These anti-capitalist protesters don't make any sense. They complain about "unemployment" and "corporate greed". If corporations aren't making money, then they can't provide jobs. I think New York mayor Bloomblerg explains it best, "You can't have it both ways. If you want jobs, you have to assist companies and give them confidence to go and hire people."
I'm afraid this argument just doesn't comport with reality. Corporate profits
hit a record high last year. By your logic, hiring should have followed suit. It didn't.
"Corporate profits have been doing extremely well for a while. Since their cyclical low in the fourth quarter of 2008, profits have grown for seven consecutive quarters, at some of the fastest rates in history. As a share of gross domestic product, corporate profits also have been increasing, and they now represent 11.2 percent of total output. That is the highest share since the fourth quarter of 2006, when they accounted for 11.7 percent of output."
So corporate profits are back to pre-crash levels, and yet
corporate hiring is not even close. The protesters are accusing the corporations of greed. Based on the facts, I find that pretty plausible.
Astroturfing is a term for hiring private firms to give the illusion of support to their views. I can't imagine what liberal group would have the money or inclination to do such a thing--and even if one did, do you really think they'd pay people to sit around wall street and make literally no concrete demands?
The Unions do it all the time. They are doing it now.
Can you cite an example of a union hiring an outside firm to pay people to show up and pretend to care about the issues they protest? I would be greatly interested to see it.
How is the government suppose to change anything when the protestors, in your words, "make literally no concrete demands"?
It's not like people in Congress need the protesters to tell them what legislation to write to address Wall Street abuses and favorable treatment of the wealthy. They know that
complex derivatives need to be regulated. They
know that banks need to be prohibited from owning investment companies so they aren't tempted to
make bad loans, turn them into derivatives, and sell them as AAA investments. They know that
capping the payroll tax makes no sense, and they know that
the 15% capital gains tax results in a lower marginal tax rate for wealthy investors than it does for ordinary working people who make dramatically less money.
I could go on, but you get the point. The solutions are there, and have been known for years now. The thing that's missing isn't solutions: it's the political will to actually vote them through. To the extent that the Occupy Wall Street protestors can exert pressure on their elected officials to act, they could end up being highly effective.