Warning - while you were typing 32 new replies have been posted. You may wish to review your post. I think that's a new record for me.
Siquo, and I say this with respect, your point of view strikes me as absurd. I'd quote part of that post, but I don't know where to start. Well maybe I do, it's the refusal to not just see but to even acknowledge the validity of
degrees of fault. Somebody who was sitting in their home, just living a human life, and suddenly finds their job gone, none to go to, their property value either skyrocketing or worthless, and a general collapse of financial infrastructure, because of system problems in a stock trading system they never knew anything of, is not equally at fault with the people who were running those institutions. The way you insist that he is, offing absolutely no reason for such except these increasingly cosmic definitions of "greed" and "guilt", makes absolutely no sense to me, and I really don't understand how you think believing this could ever help anyone or accomplish something.
You decry these Occupy people, gormless though they be, as missing the cause of the problem and doing nothing to solve it. I honestly don't see where you grasp it either, except as some kind of mass financial karmic retribution, nor what about your attitude or solution (sit on your hands and be a nice person as far as I can tell) is any kind of improvement.
Let me try to be a bit more detailed.
And so we come to the real point. Why is it necessary for you to believe that, what, people acting in knowingly destructive greed means we're all doomed so there's no reason to do anything about it, and/or some people are greedy therefor everyone is greedy therefore no one is allowed to complain?
Well, [1] if the first is true and the whole crisis is a conspiracy and happening on purpose, that means that this "public outcry" was part of the plan, and useless. It means that crying, fighting, yelling isn't going to help in any way. That's a pretty fucking depressing outlook. I'd like to think there's still something we can do.
This is patently absurd. You refuse to accept the possibility that the directors of major financial institutions and the government agencies in charge of regulating them could have been knowingly negligent at their jobs for the sake of enriching themselves, because that would mean the entire financial collapse was a "conspiracy" (you keep using that word etc etc) and that any attempt to right this wrong would therefor be both orchestrated top to bottom and inherently doomed. I don't know where to begin. Maybe that yes, it was indeed a conspiracy between financial institutions and their political partners to ensure that laws were not enforced.
You're stuck on this idea that everyone in the world is at (equal) fault for every problem, through ignorance if nothing else. So you have to come up with these bizarre ideas when presented with the possibility that maybe people's lives really were fucked up by powers totally outside of their control. Like this notion, that if there was something transpiring between managers that wound up hurting the company and there really wasn't a way of seeing it coming and stopping them by people inside the company's management let alone everyone outside, then all acts everywhere were one giant conspiracy. You're deflecting the question by painting it in egregiously overblown terms.
The second option, they did it out of ignorant greed, places them on equal footing with the 90% (and I'm being fucking lenient here, no way 9% of the population is not greedy) who put them in a place of power (also just by being ignorant and greedy). It's just a naturally evolved situation. Nobody is actually to blame. Of course, screaming justice and revenge and what have you will take place, as it always happens, but it just makes me sad that it's still just covering up the underlying problem that created the situation in the first place. In the 60s there were hippies and peace and love and then there was money and we all just kind of forgot (YES I know you and I weren't around, it's about society don't take this so personal). Edit: on my 3rd reread this still is an incoherent piece of text. Perhaps I can rephrase this better at another time.
Once again, I didn't appoint the CFO of Goldman Sachs, or the head of the New York reserve, or the last President's Attorney General. As a matter of fact, one of the biggest criticisms I hear on the radio and such about the Occupy crowds is the lack of people over 40, and preponderance of 20-somethings. To me they have the most right to complain, because they weren't legally entitled citizens until the last few years. They're being thrust out into an economic terrain that specifically punishes debt-holders and the inexperienced, because of political events and market shifts they couldn't possibly have affected, had they even been aware of. Heck most of the blame for the banking explosion of the last decade can be blamed on the repeal of the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act (enacted in the wake of whatever happened to banks in the late 1920s...) back in 1999. How liable am I for the acts of Congress when I was twelve years old?