"Occupy" Protests

Padraic wrote: Catcher10 wrote: Padraic wrote: Padraic wrote: Catcher10 wrote: Exxon Mobil reported quarterly earnings of US$10.3billion, up 41% from previous year.....Is this what Occupy people are pissed about? Probably.  They'll also tweet or FB post about it on devices made by a company that just reported quarterly earnings of almost $29 billion. I couldn't help but review this discrepancy...I think what we're actually talking about is net revenue (profit), in which case Apple made around $6.6 billion from $28.2 billion in total revenue.  There was no way Apple's profit was 300% of Exxon's.   That should make the Occupy people feel better...... It shouldn't. Exxon Mobil Corporation Profit Margin: 8.5% Apple Profit Margin: 23.4%

Also, consider the pollution that Apple causes in some of their manufacturing plants overseas and the amount of worker exploitation they do....

Check this out:http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2010/mar/01/apple-ipod

I know it's the Guardian, but there's some truth to it.

Equality 7-2521 wrote: a number too big for most people to properly interpret.

I heard Dennis Prager falsely label the Occupy Wall Street movement as being "anti-corporate" then,
using this straw man argument, he pointed out the hypocrisy of various protesters communicating their
anti-corporate views using their corporate-manufactured smartphones.

This misleading attack from Prager was followed by Bill O'Reilly's "Talking Points Memo" in which
O'Reilly warned his listeners that OWS was becoming violent -- an obvious attempt to project the violent
rhetoric of the tea party onto the OWS movement. O'Reilly's only example of protester violence was a
story about how a participant's dog's tooth became hooked onto the cuff of a police officer's shirt.

Stop the presses and hide the children! A slightly ripped cuff!

Meanwhile, police officers are attacking and beating protesters within an inch of their lives, and just
today a man was critically injured when he was shot in the head with a tear gas projectile by Oakland police.



The victim, Scott Olsen, is an Iraq war veteran. He fought to bring freedom to Iraq only to be wounded
for exercising his right to assemble here at home.

The Wall Street Journal conducted a poll recently that asked OWS supporters, "What frustrates you the most about the political process in the United States?" Only three percent said "the democratic/capitalist system." Three percent. The poll also asked supporters what they hope the movement will achieve and only four percent wanted the "dissolution" of the capitalist system.

The movement is opposed to deregulated, free market capitalism. Short of Ron Paul disciples and Ayn Rand cultists, no reasonable American wants a system in which Enron, Goldman Sachs, AIG or BP can commit heinous crimes and not pay the price. According to Gallup, 68 percent of Americans want corporations to have less influence in America. That doesn't mean a supermajority of Americans are anti-corporation, it simply means that a supermajority of Americans agree that corporations have acquired too much power and therefore ought to be reined in. Not banished or banned, just watched more closely.

The OWS movement, like the American people, isn't anti-corporate, it's anti-corporate crime.