Rather, I should call it "Whinestock Louisville 2011", as per my previous post.
Louisville's a nice city, big enough for the amenities, yet small enough to not be an urban nightmare. I like it here, that's why I live here and arranged to have been born here - always a tough decision. Yes, we have an urban area, and it's rather nice and, not to be outdone by larger cities, we've also been "Occupied", of late.
Today was a lovely, yet crisp, autumn day. I heard there was going to be a demonstration, so I went down there to get my fair share of abuse.
I had trouble finding "the Demonstration", try as I may. They were bringing in the city's Christmas Tree, so the flashing lights on the police cars were because of the tree's movement, not "the Demonstration".
As I was just about to give up, I saw about 30 or so people with homemade signs and a guy with a bullhorn. At last, The Demonstration!
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| There was the fat guy with the bullhorn |
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| There was this guy, doing his Abbie Hoffman imitation |
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| There was an aging hippie dude in poncho |
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| There was mom with her child who implored us to "Demand Glass Steagall" (?) |
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| There was a THOUGHTFUL CONCERNED PERSON with a sign to prove it |
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| Uh oh, who stole the shopping cart? |
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| "Food Not Bombs". It depends, are we eating or fighting? |
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| There was the ubiquitous "War is not the Answer" sign. (Depending on the question, it may be the BEST answer!) |
And then, there was the supporting cast of oddballs, malcontents and their nests:
I have more pics, but they're just more of the same. I have to say that things were fairly orderly; no evidence of crapping or on the streets and everyone seemed pretty friendly. Crazy as loons, in my opinion, but pleasant.
After seeing reports from across the country, I felt a little civic pride - our malcontents are behaving with a degree of civility not seen in other cities. In short, our nuts may well be better than your nuts.
I see a tourism campaign in the making.....
11 comments:
Louisville is a beautiful town, and the Occupy movement can reasonably be described as a children's version of the Tea Party. As long as it sticks to attacking the business end of corporate/state corruption and polices its area, it will have my grudging approval.
Glass Steagall...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass%E2%80%93Steagall_Act
Had never heard of it
Nicely documented - I will be adding to my next edition of Mad Libs this Sunday.
Occupy movement is nothing like the Tea Party.
The Tea Party are people that want to work for a living, keep what they earn and decide what to do with it themselves. And then be left alone to live their lifes.
The Occupy loons doesn't work (or they work in some NGO or union as professional activists, doing this sort of thing for a living) but they want free stuff that other people should pay for. And then they want to decide what to do with the money that other people work for. To them, any money someone else makes is a "national resource" that they should have control over.
People not even knowing what the Glass-Steagall Act is probably has a lot to do with us being in the mess we're in. I'm not a fan of the rest of the sign but I am a fan of the last sentence.
Repealing Glass-Steagall let the wolves loose in the chicken coop (removing the separation between investment and commercial banking).
Glass Steagall is something the "Occupy" crowd has right, IMHO. It was initially put in place in FDR's time, to separate the investment side of banking (stocks, HOUSING, etc.) from the commercial side (savings, loans, etc.). It was repealed in the late '90's in a bit of bipartisan hubris because some banks weren't able to cash in on the Internet boom. I said "uh oh" at the time, and look what happened about a decade later...
The repeal of Glass-Steagal was justified on the grounds that it would increase liquidity in the economy, which it did. Unfortunately, Congress, the White House and the Federal Reserve were not content with that increase to liquidity.
The Federal Reserve juiced up the amount of liquidity as well, and Congress conspired with the president on an unprecedented spending spree while lowering taxes.
Liquidity, indeed. On steroids. It is no surprise that a boom (and subsequent bust) occurred. The parallels to the Roaring 20's and the Great Depression are chilling.
I had never heard of G-S before all this, but those who bring up it's revision tend to use that as a weapon to criticize the GOP. It passed the Senate 90-8, among Democrats the vote was 38-7. The house vote to revise it was 362-57 with 155 democrats in favor. It was signed into law by Bill Clinton.
Occupy Palm Beach (actually in West Palm Beach) was similar, and so was Occupy Lake Worth.
I have pictures and commentary from Occupy Lake Worth here:
http://amazing.com:5500/articles/1
D
Only about 10% of the Glass-Steagall Act was repealed in 1999. Most of the rest remains in effect-- like the part that created the FDIC!
Glass-Steagall put taxpayers on the hook for bank failures, and also included provisions designed to limit the resulting risk. The 1999 "reforms" kept the risk-creating provisions, and repealed the risk-limiting ones. You think this could possibly be a recipe for trouble?
Had they repealed the ENTIRE Glass-Steagall Act, the reckless lending of the mid-2000's would not have been as extreme, and there would have been fewer arguments for the AIG bailout, TARP, TALF, BALF, and so on.
Whittaker
I've tried to answer all of you personally by email, but to those for whom that was not possible, I thank you for taking time to comment and, of course to visit.
I'll certainly do some research on Glass-Steagall and thanks for the various explanations.
Some back soon!
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