Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for November 08, 2011

I guess they know that Alex is the 1%

Joanie must wonder how Elizabeth Warren can advocate for a younger generation just as indifferent to domestic as they are to political discipline. They know Wall Street is the enemy, but do they see the connection between Wall Street and their credit card?

C’mon Alex, you know your failure to pick up the place was deliberate. And Gram, you know you’re looking for an excuse to stay elsewhere.

Youthful idealism is a powerful transformative force acting on civilizations.

Occupy #OWS follicles!.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5ypeLuKnLg.Am I the only one who thinks of pasta every time Zuccotti Park is mentioned?

Bridging the generation gap is always tough. And yeah, people with discipline…or whatever…are a LOT neater about everything than I am. Everything.

Love ain’t enough. I’ve been loved a lot. Lucky that way.And yet…maybe the only way I can be independent is to be messy enough the tight-a**d ones can’t stand it.

Kind of like Huck Finn. Gotta light out when they want to civilize you…

A blanket condemnation of the OWS movement is nonsensical. Claiming it is all unemployed, lazy youth also displays ignorance. I’ve been to the events and have found people of all ages, well-employed, including teachers, lawyers, laborers, even bankers who’ve acknowledged that things are not working as they now are. But then, I seem to remember similar wholesale contempt for civil rights activists.

Looking at the mess in Alex’s apartment tells me that she is a hoarder.

Here in the 18th century, tradesmen were always willing to extend credit to college students because they knew that, in the end, the parents were going to have to make good the debts, and college was pretty much confined to the sons of the wealthy. Further, by indulging the students now, the tradesmen often gained loyal customers for later. A few years ago I read of a problem of credit card companies handing out cards to college students to get them into the habit of using their cards, and getting them caught up in the debt cycle. I suppose that’s not so common now, now that a college education is not so readily going to get you a job. Betting on the probability of future earnings is an American tradition. But this is the first generation of young folk in America who are not doing as well as their parents did at their age, and have no expectation of living as well as their parents did.

You finally got yours Bank of America. $50 mil for not teaching kids not to use their debit cards at Starbucks when they were overdrawn.The laughs on you. They are taking their $68 accounts to CUs. With the help of a checkbook and pen, they will never be charged $35 for an unauthorized loan again.

Lean out of the window and ask if anyone wants a job cleaning the apartment. Top wages paid by the 1%ers who live there.

It’s just the working class heroes finding their voice.

Unbewevobo but twue.

I think GT is a bit lost on his geography. The Occupy Boston folks are camped out in Dewey Square, which is nowhere near Back Bay.

How about banks that put holds on a business credit card account, take the money out and leave the hold on for a day or 2. Multiply this by 50 transactions and you can see how they say you do not have enough money in there and then charge you a fee.

We fought with Wash Mutual for years over these fees. Add to this American Express that will yank money out of a merchants account for any reason (the guy took his wife out, charged the evening, when she wouldn’t get back with him, he filed a charge back. we won, but that can cause a chain reaction on a business account.

No matter how hard we tried, we could not get WM to release holds concurrent with reimbursement? It doesn’t work that way. visa and mc are not 2 companies, they are different for every type of card(a bank can have 50 different MC or Visa accounts) They pay when they want, no rhyme or reason except to charge fees They hold money back without dropping the hold and it is your fault, because “that is how it works”. They deliberately keep you in the dark because they want those fees. no wonder small business is having so much trouble these days.

Alex isn’t useless; she is an MIT graduate who was setting up business ventures when she was in high school. She just isn’t a good housekeeper.

Comment on the “Back to Clinton Tax Rate”, it would be better to go back to the Eisenhower (Republican) tax rate when the economy was really growing. For those who do not know the rate it was 91%. Look up historical tax rates and combine with economy growth over those same years.

“Elisabeth Warren . . . . Bernie Sanders . . . . Dennis Kucinich . . . . and a few others would work hard to change the terrible way we have been changed by the 1% these 30 years.” Yeah, but do you think they can prevail against the teavangelicals?

The look on Joannie’s face is priceless.

Could somebody tell me what is Glass-Seagall?

I mean Glass-Steagall.

 Psittacid machinations could possibly be entertaining.

I think jrmerm is onto something with his observation (or joke) that “the snake has been neglected by Trudeau and the readers.” GBT is vague not only about Alex’s neighborhood (see jmw1122 above) but about her future and Leo’s. We and GBT fear our children will never enjoy our standard of living; but they already know they can’t.Unless they can reject or rebel against our standards (like tigre above), Alex and Leo must live with low expectations. That’s to say, they do not hope (as do Joanie and GBT) for political betterment. That would explain her pet snake and lack of discipline, as well as Leo’s rootlessness and wariness of committing himself.The snake stands for that generation’s regression to a pre-political existence, where you don’t have to risk disappointment because you have no ambitions.

ah…..false economy……one business is neat as a pin, all the plants watered, all the pencils sharpened and lined up on desks – the other total chaos, paper overflowing wastebaskets, plants untended, floor unvacuumed. which do you invest in? the “messy” one. they’re growing so fast they don’t have time for the small stuff. and the neat one hasn’t seen a customer in so long, they had nothing to do but sharpen pencils.

I thought the snake was mainly thrown in to be funny, to show that the place isn’t just run-of-the-mill messy. We had a snake in our house once, in the ground-floor Florida room, which was even with the patio. It crawled into the room through some unsecured cranny. And I’d imagine that Alex really DID intend to pick up – I have a daughter like that. Alex may have a touch of ADD, like her half-uncle, Jeff Redfern.

pd, that sounds like Fukuyama’s “last man”, a man without a chest. Is this the end of history?

“GT is in the 1% Group” 

So is Warren Buffet.

GT produces a product and sells it. He doesn’t play games with people’s life savings and pensions. He doesn’t take government bail out money with one hand and then gives that money to lobbyists to fight government with the other.

amen!

I live in Boston, and have been with Occupy Boston. Apologies to Gram for the noise. Someone today had a vuvuzela, and that was like being next to a truck horn. I can’t imagine a football stadium full of them.