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.

paper proposal

Elder Abuse

          The topic I have picked to write about is elder abuse and neglect. This is a very sad subject to talk about but it is definitely a very important one. We all know someone close to us who is elderly, whether it is a grandmother, grandfather, neighbor etc. These people have shaped you to be who you are today. So what makes people think that they can beat, sexually assault,steal from or neglect the elderly? Unfortunately it is a growing epidemic in the United States. These people put their lives in other peoples’ hands, or their family did, in hopes that they will be cared for. I read an article on Time Magazine’s website that talked about two cases of abuse and neglect; one in New York and one in Miami. Both investigations found that the operators of these institutions were able to inflict harm with impunity, repeatedly violating the rights of their residents — in some cases, killing them — while being paid millions of dollars by the government for their "care." Worse, when such abuses were exposed, the homes were not shuttered but simply advised not to do it again (Szalavitz). This just makes me ill.

Why is this important to you? Because you are on the road to be healthcare workers, educators, social workers, and law professionals; you will be the key to our aging populations care and well being. In China, their elderly stay at home until they pass away, the oldest child gets the responsibility to care for them. I recently read a report describing the long-term care system of Denmark that makes our system look confusing and heartless. In Denmark, long-term care is essentially free or very low-cost and is available to anyone in need. Nursing home residents pay a “rent” depending on income, but the report describes these rents as “in general not high.” Those who need home care on an ongoing basis get it for free, although temporary home care is free only to those with the lowest incomes (Margolis).

According to the best available estimates between one and two million people 65 and older have been injured, exploited, or otherwise mistreated by someone on whom they depended for care or protection (Wallace). Nearly 1.6 million Americans now live in nursing homes. That number will double in the next twenty years, as medical science lengthens our life expectancies and the senior population grows. Inevitably, most of us will have to supervise the care of aging parents or grandparents, and every one of us faces the prospect of growing old and possibly frail. Sadly, thirty percent of elderly Americans say they would rather die than move into a nursing home. In California, one third caused serious injury or death, and less than 2 percent of nursing homes had no violations. (Diane S. Sandell)

          My audience for this paper is going to be for the general public who read Time Healthland Magazine because that is who I am writing this article for. Time Healthland Magazine is an offspring of Time Magazine that is all about health subjects. I enjoy this magazine and read news on their website almost daily. This would be a great subject for people to learn about because we are all going to be in the position to care for elderly or we ourselves might be in a long-term facility one day.

Diane S. Sandell, Lois Hudson. Ending Elder Abuse. QED press, 2010. 192.

Margolis, Harry S. Elder law answers Blog. 27 9 2010. <http://blog.elderlawanswers.com/?p=310>.

Szalavitz, Maia. Time Healthland. 7 6 2011. <http://healthland.time.com/2011/06/07/why-so-much-abuse-is-allowed-to-continue-in-residential-care/>.

Wallace, Richard J. Bonnie and Robert B. "Executive Summary." Elder mistreatment. The National Academies Press, 2003. 570.

Response #4

                                             Education Rut

          A few decades ago, children had it beaten into their heads that’s if they worked hard and did well; they would go to college and get a job. Now this is not so much true, kids now see that in our economy even if you go to school and get a degree, it is still not a sure thing that you will get a job (Robinson). The current school system was designed for a different era. It was designed for the 18^th and 19^th century, so how do we expect our kids to succeed when our society and economy is so much different now than it was (Robinson). College is so expensive now that people can hardly afford to go, and if you do go most of the time you have to take out loans and then once you graduate you have to start paying for them. This is difficult to do because the economy is terrible; it is not guaranteed you will get a job right away when you graduate college. There are plenty of people out there who have college degrees and are working at fast food places because they can’t find jobs.

          It should come to no surprise that higher education is in trouble. The price of tuition is skyrocketing and there is no looking down. At public colleges and universities, tuition hikes averaged nearly 8 percent this past academic year thanks to cash-strapped state governments slashing higher education budgets (Glastris).  Community colleges are in such a high demand because of the lower tuition that they actually have to turn students away. I don’t understand why there is such a shortage of labor at community colleges when people are practically begging to get in. You would think the extra money they would get by letting more students in would enable them to have more faculty. There is no doubt in my mind that the school system needs to be changed because if we are telling kids that they need to go out and go to college and they will get a job, we are lying to them. We need to teach them how to be in the 21^st century and how to survive in an economy like we have.

