Hot Topic: Why Occupy Wall Street Matters.
On my last day in NYC after Comic-Con, I made a trip down to Wall Street to see what all the hubbub over the Occupy Wall Street movement was all about. It was a bit overwhelming at first, seeing a throng of thousands sitting in peaceful demonstration. The news media had one aspect right, which was that there are indeed a fair share of trustafarians, snarky unemployed hipsters, and waaay too many potheads. But there were also far more people who were employed, educated and completely aware of what they were doing, and what they wanted to see.
The gist of it all is economic injustice. It’s the talking point catch phrase of The Other 99 - economic injustice - and I don’t particularly like it. Not because I don’t believe in it, but rather because as a descriptor it is far too vague. My cable company used to commit economic injustice on my bill every month. My credit card company is a paragon of economic injustice with all of its hidden fees and fly-by-night policy changes. The fact that I have to pay twelve dollars to see a shitty Adam Sandler movie or an 80s-remake is bona-fide economic injustice. It’s also two words that have such a wide span, and it reeks of intellectual elitism, or what the right-wingers like to call “them book learners.” Most of us don’t even understand the complete mechanisms of the economy, and that’s just amongst the college educated folks. Injustice rears its head in so many different forms, and it plays into the culture of victimization, which is ultimately the culture of blame, which is the root of apathy and not giving a fuck, and hoping that someone else will do all the hard work for you.
This guy is an idiot. And he’s standing next to a vampire from ‘Twilight.’
I don’t like the term “economic injustice,” I’d much rather call it what it is - the rich get richer, the poor get poorer. We’re facing the greatest wealth disparity in the history of our nation, and corporate influence has spread far beyond dollars and cents. It’s driving public policy, social services, and even our foreign policy. The one percent of the ultra wealthy have more influence upon our everyday lives than our own democracy, and the kicker in all of this is that we allowed it to happen. We, the other 99, have to shoulder some of this blame. We signed the dotted line on those home loans. We bought into the idea of wealth creation through the stock market. We refused to put money into savings. Ultimately if we’re in dire straits it’s by our own hand, but we are being gouged in the process. Basic needs are more expensive than they’ve ever been, and we’re paying more taxes on top of it. The rich, however, are not feeling that pinch. And not just because they can afford it.
Look, I don’t fault a rich man for becoming rich. He worked hard, put his nose to the grind and expanded his ideas into personal wealth. But he didn’t do this in a vacuum; there is really no such thing as a self-made man, because he depended upon the contributions of the people of the state to make it happen. The roads he drives upon, the schools he attended, the mail system he uses to build his business (what is Netflix without the US postal service?). And yes, the man did pay his taxes, so he has a right to those services, correct?
Theoretically, yes. But when we start looking into tax legislature since the Bush Tax Cuts, we’ll see that the man has started paying less and less into the system that built him, and the burden is being passed on to the middle and lower classes. We never raised a stink about it for almost a decade because we had solid employment and everyone was living comfortably on predatory bank loans and mounting credit card debt. The financial placebo was buying a 60” plasma on a credit card, paid for with the potential equity earned on an overinflated home purchase. That bubble burst, and now we find ourselves in the hole. High unemployment, a generation of college grads with nowhere to work, and unimaginable debt. All the while the wealthiest one percent of Americans have not felt the pinch, and in fact they’ve become wealthier because a) we’ve deemed them too big to fail and have bailed them out with tax money that doesn’t exist, and b) they proportionally pay less into the system than the people who are struggling to make ends meet.
When I say “proportionally pay less,” what I mean is that while the wealthy are paying millions in taxes, the burden upon their overall income is significantly less that someone earning a average or below-average salary. Under the Bush Tax Cuts, the wealthiest one percent of Americans paid less into the system. One of the wealthiest men in the world, Warren Buffet, said it himself:
Last year about 80 percent of these revenues came from personal income taxes and payroll taxes. The mega-rich pay income taxes at a rate of 15 percent on most of their earnings but pay practically nothing in payroll taxes. It’s a different story for the middle class: typically, they fall into the 15 percent and 25 percent income tax brackets, and then are hit with heavy payroll taxes to boot.Buffet continued by stating he paid $6.9 million in federal income taxes last year, just 17.4% of his taxable income, suggesting he paid on income of $40 million. His tax rate was lower than any of the 20 other people who work in his office, most of whom presumably make much less than him, but paid taxes at rates averaging 36%. So do the math (I loved Obama’s quote on “it’s not class warfare, it’s just math”) and you’ll see that the wealthy have gotten a pretty good deal out of this.
