Random Ideas, Comments & Thoughts, Sometimes Political, Sometimes Adult… Hope you don't choke.
Finally!
An Occupy person makes concrete demands !
I liked the speaker threatening to occupy bank lobbies and country clubs…
We’ll see what happens next.
Occupy LA was brought to an end.
Under the unblinking eye of the media 1400 Officers moved in, arresting 200 people.
Who paid for the extra Police?
Who paid for the EMS personnel on site?
Who was paying for the porta – potties?
Who is going to pay for the Parks & Recreation time to
Oh yeah… US the Taxpayers!
Again, a protest against injustice, wrongdoing, and corruption isn’t a bad thing.
A protest that goes on and on and on and on. (60 days?) Without a simple easy to follow set of talking points is doomed and pointless.
Occupy wasn’t a bad idea, It Became a bad idea because of all the dissimilar agendas and finally because people being interviewed as representatives of the movement NEVER agreed on what they were trying to accomplish.
Occupy LA ended pretty well, leaving only the squalid non-biodegradable remnants of a group of idealistic children. The place looks like a land fill. There’s some irony in the non-biodegradable nature of the stuff left behind.
It remains to be seen what will happen with the other cities as they begin removing their own infestations of Occupy. I’d imagine that the police of those cities will be trying very had to make sure they don’t have violent ends after all, the last thing we need is to make martyrs.
Occupy “feels” a lot like a petulant child holding it’s breath and kicking it’s feet. I’m sure that like the childs temper tantrum, this largely ineffective protest will be forgotten in a week or two.
OWS will probably be replaced in the public consciousness by something the Kardashians do.
Oh Joy!
I don’t have a problem with protests.
I don’t have a problem with freedom of speech, I exercise that right, in this space pretty regularly.
Hell, I’m unemployed and part of the reason I’m unemployed is that my industry was linked to the government. As the markets became uncertain, so did congress. One of the first things congress did was to stop making decisions about funding.
As the time for decisions passed, contracts in my industry starved. This caused a slow painful death of the project I was working on and many others. The deaths of those projects meant thousands of people being laid off.
If anyone would have a reason to be encamped with an Occupy (whatever) protest it would be me!
I am, however tired of the Occupy Wall street movement. I’m tired of their directionless unfocused protests.
I’m pretty sure that there are a lot more people like me at this point than there are of the protesters.
Whatever point these people were trying to make they’ve made. It’s now time for them to exit the stage and stop being PAINS in the ASSES!
These Occupy people are costing all the tax payers money. This at a time when most cities are having a hard time meeting budget in the first place. It’s not just about the special police protection… It’s about clean up, and disruptions in traffic.
In LA anything that disrupts traffic (Including Presidential visits!) costs everyone time and money in the form of work and gas.
The LA Occupy Wall Street group is sucking up even more tax payer money by asking a Federal Judge to stop their eviction. This is plan wrong on it’s face.
It’s interesting to note… while these people are against capitalism, they are selling buttons to fund their cause. If that’s not capitalism in it’s purest sense I don’t know what is.
LAPD as said that they’re going to evict these people. They made a big deal about setting a deadline. The deadline came and went they’ve still done nothing.
LAPDs inaction and failure to execute their plan makes them look weak and impotent. Exposing to anyone else in LA that the rule of law and authority need not be followed.
The Occupy crowd needs to move on and change the world by finding the architects of the banking collapse and exposing them. Bring the people who caused and fed the criminal banking excesses to account.
Then Occupy will have done something useful.
Anything less than that and it’s pretty obvious that Occupy really was nothing more than a bunch of overeducated, unemployed, whiny never do wells,
Back on Oct 22 I wrote a short piece about the incoherent message of the Occupy Wall Street crowd.
In that piece I said something to the effect, that unless the message was clear and to the point that “Average” americans would loose interest.
Looks like that is exactly what’s happening.
I was chatting with someone yesterday who seemed to thing that the violence that has occurred over the past week toward the OWS crowds in many cities will increase the movement instead of disperse it. His thinking is that “average”americans will take offense at the OWS camps being systematically dismantled by police, and that they will join the OWS crowd in solidarity.
I understand his point but I don’t think he’s correct.
The problem remains the same. The OWS “Movement” still has a very incoherent message.
They haven’t created a simple message that America can actually get behind. This is in part because of the spin created by the media, but mostly it’s because OWS hasn’t done any kind of work at controlling the message that the media is presenting on their behalf.
Scenes of police tear-gassing crowds doesn’t have the same impact on us as a people as it did in the 60s. We’ve seen too much. We’ve had 10 years of war up close and personal. We’ve had scandal and trials about everything from abuses of political power to the treatment of our enemies in prison and what constitutes abuse. (For the record… making a prisoner wear panties on his head isn’t abuse… humiliation maybe, but not abuse.)
We as a people have become numb to riots and violence in general. It doesn’t matter where they happen they always look the same, they always end the same and just aren’t shocking anymore.
Apparently, the Occupy crowd is thinking that police brutality will galvanize public opinion.
