The Wall Street Occupancy continues despite poor police work and a great deal of media non-coverage. The Wall Street crowd keeps trying to get us to believe that the protestors don’t know what they are protesting about but that just doesn’t wash. Why don’t they articulate their demands? Well, maybe they don’t because they haven’t organized them yet, maybe it’s because they don’t want them co-opted by politicos who will grab any idea, any motto, any catch phrase, any straw to get a platform, maybe it’s because, as Adam Pek, suggested in Nation of Change, that by publishing no agenda, they can avoid attack and the movement will just continue on, unabated. I don’t know if this will work but there are certainly plenty of targets for the movement and the universal one is corporate greed.
All you have to do is look over to 200 West Street, the offices of Goldman Sachs, a prime example of what is wrong with our country economically and why Wall Street cannot be allowed to operate without extremely stringent rules.
In the last nine months Goldman put aside $10 billion for additional employee compensation (bonuses). They have 30,000 employees, which works out to be $333,333.00 per employee. Of course they don’t all get that much. CEO Lloyd Blankfein took home $13 million last year, which cuts significantly into the total. But then they laid off 1300 employees in the 3rd quarter and plan to lay off 1000 more in coming months.
How could a company that is shelling out $10 billion in bonuses have the stones to lay off 2300 employees? What, the bonuses aren’t high enough, so they just screw a few thousand of their employees?
Of course the profits are down 70% from 2010 and the stock fell by 43%. Maybe this was the result of their having to pay $550 million in fines for defrauding their clients. Still, it didn’t keep them from that big bonus pool. I wonder how the stockholders made out? You suppose they’re the ones who are feeling the 70% drop. The bonuses sure aren’t going to reflect it. Why such big bonuses when the company has hit a speed bump? Well, they’ll tell you that they can’t afford to lose any of those incredibly valuable bonus boys to other companies. Yeah, everyone’s going to be scrambling after these guys, especially after they screwed the pooch on 70% of their corporate profits. What reason, outside being in the golden circle is there to give this bunch of losers a $10 billion bonus?
Are you getting a picture? Is it becoming evident that these are the biggest bunch of greedy, scum sucking slime since Morgan Stanley sold its own product short and crashed the economy? The protestors may not have the solutions but they are asking all the right questions and making the Lords of Wall Street very nervous.
They may not be able to articulate it as clearly as the media wants them too, but this kind of consummate greed, this kind of I got mine, screw the world greed, and the fact that in order to get theirs the thieves of Wall Street have destroyed our economy, crushing working class families dreams and making us look like the financial version of Haiti, this is what OWS is all about.
But that’s not all it’s about. It’s also about the conscience-less slime that want to build a pipeline through our most ecologically sensitive heartland, a pipeline that will threaten our largest natural water system, a pipeline that will, in the long run, be harmful to our entire economy because it will ultimately raise the cost of oil in this country, a pipeline that by its existence will put off the R&D needed to eliminate fossil fuels from our roads and industry and replace them with clean technology. So it’s also about the oil industry and with oil, the coal and natural gas industries.
These industries are all about big money and OWS is also about big money and how it is in the process of destroying democracy as we perceive it, because that, dear readers, is the real problem. Big money is taking over the democratic process, subverting it for the sake of the almighty buck. I would be shocked if there was one member of congress who was not indebted to some money source with a political agenda. That means that there are no, or at best very few legislators who are making decisions based on the merits of the proposed legislation but rather on the urgings of the lobbyists from the companies that have made significant contributions to their campaigns.
A recent quote in the NY Times came from an un-named money manager. “Financial services are one of the last things we do in this country and do it well. Let’s embrace it.” Too bad this clown didn’t have the stones to use his name. “And do it well?” Where the hell was this moron when the financial services industry was crashing the economy, when it was losing $9 trillion of American’s savings, when it was destroying the housing industry, all in the name of greed. “I’m making mine, screw you,” should be on the all time Wall Street T-shirt. Wall Street got too big to fail while the American middle class disappeared.
*********
Eric Cantor is worried about the Occupy Wall Street groups and why shouldn’t he be? They are aiming their rhetoric directly at the kinds of liars and double dealers objectified by Cantor and his ilk. Cantor, the ultimate sleaze, says he is increasingly concerned about the growing mobs occupying Wall Street and is worried about pitting Americans against Americans. This statement takes huge stones considering that separating the country and pitting one American against another is exactly what the far Right led by Cantor has been doing ever since Obama got elected. We don’t care if we destroy the country as long as Obama isn’t re-elected is the credo of those doing exactly what he says he’s worried about.
He accuses President Obama of encouraging the protestors, like that’s a bad thing. This is how we got this country, you little worm. This is how we will keep it.
**********
There have been mountains of conjecture and unending condemnations about what the protestors really want. Well some of them want their faces on the news and some of them want a legitimate excuse to get out of school. There will always be people who take advantage of any situation to benefit themselves. Kind of like the bankers who are the targets of much of the protest. But there are some universal themes that are developing and being exported all across the globe and these are themes that must be addressed or at some point the peaceful demonstrations will end in chaos.
High unemployment, income and wealth inequality, underemployment in advanced and emerging technologies, inadequate skills and education by means of which our young can go on to innovate and our older, currently less skilled, can learn what they need to get the jobs that exist now and in the future, resentment against the corruption that is pervasive in our institutions, especially the feeling that nothing can be fixed because it is not in the interests of those in charge of fixing to make any change. All these are the reasons that parks around the world are now filled with protestors.
Of all these problems the one that incite the most despair is probably the last because no one seems to be able to see a way out of it. Money drives not only the economy, but more importantly the government. It takes big money to get elected to anything in this country and those who take that money are beholden to those who give it. There will always be dishonest politicians who take bribes and such but in our current system even the honest politicians must take money to get into office and that money is the curse of our system. How do we stop it, this honest graft? No politician will vote to cut it off entirely, they can’t and continue to exist so there must be another way, a way that doesn’t ask the lawmaker to act against his own self-interest. That way is legislation through national referendum and it is demonstrations like OWS that will eventually lead to it. Today’s Internet driven society is ready made for just this approach. Steve Jobs has led us to the brink of real self-government, government where the people can speak directly to the laws that they want and need; laws that will reduce the power of those in governance and make them truly responsible to the needs of their constituents.
But the only way it will happen is through demonstrations like OWS because they are the only ones who are pointing to the problems.
I know that there are others who see the same problems, others on both sides of the aisle. Many of them are put off by the concept of public demonstration, but that is often the only way to get things done. It worked in the fifties for equality, it worked in the late sixties against the war and it is currently working all over the Middle East against oppressive regimes.
Why are we having such a problem with it working here where we need it so desperately to point out the problems with our system? I can’t believe that we have become so apathetic that it is beyond our pale. All you have to do is go to a football game and watch the thousands scream for blood. Maybe instead of blood they should be screaming for justice. Maybe then OWS wouldn’t be necessary. But until that happens, hooray for OWS and the people who are making it happen.