Nah, sometimes the best thing to do is be present, not predominant. It is not necessary to adopt a slogan, force ideas on others or become run by someone whose actual interests don't include you.
For all practical purposes, OWS is the American portion of the Arab Spring. Is there a reason to define dissatisfaction? When you're the 99% and being taken advantage of by the 1%, is there any question about what you are actually miffed about?
Do we need to line people up and say, "These people have lost their homes", or these and say "these people have lost their pensions", or these and say "these have just graduated college and can't get a job"?
The point is that there are so many people in this country that have been screwed over in the past 30 years that those remaining standing are obviously the problem. And the logic is impeccable, irrefutable, and obvious to the entire world.
Absolutely no one can say that they caused their own downfall, for if they could, then they would be the only ones. Since there are so many people who "Don't blame Wall Street" and have still lost everything, their ideological bent still supports the people who were hunting for them day and night through methods of information gathering that you couldn't believe.
You cannot have such a collapse of all that is known without either being stupid and not knowing anything, or you have some control over your future unless someone takes it from you.
Again, even if this were just one situation then you could throw out the hypothesis, but such things are happening to millions upon millions of people on the entire planet, you know damned well that it is not your fault. Only an external force can create such chaos for so many people, and it ain't the 99%.
No one bets against 99% except the 1% holding all the other cards.
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This was my answer to http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/21/rawls-on-wall-street/?hp#preview , titled Rawls on Wall Street.
But this covers only the first 30% of the 99 whilst the threat of it happening hangs over the heads of the rest of the 99.
Yes, there are some of the 99 that are doing better than the others, but that is only happenstance. Happenstance in that when the financial crisis hit one wasn't under water with their health care problems. Happenstance that they weren't the first wave of the layoff of qualified people to do the jobs when young people could be "bodies" to do the jobs at significantly lower wages.
Happenstance in that women have been moving their way into the workplace and were willing to earn 78% of their male counterparts.
The drive to cut wages was on, and most of us didn't notice. We just thought it was our fault.
Ah, but the drive to create easy credit was also on, and hey, cheap credit sounds good, right? I got a credit card based on my piddling earnings delivering The Washington Post to Condo Canyon in Alexandria. Hundreds of newspapers per day, up and down the buildings, and I got credit. Not much, mind you, but I could buy things.
The truth is that I would have never been able to pay the credit off if I hadn't realized that I wasn't credit worthy.
And this is what I was talking about with my response to the NYTimes article. The ability to get sucked into a jet engine really doesn't require anything by being in the wrong place at the wrong time. But the ability to lay your life wide open to manipulation via inexpensive credit is just as deadly. It only takes longer to realize that you can't breath.
Now my point was that most of the 99 felt for oh those long years that they had failed their obligations, but then along came an even newer method to use credit to get out of your personal funk.
If you had a house, you could borrow on it almost every year. Rates would fluctuate, but you'd still be able to get the money and purchase those things you needed, like a new roof or a new car, or you could stick some money away to pay for your child's education.
No matter what you did, and you didn't know it, you just passed your money up to the wealthy. The one percent.
At that point, you were working to support the smallest portion of Americans as if you were the subsidies that Reagan called the "welfare queens". But who really were the welfare queens?
It turns out they were the rich, the wealthy, people who eat caviar at lunch when they slept in until noon.
OK, the Rock Stars of money, if you will.
However, let us get some delineation defined here. Rich people aren't people with money. They are people with value, but that value doesn't come close to the wealthy.
The wealthy are people who cannot get rid of their wealth, even if they tried. They might pass their wealth onto someone else, but the wealth is a living being that cannot be defeated sans a comet destroying the planet.
Wealth can never go away. You cannot spend it fast enough and you cannot throw it off a cliff for long enough. You will die and your children's children's children will still be standing on the cliff throwing money off, and yet more money continues to come in.
Wealth begets wealth and the wealthy know it. They buy mansion sized yachts and ply the seas for months at a time without concern of where their money is coming from, because they have wealth, and it will never go away.
The biggest ploy the wealthy ply upon us is that we, too, can become wealthy.
No, we can't. The best we can do is become rich, and the rich and the wealthy don't talk to each other, unless the wealthy wants to use your money to make them wealthier.
If you haven't noticed, we've been moving up the totem pole where all the money goes. And here it is. If the wealthy lose money on investments they make (supposedly the job creators), they get tax write-offs and subsidies because they paid for them in their support of certain candidates for political office.
Face it, even if they lost on investments, the amount of money coming in from their other investments will continue to build their coffers. Losses are a normal part of investment, but when you get all your money back, you didn't take a risk, which is what investment is all about.
So we don't really just have a financial institution that is too big to fail, we have PEOPLE whom are too big to fail.
Now that is a giant leap. We have financial institutions that are supposedly too big to fail, but their investors are too big to fail in the first place. How could this be good for the 99?
I realize that I perhaps seem a little obtuse to some of you, but the fact is that even this doesn't go far enough.
Wealth has been grown over the centuries, often by creating bubbles that cost the poor man money and moving that money up to the wealthy.
Why would a wealthy man want the money out of a poor man's pocket?
Because there are far more poor men then wealthy and a billion nickels is a lot of money. Fifty Million Dollars to be exact.
How about you can grab a nickel out of everyone's pocket per day? Just a nickel.
Think about a group of people coming into your house and going through your sofa for change every day. Nay, every 15 seconds.
Well, guess what. Goldman Sachs and numerous other Bank Holding Companies, are using massive computer systems to leech hundredths of a penny out of your pockets every 1000th of a second.
If this is what we have become, then you should be able to see that the failings of the 99 are not their fault. It is the fault of people whom would take advantage of you at every turn of events. At every second you live.
About 30 years ago there were mail order companies that would send you catalogs, suggesting items were in stock and could be shipped immediately, but they weren't. These companies planned on using your cash for a 7 day period to make money, and then send you the product you bought, and most people didn't even notice.
People were less aware of transactional money at the time, and they'd send in their check and wait for the product.
Now if it were a camera, for instance, then you might have a tendency to wait for a couple of weeks, but in the meantime these people were buying and selling diamonds with your money. And then they'd finally send you the product.
This is the way Capitalism works. It is Money Creep. The money creeps up the totem pole, and whilst you may get product, you have no clue that you are being raped.
I know for a fact that some gas stations take a dollar from your account, supposedly as a test to see if the account is valid, but they are stealing money from you to back their investments. Yes, they give you your dollar back, but they used it for their own purposes during the time it was away from your bank account.
This is Capitalism. If you aren't a part of the 1%, you are meat.
