Occupy Wall Street

[The Ozzman]

This is their list of demands apparently. Although, I pulled this from freerepublic.org, so it might be troll fodder to feed the freepers agenda as well:

Repeal the Taft-Hartley Act. Unionize ALL workers immediately.

Raise the minimum wage immediately to $18/hr. Create a maximum wage of $90/hr to eliminate inequality.

Institute a 6 hour workday, and 6 weeks of paid vacation.

Institute a moratorium on all foreclosures and layoffs immediately.

Repeal racist and xenophobic English-only laws.

Open the borders to all immigrants, legal or illegal. Offer immediate, unconditional amnesty, to all undocumented residents of the US.

Create a single-payer, universal health care system.

Pass stricter campaign finance reform laws. Ban all private donations. All campaigns will receive equal funding, provided by the taxpayers.

Institute a negative income tax, and tax the very rich at rates up to 90%.

Pass far stricter environmental protection and animal rights laws.

Allow workers to elect their supervisors.

Lower the retirement age to 55. Increase Social Security benefits.

Create a 5% annual wealth tax for the very rich.

Ban the private ownership of land.

Make homeschooling illegal. Religious fanatics use it to feed their children propaganda.

Reduce the age of majority to 16.

Abolish the death penalty and life in prison. We call for the immediate release of all death row inmates from death row and transferred to regular prisons.

Release all political prisoners immediately.

Immediate withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan.

Abolish the debt limit.

Ban private gun ownership.

Strengthen the separation of church and state.

Immediate debt forgiveness for all.

End the 'War on Drugs'.

 

[Vimana]

Removed due to hate speech. Was there actually any in that video?

 

[Saparmurat_Niyazov]

Not that I recall.

 

[Dak]

Whether or not that list is legit or not, that list is scary as hell.

 

[Saparmurat_Niyazov]

The list of demands would have had to change a whole hell of a lot from what I remember.

 

[Vimana]

I just watched the video of the message to the occupy police. LOL at it being hate speech. They called the cop that pepper sprayed the kids at UC Davis a coward and a bully.

 

[King Richard]

Whoever wrote that list needs to be locked in a cage with political prisoners in Iraq with a gun under their ownership with a single bullet on death row for life.

 

[Dak]

Whoever wrote that list needs to be locked in a cage with political prisoners in Iraq with a gun under their ownership with a single bullet on death row for life.

I don't understand the connection.


Anyway, that list is the most tyrannical thing I have seen in a while. The only two decent things on there is get out of Iraq & Afghanistan and end the War on Drugs, and those have nothing to do with the other demands.

 

[SkeletonWitch]

To protest something and be taken seriously, one has to offer a viable alternative.

 

[Vimana]

Have you heard of The Plan?

 

[King Richard]

I don't understand the connection.

...what?

 

[Vimana]

It was a joke referencing the demands, right?

 

[Dak]

To protest something and be taken seriously, one has to offer a viable alternative.

"Viable" in this case is being used in a highly subjective sense.

 

[Saparmurat_Niyazov]

Have you heard of The Plan?

I have.

I have a feeling that OWS has been infiltrated and co-opted to de-legitimize the movement, exactly as was done with the Tea Party. I remember the early days of the Tea Party, and they had a solid case against corruption. Then the Fox News crowd came in and clogged the toilet bowl, so to speak. The exact same thing has happened with OWS, except from the MSNBC/Stalinist/Maoist left. I have actually witnessed it first hand at an Occupy Omaha general assembly. I marched and met a lot of people against the Fed and NWO. One week later, those people were gone and replaced with strangers from out of town who kept disrupting the GA and pushing their Soviet style agenda.

 

[zabu of nΩd]

Let's look at those demands one at a time.

What's the problem with unionizing all workers, dak? Corporations have the advantage of collective bargaining by default. Don't workers need an equivalent?

 

[Cythraul]

The wage advantage enjoyed by union members results from two factors. First, monopoly unions raise wages above competitive levels. Second, nonunion wages fall because workers priced out of jobs by high union wages move into the nonunion sector and bid down wages there. Thus, some of the gains to union members come at the expense of those who must shift to lower-paying or less desirable jobs or go unemployed.

