They're wasting hundreds of thousands of dollars of our cities budgets....all the police labor hours, the rubber bullets and tear gas cost a lot of money.
Do you realize that the government spent $700 billion bailing out the banks that held toxic funds that had deliberately been packaged together with the goals of short-term profits? Do you realize that Citibank just settled a case in which it was documented that they assembled funds that they knew were worthless, sold them to customers, and then bet against those funds?
And you're angry about the dollars that cities have to spend to control crowds at the protests?
The goal of Occupy Wall St is to shift the balance of power away from the extremely small number of ridiculously wealthy who have an absurd amount of the country's wealth and an even more absurd amount of political power. There is not a discrete set of policies that will achieve this goal, which is part of the reason why the movement has not made specific demands.
Yes, the protests have attracted a large number of wackos, just like the Tea Party movement has over the past couple of years. Hopefully that doesn't distract from the message.
If you're worried about hundreds of thousands of city dollars, I would hope that you would also be worried about the hundreds of billions of dollars that you and I paid to bail out the banks. If you're angry about annoying protesters, I'm with you - but you might also direct some of your anger to the people who deliberately defrauded customers in order to get rich, and brought down the economy along the way.
If you have any friends/family who are unemployed or who have had their homes foreclosed, you might spend a few minutes thinking about why they are in the predicament they're in. And then you might better understand what the Occupy Wall Street folks are working toward.
