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The Forum > Article Comments > Why the Occupy Wall Street movement hates business > Comments

Why the Occupy Wall Street movement hates business : Comments

By Peter Shergold, published 17/10/2011

Something serious is going on. It was the Harvard Business Review, no less, that earlier this year published an article premised on the prescient view that the 'capitalist system is under siege'.

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...Capitalism is “never” under siege. Capitalism is the system most resembling nature and the evolutionary cycle and is the most fundamental and compatible “bed fellow” of humanity.
As nature uses up the vast store of human energy for its own purposes, likewise does Capitalism; we are simply on earth to be “used and to use”, it’s the “Great way”.
Posted by diver dan, Monday, 17 October 2011 7:19:29 AM
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No we don't hate businesses just corportate excesses.http://www.secretofoz.com/ L Frank Baum In "The Wizard of Oz' had a serious message for us back in the 1890's,but we missed the point.

It is the fractional reserve system of banking that is robbing us all blind.
Posted by Arjay, Monday, 17 October 2011 7:22:39 AM
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Capitalism is the best of a bad bunch but it is like any other system, man-made and it can easily be manipulated to its worst excesses or managed well to ensure greater benefits to society and not just for a small minority. Just look to history when Marie Antoinette said eat cake, the punters started throwing it.

It is not about being anti-business but anti-fraud as Arjay has already written.

There is nothing wrong with tweaking a capitalist framework to ensure the benefits of the system are more widely distributed. A social democracy allows the best of Left/Right principles to cohabitate within the mix of personal and individual freedoms, incentives and collective benefits. The other aspect is the idea of continual growth and the effects this has on other aspects of 'living', not all economists buy the perpetual growth paradigm.

I can see these protests already being labelled as the loony Left without deeper thought and analysis. It is a pity as this is part of the problem.
Posted by pelican, Monday, 17 October 2011 7:42:28 AM
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RJ:

...Try to observe the game as a whole. If I can offer you criticism, it is your fixation on the "batter only" causing your anxiety.

...The greatest impediment to Capitalist evolution, (that is in simple terms, the rich getting richer while the poor grow poorer), is the law of man. One of the greatest impediments to progress was (past-tense) the moral law implanted in religion. God is now well and truly dead in the west, along with his moral codes for life which acted as a break on the consuming progress of Capitalism.

...The moral way has no duty in law and as a consequence has no duty in a society of capitalism; beat your chest all you like, the march of capitalism is moving exponentially towards a conclusion of total domination and will achieve its aim by conquering the influence of morality totally.

...Without the argument of "morality" anything goes. Atheism is the Capitalists lieutenant
Posted by diver dan, Monday, 17 October 2011 8:02:20 AM
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The "analysis" of this phenomenon will take a while, methinks. In fact, I venture to suggest that it will substantially outlast the events themselves, which are bound to disappear up their own fundamental inconsistencies fairly quickly.

The Porter/Kramer article is a profound and honest piece of work. It takes a very clear-eyed view of the problems that unfettered greed (let's not be lazy, and call it "capitalism", shall we folks?) has created over the past fifty years or so. The knee-jerk reactions to it in the comments at the end of the precis show how much it hit home:

"Shared Value is nothing more than 21st century cheerleading. Good corporate citizenship…blah, blah, blah. Business has only one requirement. That requirement is to make a profit. Business is not in business to save the environment or create jobs."

That has at its heart the essence of capitalist logic, based upon Adam Smith's famous "invisible hand", that is supposed to ensure that the market self-regulates, and all will come out in the wash of our being rational human beings.

What would have surprised Smith, of course, is the manner in which his logic has been perverted to justify obscene amounts of money being paid to executives, despite the fact that these payments bear no relation to performance. And how technology has enabled even more obscene amounts of money to be made from financial transactions that, in and of themselves, create no economic value.

Which is of course the problem with the "movement". It is super-easy to point fingers at the causes of resentment. But without dismantling capitalism itself, the only solution is to address the greed of individuals who work entirely within its financial "rules", but are oblivious to the fact that those rules lack an entire human dimension.

That will take a while. And the time and energy currently being expended in a load of hot air about the demise of capitalism will only entrench resistance, and make the journey longer.
Posted by Pericles, Monday, 17 October 2011 8:31:06 AM
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Dan,
God isn't dead in the West, it's just that the widespread apostasy within church hierarchies is rendering them ineffective as a counterpoint to materialism.
Globalists love universal ideologies, especially the ones with a concept of revelation and debt at their core. There are only two main ideological forces which could operate as agents of global social change, for better or worse, Roman Catholicism and Islam.
Globalists long ago gained control of the Vatican and their "moderate Islam" still totters along, both faiths could play a role in ending debt slavery if they were returned to their true path.
Given that the "south" is now the focus of Christendom it's more than likely that Third World Christians will lead the way in this regard, we're already seeing a schism in global Christianity between the Apostate West and the literal intepretations favoured in Africa, Asia and South America.
Posted by Jay Of Melbourne, Monday, 17 October 2011 9:58:49 AM
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