First up the AP via ABC:
China: Occupy Wall Street's Issues Worth Thought
China's foreign ministry said Monday the Occupy Wall Street movement highlights issues that are worth considering, but that debates generated by the protests should promote global economic growth.And from CNN Money:
The movement began a month ago in Manhattan's Zuccotti Park with loosely organized protests against what demonstrators consider unbridled corporate greed.
It has swelled to include demonstrations on Saturday elsewhere in the U.S. and in Europe involving hundreds of thousands of people. In China, online calls for similar protests did not appear to elicit any responses.
"We feel that there are issues here that are worth pondering," said Liu Weimin, a foreign ministry spokesman during a regular briefing in Beijing.
"We have also noticed that in the media there has been a lot of commentary, discussion and reflection. But we think that all of these reflections should be conducive to maintaining the sound and steady development of the world economy," Liu said, without elaborating.
The state-run Global Times newspaper said in an editorial that the Chinese should "calmly observe the protest movement and the global situation, and not be confused by extreme points of view."...MORE
GE's Immelt empathizes with Occupy Wall Street
General Electric's CEO Jeff Immelt said Monday he empathizes with the grievances of the Occupy Wall Street protesters.
"Unemployment is 9.1% and underemployment is much higher than that, particularly among young people that don't have a college degree," he said. "It is natural to assume people are angry, and so I think we have to be empathetic and understand that people are not feeling great."Sooo... China is down with protesting, just not in Tiananmen and the guy who just sent GE's medical imaging division to China, the head of the President's Jobs Council, about as close to a crony capitalist as you'd care to get, one of the largest recipients of government assistance in 2008-09, he sympathises?
Speaking at a ThomsonReuters event in New York, Immelt went on to discuss the gap between CEO pay and average wages, one of the main sources of discontent among the Occupy Wall Street activists.
"I think the discrepancy is certainly one of the problems today in terms of why people feel the system is unfair," he said. "So let's be honest about that. It is part of the problem."
That said, Immelt was also quick to point out that high CEO pay is not the cause of America's job crisis or weak economic growth...MORE
As I said earlier (and ran through the GE bailout numbers/programs):
Too Funny: "GE Capital CEO "sympathetic" to Wall Street protests"Okay, I can breathe again.
Have you ever pulled high G's and had that tunnel vision thing...
