Occupy Wall Street ...... Who's had enough ?? .....

Status
Not open for further replies.
Evitzee

Evitzee

Wizard
Visit site
I'm 60 years old and grew up in the turbulent 60's, graduated from college in 1973 into a very weak economy, yet I never bitched and complained that somehow I was screwed out of the American dream. I found work 1000 miles away from where we lived and my brand new wife and I move ourselves into an apartment in rural South Dakota (the first time we had ever been away from home) and made a life for ourselves dispite the crappy presidency of one James Earl Carter. I moved up over the years, often taking jobs outside of the USA in Saudi Arabia, Thailand, Canada, Europe and other places around the globe when the US couldn't provide an opportunity. Yet all we hear today are sons and daughters of baby boomers who are blaming the system for not providing a high paying job for their MS degree in Women's Studies or Comparitive Religion. Hey, life has consequences, you made a poor choice in your college degree, you should have gotten a Civil Engineering or Accounting Degree. Don't blame me.....blame yourself !!!

I'm tired of being told I don't pay enough in taxes when I pay a huge percentage of my salary while living away from home. These low lifes, bums or whatever you want to call them are fools, being taught this nonsense in school from Kindergarten. You creeps don't have a clue and if you think you are going to take everything away from the huge component of hard working Americans who get up everyday and go to work to put bread on the table and add direction to their childrens lives, you are sadly mistaken.

I HAVE HAD ENOUGH...... enough of this Administration and enough of the main stream media who put out the lie that America is inherently unfair, racist and devoid of any positive values.
 
Last edited:
This weekend I was in DC and walked through the "Take Back DC" camp site. I was with my 11 year old son, I figured it would be good for him to see this.

Dad what are they doing? "Well they are protesting." Why are they protesting? "Well they say they want jobs and prices are too high and the government isn't helping them." Are there jobs here? "Nope." Then they should go look for a job somewhere else. This is dumb.

A few things I noticed, every sign was different, not consistent message. If they didn't like it they were protesting; "Stop the War", "Save the Whales", "Hands Off My Body", "Take the Country Back", "Corporations Kill". "If Corporations are People I'll Believe it when Texas Executes One."

We also noticed that most of the people there, aside from the drunks that were passed out in the grass, were about 60 to 65 years old. Me thinks the 60's protesters are longing for the good old days of the 1960's.

But here's the best one. A guy from what appeared to be the Mid-East was interviewing some 60+ year old woman who was sitting outside over her tent. He asks, "How long will you stay?" Her reply, "Until democracy breaks out!" He has this puzzled look, "But America has democracy what do you mean?" Her reply, "The Corporations have taken over and are crushing us. Corporations need to be abolished!"

Me, if they want to "protest" fine. But at this point they get the bill for all of the OT that cities are having to pay the cops.
 
i can see why the college grads and current students are protesting a bit against the college system. i can see why people are protesting wall street. i don't honestly know all about this stuff, so i would need to know more before i could say if i was on board with them or not, but i think they may have some valid concerns. as far as the administration, i have mixed feelings on some of the things that they have done, or haven't done as well. i'm a pretty middle of the road kind of guy. i agree with some things republicans want and some thing democrats want, but i really am neither.
 
The Rich Get Richer and the Rest Get Less

by JACK RASMUS

Do you feel like you're working harder, longer hours, and still can't keep up with rising taxes, gasoline prices, utility bills, ballooning medical expenses, or the accelerating cost of paying for your kids' education?

Well, you're not alone! You're in good company. The company of tens of millions of American workers today on the same economic treadmill, having to walk faster and faster just to stay in the same place, or, unable even to keep up with the pace due to unemployment, loss of benefits, or wage cuts by their employers.

