Is complex.
One the one hand, I’m glad that people are waking up, protesting, making themselves heard. This is definitely a positive development. I’ve been wondering when this was going to happen in the US, and finally it has.
However, there are a few things that bother me about the protests. One is the “1% vs 99%” slogan. As Spanish Prof brilliantly puts it,
I’ve seen a comment this weekend from somebody who is supposedly a progressive where class is divided between “those who rule the country and those who are fucked”. So if you are not among the 1% of the wealthiest, you are supposed to be oppressed like the remaining 99% of the population. Sorry, but that is absurd, and a good way of overlooking poverty rates in the United States.
I understand that every movement needs a catchy populist slogan, but does it have to be so reductive? The provocative “We are the 1%” statement folks at the Chicago Board of Trade placed in their windows resonates with me. Not because I will ever have any access to the kind of wealth the richest people have (nor do I want to), but because the idea of being lumped in with a very vaguely defined majority is not something I am likely to respond well to.
Another problem I have with the movement is that it’s taking the protest to Wall Street, Chicago Board of Trade, financial districts, etc. Can anybody tell me what the point of that is? Isn’t it clear that Wall Street is not the problem? Yes, the traders and the hedge fund people want to enrich themselves. That’s their job, that’s what they do. It isn’t their job to have a social conscience. And said conscience will not be awakened, no matter how much you scream and shout under their windows.
Is the movement hoping that touching stories of personal suffering, debt and illness will convince Wall Street employees to share the wealth with them? I sincerely hope not because that would be too pathetic. What’s the point of standing under the windows of a hedge fund with posters saying, “I’m 22, $50,000 in debt, no medical insurance”? Why should a hedge fund manager care about another private citizen’s debt or insurance? That’s the duty of our government, so maybe it makes more sense to take the grievances where they belong.
Seriously, how would everybody feel if I wrote a similar poster about my personal issues and went to wave it under the windows of a local farmer-millionaire?
Or take this slogan, for example:
Greed is a sin in the Christian worldview and a personal failure in many people’s system of morality. Walking down the streets denouncing other folks’ faulty morals seems kind of useless. Is anybody going to stop being greedy the second they see this placard? Obviously not.
People should feel free to be as greedy (lustful, angry, proud, gluttonous, etc.) as their individual value systems allow them to be. What matters is how far our political system allows these personal failings of some to influence the collective governmental policies affecting us all.
The problem is not located in the financial districts. It’s located in the centers of political power. Politicians do not render accounts to people but to their lobbyists. The US government is distributing bailouts to banks and cutting down on social programs. Washington and state Capitols should be marched on. People on Wall Street are just folks who act in their own interest. Just like the protesters are. The trouble begins when politicians become intimately involved in promoting personal interests of a small group of people and want to pay for that from our collective pocket.
I really want the movement to be successful. This is why I fear it will degenerate into a series of protests by private citizens bemoaning the bad moral values of another group of private citizens. If we get into a debate on who’s more greedy than the other guy, we’ll never get out of it and never achieve anything useful.
Let’s stop making politics be all about personalities already. Let’s make it only and exclusively about political issues.
Clarissa's Blog 
I’m surprised this hasn’t drawn many comments already.
My problem with the protestors – they seem, from my perspective, to be focused on the ‘equality of results’. This is something I can’t support. I will fight for equality of opportunity. One needs to focus on what needs to change in the process, rather than blanketing the system is broken simply because the results aren’t optimal.
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I think the lunch break is over in many places. 🙂
I couldn’t agree more about the equality of results. Also, there is an inequality in starting conditions that nobody can legislate away. I was taught to speak different languages from the cradle by my parents who wanted to give me an advantage in life. So I do have the advantage. There can only be equality in terms of how the law treats us but nobody can – or should – guarantee the results.
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I find it ironic that the people outraged with the “1%” are the same people who venerate Steve Jobs. America has a double standard: if you make a fortune in a sexy field like sports or movies, you are an hero who deserves that wealth. But if you make a fortune in a boring field like engineering or hedge funds, your a parasite who got rich exploiting the system.
Compare Steve Jobs to Bill Gates. There is no record of Jobs giving any of his $8.3 billion to charity. None. He also has a track of arrogance, as seen in from his emails and habit of parking in handicapped spaces (he figured he was rich enough to just pay the ticket). But people loved his IProducts, so they loved Steve Jobs.
