Chick With A View

Where Occupy events have taken place

Occupy Wall Street began with a small group of activists who claimed to stand against corporate greed, social inequality and other disparities between rich and poor. While it has grown to include cities around the country (DC, Boston, Portland, San Francisco, Boise, New Orleans, etc) it is still gaining traction where it began: New York City, where more than 1,000 people have been arrested in connection with the non-violent protest. Claims of police brutality, violence and illegal behavior are hard to pin down but the mainstream media insists on highlighting the negatives.

In fact, the irresponsible, obsessively-entertainment-focused mainstream mass media couldn’t be more wrong about who is involved after three weeks of the Occupy Wall Street movement, as this picture shows:

Occupy Wall Street participants

So here we have it; Occupy Wall Street is a real, important and growing movement that speaks to all American’s frustration–not merely the youth who’re the majority there –with the economic power leanings of the country. And why wouldn’t we all be supportive and be a participant in this movement? We are unemployed, and we are busted. The banks we bailed out are now ready to charge us to use our own money through our debit cards. This despite the fact the use of these debit, or ATM, cards has actually saved the banks money. This alone should be enough to make everyone protest.

Debit cards don’t involve a loan from the bank, pose very little fraud risk and are extravagantly profitable to banks because they eliminate the costs of processing and clearing checks.

That only 1 percent of the population controls the economic direction of this country is despicable. Meanwhile highly paid television pundits claim that protests such as Occupy Wall Street are the next step before anarchy, the truth is far less glamorous.

See this if you want to be moved by regular people’s real circumstances.

Anne-Marie Slaughter wrote in the New York Times, Oct. 5, : “At a time when one in six Americans live in poverty and virtually all of our social indicators are worse than at any time since the Great Depression, the political system is locked in partisan paralysis. They are not being heard, so increasingly they will make themselves seen. And given unemployment rates, millions of Americans have nothing better to do with their time.”

Are you part of the 99 percent?

I am. I was laid off two years ago. My husband lost his job in May. When we got married 10 years ago we both had full time career jobs, with insurance, profit sharing, paid vacations and a degree of security. Now neither of us have health insurance. I pay for half my daughter’s college tuition so that she will not be burdened with debt when she graduates with a degree in nursing. I have a mortgage, utility bills and outstanding credit card payments. I am working three part time jobs. But I am lucky. At least my mortgage is not upside down. And because I am very careful with my diet I have my health.

Many have less than zero. Why?

I pay taxes. Chances are you do too. Our money pays the salaries of hundred of thousands of government employees, and their health-care. It’s going to an unregulated war machine that is wasteful in the extreme. It has bailed-out banks and car makers. It goes to foreign aid.  It goes to mandatory spending that has risen from 6 percent of the GDP in 1970 to more than 10 percent in 2007, while G.W. Bush (43) was still in office. Much of the mandatory spending is in the health related fields but also it goes to retirement packages for government and military employees. At the same time the Bush tax cuts have lowered the country’s revenue sharply while it continues massive overspending–just like a spoiled American.

What about the rampant unemployment? Is it caused by the EPA and excessive regulation? Is this the fault of one president? Hardly. The labor market had been deteriorating for months before President Barack Obama took office, and private analysts agree that his stimulus package created millions of jobs. Rather unemployment has come about as companies react out of fear, move their businesses overseas and reward those at the top while dismissing those at the bottom. Rampant fraud and abuse by banks through the mortgage debacle has cost a huge amount of money.

“Lenders and their lawyers have been following unconscionable practices, and the watchdogs have been out to lunch. No wonder Occupy Wall Street has sprung up to protest corporate greed. Homeowners should not have to worry about whether they will be victims of foreclosure abuse within the legal system,” wrote Lynette Holloway in The Root.

Manufacturing in the U.S. has nearly disappeared and with it hundreds of thousands of jobs. How did that happen when once the U.S. boasted hundreds of factory towns in every state? A few of the obvious reasons are lower labor costs in other countries, fewer environmental regulations, less government interference in building codes, lower taxes and a global “free trade” mentality. Less obvious was the governmental-headgame: let others (China, etc.) build the cheap stuff – we’ll stick with high technology.

An August 2011 Congressional Budget Office report estimated that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act “lowered the unemployment rate by between 0.5 percentage points and 1.6 percentage points” and that the law “increased the number of people employed by between 1.0 million and 2.9 million” during the second quarter. But just this week, Congress again voted to make Obama look like a failure by voting against his new Jobs Bill at the risk of millions of people’s livelihoods.

Consider the stats: 15 percent of people in the U.S. live in poverty. Fourteen million are unemployed. Forty-six million are hungry and meanwhile 40 percent of U.S. wealth owned and controlled by top 1 percent, more than it ever has since the 1920s.

So are you with us or still confused?

Rolling Stone’s ace political reporter Matt Tiabbi (Doing some of the best work in the country) suggests that Occupy Wall Street which is essentially a leaderless movement adopt these five demands:

“1. Break up the monopolies. The so-called “Too Big to Fail” financial companies – now sometimes called by the more accurate term “Systemically Dangerous Institutions” – are a direct threat to national security. They are above the law and above market consequence, making them more dangerous and unaccountable than a thousand mafias combined. There are about 20 such firms in America, and they need to be dismantled; a good start would be to repeal the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act and mandate the separation of insurance companies, investment banks and commercial banks.

2. Pay for your own bailouts. A tax of 0.1 percent on all trades of stocks and bonds and a 0.01 percent tax on all trades of derivatives would generate enough revenue to pay us back for the bailouts, and still have plenty left over to fight the deficits the banks claim to be so worried about. It would also deter the endless chase for instant profits through computerized insider-trading schemes like High Frequency Trading, and force Wall Street to go back to the job it’s supposed to be doing, i.e., making sober investments in job-creating businesses and watching them grow.

3. No public money for private lobbying. A company that receives a public bailout should not be allowed to use the taxpayer’s own money to lobby against him. You can either suck on the public teat or influence the next presidential race, but you can’t do both. Butt out for once and let the people choose the next president and Congress.

4. Tax hedge-fund gamblers. For starters, we need an immediate repeal of the preposterous and indefensible carried-interest tax break, which allows hedge-fund titans like Stevie Cohen and John Paulson to pay taxes of only 15 percent on their billions in gambling income, while ordinary Americans pay twice that for teaching kids and putting out fires. I defy any politician to stand up and defend that loophole during an election year.

5. Change the way bankers get paid. We need new laws preventing Wall Street executives from getting bonuses upfront for deals that might blow up in all of our faces later. It should be: You make a deal today, you get company stock you can redeem two or three years from now. That forces everyone to be invested in his own company’s long-term health – no more Joe Cassanos pocketing multimillion-dollar bonuses for destroying the AIGs of the world.”

Now are you with us?

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