How would you like to be making $200,000 a year today after 25 years on the job? Well, if you started with the pay of an average worker 25 years ago that's what you'd be making today---if you got the same kind of raises that CEOs of American companies got for the past 25 years! The average compensation of a CEO in 1980 was about 40 times that of the average worker in his company. Today it is more than 500 times! If your pay had kept up with his, you would be making more than $200,000 this year. Of course, that didn't happen, did it? So let's see what actually did happen to the average American worker's pay over the past 25 years of the Reagan-Bush economic regime..
Stagnating Workers' Wages

In 1979 the American worker's average hourly wage was equal to $15.91 (adjusted for inflation in 2001 dollars). By 1989 it had reached only $16.63/hour. That's a gain of only 7 cents a year for the entire Reagan decade.

But wait. Things get worse! By 1995 it had risen to only $16.71, or virtually no gain whatsoever over the 6 years between 1989 and 1995. During the great 'boom years' between 1995 and 2000 it rose briefly to $18.33 per hour. In other words, from 1979 to 2000, even before the most recent Bush recession, after more than two decades the American worker's average wages increased on average only 11.5 cents per hour per year! With nearly all of that coming in the five so-called 'boom' years of 1995-2000, and most of that lost once again in the last three years. And that includes for all workers, even those with college degrees.

The picture is worse for workers who had no college degree. That's more than 100 million workers, or 72.1% of the workforce. For them there was no 'boom of 1995-2000' whatsoever. Their average real hourly wages were less at the end of 2000 than they were in 1979! And since 2000 their wages have continued to slide further.
The Great Productivity Swindle

Management is always quick to say in contract negotiations, 'give us more productivity and we can afford to give you a bigger raise'. But this has been a false promise from 1979 to 2000, and an even bigger lie under George Bush II.

With 1992 as base year, productivity was at 82.2 in 1979. It grew to 94.2 by 1989 and 116.6 by the year 2000. In the past year, moreover, it has exploded, putting it over 120. That's a nearly 40% increase since Ronald Reagan took office nearly 25 years ago!

The 100 million American workers without college degrees, whose real take home pay today is less than it was 25 years ago, certainly can't be said to have shared in that 40% productivity gain. And the other 20 million or so with college degrees whose pay rose modestly at best certainly shared in very little of that nearly 40% productivity gain.

So who got all the money?
CEOs & Executive Compensation

Considering just the period from 1989 to the present yields an obscene result. The median executive salary (cash pay and bonuses) of American CEOs rose by 79% from 1989 to 2000�and has continued to accelerate right through the current Bush II recession! And that's only the median. The average CEO cash and direct compensation growth is even higher than 79%.

But wait! That's only CEO wage or 'cash' compensation. How about management incentives, stock options exercised, the value of new stock grants, special supplemental pensions, etc. etc. The growth of this 'direct compensation' of CEOs from 1989 to 2000 was no less than 342%!. 212% of that growth occurred in the 'boom years' of the late 1990s.

Put in real money terms, the median pay for an American CEO was $2,436,000 in 1989 and $10,775,000 by 2000.

The growth in CEO compensation has been unstoppable, and is accelerating faster every year. In 1965, CEO pay was 26 times that of their average worker. In 1980, as noted, 40 times. In 1989, it was 72 times. In 1999 it had risen to 310 times, and today, as per the above data from the accounting firm, Towers Perrin, survey it has reached 500 times.

The international comparisons are also interesting to note. Whereas the American worker today earns only about a third more than the average wage of the worker in 13 other industrialized countries, for those same countries the American CEO earns 300%, or three times, as much as his CEO counterpart. No average CEO compensation in any of the other 13 countries is equal to even half that of the typical American CEO's. For example, the ratio of CEO to average worker's pay ranges from a low of around 10 to 1 for Japan and Switzerland to a high of around 25 to 1 in the UK and Canada.

As one source has put it, "in 2000 a CEO earned more in one workday (there are 260 in a year) than what the average worker earned in 52 weeks. In 1965, by contrast, it took a CEO two weeks to earn a worker's annual pay".
The Falling Minimum Wage

One of the more shameful legacies of the past decades has been what has been allowed to happen to American workers at the lower end of the earnings spectrum. While workers at the top end have become fewer and fewer with the outsourcing and offshoring of high pay-good benefits union jobs, those at the lower end have been suffering their own severe hardship.

