Wow.. just.. wow. For those of you who have never been in the general vicinity of mace exposure I assure you the reaction of these women is not being over-dramatized.

People from NYC aren't generally into social justice?

I don't see the irony. Demanding responsibility and change is not the same as wanting to abolish corporations.

It's easy enough to see that an office pepper-sprayed a crowd of women who were already held behind a police fence. I did not see the women doing anything besides shouting.

Apple products.

At the risk of sounding like a complete jackass, pictures of people on Wall Street don't really immediately make me think the protest is large or small. As someone who is literally never been to New York, I can't tell if that's all human traffic from regular activity or not. I'm not trying to dismiss it, I'm just asking if it's a fair assumption that all of those folks are in the protest. I honestly don't know.

Not to make this thread about Apple, but it can be argued that their vertical integration strategies allow them to abuse their market share where they dominate and engage in anti-competitive practices. Much like Microsoft has done.

If you want to start another thread about that, I'd love to join. I'm taking an IT Policy and Ethics course where this is frequently brought up as a topic of conversation. Could stand to increase my knowledge and test my preconceptions on the matter.

I'll start this post by absolutely supporting people's right to protest things - I certainly support the right of the protesters to gather, they shouldn't be maced or beat up by cops, etc.

However, as someone who happens to actually work on Wall St, I have to say the reasoning behind the protests seem... misguided, at best. From what I can tell, this is to draw attention to the (overly simplistic) "wall street soars while main street crashes" theme, with the subprime fiasco as the smoking gun. Or just generally, the idea that "the people who got us here" should still be getting paid while lots of people are out of work.

First, if the goal is to seriously disrupt market or financial operations, that's a fool's errand. Even if the NYSE gets nuked off the planet, there's enough DR infrastructure that the markets would continue to run. To be honest, besides going through a security checkpoint, the main affect on my day-to-day so far is that my favorite Korean taco truck can't make it through. If the goal is to make the subprime financial guys feels shame, well, of the top 40 financial companies, only like 2-3 are still headquartered physically close to Wall St. Go up to midtown, you'll catch more bankers.

But okay, let's assume Wall St. is a symbolic target. You're *still* barking up the wrong tree. If your beef is that corporations pay too little in taxes, go to Washington. If your beef is that the mortgage market was/is too lightly regulated, go to Washington. If you think CEOs should only be paid ten times the amount of their lowest paid employee... go to Washington. Virtually every solution to the problem these people are pointing out is in the grasp of the federal government - expecting corporations to solve this is like Mothers Against Drunk Driving picketing local random bars. Good luck, but your energy is better spent elsewhere.

Now, as for *why* a group of liberals are marching on wall st instead of pennsylvania ave, I'll leave as an exercise for the reader

Good news, Norman. They are!

If you look at a map of the White House compound, you'll see that Pennsylvania Ave is closed immediately in front, in the middle of the compound. This is prime protesting real estate, and someone is protesting something there basically every day. If you include the anti-nuclear war people, someone has been protesting there 24 hrs a day, seven days a week since 1981. (They throw them out every now and then for security reasons.) In general, there's someone protesting the White House for something all of the time, except for nights(this is a security issue, but the anti-nukes people have been there since before it went into play).

To get a protest permit you basically just need to pick a day that no one else has already signed up for. Again, security issue. And then you yell your slogans, wave your signs, and tell the world that whatever it is you're against is ruining the world. The only consistent times no one's there is when the pres. is away or when the weather is really bad. Because you may think {blank} is ruining the world, but you don't think it seriously enough to stand in freezing rain over it. And you know what? Nobody cares.

With a little Googling you can get a schedule of who's protesting when. So don't worry. The libs/hippies/whoever taking over Wall Street are probably on the rotation.

"Because we don't like them and they're wrong" is no justification to harm someone, especially from a position of authority. I would've expected more from the US police in (what I can tell is) a peaceful demonstration.

Obviously I agree because that's literally the first sentence of my post.

Bingo!

I think you can put enough pressure on Wall Street that you can guilt them into accepting Buffet's plan. They need to feel public scorn, and that is what these protests will do, if the media ever gets around to covering them.

And this explains why they should target Washington, how?

I didn't say they were right, or even making the impression they want. I just said that you can make a case that protesting Wall Street is a better strategy than protesting Washington.

Arguing red herrings is kind of foolish. You might even look as foolish as the trader calling apple a monopoly.

No. We do not know why she was pepper sprayed. All we know is that we got this video that shows no context. I'm not willing to jump on the back of a police officer and on the side of some neck bearded hipsters without an investigation.

Well that's awfully fair-minded of you, and, based on your attitude, you're clearly open to whatever the results may be.

At about 17-18 seconds in, on the left-hand-side of the video of the OP, you can see that a post or something is knocked over or thrown from from the crowd towards the line of police officers. It looks to me like the pepper spray is aimed towards people farther back than the view of the cameraphone, and these people happened to get caught in the spray.

(Note, not making judgement call on whether it was justified or not. We simply don't have enough info on what is being said, nor is the view provided by the cameraphone good enough to get an idea of the mood/actions of people outside of the film.)

Off the top of my head (and I want to be clear that i have no idea what could have been said or not), someone in the crowd that was sprayed could have yelled "get them" or "push past the barricade!"