re: #17 palomino

Aren’t these kind of like modern day Hoovervilles? Which I would guess attracted plenty of crime, drug use, unsanitary conditions, etc, and probably ran afoul of the police quite often.

The reason I won’t totally condemn OWS, despite its manifest flaws, is that the articulate sane members of the movement are at least complaining about the right things, namely banking practices and economic injustice.

OWS has just nothing in common with Hoovervilles. The people attending them, overwhelmingly, have their own housing. Most own far more than the middle class of 1930 did. The Hoovervilles weren’t a political movement’s construction, but what you get when 25% of the country is out of work and can’t pay the mortgage or the rent and has nothing to fall back on.

As to economic injustice, our attempts at reform of Wall Street haven’t done anything about the root of the problem: intertwined government and corporate management, feeding each other inside tips, trading on them, writing the regulations that will have just the loophole they need, and so forth. Bouncing back and forth between government and business, getting huge paydays for almost no real work. Small and interlocked boards of directors who aren’t even answerable to shareholders, much less to any wider public. And we’re not just talking Newt Gingrich here. There’s some with D’s.