Bill Gates, on the other hand, has given away $28 billion to his foundation, with more donations planned. The Gates Foundation has single-handedly revolutionized the non-profit sector, by creating a new ruler by which to measure non-profit efficiency.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/37l/how_greedy_bastards_have_saved_more_lives_than/
But when people think of Bill Gates, they think of buggy Microsoft products like Vista and Clippy. So he gets populist hate, while Jobs gets populist love.
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I want to call you cynical, but all I can do is nod in agreement.
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I believe that despite the slogans, the targets, the disparity in protester’s opinions, our society needed a wake up call, it needed to show its discontent in a large scale. Even if it is only against part of the guilty party, because Wall Street may not be the only source of the problem, but they do play a major role in it. But once again, people like those at Fox and their followers insist on making out of this a leftist invasion on civil liberties. I call this selective memory, because they are the same people who praise any Tea Party protest against anything!
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I agree, of course, that the protests are long overdue.
What I fear is this very American tradition of making everything political about personalities. Presidents get elected on the basis of how kind they are to puppies and who’d like to have a beer with them. The political message here is getting lost in these personal stories of “I’ve been married for a year and now I lost my job.” What does the length of anybody’s marriage have to do with anything, I ask? This just trivializes the whole thing needlessly.
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The timing just seems really off to me. The bank bailouts occurred years ago. There was little protest. We have a democratic president now. Progressive action has been almost entirely focused on gay marriage and anti-racist and similar social issues for ages. It has a feeling of trendy piggy-backing on the protests around the world. Maybe I just don’t know enough about it. I agree that it is government corruption that needs a closer look.
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I think it’s mostly the fact that unemployment numbers are not going down.
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Yep – continued high unemployment while corporate America is sitting on Billions of cash reserves. Joe average doesn’t understand why the companies aren’t just hiring people in order to spend their money.
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It seems like America might possibly follow Greece’s lead in ctizen protests but that doesn’t give me comfort. Last week the US sold Greece 400 tanks plus an unknown number of armoured personal carriers. So who is planning to invade Greece? My bet is there’re planning for the eventual coup and it will be bloody. If this is how the American government thinks about the best response to disturbances caused by economic turmoil in Greece then what does it think about the best response to the 99% club? Think Latin America. Here’s the link:
http://www.defencegreece.com/index.php/2011/10/the-u-s-approved-to-grant-400-m1a1-abrams-to-greece
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What’s your position on those fucking Guy Fawkes masks?
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What masks?
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To keep this dumbass repost from being a total wash, I’ll use the space to agree that the rhetoric on class is grossly reductive and the rhetoric on morality is not very helpful when dealing with people whose job description is all about making money and nothing to do with social interests. I guess folks are upset about graft and private interest lobbying that influences government and economic policy, and want to yell at something that stands for financial corruption. As the signifier for unscrupulous money-making in the US, Wall Street is the obvious Big Bad in this scenario.
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What’s your position on those fucking Guy Fawkes masks?
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Isn’t Guy Fawkes more of a British thing?
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I just made a dumb joke about a dumb thing. That Anonymous internet gang uses Guy Fawkes masks and sometimes they wear them to protests so they can pretend that their DOS attacks and sign-waving is violent anarchy in the tradition of a 17th c. English Catholic would-be bomber and his cool comic book guy similacrum.
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Isabel, the timing is based on Obama’s being down in the polls.
Prof F-B. The Tea Party isn’t doing what the Occupy Wall Street protesters are doing.
Clarissa, One rule to keep in mind when you see protests like these is to follow the money. Who is funding the protesters? There’s some indication that the Tides Foundation is involved. Now some unions are trying to tie themselves in with the protesters.
The narrative is to set up a counterweight to the Tea Party, blame Wall Street instead of Obama, have the unions push their agenda, and get Obama reelected.
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I’ve heard the suggestion that this is all Obama’s ploy to get reelected and I find it unconvincing and silly. The idea that a sitting president benefits from mass protests over what happened during his presidency is inventive but quite bizarre.
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Not entirely. As long as the vitriol and anger is directed at anyone but Obama, and by extension supposed Republican sympathizers, then Obama skates by. If you can’t solve a problem, at least find someone else to blame.
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Not that I think he’s behind it – just that he has no interest in stopping it. And that he sees the personal benefit of it. His friends are trying to take care of him, so he’ll take care of them.
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I think at this point Obama is trying to figure out whether allying himself with the protesters or even looking receptive to them might damage his chances too much. The guy is a Centrist, this should go very much against the grain with him.
