippies and hipsters have become the answer.
Also Queenfosomething, this isn't poetv condensed. Where is the irrelevance? Where are the cats? Where are the weird Japanese fetishes?

HarrietTubmanPI
Cena, then if you don't have the answers, don't complain until you get off of your ass and try to fix this problem.

Cena_mark
I proposed a solution over 3 years ago, but no... you guys had to vote for Obama.

HarrietTubmanPI
Cena, that is not a solution. You are like any other GOP politician. What is the mechanism that McCain would have been any better? What policies would have been different?

You might as well have said "that's a great question, and I'm glad we live in this country where we can ask questions and have an open debate".

Do you have any substance whatsoever?

baleen

Harriet, I can answer that question from an informed libertarian/Ron Paul perspective far better than Marcus can. He is incapable of defending his ideas from any kind of educated or researched vantage point, resorting to AM radio burbling whenever he's made to look stupid, and he's proven to be something of a slow creature, so I'll do him a solid and answer it for him.

Lots of pseudo-libertarian Republicans believe that if the government was not around, there would be no monopolies, and no too-big-to-fail banks. This coincided with von Mises and the Austrian school's understanding of capitalism and cartels:

"The monopoly problem mankind has to face today is not an outgrowth of the operation of the market economy. It is a product of purposive action on the part of governments. It is not one of the evils inherent in capitalism as the demagogues trumpet."

and

"Most cartels and trusts would never have been set up had not the governments created the necessary conditions by protectionist measures."

What they would argue is that everything should be allowed to fail, and the natural laws of market forces will fix things. There is a lot of merit to the ideas of von Mises when you address the fact that, yes, the central banks and the government bailouts are propping up failed monopolies and allowing them to grow stronger. There is also something to be said in favor of the Ron Paul perspective, that if these megacartels were allowed to fail in 2004, all that money used to bail them out could have been used to fund a navy of newly independent entrepreneurial yachts instead of patching a few sinking aircraft carriers.

So much has come to surface to prove this shit wrong, it really boils down to the Austrian crowd saying "Well, you can't know that this is wrong since there's never been real capitalism before because of government interference."

This perspective is about as unassailable as proving that God exists. What we do know is what is working now, what is working in other countries. Take for example, the success of small business and independent entrepreneurs in other countries:

http://www.cepr.net/documents/publications/small-business-2009 -08.pdf

Removing the role of government in these small countries opens the door for hostile intervention by foreign governments and foreign companies. THIS IS WHY THERE ARE RULES. The market is cruel and unfair... Also...

Why let GM fail? It represents hundreds of billions of dollars of manufacturing infrastructure. Barring takeover from foreign powers, why should this labor and utility be liquidated solely to satisfy the undulations of free enterprise? At the very least, it could be broken up into competing units, or nationalized until its corrupt executive gambling apparatus was purified from it, then released back into public hands.

This is really what's upsetting about the GOP/Democratic solution to the crises. They have both taken half-measures toward fixing the problem in both free market and market socialist directions, and the result is a megalithic and unsustainable mess.

HarrietTubmanPI
You're right baleen - I just wanted to see if he would admit it.

memedumpster
Holy shit, that guy who set himself on fire in the street in Tunisia was a rapper? He is officially the most gangsta possible.

Hooker
Can you people please stop getting trolled by baleen's lame sockpuppet?

StanleyPain
People who oppose OWS seem to fall into a few distinct camps:

1- People who benefit from the status quo, but are too stupid to realize that they're still part of the 99% statistic.
2- People who actually ARE in the 1% and like it that way and see no reason to change things.
3- Dumbshit "libertarian" types who always bootlick and side with the state whenever shit like this comes up because they're too fucking embarrassed to admit people like them don't have the balls to actually challenge the status quo in any sort of meaningful way, instead all they do is take the cowards way out of attacking the poor and the socially weak to fulfill their weird, twisted, juvenile, Randian fantasies.

baleen
Hooker, do you really still believe that Cena is me? Like, after years, really? I hope so. Yes.

Cena_mark
Baleen, the funny thing is I don't really believe a lot of that libertarian stuff anymore. Since joining the Coast Guard I've been away from talk radio and have found myself increasingly politically apathetic. I admit we do need to decrease the gap between rich and poor, but my prejudices against hipsters and hippies keep me from embracing the occupy movement.

baleen
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Occupy-Coast-Guard/170483863039809

Louis Armstrong
Stupid reverse psychology!
It's working :(

Cena_mark
Your tent isn't a protected form of speech. Its not even a form of speech; its a tent.

baleen
A right to assemble is a right to assemble. Do your job and defend the Constitution.