We’re giving Paris Hilton a tax break. Why?
This is the pitfall. There are so many loopholes and protective measures for the wealthy, and conversely the wealthy are not paying back into the system that protects them. We bailed out the banks, and the banks are not lending, and the hedge funds (the biggest crooks of them all) have gotten off without even a slap on their wrist. They’re hoarding cash and still making globally destructive financial moves, all the while we let them get richer and pay less taxes.
The grand vision of fiscal conservatives, the Reagan-era “Trickle Down Economics” was that if you support the rich, then their expansion will trickle down to the middle and lower classes in the form of newly created innovations and jobs. But when the ultra wealthy are peddling financial instruments that move imaginary money, how can that create a job for Main Street America? How can a small business start if no bank is willing to lend? When the wealthy are allowed to keep more and more of their own money, how does that trickle down? They’re not putting money into privately owned small businesses - they buy food at Whole Foods, clothes at Barneys, buy books on Amazon. The wealthy are putting the money back into the wealthy corporations, and expanding their own shareholder wealth.
Dick Cheney eats mom-and-pops for breakfast. Dick Cheney is evil.
The Republicans love to point fingers at the kids on Occupy Wall Street as being “lazy,” and that they should “pull themselves up by the bootstraps” and get a job, or else create a job for themselves. Believe me, after talking to folks at the protest, they want a job more than anything else in the world. There are college loans to pay off, a living to be made, and food that needs to be put on the table. The wealthiest corporations are not creating jobs, they are not lending to create small businesses, and they’re not paying into a system that cultivates education and a stronger work force. But we don’t need the corporates to give us jobs, we need them to play fair, because under the current system, they’re having their cake and eating it too. Nothing is allowed to prosper except them.
This is why Occupy Wall Street matters. It’s about playing fair, and the wealthy have had an unfair advantage for too long, and it has damaged our global economy. This is not a war on capitalism, it’s about creating a functioning democracy. Capitalism is not a system of government. It’s an economic system, and it is not being properly run. Capitalism is not bailing our billion dollar banks. That’s socialism. Capitalism is allowing the market to correct itself without bailouts. Capitalism is free enterprise and the ability to compete in a free market. And we can’t do that right now, because the rich kids have hogged the playground, and are charging us an unaffordable fee to play with them.
But during the entire month of the protest, Wall Street has carried on without a scratch, infact the Dow has gone up. So what is the movement accomplishing? It’s about non-violence. It’s about civil disobedience. It’s about being an irritant for so long that you become impossible to ignore. It’s getting there, but it has to grow, and it has to be on point in its goal.
Therefore a final word to any of us planning on joining the movement, which I have. Do your homework before you go, and only go if you understand and believe in the message. Do not go to push your desire to legalize pot. It has nothing to do with economic inequality. Do not go if you want gay marriage legalized in your state. It has nothing to do with bank bail outs. Do not go to simply be a part of something you don’t care to understand, just so you can say to your Facebook friends that you were there. Do not cloud the core message, because the message needs to be clear and concise. From my observation, the Occupy movement risks being diluted by its own constituents. Masses of people are good, but they must all be on the same page. The Tea Party started with noble intentions, and as its masses grew, its core message of taxation without representation (which is very similar to the Occupy movement), got lost in the rhetoric and agendas of the fringe. Taxation without representation became about anti-immigration, homophobia, and fighting against a woman’s right to choose. The Tea Party instantly became a joke, a fringe band of loonies who knew nothing of the economy, nor the spirit of the original Tea Party. Let’s not let that happen to the Occupy movement, because it is far too important to be lost in a haze of liberal wish-lists. Keep it simple, keep it informed. To quote Bill Clinton, the true great communicator:
It’s the economy, stupid.
We are indeed seeing the seeds of a revolution that honors our tradition of democracy, but it must be nurtured to let it grow. That’s our responsibility. Let’s not screw it up for five seconds of fame on YouTube. We’re bigger than that.
