Forum Post: Let's do this out of LOVE for our country, not out of HATRED for the rich or the oligarchs.
Posted 13 years ago on Oct. 10, 2011, 12:05 p.m. EST by TIOUAISE
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No need to hate ANYONE... Rather ate their ACTIONS and come up with clever ways to make such actions more and more difficult. And of course, make all players FULLY ACCOUNTABLE, prosecuting them fairly but unflinchingly when justified.
Hatred is never helpful : it eats you up inside and makes you weaker, less lucid and less efficient. It even risks PERPETUATING the very system we are trying to change!!!
Love, on the other hand, is healing and energizing. So, P L E A S E let's do this out of LOVE for our country, not out of HATRED for the rich or the oligarchs.
They are ILL anyway : as the movie "Inside Job" shows, many of them are sociopaths. And books have been written on corporations as "pathological entities", driven mad by the monomaniacal pursuit of profit We are dealing with sick people and sick institutions here. To heal America, we need the steady hand, insight and compassion of a skillful surgeon-cum-psychologist.
America has a cancer and that cancer is greed of politicians and wall street. Time for surgery.....
Yes indeed. Time for SKILLFUL, well-planned surgery... All the while never forgetting that EACH ONE OF US has to do his own introspection and inner healing. I try never to forget the words of Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn: "If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?"
That being said, there is no doubt that, as Martin Luther King put it almost half a century ago, "America's soul has become poisoned". Has this poison reached the highest seats of power, the big corporations, the Supreme Court, the so-called White but so very blood-stained House? Without a doubt!
Spiritual teacher Deepak Chopra, who has so often been seen on "Larry King", used to be an unconditional supporter of Obama. In an October 5 interview, Chopra declared that he was disappointed in Obama's actions and went so far as to exclaim : "Obama is surrounded by Mafia!" (see full interview on YouTube).
For a man as calm and measured as Deepak Chopra to utter such a statement, it has to be the plain and obvious truth. The Mafia is in the White House, it already was under Bush and it still is under Obama. Such things need to be SEEN and need to be SAID. To see and recognize the truth of the situation - no matter how extreme or tragic, and it IS extreme and tragic - IS THE BEGINNING OF HEALING.
I too used to be an ardent supporter of Obama and I am broken-hearted over his broken promises and shocking hypocrisy. Granted, he's a consummate actor and doesn't look one bit like a mafioso, but his ACTIONS and the actions of his blood-stained White House speak louder than his fine-sounding words and tell me that a Mafia is indeed in control in America and poses a danger to the future of this country every bit as grave as did the Bush administration.
Amen, Tiouaise
OWS can't help but hate the rich, envy is in their DNA, OWS supporters merely want something for nothing, so please continue your rants, just march and spew your innate hatred for freedom and responsibility so that we can continue to see what OWS really stands for. The only difference between OWS mobs and totalitarian butchers/communism is they had focus and strategy and were willing to rob, nationalize and kill innocents for what they believed - OWS has no such focus and never will, hence they are just a mob. But the goals are still the same.
Point me towards where you saw this.
I'm here for campaign finance reform and ending corporate influence over my American government. What about this is freedom hating or has the slightest thing to do with toltarialism or communism?
You see the hatred in the hearts of others, but what about your own?
"It gradually became clear to me, that the line between good and evil lies not between states, not between classes and not between parties, but rather cuts across every human heart." (Alexander Solzhenitsyn).
We all need to work on ourselves... Without that healing work, how will we succeed in healing this country?
Hahaha i hate the rich, but this girl apparently doesn't! Then you react like this. Get your brain out of your arse? Freedom, hahaha the USA has 1% in jail, land of the free.
I agree. I can certainly understand the desire for money and power and can perhaps even admire the wealthy for their success at playing the game that we all agreed to. But when so many suffer because of their success, we need to change the rules of the game. It should not be hatred that drives us, but compassion for each other and clear sight of what motivates people.
Well said, please read and consider: I welcome all additions, editions and suggestions to make this statement more powerful
http://occupywallst.org/forum/a-rally-cry-to-occupy-join-in-once-voice/
Fine, contempt for oligarchs will suffice. There is, nevertheless, widespread animosity toward the banking oligarchy.
OWS has been characterized as a "hate the rich" movement. To some extent there is confusion on this point, but "hating the rich" has no explanatory value and cannot account for the success of the movement. Crucially, hating the rich will not motivate the American people, who care more about fairness than wealth inequality. But there is more than enough unfairness around, and general consensus across the political spectrum about who the culprits are. Many Americans have seen their livelihoods threatened and destroyed by oligarchs who enriched themselves at taxpayer expense and who have shown no love of free markets. Conservatives who believe in meritocracy fail to see the merit in a rigged system that rewards oligarchs for their political position, and that punishes the remaining 99%, or more accurately, the remaining 99.5%, no matter how hard they work.
Wall Street wants Washington to give it business, and Washington has complied by providing it with privileged access to the money supply, lax regulation and an implicit tax on savings. Despite a public relations campaign according to which the oligarchs have repaid the taxpayer for bailouts with interest, the Fed zero interest rate policy (ZIRP) provides banks with very low interest cash loans they use to purchase debt from the Treasury, which remunerates the banks with interest, using public tax dollars. Savers are punished for saving, and popular social programs such as Social Security and Medicare are threatened. Bank reserves are very high compared with historical levels, and the Fed pays interest on these reserves, providing a further disincentive to invest.
