If the word comes down to shift those people from WallStreet or wherever it'll be the Police doing the shifting. They are the muscle, they also enforce the law. I don't think they are mutually exclusive.#

But here we arguing the metaphor. The shill won't be obvious to all unfortunately, its obvious to us because we already knew the game was rigged. I hope OWS changed some minds.

Already has...I should've never bought it. It was beyond my means.>> ^GenjiKilpatrick:

@rottenseed
I hope your house gets foreclosed.

her mouth only needs to open for one thing...

edit: penis...in case you were wondering. It only needs to open for penis.>> ^BoneRemake:

>> ^rottenseed:
that girl in the bear costume is cute though

Just not too bright in moderately thought predominant conversations.

>> ^rottenseed:

that girl in the bear costume is cute though


Just not too bright in moderately thought predominant conversations.

>> ^ponceleon:

The interviewer is actually Opie from the Opie and Anthony radio on XM.


Indeed, and the sky is blue as well !

yeah somehow we've idly watched this go down. not everyone of course, but a very large percentage of the populace, whether through propaganda or socialization, is both complacent and stuck on warped ideas of status and achievement. We've idolized the rich, even though they mostly schemed their way to the top at the expense of everyone. But "consumerism" as a psychological movement has really supported these notions...and has really helped keep us self-focused and self-indulgent....and our focus on our own individual accumulation of goods, status, and wealth blinds us to what is happening all around us. we erect our own psychological barriers to higher awareness.

and there seems to be a vast difference between awareness and what we normally consider to be intelligence. what do you think?

Consumerism continually tells us how smart, special and awesome we are in order to sell us goods. They don't sell on the quality of the good. they sell to the emotional side of us. Like religion, they convince us that we're special, and entitled.

i think the problem with that is that when we buy into how smart, special, and awesome we are, our self-centered psyche then misses what is happening around us.
How smart are we when mass extinction is occurring on this planet, global warming threatens our very existence, and crooks are stealing our future from under our noses?
i think we need to get over ourselves
imho

>> ^Lawdeedaw:

They complain about Wallstreet greed---but isn't mainstreet evil too? (@NetRunner and @dystopianfuturetoday) The 99% must change first, me thinks... (P.s., I will still respond to the other thread--hopefully tonight. This comment was just a musing of mine.)

>> ^Lawdeedaw:

They complain about Wallstreet greed---but isn't mainstreet evil too? (@NetRunner and @dystopianfuturetoday) The 99% must change first, me thinks... (P.s., I will still respond to the other thread--hopefully tonight. This comment was just a musing of mine.)


The 1% wrecked the entire world with their greed, economically and physically. The 1% have all the power. This guy ultimately works for one of them (because we all do), and is trying to make a living under a system of incentives that they created.

If he wants to eat, he needs money. If he needs money, he needs to work. If he wants to work, he has to do what someone else tells him to do. If he tries to just go get the food without first getting money, men with guns will come to toss him in jail. (You know, liberty freeberty)

In this case, they probably give him bonus incentives that are designed to marry his self-interest to the 1%'s objectives as profiteers. They probably pay out a bonus for keeping insurance payouts below a certain target, which pits his self-interest against his ethical duty to be fair and honest with home owners.

The fact that the net result of such a bonus is that it results in some less than ethical dealings that boost the company's bottom line is a feature, not a bug. Best of all, the 1% have plausible deniability if someone does get caught. After all, they didn't tell him to behave in an unethical manner.

So that's why the 1% needs to change first.

If you're open to some skepticism about liberty capitalism, then a more subtle observation I'd make is that there sure seem to be a ton of situations in our society where doing the wrong thing brings you a reward, but doing the right thing usually loses you money. Seems worth re-examining how we do things to see if maybe we can't make it just a little easier for people to do the right thing.

They complain about Wallstreet greed---but isn't mainstreet evil too? (@NetRunner and @dystopianfuturetoday) The 99% must change first, me thinks... (P.s., I will still respond to the other thread--hopefully tonight. This comment was just a musing of mine.)

I don't get it...Democracy Now! went down to Occupy Wallstreet and found tons of very intelligent and well informed people. How is it so hard for everyone else?

>> ^snoozedoctor:

In the multitude of recent posts/blogs/discussions about eating the rich, one name is consistently absent of criticism, even prior to his death, Steve Jobs. Net worth over 6 billion dollars, doing no philanthropic work to speak of (as compared to the often vilified Bill Gates), and not one of the many billionaires pledging half of their estate to charities (check out "the giving pledge". Why not Jobs? "Cause dude, like, you know man, he made cool stuff."
Anyone that cannot see the benefit to society, the multitude of companies and people employed that simply augment and support apple products, from iphone covers, to sound docks, on, and on and on, well......if you can't see that, no wonder you don't understand and appreciate capitalism at it's best. True, I don't think money motivated Steve Jobs, I'm quite sure it didn't, but he wasn't keen on giving it away.
If you don't like your lot in life, do what I did, borrow money, do 8 years of post-grad training working 80 hour weeks, get a job, pay back your loans and have a lifestyle above the mean, get yourself on the Board of a charity and give 10% of your income to charities that you trust will distribute money to people that really need it. I didn't do all that work to give money to someone that wants to sit on their ass. I guess I'm what's wrong with this country, an ordinary dude that wants to get ahead.


Steve jobs: The richest income tax evader the world has ever seen. A 1$/year salary? So endearing.

