Occupying Wall Street

Like a lot of people, I've been paying attention to the whole Occupy Wall Street movement. I've kept my mouth shut until now, because I've been formulating how to respond. That silence ends today.

I suspect that I'll have something to say that'll piss everyone off, but I'm going to start off by irritating the right. There's one of my Facebook friends who has spent a lot of time and energy re-posting right wing propaganda bashing on the Occupy Wall Street people. (By the way, I struck the "and energy" part, because any of the sheeple can re-post shit that others have already said.) My favorite one was that fancy little quip about 700 people getting arrested in one day, but saying that nobody has been arrested at a Tea Party rally. Well, whoop-dee-fucking-doo! I suppose that the civil rights protesters were wrong too. And while we're casting stones, let's DO talk about the Tea Party activists who cheered the idea of letting the uninsured die, or those who booed a gay soldier. It looks like somebody missed the point of this movement.

And let's look at Herman Cain's commentary on Occupy Wall Street. (By the way, I am going to paraphrase. If you want to know exactly what he said, then look it up yourself.) "It's not the fault of the rich that they're rich. But it is the fault of the poor and unemployed that they're unemployed." That statement has a LOT of truth in it. But it's not looking at the whole picture. First, that statement assumes that everyone was born with an equal opportunity of success and failure, and that all of your financial success and failure in life is in your hands. The fact is that those born middle and upper class have a large advantage over those born into poverty. But let's put that aside. Cain's comment absolutely dismisses the widely-accepted conclusion that our current economic circumstances is essentially a result of greed. Yes, the middle class was stupid by leveraging their homes, but it was the greedy bankers and Wall Street advisers that created the opportunity in the first place.

And let's look at the Democrats. These idiots want to "claim" and "take ownership" of the movement... something to offset the Tea Party. You're a bunch of fucking morons. You're just as guilty as the rest. The fat-cat union bosses, collecting their six and seven figure salaries, are jumping on the bandwagon, conveniently forgetting that they refused to negotiate when problems first arose, which contributed our abysmal employment situation. The Democratic politicians seem to ignore their votes that advocated stealing money from the poor and middle class, in order to prevent private businesses from failing, because they were "too big to fail."

What a lot of people are missing is that this isn't just a few lazy welfare cases squawking because the government isn't giving them enough crack money. In fact, there is no real, single issue uniting the Occupy Wall Street movement. This isn't a flash protest to a single hot-button issue. This is the result of a slow realization that a small group of financial and political elite have screwed the population at large. We don't begrudge people their rags-to-riches success. What we DO object to, is the corrupt and privileged few raping and pillaging the masses in order to protect their already-obscene level of wealth and power.

The super-rich (stereotypically) seem to resent paying high taxes to help the 10+% of the unemployed population. But these same individuals had no issue with walking, hat in hand, to our government, asking for a bailout for their pet company, because they were "too big to fail," all the while, ignoring the fact that their short-sightedness created the whole "too big to fail" scenario in the first place.

Many people decry my words as class warfare. Tax the rich. Screw the poor... Yada yada yada. No, the Occupy Wall Street movement is an issue of fairness. The rich are willing to let the poor and middle class twist in the wind, but when it comes to THEM losing THEIR creature comforts, the game suddenly changes. Occupy Wall Street is not about welfare, taxation, or what have you... it's about a perception that there's a fundamental unfairness in society. And yeah, life isn't fair, but the majority of us think that it's getting ridiculous.