Video: Occupy Wall Street is Very Different From Occupy Calgary

In the United States the Occupy Wall Street “situation” makes sense because:

1. The Banks that took crazy risks and then “insured” them with Credit Default Swaps successfully pushed the free market risk to the public.
2. The Banks continues to aggressively (and successfully) lobby to block regulation that would stop this situation from happenning again
3. The US Government, for whatever reason (read: I am NOT saying Obama is useless or that the Republicans are bastards for blocking Obama’s actions) can not pass legislation to reduce the great likelyhood of future bank failures resulting in public bailouts (i.e. moving risk from the private sector to the public sector).

Given these factors, Occupy Wall Street has some credibility.  Re-regulation is needed to reduce the likelyhood of bank failures occuring and then requiring vast sums of public funds:

1. the Government can’t do it (at least not right now)
2. the Financial Sector will not acceptably self regulate

So Occupy Wall Street, at least in theory, is a good idea to keep presure on these two seemingly immovable groups.

Note that I did NOT say Occupy Oakland has credibility… I don’t know if it does or doesn’t but I think it is MUCH less likely that Occupy Oakland has credibility.

In other parts of the world, these circumstances are not necessarily the same as Wall Street.  In Canada, for example, banks acted responsibly largely because of federal regulations requiring them to, and as a result we did not have a massive econmic colapse.  Difficult times yes; colapse, no.   We also enacted some new legistation to further ensure our financial sector is more secure in the future (higher down payment requirements on houses and higher bank reserves).   Canada definately can improve its banking regulations… and it better, however very few Canadians can look to their Federal Government or national Bank and say that they “got screwed” and that the Canadian system is continuing to push their systemtemic risk to the public.

The following video is, I think unfair to many in the Occupy Wall Street “situation” but abundantly fair to the Occupy Calgary, or Occupy Vancouver “movement”.

“…The Occupy Wall Street protesters are complaining about everything from corporations to having to repay student loans. Is America the victim of its own success? Have we created a generation of self-entitled cry babies? Is it time to make these people spend three and half days in the woods so that they can appreciate what capitalism has given them? Find out.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OAOrT0OcHh0&feature=player_embedded