I dont think I've ever agreed with you but I do agree with your remark that the repealing of the Glass-Steagall was a mistake.>> ^NetRunner:

Repealing Glass-Steagall got government out of the market, and was a huge mistake.
>> ^Winstonfield_Pennypacker:
Repealing Glass-Steagall was a horrible mistake.
...
Get the government OUT of the market.

>> ^snoozedoctor:

I have yet to hear one of the protesters voice a plan. I'm with Cain, I don't know what they want. Was there greed involved in the sub-prime fiasco....YES. WE ALL KNOW THAT. PEOPLE ARE, BY NATURE, GREEDY. Congress's explicit approval of sub-prime lending, under the banner of "affordable housing for all" was mostly a lefty dem deal, (I think I hear Barney Frank somewhere), although both sides of the aisle should have been pistol whipped for letting such an obvious fleece go on for so long.


http://videosift.com/video/why-Occupy-WallStreet

Repealing Glass-Steagall got government out of the market, and was a huge mistake.
>> ^Winstonfield_Pennypacker:

Repealing Glass-Steagall was a horrible mistake.
...
Get the government OUT of the market.

Your video, why Occupy Wall Street?, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

So, these statistics are from the IRS and isn't internet hearsay. Medicare makes the percentages paid by top earners go up. So do property taxes. (Sales tax and state taxation is another discussion and doesn't involve the Federal government. In any case there's no way to enforce a progressive sales tax. So if this is unfair, then the only thing to do is eliminate it altogether. But that is a state-by-state decision.) Medicare along with Medicaid and some other mandatory taxes account for 33% of Federal expenses/budget, while social Security for 21% (even thoug Social Security is a separate Trust Fund).

Social security is capped for various reasons and it doesn't have anything to do with current tax debates or legislative proposals. Social security tax is about 15%, half of which is paid by the employer. Social Security is in theory a separate budget from the rest of the federal budget. And for 2011, the total tax is reduced with the employee paying only 4.2% of it and the employer paying 6.2%.
Medicare, as mentioned, is not capped at any income. On a million dollar income you pay about $14,500. On a 45K income you pay about $652.

Unemployment taxes are paid fully by employers not employees.

The complaint that the bottom 80% pay 13% is misleading because the bottom 50% (half the population) pay between only 0-3%.

Top 10% (not top 20%) - pay 70%
Bottom 50% - pay 3%
Everyone else - 27%

But it gets a bit more complicated because about 47% of households pay 0% income tax, a majority in the bottom 40% of earners.

Top 10% earners have to pay more (70%) for the roads, government salaries, wars, national parks, Airforce One, NPR, corporate welfare, bank bailouts, and most other government services (the bottom 50% pay less than 3% of it) but when buying goods (with or without sales tax), like coffee or an iPhone or pumping gas or a movie ticket, it does cost top earners a smaller percentage of their income.

Some other "taxes" are, in effect, flat taxation like business license, car registration, bridge toll, sanitation and flood control, parking meters, etc.

Fairness in this is a matter of opinion (and self-interest). I'm not an accountant so I can't really go into all the various loopholes in our tax code.

And I'm talking mostly about taxation at the Federal level of which income tax accounts for about half. Like I said, sales tax is a state matter and so are fees like parking meters etc. Taxation at the state level seems to draw less controversy because Democratic states will "happily" pay more and Republican states will "happily" pay less and you can select a state to live in at just the right taxation for you.

And as we all know on the Sift, you have that statists on one side who think more taxation is better because the government is here to help and anti-statists on the other who think "that government is best wich governs least" (or not at all). And also the hybrids like Lyndon Johnson, Larry King, Jon Stewart, and others, including most corporatists.

>> ^Ariane:

>> ^Trancecoach:
The Top 1% also pays nearly 40% of the Federal Income Tax
>> ^ghark:
Some interesting facts about the top 1%:
The Top 1 Percent Of Americans Owns 40 Percent Of The Nation’s Wealth
The Top 1 Percent Of Americans Take Home 24 Percent Of National Income
The Top 1 Percent Of Americans Own Half Of The Country’s Stocks, Bonds, And Mutual Funds
The Top 1 Percent Of Americans Have Only 5 Percent Of The Nation’s Personal Debt
The Top 1 Percent Are Taking In More Of The Nation’s Income Than At Any Other Time Since The 1920s
http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2011/10/03/334156/top-five
-wealthiest-one-percent/


Umm, no.
"The Internet is awash with statements that the top 1 percent pays, depending on the year, 38 percent or more than 40 percent of taxes.
It’s true that the top 1 percent of wage earners paid 38 percent of the federal income taxes in 2008 (the most recent year for which data is available). But people forget that the income tax is less than half of federal taxes and only one-fifth of taxes at all levels of government.
Social Security, Medicare and unemployment insurance taxes (known as payroll taxes) are paid mostly by the bottom 90 percent of wage earners. That’s because, once you reach $106,800 of income, you pay no more for Social Security, though the much smaller Medicare tax applies to all wages. Warren Buffett pays the exact same amount of Social Security taxes as someone who earns $106,800."
http://wweek.com/portland/article-17350-9_thin
gs_the_rich_dont_want_you_to_know_about_taxes.html
Sales taxes and other flat taxes are even more unfair. We low income people pretty much spend all the money we make and as a result pay (in my state) 8% of my income in sales taxes, while the top 1% only spend a small fraction of their wealth on items likely to collect sales tax, so I would not be surprised if the average top 1% pays even 1% on sales tax.
The top 20% earn 93% of the wealth, yet only pay 70% of the taxes, leaving the other 13% to the bottom 80% who only earn 7% of the wealth. THAT is what needs to be corrected.