They may be right…
The $64,000 question will be which way? Will public opinion swing in sympathy toward the Occupy crowd regardless of their complete lack of platform? Or will public opinion swing towards an attitude of “ABOUT TIME, get those squatters out of the public spaces and make ’em stop hindering folks going about their business”
I think that the fickle beast of public opinion is about to move toward the “Get out of here ya BUMS!” side of Occupy.
Occupy Wall Streets 15 minutes of fame is over.
In my opinion they’ve done nothing but HURT the protest process. For the remainder of this election season, anyone protesting, regardless of their message will be seen as a bunch of directionless irrelevant idiots from Occupy.
Occupy Wall Streets legacy will be that they killed the public protest and by abusing their free speech they silenced us all.
Nice Job!
So California is talking about raising the gas tax to fix the roads?
Because the state is projecting a 500 billion shortfall by 2020.
WTF?
Maybe they shouldn’t have been raiding the DMV fees, and reallocating other highway maintenance funds to purposes that WERE NOT highway related.
Of course we will never find out what happened to all the funds “Borrowed” to fix other shortfalls.
Oh yeah… We’re not supposed to remember that… And we’re not supposed to mind paying some of the HIGHEST license fees in the country.
I’ve got a salvage title on my 13 year old truck and have an annual 120.00 bill, same on my 10 year old bike. But the real killer is the 600 dollar bill on my passenger car.
Add it all up and the state of California gets 840.00 a year just for me to license my vehicles.
Add to that the 50.5 cents per gallon of gas and long commutes and I end up paying… and I’m estimating here, about an additional 480 to 600 dollars in added taxes per year.
That’s a grand total of around 1300.00 per year to the state. Don’t even think about the additional costs of repairs CAUSED by the bad roads, or the cost of vehicle insurance.
You’re telling me that’s not enough!?! How do other states have great roads?
Why is it that when you cross the Nevada or Arizona boarder magically the potholes are gone and the roads are smooth? Why is I-75 on the East coast clean and well maintained?
If you factor in fuel wasted sitting in traffic, sitting behind morons that drive like they’re driving pace cars at Indy, and the idiots that slam on their brakes when a bird flies overhead, it’s probably a safe bet that most folks are filling their tanks at least twice a week.
So multiply just half of what I’ve been paying, by the number of drivers in the LA area alone and that’s an OBSCENE amount of money.
Then do the same for all the cities in the state and you’ve got a crazy obscene amount. So Sacramento… tell us again how we don’t have enough cash to maintain the roads?
Here we are;
Rock… Us ….Hard Place.
Our roads are for shit and decaying more every day, that hurts the economy. On the OTHER side of the coin Sacramento RAISING the taxes on a critical item like gas screws the economy.
This is especially true of most cities in California because WE DON’T HAVE MASS TRANSIT.
With the exception of the San Francisco Bay area, cities in California opted for commuting instead of trains / buses that run on time.
Yeah, Yeah, The talking heads and politicians speak breathlessly about the success of the light rail in Los Angeles.
I’ve ridden it folks… yep you can get from one point that’s 40 miles away from your home to another point that 10 miles away from your place of work as long as you’re in the LA basin.
Oh and by the way it can take you an hour to go the same distance you can go in 15 minutes driving your car during rush hour. If you want to bicycle that last 10 miles to work…. TOO BAD, you’ll have to wait for a train that has one of 4 bicycle slots open.
Since the trains run more or less every 10 minutes well you could be on that platform for a while. So you put your bike back on your car and drive to work. So much for being green, getting some exercise, and saving some money.
The Folks in the Valley and Orange County??? Uhhh well you’re screwed… have a nice day!
Again with one exception, there is no mass transit in California.
Which leads us back to the decaying infrastructure, and what to do about it.
As one article pointed out, construction costs have risen considerably since the last time the gas tax was raised. Really? I guess we in the middle class hadn’t noticed that or the rising cost of living and our more or less static wages!
I’ve mentioned it before, I’m going to repeat it again.
It’s a given that he largest cost of major projects isn’t the material… it’s the labor.
We have a standing labor force in prisons throughout the state.
Instead of feeding, clothing, housing, and providing HBO, & Gym facilities to
these folks, how about we feed & clothe them and let them pay their debt to society with real work?
Prisons wouldn’t be as crowded…
At least not during the day while the work crews were out, and at night… well folks are sleeping and then all they’re worried about is having a bunk.
I’d even be for incentivizing. For each year you work on a road crew without incident, it’s a year subtracted from the sentence. You have to admit it’s a very real way to teach someone that WORK is rewarding.
I personally think that’s a lesson worth teaching.
I also think that little Johnny or Susie riding with Mommy & Daddy in their Prius would see a prison work detail as a cautionary tale of the consequences of right vs wrong.
That might have a beneficial effect in the future, reducing prison overcrowding and the costs associated with our penal system.
After Sacramento implements my suggestion… then lets talk about raising taxes.
Until then…
Keep YOUR wasteful greedy hands out of my pocket!