Thursday 17 May 2012

Forbes - Occupy Wall Street Plans 'Laugh Riot' At G8 Summit And Beyond

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  http://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/2012/05/16/occupy-wall-street-plans-laugh-riot-at-g8-summit-and-beyond/
5/16/2012 @ 5:01PM |493 views

Occupy Wall Street Plans 'Laugh Riot' At G8 Summit And Beyond

From the Adbusters ad announcing their latest activist campaign against the financial follies of our times.

From the motley Canadian crew that brought us Occupy Wall Street comes Friday’s “laugh riot”. Thousands of Occupy Wall Street plan to take to the streets on May 18 in uproarious laughter. What’s so funny? Jaime Dimon’s serving of humble pie! Hilarious!

How about the fact that since the fall of Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns, many in the market are now wondering if FinReg has any teeth to curb high risk gambling that guys like whale-sized loophole swimming JP Morgan trader Bruno Iksil found when he lost a minty $2 billion.

Bruno recently gave up his gig as a JP Morgan derivatives trader in London, but does anyone doubt this guy won’t be laughing all the way to the bank? Not that he broke any laws. He didn’t. He gambled with JP Morgan’s money; some of which it got for pennies on the dollar in Treasury swaps with the Federal Reserve and in its cash windfall from a bargain basement purchase of Washington Mutual in 2008.

The Occupiers at Adbusters, the Vancouver-based magazine that launched the OWS movement last summer, said in a note to their readers Wednesday that a global “laugh riot” could “break through the G8’s veneer of legitimacy and expose the Camp David Summit and our current capitalist model for the farce that it really is.”

Activists will be taking to the streets again next week, when the G8 Summitis in full swing in Chicago.

“At a time when our human experiment is buckling under austerity, financial madness and eco-angst, there is something so ludicrous, bizarre, even insane about the eight most powerful people in the world trying to conduct the people’s business – to set things right – from behind closed doors and razor wire fences,” Adbusters editors wrote. As if planning the future of all mankind behind closed doors was anything new. Geesh. What planet are they on?

Maybe the global laugh-in is what we’ve all been waiting for. If their latest May Day demonstrations are any indicator of future results, then maybe not. Otherwise, Chicagoans and New Yorkers might be watching people break out in uproarious laughter for no apparent reason. They’re not crazy. They’re activists.