Understanding the Occupy Wall Street Movement

I will be honest, until we started talking about this in class; I hadn’t heard anything about the Occupy Wall Street protests that were going on. So, I was glad Professor Benton showed us videos and made us go and investigate more about what is going on. So the first thing I did was I googled it. The first link that came up was the actual occupy Wall Street web site. I watched the videos and I read the articles. I can say that I am so proud to live in a country that is so willing to put their dignity and lives out there and protest for a change that we need in this country. People need to open their eyes and see that we are in a big mess, if they haven’t noticed yet. Of course I knew that we were in a recession (who doesn’t?) but I didn’t know really about everything behind it and the big banks and government involvement. I really liked the statement that they had on the Occupy Wall Street web site, It read; Occupy Wall Street is leaderless resistance movement with people of many colors, genders and political persuasions. The one thing we all have in common is that We Are The 99% that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1%. We are using the revolutionary Arab Spring tactic to achieve our ends and encourage the use of nonviolence to maximize the safety of all participants. This shows movement empowers real people to create real change from the bottom up. We want to see a general assembly in every backyard, on every street corner because we don't need Wall Street and we don't need politicians to build a better society. Lots of websites I visited were against the movement and are angry about it. Why would you be angry about your fellow citizens trying to make a change for all of us? The most current video I watched on the Occupy Wall Street web site was, “Where do we go from here?” as they reached the one month anniversary of the start of the movement. Ed David went to liberty plaza to ask people where they think this movement will go next.  It’s not only just at Wall Street either; it is in over 1500 cities worldwide. There is also a website called occupy all streets where it shows news from all over the world and what is going on day to day with each protest. An October 13 survey by Time Magazine found that 54 percent of Americans have a favorable impression of the protests, while 23 percent have a negative impression. An NBC/Wall Street Journal survey found that 37 percent of respondents "tend to support" the movement, while 18 percent "tend to oppose" it. The protestors are now in their fifth week of protesting and are still going strong, even with the police brutality and the negative feedback they are getting for their efforts. I am so proud of all these people who are taking a stand against the 1%.

Works Cited:

http://occupywallst.org/

http://www.ask.com/wiki/Occupy_Wall_Street#Background

<iframe src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/30778727?portrait=0&amp;color=ff0179" width="400" height="225" frameborder="0" webkitAllowFullScreen allowFullScreen></iframe><p><a href="http://vimeo.com/30778727%22%3EWhere Do We Go From Here?  Occupy Wall St.</a> from <a href="http://vimeo.com/eddavid%22%3EEd David</a> on <a href="http://vimeo.com%22%3evimeo%3c/a%3E.%3C/p>

Extra Credit: Inside Job documentary

Katelyn Beard

Prof. Benton

10/08/11

                                              Inside Job

          I recently watched the documentary Inside Job about the economy crisis in the 2000’s. I wasn’t quite sure about what they were talking about because I was in elementary school when this stuff happened, so I had never heard anything about this before now. After I watched it I now understand about how ridiculous our banking system is. This documentary was split up into five sections; How we got here, The bubble, The crisis, Accountability, and Where we are now. It all started on September 5^th 2008.

They open with Iceland and how it was highly deregulated in 2000. Their banks were privatized. Then, when Lehman Brothers went bankrupt and AIG collapsed on September 15^th 2008, Iceland and the rest of the world went into a huge recession. The first part that talked about how we got here; he talked about how after a long time of deregulation, at the end of the 1980’s there was a savings and loan crisis which cost taxpayers about $124 billion dollars. 2001 there was an internet stock bubble because investment bankers decided to promote internet companies they knew would fail, this caused investors over $5 Trillion dollars. In the 1990’s derivatives became popular and added instability. Then investment banks started to roll mortgages and other debt into one called collateralized debt obligations (CDO’s). Also subprime loans became more popular and lead to predatory lending, this means that loans were given to people that they knew the people could never repay. I felt like my jaw was in my lap throughout this film, before now I never knew how bad our banks were and are.

The Bubble which happened from 2001-2007 was from how I understood, it was during the housing boom and the ratio of money that was borrowed by an investment bank versus the bank’s own assets reached major levels. Credit default swap (CDS) was akin to an insurance policy. Speculators could buy CDSs to bet against CDOs they didn’t own.  Goldman Sachs was the worst by far, they sold about $3Billion dollars worth of CDOs during 2006. They also bet against low value CDOs, and telling their investors they were actually high quality. This made them lots of money off of their investors, just a bunch of crooks if you ask me.

 Then finally came the crisis. This happened because the market for CDOs went under and investment banks were left with billions of dollars in loans. The Great recession started in 2007 and in March 2008, Bears and Stearns ran out of cash. In October of 2008, President Bush signed the Troubled Asset Relief Program, but global stocks continued to fall. Major layoffs and foreclosures happened and made unemployment rise to 10%. By December, GM and Chrysler had gone bankrupt.

But not to worry, because the top executives walked away with their fortunes intact; God forbid, the people who put us in this vary mess suffer like everyone else had to. And actually not only did they not suffer, but they even got bonuses after the government bailout took place. The major banks became powerful and doubted anti-reform efforts. The Academic economists who advocated deregulation and helped form the U.S policy still opposed the reform even after the crisis.

So where are we now? Not too much farther than we were, tens of thousands of factory workers were laid off and the new Obama administrations financial reforms are weak and there was no significant proposed regulation of the practices of rating agencies, lobbyists, and executive compensation. European nations have imposed strict regulations on bank compensation, but the U.S has resisted them; of course.