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Yahoo News Being Misleading about OWS?

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posted on Sep, 20 2013 @ 11:48 AM
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I don't think many of us, if any of us at all, can explain what Occupy Wall Street actually stood for. It had a lot of issues on this point alone but most seemed to be to fight corruption. What I never thought of Occupy Wall Street when I was there was, that we were pushing for socialism. Socialism is actually what it seemed like we were fighting, that and fascism. But when I clicked a random link about OWS that lead me to Yahoo.com I was surprised.

ca.news.yahoo.com...


The picture here shows what seems to be a Union fighting for socialism....


Am I wrong? Was occupy just a socialism front? Because the people I saw there were just trying to shrink government and prosecute those who've robbed us. Insight appreciated.



posted on Sep, 20 2013 @ 11:54 AM
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reply to post by Antipathy17
 


moderation of capitalism is not socialism, imo.

after the collapse of 2007, some regulation was obviously needed, our congress busy with their ideological battles has still not sufficiently addressed the problems of the financial sector and, imo, will lead to another financial fiasco.

the occupy movement was a voice in the desert unfortunaly, as the future will show, nobody listened.



posted on Sep, 20 2013 @ 11:55 AM
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No you are right. It was about fighting wall streets control of government.



posted on Sep, 20 2013 @ 12:06 PM
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You hit the nail on the head when you said it was about fighting the corruption in Wall Street and its influence on the political system. I don't think it was ever about socialism, but for some elements it may have been.

The truth is the movement got hi-jacked by several fringe groups and the whole thing became a mess. The occupy movement in my home city seemed to be more about anti-capitalism, and that was a real shame.

IMO, it was an opportunity for change missed. But maybe, just maybe the movement was hi-jacked to de-rail it?


edit on 20/9/13 by Cobaltic1978 because: (no reason given)



posted on Sep, 20 2013 @ 12:08 PM
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reply to post by citizen6511
 


Well, the dudes in the riot gear paid attention, unfortunately.

From what I recall as I knew a number of people involved with it and went down on several occasions to my local occupy to talk with a number of people there is that the overall theme was fighting corporate corruption. In fact, I was going back to school at the time and several of my professors in the School of Business were heading down there for marches and to give talks. Basically, even my School of Business professors were saying that capitalism needed to be modified as it was not working to benefit humanity. I do recall, however, that towards the tail end, a lot of unions started getting involved with Occupy locally. Namely, AFL-CIO would have representatives down there. However, even they weren't calling for pure socialism in that sense but simply a clean of Congress and a lessening of economic disparity.

Brains working a little slow today but if I recall correctly, the association between labor rights and socialism basically emanated from Marx, himself, in response to the grievous activities occurring in the early Industrial Revolution. However, I think a lot of propaganda laden weight gets placed on the word "socialism" that may not be warranted. I tend to ask myself what protections would I want as a worker in a factory. Is it really socialism to want a job that pays a sustainable wage (able to pay for shelter, food and energy) or to not want to have one's life at risk when entering a factory? There's a lot of cases where workers in factories were not protected at all and were unknowingly exposed to toxic chemicals or radiation and died for it. BP cut corners on the Deepwater Horizon to stay within budget and how much death resulted from that, both human and wild/marine life? So it's not like these problems are really gone, even in our regulated US. Part of the reason why there are still problems is because many of the regulatory agencies may have been corrupted.



posted on Sep, 20 2013 @ 12:27 PM
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Antipathy17
I don't think many of us, if any of us at all, can explain what Occupy Wall Street actually stood for. It had a lot of issues on this point alone but most seemed to be to fight corruption. What I never thought of Occupy Wall Street when I was there was, that we were pushing for socialism. Socialism is actually what it seemed like we were fighting, that and fascism. But when I clicked a random link about OWS that lead me to Yahoo.com I was surprised.

ca.news.yahoo.com...


The picture here shows what seems to be a Union fighting for socialism....


Am I wrong? Was occupy just a socialism front? Because the people I saw there were just trying to shrink government and prosecute those who've robbed us. Insight appreciated.


