Occupy Wall Street Movement

[thir]

The hyperbole doesn't help - on those criteria, they aren't 99% ... more like 9%.

As I understand it, the 99% are the people without vast fortunes.

Factor in raising three disabled kids on welfare and they're probably more like 0.09%. (Having those four kids without a decent job between them doesn't sound too bright either: OK, the mother did have a job for a while, but it sounds as if the father has never made more than the $22k? In my book, having four kids is indeed "spendthrift", to use the wording they use to deny it! Some people can afford that, this family obviously can't - but chose to do it anyway.)

Now here you have an interesting topic: are children for those with money? What about the low birth rate? Should we have a law or rule against having children if your income is low? Would the Chineese way (if they still do it) of everyone being limited to one be fairer? If you have a handicapped child, should you be allowed another, or is that it? What if you start out ok, but then loose your job or your business crash after good times are turned into bad times? If many cannot afford children, who will look after (pay) for people getting old?

At one time children - or the continuation of the species, or the future, if you like - was anybody's business. Now it sort of blows in the wind.


As for me, I think there should be a law against having more than 2 children, not for economical reasons, but because we are far too many people.

The trouble is, these people are still protesting in the wrong place. It isn't Wall Street or the London Stock Exchange that set suicidal interest rates then printed hundreds of billions of Mugabe-money: it's the Federal Reserve and the Bank of England, and the governments which appoint their management. It isn't any company which threw away hundreds of billions (and now plans to up that into multiple trillions) trying to cover up dishonesty and incompetence in Greece, but "our" governments. Why aren't the protestors outside Parliament, Congress, the White House?

I do not think it matters much where they are, exactly. The protest is (if I get this right) against the grotesk gap between rich and poor, and the reasons for it.