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AYY, are you sold on the Iron Law of Oligarchy, with the implication that nothing as large as, say, OWS, could possibly be organized from the bottom up? Or are you sold on the “communist dupes” theory that anyone left of center is a tool?
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I hear the movement has no leadership and no center of power. That is very heartening. It probably is one of the best things about it.
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I’ve heard it described as peer-to-peer, and incorporating some ideas borrowed from Egypt.
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n8chz,
Read the part again about following the money. (It will always keep you ffrom going astray. ) Look at who is funding the protesters, and who is using them to fulfill their agenda.
It’s pretty clear that even if at one point people were going there just to smoke dope and bang drums, the left wing establishment is now trying to take it over.
I don’t know if everyone left of center is a tool, but many are subject to indoctrination and are being used.
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The idea that someone would have to be in the 100th percentile to benefit from current economic trends has been advanced by mainstream progressive pundits (Ed Schultz etc.) for a while now. They know that if they name any income level above which people are undertaxed, there will be someone there who ordinary folkx identify with at some level, unless they’re up in the old money brackets. I’m not sure I quite buy it as the gap between the upper middle class (doctors, lawyers, etc. around the 80th percentile) and lower middle class (retail, restaurant, temp agencies, etc.) is widening dramatically (but not to as shocking a degree as the spread between the top 1% and the next 19%). There’s also some reason to believe that the bulk of the “tea party” activists are largely from the professional classes.
While I’m not stupid enough to fight to the death for equality of results, as it’s mockingly called, I won’t under any circumstances join the chorus against the idea, as I find the tone of such rhetoric often borders on red-baiting. You might say I’m an anti-anti-egalitarian (in the results sense). I don’t buy the (equality of) opportunity vs. results dichotomy, anyway. I carry water for a third sense of equality, which I claim is distinct from the other two, which I call equality of footing.
Oh, and Wall Street is definitely a legitimate target for protest. The American System in a nutshell: Wall Street says “jump” and Washington asks “how high?” Washington-bashing is inherently right-wing.
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So in the scenario you give (that I agree with completely) the blame doesn’t like with those whose servility makes them ask “How high?” but with those who say “Jump?” I don’t get that at all to be honest.
Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T
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OK, so a pox on both their houses. But if you’re out to fight the power, fight it where it lives.
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In a democratic society, begging under the windows of millionaires for a handout seems kind of less productive than forcing your elected officials to do their job. If this makes me a right-wing Washington-basher, I could honestly care less.
Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T
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I didn’t know begging for handouts was part of the agenda.
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I honestly don’t see what other goal chanting and wearing slogans with sad personal stories under the windows of hedge fund managers is supposed to achieve.
What do you think the hopes here are: “The hedge fund manager will hear me, read my slogans and. . . .” Do what? Go pay more taxes? Feel ashamed? What action is expected from these people?
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Perhaps it’s just a way of saying we’re wise to their game and not taking any more of their shit. Better, of course, would be a statement of “we don’t need your shit.” Alternative means of financing projects, or better yet, alternatives to projects that need financing.
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‘Perhaps it’s just a way of saying we’re wise to their game and not taking any more of their shit.”
-I’m sorry, it still doesn’t work. What is the point of repeating “I won’t take you shit” for days? Just don’t take it, and that’s it.
I still believe that choice of the venue for these protests is their greatest flaw.
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Clarrisa, you’re missing the point. This is 4th generation warfare. The idea is to get the photo ops and play to the cameras.
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Getting media coverage was an important part of protest culture briefly during the sixties, but the business model of media very quickly adapted to guerrilla tactics. In more recent years, ignoring protest has been, for all practical purposes, part of editorial policy, unless of course we’re talking about #teaparty Americans, who can get coverage for even miniscule gatherings. I suspect that #OccupyWallStreet has broken through the protest coverage blackout mainly through persistence; sustaining the demonstration long enough so that at some point either Big Media takes notice, or is rather conspicuously behind the amateurs in chronicling events. Where it goes from here is anyone’s guess.
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I heard that the Spanish participants of the Indignado moving is helping the protesters. That is great news. The #OWS protests are getting a lot of coverage in Europe, which is great. Getting attention is crucial for any protest, so I’m glad this one isn’t getting silenced any more.
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I don’t know what “4th generation warfare” means.
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It’s a notion I associate with John Robb and his Global Guerrillas blog (which I highly recommend)
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Although AYY provides a nice preview, here’s another look at the backlash. I’m sure there’s no shadowy groups pulling the strings of the 53%…
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