Regardless of what OWS stood for, the movement didn't have a unified issue that everyone was for/against. That will always cause a movement to fail. If the movement had chosen say adding consumer protections back to student loans, and just focused on one issue at a time...it might have been successful. Just look at he prohibition movement.
edit on 20-9-2013 by OrphanApology because: d



posted on Sep, 20 2013 @ 12:47 PM
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reply to post by OrphanApology
 


You know that you're regurgitating exactly what the various media were saying repeatedly over and over again in every news piece about OWS, right? Corporate corruption in government was the consistent complaint. At one point, some random person put out a convoluted list of demands in the name of OWS. However, the source of that was extraordinarily dubious and, honestly, the whole "list of demands" stunk of COINTELPRO type activity. The question I still don't have an answer to was who signed that guy's paycheck. Notably, it was picked up by several media outlets as being an "official" OWS demand list.

s3-ec.buzzfed.com...

The media did this exact kind of thing back in the 60's. If you listen to MLK Jr's "I've been to the Mountaintop" speech, he directly talks about media representation of the civil rights movement. It was his final speech:



posted on Sep, 20 2013 @ 12:49 PM
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The OWS movement was basically "rich people have too much give some of it to us". That is pretty similar to socialism.



posted on Sep, 20 2013 @ 12:54 PM
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WhiteAlice
reply to post by OrphanApology
 


You know that you're regurgitating exactly what the various media were saying repeatedly over and over again in every news piece about OWS, right? Corporate corruption in government was the consistent complaint. At one point, some random person put out a convoluted list of demands in the name of OWS. However, the source of that was extraordinarily dubious and, honestly, the whole "list of demands" stunk of COINTELPRO type activity. The question I still don't have an answer to was who signed that guy's paycheck. Notably, it was picked up by several media outlets as being an "official" OWS demand list.

s3-ec.buzzfed.com...

The media did this exact kind of thing back in the 60's. If you listen to MLK Jr's "I've been to the Mountaintop" speech, he directly talks about media representation of the civil rights movement. It was his final speech:



I never watched the MSM's take on it, I simply looked at it from a rational perspective. When I talked to the local OWS in my area none of them had a unified message and from what I could find online neither did the ones from other areas. "Demands" in the context of a movement are well and good but without a specific plan of action it gets nothing done in American politics. In the case of OWS this meant that the majority of people didn't understand the movement and for the most part no laws have been changed or done away with.

Also if you don't think that Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement didn't have a very skilled and wonderful coordination with a clear plan of action, then you must not know about Bayard Rustin.



posted on Sep, 20 2013 @ 12:59 PM
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reply to post by Antipathy17
 

I can tell you STL had socialists and true red communists. A couple, I think would have visibly reacted if addressed unexpectedly in Russian, for how I thought it was obvious on that point. Still, there were as many I saw and knew that were not. Even Livestreams of all the other camps? Some Commies and some socialists...but mixed in with every other ism and ist you could ask to see in one movement. Perhaps...part of the problem, but I digress on that. Different thread for faults...

I had the impression we were all pushing for the simple right to determine, as citizens, which of the various systems we wanted it to actually BE. Not simply have it dictated and forced into more warped versions of something which I think DID exist. Heck, I KNOW it did. I saw Capitalism before it blew fuses and went haywire to chase profit right into it's own destruction. It wasn't perfect, but less imperfect than most. ...and others in camp hated every last word of my opinion on that, too. lol...... We all still protested the same direction tho, right?

Self Determination...would be the one value I think you could call a common denominator. Something we don't have anymore and didn't even miss until it wasn't there anymore.



posted on Sep, 20 2013 @ 01:09 PM
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reply to post by OrphanApology
 


My point of bringing up that speech is what MLK says about the media at the 11:20 mark. That's the correlation I was trying to draw. Please don't extrapolate anything other than what I specifically say. I said this:


The media did this exact kind of thing back in the 60's. If you listen to MLK Jr's "I've been to the Mountaintop" speech, he directly talks about media representation of the civil rights movement.


I did not say anything or imply any correlation like you said I did. There is nothing in between the lines in what I said.

You didn't even need to watch the MSM because people largely turned into a massive echo chamber on that specific line. Another issue that absolutely crippled OSW and similar movements around the country was that you basically had areas within the city that had tens, food, people were bringing blankets and other supplies. We have had a significant increase in homelessness over the last couple decades and most significantly post-Financial Crisis that such an encampment became a kind of beacon for the homeless populations in the city. I know that, locally, my movement ended up splitting and dismantling itself from within largely because of the issues began to get really muddled. It's not to say that speaking out for the homeless is a bad thing, mind you. It was just that that became a topic derailing factor in the original intent of the movement. There was a whole lot of internal issues. The overall execution of the various Occupy Movements were inherently flawed and it left them wide open for this.