We are talking here about more than 10 million American workers who earn the minimum wage. (Contrary to corporate propaganda, only 28% of those getting paid minimum wage are teenagers. Most are single women or men as head of households). The minimum wage in America reached its high point in the late 1960s in terms of real buying power, and thereafter went into a deep and steady free fall of more than 29% decline in buying power under Reagan during the 1980s. In the early and mid 1990s the decline was slowed somewhat with modest increases in the minimum wage legislated by Congress, but has fallen sharply was again since the last increase in the federal minimum wage in 1996, now approaching almost a decade ago.

In terms of 2001 dollars, the minimum wage in 1979 was worth $6.55. It fell to $4.62 in 1989, rose modestly in the early and mid-1990s, but today in 2003 is equivalent to only $4.94 an hour. The minimum wage is 21.4% less today than it was in 1979.
The Legacy of Declining Hourly Wages in American: Working Longer And Harder

The overall picture is abundantly clear: real average hourly ages of more than 100 million of American workers' are less today than 25 years ago; real wages of college educated workers have risen only modestly in the late 1990s and fallen since under Bush II; and real wages of the 10 million lowest paid workers have declined more than 21%.

Given this irrefutable array of facts, one might ask 'how has the American worker and his or her family survived the last quarter century under Reagan and Bush'? The answer is by working longer hours�individually and as a family unit�and by taking on more and more household debt�both in lieu of hourly wage gains.

Let's look at hours worked: The American worker not only works more hours in a year than his counterpart in other industrialized nations, but is the only worker in the 13 major industrialized countries whose hours worked per year actually increased since 1979.

Workers in all the other industrialized countries have enjoyed an actual decrease in their total hours worked per year in a comparable period.

For example, there are approximately 2080 hours of work in a year. In 1979 the American worker individually worked 1905 hours out of the possible 2080. But by 1998 he or she was now working 1966 hours a year. That's an increase of 61 hours. In contrast, a worker in Germany saw his working hours decline from 1764 to 1562. A worker in France from 1813 to 1634. And in the United Kingdom from 1821 to 1737. The picture is similar in all 13 industrialized countries recently surveyed.

As a family unit, while real wages of male workers as heads of households in the US have fallen, the American family has worked longer hours by adding more family members to the workforce. Since 1973 this increase in family average hours worked is the equivalent of adding 5 months of work in a year to the 2080 hours. Wives in working families have assumed the major share of this increase in total family hours worked, contributing more than 500 additional hours of work per year. But the male worker in the family has also worked more overtime hours, and both husbands and wives have taken on second part time jobs as well. All three developments add up to the 5 additional months of work American workers' families now work in order to offset declining hourly wages and just to make ends meet.

If it were not for working these longer hours worked, or adding record amounts of family debt (installment, mortgage, student loan, etc), the standard of living of the American worker and his family would have certainly collapsed.
What George Bush and Friends Want In A Second Term

Given these trends of longer hours worked, it is not surprising that Bush and corporate America are intent today on reducing overtime pay. After making sure hourly wages haven't risen for more than two decades, Bush and friends have recently implemented new rules to cut overtime pay for 8 million workers. Their other wage strategies include preventing any increase in the minimum wage; continuing pressure to make workers pay more for health insurance premiums, co-pays and deductibles; and promoting more offshoring of American jobs. Finally, of importance in particular to longshore workers, there's the additional Bush goal to eliminate industry-wide union contracts and replace them with local agreements. If Bush gets re-elected, expect a new Bush-Corporate offensive and push on all these fronts
Conclusion

While the American worker and family are working harder, with longer hours, and still falling further and further behind�the American CEO is 500 times better off since Reagan, Bush I, and Bush II. Think about that $200,000 equivalent pay you might have gotten if you were treated as equally or fairly as the CEO of the company you work for.

