mystral: Most of the people taking part is these protests seem to be aimlessly protesting because their life has suddenly gotten worse, they're angry about it and they need some kind of outlet.
Well, instead of raging against scapegoats like banks, the government and whatever, maybe they should develop some perspective:
Yes, that is why many people are protesting. It's a valid impetus for the protests. The banks and the government are not mere scapegoats, however, they are the reason for the problem. The subprime mortgage crisis was a direct result of predatory lending tactics, shady stock trading practices, and government regulatory bodies that were paid off to allow all of it to happen without consequence. We have spent nearly 13 TRILLION dollars on the resulting bailout. If you pay taxes that number should have you furious because it's money you are spending to keep bankers rich and without legal consequence.
mystral: 1. Everyone who took advantage of the incredibly cheap loans that were around before the crisis is partly responsible for it. From an outsider's perspective, it was obvious you were playing with fire, and you got burned.
Sure, the financial and governmental institutions have a bigger responsibility, but don't act like you're blameless and they're evil.
Finding scapegoats to blame for problems may be a time-honored tradition, but it's never the right way to go to find solutions.
Yes, the people that took the home loans they couldn't manage are partially at fault as well. But their consequences are being carried out for their misguided actions as their homes continue to be foreclosed and they go into massive debt. The banks, on the other hand, entered these loans knowing full well that these people would default on their loans. What the banks also knew is that they could defer the risk to the stock market by trading CODs of bundled mortgage. Corrupt systems allowed them to trade these as AAA securities. The banks knew that they could also eliminate their risk by asking for a government bailout. We are essentially paying for their bad gambling decisions and they made the risky bets because they knew they could transfer the consequences to the stockmarket and the taxpayer. Again, the banks are not mere scapegoats: they are the primary source of the problem and they have largely gone unpunished, and in fact, been rewarded for their scams.
mystral: 2. Sure, your life may have changed for the worse, you're relatively poorer, you can't seem to find a job as easily as before.
Well, maybe you should look at actual poor people, both in your own country and in countries like Somalia, Zimbabwe or North Korea, and then tell me you have it bad.
I teach history in college and I know how good a life those of us who live in rich Western countries now have compared to our ancestors.
How people can complain when they aren't able to afford a second car, or a second TV, is something I'll never understand.
A country doesn't have to hit rock bottom before they can fix a problem. The very notion that we should wait until we are destitute, impoverished, and on the verge of death before we start to push for social change is just patently stupid. I don't want to be insulting, but to think that we should wait until we are at the absolute worse before we do anything is just stupid. I don't know what else to call it. To your point though, yes, we do have things relatively well when you compare us to our ancient ancestors or compared to a 3rd world country. These are things to be grateful for. We have much to be grateful for. But we don't keep all of the good things we have in our society by being apathetic and allowing shady business practices to extract trillions of undeserved dollars out of the American people.
mystral: 3. Maybe instead of being all "big corporations are evil, the government is good" you should realize both of those are made up of people.
The fact is that in any system, any culture, there will always be a small fraction of the population that wants money and power and is willing to do anything to get it.
Right now those people are mostly in big corporations because that's where the money is.
If you took the money and power and shifted it to the government instead, then those people would just follow.
If you think governments are inherently less greedy than corporations, I'd just point out the several counter examples of governments with a lot of power, like Vladimir Putin's in Russia.
Bottom line is, you can't change human nature, and people who are willing to do anything for money and power will almost always win over those of us who aren't.
I don't think people are anti-corporation and pro-government. I would say I care both about free enterprise and democracy. The crux of the problem is that people are cheating those systems and profiting from it considerably.
mystral: 4. As for capitalism, I'm sorry but looking at history it's very obvious it's the best economic system we've been able to come up with. Why? Because it plays along with human nature, mostly greed, instead of trying to change or suppress it.
Ever since we've invented capitalism, people have gotten richer, and more free. Sure a small percentage of the population may have grown even richer than the rest faster, but everyone has got a better life than they used to, and not just because of scientific progress.
Sure, the system has faults, some people can exploit those (but as I argued earlier, those have the motivation to exploit any system, and it's pretty obvious they'd be at the top even in a communist system too) and it has hiccups now and then.
The 1929 crisis was one (and a much bigger one than the one we're living through now), as were the oil krach in the 70s and several more minor downturns, we're now living through another.
Trying to claim that current problems mean capitalism is broken is laughable. If it survived 1929, it will survive this.
It will survive, because any other system has a lot more potential flaws, and trying to come up with a perfect system is impossible, because the economy has one serious problem; it's a system where human beings interact with each other, and human beings are far from perfect.
You can only go so far with the Ayn Rand philosphy that greed ultimately leads to quasi-ethical behavior that profits everyone. There is a fair amount of truth that the capitalist system does self-organize into something that more-or-less works pretty well. Nevertheless, it can be exploited and it can be exploited heavily. That's what we saw with the subprime mortgage crisis. That's why there is a class divide where 1% of the population owns nearly 45% of the nations wealth. Capitalism is great, but it's not perfect. We depend on our governmental regulating bodies to step in and keep the system in line when excessively greedy people or organizations try to exploit the system to the detriment of everyone else. The trouble now is that our regulating bodies can't be trusted because they have been bought and they either change the rules or they don't enforce them. This is what needs to stop or we are all in for a world of hurt. This is the major point of the Occupy movement: separate the money from the politics.