These developments--among many others--have served to enrich the banking oligarchy at the expense of the taxpayer. This offends a basic sense of fairness--hatred of the rich is a luxury.
Some economists believe that by dismantling firewalls between investment and commercial banks, the too-big-to-fail behemoths ensured that the US government would have to bail them out, or else Americans would not have received their paychecks at the time, and their bank accounts and pensions would have been wiped out. Perhaps this is the reason the Treasury warned of catastrophic consequences for the economy if the bankers weren't bailed out--the public would see that the system was rigged against them. This would not work to the advantage of the oligarchs.
Others dispute this explanation, saying that the government would have stepped in to make payrolls. The point is that the system is an interlocking network, whose losses are largely absorbed by the taxpayer by design. In other cases institutions are permitted to survive even though investors take a bath, but someone has to pay for the institutions to survive. Whether making shareholders whole, or permitting failed institutions to fail another day, the bitter taste of unfairness and the profound sense that merit is nowhere to be found, leads to the animosity of the public toward the financial industry. This has nothing to do with hating the rich.
It's fine to be critical, but we should consider some proposals. These aren't original with me--they are due to an economist, Herb Gintis, who is in no way a liberal. "These recommendations all stem from the simple observation that contemporary financial fragility is caused by excessively tight interactions among participants in the network of financial institutions. This excessive institutional interpenetration leads to amplifying rather than damping reactions to shocks to the system. Banking regulations should foster a large number of small and medium sized financial institutions, as well as limited inter-institutional connectedness. There should be firewalls between different types of financial institutions of a sort that limit contagious asset bubbles and collapses. Stockholder groups should ensure that monetary incentives for decision-makers in the financial sector favor long time horizons. There should be a complete separation of auditing and audited institutions. In particular, the latter should not hire and fire the former. Auditing firms should be financially liable for covering up weaknesses in the firms they audit. We need a new macroeconomic model replacing the rational expectations model that is engineered to deal with complex networks of financial institutions. There perhaps should be a small tax on financial transactions. The European Union should develop a central back with the full powers of a national central bank. Government accounts should be audited by international lending institutions, thus preventing covering up the true state of a country's finances. The major impediment to implementing these changes is the political influence of the financial sector, especially in the United States. The current "too big to fail" system is perfectly acceptable to the giants of finance, and the move to accountability will be vigorously opposed. In Europe, the obstacle to reform is political fragmentation."
wow - I haven't seen the movie "Inside Job" but I will tell you that in my personal experience most of the rich I have met or read about are NOT ill. Yes, a few might be, probably the same percentage of the OWS protesters. "Sociopaths" is NOT an illness that is restricted to just the rich...
Please DO see the movie "Inside Job" - every American should see it - and COUNT the sociopathic players, who destroyed this country's - and part of the world's - economy. These people were clearly engaged in the gravest kind of criminal activity, but felt no apparent remorse - the mark of a sociopath - and were in fact richly rewarded for it.
Are there sociopaths in other milieus, among the poor, etc.? Of course! But those are NOT in a position to destroy the country. Sociopaths are very sick people and they must be TREATED, not placed in the higher echelons of power, where they can do grievous harm to us all.
http://occupywallst.org/forum/why-end-the-federal-reserve-and-what-do-you-replac/
Who are you to tell what is good for me? I hate the rich and olicharch? It drives me babe! I feel it eating me on the inside then i go online and spit out some utter hate against those bastards and people love it because they feel the same! HATE HATE HATE! But you can love if you want to.
You're right: who am I to tell you what is good for you?
Besides, I understand where you're coming from... You say that when you have those strong feelings of anger, rage or hatred, if feels good to go online and spew it all out. It seems almost therapeutic, you feel relieved... at least for a little while. But eventually, you'll need to get to the root of that rage... or it will consume you and you'll never know the peace and joy that are your birthright as a human being.
If you are from Bourges, I assume you understand French. You might want to have a look at the writings of Arnaud Desjardins, such as "L'audace de vivre".
Good luck on your healing journey! Bon courage! Il y a de la lumiere au bout du tunnel.
Top lass my girlfriend says! And laughed out loud! You're a sweet person T. and i exaggerated. But anger is a gift and just as natural as your love, but love for my country is a strange thing to me, cause my country is so small. It consists of a piece of land and the people don't care about it. I love the nature, the clouds the forests and the amazement it brings to me. I love working cause i make things with my hands and use my brain. I need no healing, other people need it and the ones who are the most in need are... You've guessed it!
P.S. Please have a look my other post : http://occupywallst.org/forum/beware-of-hatred-it-is-what-derailed-the-french-re/
"I need no healing, other people need it ..."
What does your girlfriend think of that? :)
Don't we always think it's THE OTHERS that have problems, never ourselves?
Joy de vivre n'est ce pas? No i don't need to heal. It's really the others.
De Nile is not just a river in Egypt :)
No need for such emotions. Just indict Alex Mozilo, Joseph Cassano, Lloyd Blankfein, and many others.
Sorry, but even mass indictments will not be sufficient.
"It gradually became clear to me, that the line between good and evil lies not between states, not between classes and not between parties, but rather cuts across every human heart." (Alexander Solzhenitsyn).
We all need to work on ourselves... Without that healing work, how will we succeed in healing this country?
It's a good start.
Agreed. It IS part of the solution and would set an example.