—Jack Rasmus, National Writers Union,
 
‘The World Has Divided into Rich and Poor as at No Time in History’

A recent study on the distribution of wealth in the United States, by G. William Domhoff of the University of California in Santa Cruz, is just as disheartening.

In the United States, wealth is highly concentrated in a relatively few hands. As of 2007, the top 1% of households (the upper class) owned 34.6% of all privately held wealth, and the next 19% (the managerial, professional, and small business stratum) had 50.5%, which means that just 20% of the people owned a remarkable 85%, leaving only 15% of the wealth for the bottom 80% (wage and salary workers). In terms of financial wealth (total net worth minus the value of one’s home), the top 1% of households had an even greater share: 42.7%.
Power in America. Wealth, Income, and Power
 
This is what I know. I've been working since I was 16. I served and was honorably discharged from the Army. I'm 44 now, and I work harder, longer, and get less, then I ever have. I'm an electrician. Excuse ME that I didnt have the means, or the support to go to college and get a degree. But I keep the world running. You don't work any harder then I do. If your more privileged you SHOULD pay more. Period. I'm middle class. We get more and more compressed all the time. I can say this. The government favors big banks, corporations, and big money, and THEY get bailouts. Steal without repercussions. Given tax loopholes. While the country continues to RUN on the backs of people like me, the middle class, workin hard. And when the financial institutions crash down around the rich and privileged heads of the selfish self serving, the only ones that will know how to work on your car, your bike, your electricity, plumbing, roof...will be the people like ME. Who are currently being under paid, over taxed. Chew on that awhile.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
Missyl1713 I TOTALY agree with you!!! I to am a electrical worker. I to started working at 16. I had to work 2 jobs and go to college at night to get my little 2 year degree. I currently work around 600+ hours of overtime a year and don't have a lot to show for it. It's insane that anyone works my kinda hours in the first place but to work that much and not be loaded with cash is just sick. The way things are going in this country I would not be suprised to see large scale riots start breaking out soon.
 
I don't see why people see additional taxes on people above a certain income bracket as a attack on corporations in America. The people being taxed simply work for the corporation. It would be nice to see a higher level of taxation on those who nearly destroyed our banking industry, accepted money from our government, supplied by taxpayers then lined the pockets of those at the top who caused much of these issues to begin with. Quite frankly I'm ok with this "talent" going else where.

I'm all for capitalism but we need to figure out a way in which the rich cannot buy our politician do fulfill there needs, which are all personal gain of money and power.

I think it's safe to say corporate business men are running the country and not the will of a democratic society.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
Last edited:
The only comment I'll make is that if the people protesting right now were running the country we would be in much, much worse shape than we are in now...think about it...
 
NJFZ1 said:
The only comment I'll make is that if the people protesting right now were running the country we would be in much, much worse shape than we are in now...think about it...
Click to expand...

You are most likely correct but I feel that something has to change b/c the rich folks running this country are killing it.
 
joker80 said:
You are most likely correct but I feel that something has to change b/c the rich folks running this country are killing it.
Click to expand...

I don't disagree that things need to change, but people are too quick to single out the rich. This is a capitalist, not socialist, society. Wealth redistribution is not the way to go. What needs to happen is to have our tax laws revamped to close the many, many loopholes and ensure that everyone pays their fair share of taxes. And don't think that rich people are the only ones that benefit from our current tax laws...
 
Ladies and Gentlemen, not to put a damper on things here but forum rules don't allow for any discussion of "politics" at all. We understand that people are fustrated with the "goings on" with our present government, but we just can't voice it here.

Forum Rules State:

Disallowed specific topics
We're all about freedom of speech, however there are some topics that don't belong here, such as:

Running from the cops.
Police bashing/slander.
Breaking the law.
Politics
No satanic threads/links etc.
Any form or racism PERIOD.

Thanks for your ongoing cooperation! :)
 
These days political discussions just get too heated. Let's all just be bikers here on www.998cc.org united in our affection/passion for the FZ1.

There are plenty of forums that folks can visit to discuss politics.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top