Wall Street Is Cheating?

[MA-Caver]

I like how the article (for me at least) explains the pros of the OWS.

I was at an event on the Upper East Side last Friday night when I got to talking with a salesman in the media business. The subject turned to Zuccotti Park and Occupy Wall Street, and he was chuckling about something he'd heard on the news.
"I hear [Occupy Wall Street] has a CFO," he said. "I think that's funny."
"Okay, I'll bite," I said. "Why is that funny?"
"Well, I heard they're trying to decide what bank to put their money in," he said, munching on hors d'oeuvres. "It's just kind of ironic."
Oh, Christ, I thought. He’s saying the protesters are hypocrites because they’re using banks. I sighed.
"Listen," I said, "where else are you going to put three hundred thousand dollars? A shopping bag?"
"Well," he said, "it's just, their protests are all about... You know..."
"Dude," I said. "These people aren't protesting money. They're not protesting banking. They're protesting corruption on Wall Street."
"Whatever," he said, shrugging.
These nutty criticisms of the protests are spreading like cancer. Earlier that same day, I'd taped a TV segment on CNN with Will Cain from the National Review, and we got into an argument on the air. Cain and I agreed about a lot of the problems on Wall Street, but when it came to the protesters, we disagreed on one big thing.

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politic...t-winning-its-cheating-20111025#ixzz1cZWhIMpQ
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STUPIDITY INSURANCE. Defenders of the banks like to talk a lot about how we shouldn't feel sorry for people who've been foreclosed upon, because it's their own fault for borrowing more than they can pay back, buying more house than they can afford, etc. And critics of OWS have assailed protesters for complaining about things like foreclosure by claiming these folks want “something for nothing.”

This is ironic because, as one of the Rolling Stone editors put it last week, “something for nothing is Wall Street’s official policy." In fact, getting bailed out for bad investment decisions has been de rigeur on Wall Street not just since 2008, but for decades.
Time after time, when big banks screw up and make irresponsible bets that blow up in their faces, they've scored bailouts. It doesn't matter whether it was the Mexican currency bailout of 1994 (when the state bailed out speculators who gambled on the peso) or the IMF/World Bank bailout of Russia in 1998 (a bailout of speculators in the "emerging markets") or the Long-Term Capital Management Bailout of the same year (in which the rescue of investors in a harebrained hedge-fund trading scheme was deemed a matter of international urgency by the Federal Reserve), Wall Street has long grown accustomed to getting bailed out for its mistakes.
The 2008 crash, of course, birthed a whole generation of new bailout schemes. Banks placed billions in bets with AIG and should have lost their shirts when the firm went under -- AIG went under, after all, in large part because of all the huge mortgage bets the banks laid with the firm -- but instead got the state to pony up $180 billion or so to rescue the banks from their own bad decisions.

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politic...t-winning-its-cheating-20111025#ixzz1cZVmWgYk

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The media distortion of why people are protesting... carefully selecting the not so brights in the crowd who seem to have a sense if not clarity of what exactly the protest is all about and using them to say... "what a bunch of maroons!... don't worry folks they're harmless". Made me wonder about the ones that were arrested... were specific ones being arrested along with the ones who gotten out of line?

There's been something awfully rotten in Denmark for a long time now and most of us know it. Sure hard-work and making your own way IS the best way to go. I'm sure a lot of those execs worked hard for what they got too. So why are they making giga-tons more money than the rest who are doing what they've done? Sumting not wight here... it hasn't been right since after WWI or even before then. Railroad, gold, coal, lumber, steel barons getting super-rich off the labors of those who worked for the companies that still lived in shantys and were abused by foremen and made to work sun-up to sundown in often dangerous conditions...

The banks get a bail out and the CEO's line their pockets first because they need to make sure they got their annual bonuses.

Something just isn't quite... right.

 

[HammockRider]

Yes they are cheating. There have always been people who have wanted to "run things", ,people who want the most money, power control, etc.

In the old days these people were the heads of monarchies, theocracies, dictatorships plutocracies. Nowadays they are the corporate oligarchy. I'm not saying there is some planned, orchestrated movement by corporations to control the masses. I am saying that they are extremely powerful and only care about acquiring more money. They're blind to everything else.

They're like the giant brontosaurs who lumbered around mindlessly eating plants. If they happened to step on some smaller animals, oh well, to bad for them. The big companies, including banks, are like that. They mindlessly pursue revenue and if anything gets squashed in the process, oh well, to bad for them.

Of course, the dinosaurs are now extinct.

I'm not against making money either. I'm not against banking or most of the traditional instituions that exist in our society. But the pursuit of profit at all costs has finally gotten to the point where it's causinig serious problems around the world. It needs to stop.

 

[WC_lun]

The problem isn't making money or being rich. For most it isn't capitalism either. The problem is that the playing field is not and has not been even for many years and this has caused issues that the middle class are paying for. I worked in the financial inductry and I can tell you without reservation that the rules are different for financial institutions and regular Joe Schmo. Here's an example. If you are an average person and you make a trade, once you make it, it is final. You cannot go back and say, "Oh I really didn't mean to order that trade. Since it lost money I want to null the trade." For obvious reasons that isn't allowed...unless you are a financial institution. If a trade is truly in error, like there was a typo or something then it is legal to void or change it. However, financial institutions take advantage of this all the time. They make a bad trade losing money, they have the trade voided or changed. This happens daily, with nothing more than a nod and a wink from the stock transfer companies or thier clients, such as AIG, ING, Hartford, etc.