Despite considerable rhetoric to the contrary, unions have blocked the economic advance of blacks, women, and other minorities. That is because another of their functions, once they have raised wages above competitive levels, is to ration the jobs that remain. The union can discriminate on the basis of blood relationships or skin color rather than auctioning off (openly selling) the valuable jobs to the highest-bidding applicants. Because craft unions such as the carpenters’ and railway unions have had more monopoly control over wage rates and hiring practices than industrial unions such as the auto and steel workers have had, craft unions have had more opportunities to exclude minority workers. Industrial unions have had to organize whoever was hired, and industrial companies have hired large numbers of black workers. The degree of racial discrimination exercised by union officials depends on their ability and willingness to exclude. For example, leaders at the local shop level facing contested elections and turnover in office cannot stray far from median membership preferences, while insulated top union leaders have more discretion.

Economist Ray Marshall, although a prounion secretary of labor under President Jimmy Carter, made his academic reputation by documenting how unions excluded blacks from membership in the 1930s and 1940s. Marshall also wrote of incidents in which union members assaulted black workers hired to replace them during strikes. During the 1911 strike against the Illinois Central, noted Marshall, whites killed two black strikebreakers and wounded three others at McComb, Mississippi. He also noted that white strikers killed ten black firemen in 1911 because the New Orleans and Texas Pacific Railroad had granted them equal seniority. Not surprisingly, therefore, black leader Booker T. Washington opposed unions all his life, and W. E. B. DuBois called unions the greatest enemy of the black working class. Another interesting fact: the “union label” was started in the 1880s to proclaim that a product was made by white rather than yellow (Chinese) hands. More generally, union wage rates, union-backed requirements for a license to practice various occupations, and union-backed labor regulations such as the minimum wage law and the Davis-Bacon Act continue to reduce opportunities for black youths, females, and other minorities.

The monopoly success of private-sector unions, however, has brought their decline. The silent, steady forces of the marketplace continually undermine them. Linneman and Wachter, along with economist William Carter, found that the rising union wage premium was responsible for up to 64 percent of the decline in unions’ share of employment in the last twenty years. The average union wage premium for railroad workers over similarly skilled nonrailroad workers, for example, increased from 32 percent to 50 percent between 1973 and 1987; at the same time, employment on railroads declined from 520,000 to 249,000. By 2002, railroad employment had slipped to 216,000, down 13 percent since 1987, while total nonfarm employment grew 26 percent during the same period. Increased wage premiums also caused declines in union employment in construction, manufacturing, and communications. The silent, steady forces of the marketplace continually undermine labor cartels.

In recent decades, union representation of workers has declined in all private industries in the United States. A major reason is that employees do not like unions. According to a Louis Harris poll commissioned by the AFLCIO in 1984, only one in three U.S. employees would vote for union representation in a secret ballot election. The Harris poll found, as have other surveys, that nonunion employees are more satisfied than union workers with job security, recognition of job performance, and participation in decisions that affect their jobs. And the U.S. economy’s evolution toward smaller companies, the South and West, higher-technology products, and more professional and technical personnel continues to erode union membership.

http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/LaborUnions.html

 

[Dak]

Workers vs corporations are a false dichotomy created by our current system.

Unions are merely another layer of beaurocracy that mooches off the worker, and guts productivity and savings.

+1 to what Cyth posted.

 

[Vimana]

I have.

I have a feeling that OWS has been infiltrated and co-opted to de-legitimize the movement, exactly as was done with the Tea Party. I remember the early days of the Tea Party, and they had a solid case against corruption. Then the Fox News crowd came in and clogged the toilet bowl, so to speak. The exact same thing has happened with OWS, except from the MSNBC/Stalinist/Maoist left. I have actually witnessed it first hand at an Occupy Omaha general assembly. I marched and met a lot of people against the Fed and NWO. One week later, those people were gone and replaced with strangers from out of town who kept disrupting the GA and pushing their Soviet style agenda.

I'm really starting to wonder if Anon fueled OWS, or at least was a catalyst. The first phase of the plan was publicized in June, and based on what they told people to do (educate themselves of the corruption in the world) I wouldn't be surprised at a protest coming out of it. I may have the timeline wrong, though.

Regardless, even if Anon started this, it's going to need more guidance to not get ruined by tons of dipshits. Anon already urged the occupiers to retreat for the winter. Hopefully round two of the movements will be stronger. The Plan is three phases, and I'm really starting to wonder what the second and third are. They're supposed to be done by June next year.

 

[zabu of nΩd]

Good points, cythie and dak.

 

[Saparmurat_Niyazov]

I'm sure Anon initiated OWS, but they've definitely lost control at this point.

While I appreciate the above points, I still wouldn't want to live and work in a economy without any form of organized labor. Workers need some sort of protection, or at least advocacy.