          Most high school graduates now are taking time off before going to school so they can work and figure out how it is to be on their own. A few decades ago, this wasn’t the case. Kids lived at home until they graduated and then they moved out and lived at school or they went into the military and then they graduated and got jobs. I think it is crazy that there is such a high demand for labor, yet it is almost impossible to make it into programs and colleges unless you are wealthy and have perfect grades. There is a large need for nurses right now, but it is so hard to get into nursing programs because of the lack of teachers. I think this country is in an education rut. And we don’t know how to get out of it.

Someplace like America---response #3

                      

“Crumbs for the rest of us”

As I started reading this story and read about the homeless man that was killed in California. I honestly cried. Is this really the country we are all so proud to live in? After reading a few pages I just feel embarrassed honestly. I have known all along that there are many homeless veterans that live on the streets and in bushes or underpasses, but I never realized how they were treated. They put up with death threats, police ambushes and of course, hunger. Knowing that men who fought for our lives and the freedom we have today are living in these kinds of circumstances, makes me feel sick for every time I have whined or complained about something selfish.   
                                                                                                                          As we go through this economic struggle, all we really hear about is the wealthy and not the real hard working and low-income Americans. As Dale Maharidge says “Trillions for the titans. Crumbs for the rest of us.” I think this quote really sums up what is going on in this new great depression we are going through. We see millions of people who have worked in factories and fields that get shut down and sent home because of these new struggles. When really, we have already been through this with the depression in the 30’s. I wonder how we ever recovered from that until just a few years ago when we started this newdepression.                                                                                                                       
 Hearing the stories about these homeless people in California that fought in the Vietnam war, just makes me embarrassed. Something needs to be done about the homeless and everyone else who is suffering and working 4 jobs trying to feed their children, but what? I often wonder about other countries and why they aren’t going through the same struggles as we are? Are we too proud to reach out and learn from other countries and use some of their ideas? Yea I guess we are.

Response #2

Will there be any fish in 2050?

As I was waiting for this podcast to download, I was thinking; what would we do with no fish? Or even, what would fish look like in 40 years? I thought; why would they look different? Well as I listened to these people talk they gave some great points about why fish will be different or if there even will be any fish in 2050. As Villy Christiensen said on the ABC science show that by 2050 our seas will be filled with tiny fish, the large predatory fish will be largely gone (Fisher).  So what happened to all the fish? Well studies have found that are built on global information that because of the way the large fishing fleets have been developing and also there will be consequences from global warming (Fisher). Now, they aren’t telling us not to fish, but instead use all the fish that are caught and not focus on the big prize fish or fish high in the food world.                                                    
Fisheries are a good thing, they do the hard work and catch the fish that we get to eat; they also are jobs to thousands of people. If there were no fish left, or even just tiny fish that people would not eat, than that means that thousands of people are out of a job and we don’t get to eat yummy fish. So what should be done to help in the “war against fish”? As of right now in the war against fish, we are winning. 90% of large fish have been wiped out, and the surge continues (Fisher). Siwa Misangi, a research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute, says that there should be quotas enforced for catching fish. But, there also needs to be a way to enforce this quota. There have been some success in fishery quotas, but on a global level, it’s not enough. They have found that the European fisheries are the most uncontrolled and they are totally out fishing the sea. A lot of effort will be needed there to control their fishing because poor people trying to fish to feed their families and survive, can’t catch any fish because of the overfishing.                                         
This fear of not having large fish by 2050 is nothing new in the hunting/fishing world. How many other animals have humans made extinct? Lots of them, why do we need to overfish and make this species extinct also? If we enjoy fish now and fisheries give people jobs then there definitely needs to be a quota for the fisheries so that in 2050, we won’t have to worry about not having any fish.

Fisher, David. The science show. 26 02 2011. <http://www.abc.net.au/rn/scienceshow/stories/2011/3145424.htm>.