The Occupy Wall Street movement continues despite getting met with evictions from public spaces across the country and mass misunderstanding of the general feeling behind the whole protest.
There have always been haves and have-nots. What makes this situation different is that, yes, the haves have tons more than ever before in history, but mainly it’s the sense of injustice felt by the have-nots, who have bore the brunt of the worst recession since the Great Depression, trying to survive in an economy where we’ve lost over a 12 million jobs yet only gained back 80,000 jobs in October, and for this, are branded as being lazy.
This is why you have people marching in the streets.
And in Chicago, anonymous flyers were spread around the entire Occupy area, supposedly written by the 1% and addressed to the 99%. Here is a photo of that flyer that has been making the email rounds so I don’t have anyone to credit for this:
Whoever wrote this misses the point entirely as so many do: it’s not about inequality, it’s about injustice. Yes, it’s their job to make money, but fleecing the middle class and then nearly collapsing the economy shouldn’t be part of that equation. There need to be limits. Rules of the road. Whether or not they were following those rules is up for debate (as is everything these days since opinion is now considered fact), but any sane person would look back on the past few years and say that we need a few more rules – or properly enforced existing ones – to prevent this sort of calamity from happening again.
It’s true that people weren’t complaining when the market was at 14,000. But, they should’ve been because it was all fake. It was all a con. And, yes, the market has rebounded decently, but the only ones who are really feeling the benefits of that are the banks and big business. Corporate profits are at record highs while the rest of the country still deals with 9-plus-percent unemployment.
Wall Street felt some pain but that was no different than the rest of America: jobs lost, retirements evaporated. But the difference is that their jobs came back quickly, or never even were lost, because we, the taxpayers, the 99%, bailed them out. And even if 51% of those 99%ers didn’t pay income taxes last year, they’re still paying for it with other state and local taxes, sales taxes, as well as all of the austerity measures aimed at cutting pensions, cutting public services, cutting public sector jobs, etc.
The nerve and sheer entitlement of this writer. There wouldn’t even be a Wall Street anymore if we lived in a true free-market economy because they all would’ve failed and this Wall Streeter would be having to put his money where his mouth is in regards to teaching and landscaping and everything else that he considers to be so unbelievably easy that he could just jump right into any other profession and do it better than you. It’s easy for him to demonize everyone else on high while his profession, his entire industry, was saved by us the rest of America, while our industries disappeared. Jobs haven’t just been lost; they’ve been exported, never to return.
Which brings me to another point: it’s not that people feel that they’re too good for landscaping and teaching; it’s that they want to be treated fairly. They’d like to be able to make a living wage doing those jobs. Instead, while the financial industry and corporate Americans in the 1% have seen their overall income go up by over 200% over the past 30 years, the average middle class worker has seen their wages remain stagnant. They’d also like to, you know, not be blamed for what almost became a global economic Armageddon because they receive a modest pension after being a police officer or custodian for forty years. Anyone who believes that is what caused the recession or is what is dominating our deficit prefers their own ideology over reality.
“We eat what we kill.” I have zero idea what they means. All I can assume is that he has unbridled greed that knows no ethical bounds (not a stretch, really) and it just reinforces to me why we need regulations to keep these pure ids from trying to destroy the economy again. Is that implying that families barely making ends meet are wasteful, not eating everything they kill? Or that they’re not as successful because they’re not cannibals like he and his kind are? Whatever.
His major fallacy (and, yes, I’m certain that the author behind this creed is a man) is that Joe Mainstreet doesn’t want Wall Street to not exist. Sure, there are the Occupy Wall Street loons out there on the fringes who want all debt absolved and other impossible scenarios. But the overall feeling is that there’s a middle-ground that can be achieved here. (You know, compromise? That act of giving up something you want in order to get something you want and then the other side does the same thing? That thing that you do with your spouse if you want to keep things moving along smoothly? Yeah, that.)
We need banks. We need investors. We need investment banks. We need lenders. We need businesses. We need entrepreneurs.
But we need a lot of other professions and industries, too, if our entire country is going to be productive, not just the plutocracy currently running things. The level of inequality is getting dangerously high, but I think that people would be willing to ride it out were it not for the accompanying injustice that exacerbates the feeling that there is a monster divide between the 1% and the rest of us. How else do can you interpret it when teachers, custodians, fire fighters, police officers, environmental regulators, factory workers, and everyone else are demonized as being lazy, undeserving, entitled, or all of the above simply because they want some accountability from the people at the top? As long as that’s happening, you’re going to find people on the street holding picket signs demanding something be changed.
Most of the Occupy Wall Street movement just want them to be held accountable for their actions. It’s about the injustice, not the inequality.
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