posted on Sep, 20 2013 @ 02:05 PM
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reply to post by jjkenobi
 


Absolutely incorrect. The ows movement was sparked by the outrage that the wealthy could sale more loans than they could afford to people who could never afford to payback said loans, then recive taxpayer money to reimburse the wealthy for their failed scam while they confiscated the property to resale at auction. The wealthy basicly drained everybit of wealth left in the middle class and got the government to be their insurance at the cost of me and you.



posted on Sep, 20 2013 @ 02:24 PM
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Antipathy17
I don't think many of us, if any of us at all, can explain what Occupy Wall Street actually stood for.
Of course nobody really knew what OWS stood for. The amusing thing about the movement was that it stood for a lot of things and nothing at all at the same time.Occupy never really had strong leadership that could deliver a clear and concise message. Thus, you had many people with many ideas. This is where the establishment can say "well, they really don't know what they want".A lack of any real leadership was the first sign that OWS didn't really know what they were doing. The idea that they didn't have a leader/s sounds really nice philosophically, but it doesn't really work in reality. If you don't have a seat at the bargaining table then you're not negotiating for $h!t. You're nothing more than a spectator.I do believe that if OWS had at least some competent leadership they could've done some damage. A big part of the narrative delivered by OWS resonated with many more people than some people want to admit, and it would've gained some serious steam if it could've maintained itself. Unfortunately, there were some fatal flaws in the movement from the very beginning. You also have to take this leadership idea very carefully. Representation is a double edged sword. Your leadership/representation can help or hurt depending on their intentions. This is where an intelligent populace becomes paramount in not allowing their movement to be co-opted by entities who have no intention of working towards the populaces best interests.It's all about consolidation and mobilization of popular sentiment. It's an extremely difficult thing to do. Problem being, if you don't, popular stresses reach a breaking point and it usually results in violence.



posted on Sep, 20 2013 @ 02:51 PM
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reply to post by GD21D
 


I agree. Again, if you listen to the above linked MLK Jr. video not as a point of view on what the Civil Rights Movement was about but in the role that MLK Jr. played as a leader for that movement, it was to basically reaffirm focus for the protesters. The lack of leadership was a point of interest for me in regards to OWS. What they were attempting to model would be a flat organizational structure and the most frequently cited reason for this lack of leadership was to avoid being co-opted. Having had to learn about the various organizational structures for my degree, such a flat organization is great in terms of creativity and responsiveness. The downside to such a structure can be lowered efficacy and efficiency that decreases as the structure gets larger and larger because it basically spirals out of control. Whoever suggested such a thing in the first place either flunked their class in organizational structure or deliberately suggested it. Without a leader in a large flat organizational structure, it guarantees that the organization will disintegrate without an individual refocusing the whole back to the goal at hand.

Adbusters was responsible for the suggestion of encampment, which was also modeled across the nation for other Occupy Movements. Again, there's a correlation that could've been found with the Civil Rights Movement in regards to the Poor People's Campaign and what happened with that idea: en.wikipedia.org... You'd think that Adbusters would have done their homework to know that encampments in cities a. don't end well for those occupying and b. did not have a positive outcome in terms of goals.

It was doomed to fail. I recall seeing things about potential civil unrest occurring within the US being predicted by the government in the years prior to OWS. You also have the militarization of the police force occurring in those years prior. What you have with OWS that could almost be a movement built to fail. It took everything that had doomed prior movements to failure and smashed them all into one movement. Lack of leadership, flat structure, and encampment. You had a police force ready for riots.

What does the Forest Service do when they know that the conditions within the forest are ripe for a bad forest fire? Why they do a controlled burn.


edit on 20/9/13 by WhiteAlice because: apparently it was an insignifcant word.



posted on Sep, 20 2013 @ 03:04 PM
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reply to post by Antipathy17
 



Am I wrong? Was occupy just a socialism front? Because the people I saw there were just trying to shrink government and prosecute those who've robbed us. Insight appreciated.
It certainly started out as a movement to fight corruption. But like all good movements it was quickly hijacked by special interests….in this case it was the George Soros progressive crowd and big union thugs.

Whatever Occupy WAS…it is no longer. The rational elements have all but faded away leaving only the hardcore special interest activists.



posted on Sep, 21 2013 @ 01:16 AM
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reply to post by seabag
 


I appreciate the replies. I read them just now and although I would like to i am a bit too intoxicated to reply




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