Why, it seems like, oh, almost exactly a year and a day since hordes of concerned citizens who’d had enough of corporations took to the streets of New York…and then the streets of the world…and then to the invisible, capillary-sized “streets” that beat inside the the hearts that are nestled within the rib cages of the “99%,” which is quite a broad coalition when you realize that politics is ultimately a number game.
Tragically for some, quite humorously for others, this massive groundswell, this economic revolution, this taking back what’s been taken from us and holding it in our hands like a beautiful little butterfly with a slightly broken wing, failed to keep its shit together for even a year and a day.
Sure, it was the cold weather that drove many of these erstwhile revolutionaries indoors over the winter months, but when things warmed up again this spring, what had once been a mighty intestinal blast of anti-corporate angst was a feeble fart that not even those who laid it were able to smell.
Some of it had to do with opportunistic street bums, some had to do with those pesky rapes, and some had to do with heavy-handed police tactics, but most of it had to do with a vague, aimless angst that in the end may have been rooted more in base human envy than in any concrete ideas that could be molded by the proper hands into a right pretty piece of artisanal political pottery.
So what do you think that “movement” was all about? Why has it stopped moving? What would have made it succeed? If you were to try again, what would you do differently?
How about we start with “anarchists” who don’t use “more government” as a solution to every problem. It sucks that CEO salaries are so much higher than worker salaries but assuming the government could regulate something is beyond naive. They would just pocket the money themselves like they do everything else. If they stuck to a “fuck the government” platform they could have been a real Youth Movement.
Socialism can never work, it’s infantile to think otherwise. Human nature is base and self interested and always will be. We’re a product of the pack status mentality our monkey forefathers evolved from. Also boobs!!! Boobs are awesome!!!
I only had one father, and he wasn’t a monkey.
At some point protest as performance art and publicity grabs has to give way to the real work of grass roots movements. Even the Panthers and the Lords put their noses down to the ground and got involved by showing up at city council meetings, engaging local politicians, starting neighborhood voter drives to support politicians with policies they backed, as well as collecting the garbage themselves when city governments stopped doing it in their neighborhoods. They ran breakfast and lunch programs for children in working class neighborhoods, and engaged young doctors, nurses, and med students to volunteer with free health care programs to set up free clinics and student medical offices in schools, in neighborhoods where there was no funding for it. They found grass roots solutions for real social change that shamed policy makers into adapting them, while protesting the problems they saw to get changes in official policy. Of course none of that shit looks cool on instagram.
The OWS movement and the tea party should have joined forces to attack their common enemy, which is the manipulation of government policy by private interests. The problem with government regulation of business is that the most powerful companies in a given industry use their influence to help push through policies that further their own interests and force out competition from smaller firms who can’t benefit from the government’s power. The ICC gives out licenses to trucking companies which are required in order to drive a truck full of oranges from California to Oregon. Are we really worried that the poor orange company is going to get fucked if they are allowed to chose whomever they want to drive their oranges? No, it’s just that a few powerful trucking companies want to maintain their dominance and insulate themselves from market forces that would oblige them to keep their prices down and services up. This shouldn’t even be a left/right issue. Both sides should be upset that the finance industry spends billions in lobbying fees and campaign contributions to make sure that they can also be isolated from market forces. Together, OWS and the tea party could have effected real change by showing that the whole country, all sides, are fed up with the institutionalized corruption in congress.
Instead, OWS turned into the general far lefty “rich people are bad, everyone should be able to have whatever they want for free, and we should all dance around the drum circle” mushy-headed fantasy world while the tea party was taken over by the Koch brothers and their myriad financing organizations, including the one that took the campaign finance reform law to the supreme court and helped buy the verdict that makes sure this stuff can’t change.
When it comes down to it, the left and the right ultimately do want the same thing. Stopping the government from manipulating markets to chose the victors ultimately brings down prices through competition and benefits the poor. Unfortunately, the current victors have a heavy stake in not submitting themselves to free-market forces, and spend so much money to maintain their privileged position that congress is now totally reliant on their money to stay elected. When you take gay marriage and abortion off the table, and limit yourself to honest, educated opinions, there’s more to agree on than to disagree on.
The standard of living for the average American has gone up every ten years for the last seventy years whether there is an inequality of wealth or not. As long as that keeps happening, I don’t give a shit what a CEO makes. A homeless man can get a used ipod in a pawn shop that is in almost perfect condition for twenty or thirty bucks. In terms of music, that homeless man has a higher standard of living than the royalty of Europe did in 1850. Fifty years ago, people didn’t debate the ethical issues of health care because people simply died and that was that. In another hundred years I’m sure that they will be able to grow a genetic replica of your heart inside of a test tube and have an artificially intelligent robot put it in for three hundred bucks. The surgery will be one hundred percent safe and you’ll be running on a treadmill in six weeks. When this new futuristic heart transplant technology comes out for the general population, it will be expensive and, as a result, some men will become billionaires. However, eventually, having a robotic heart transplant will be old technology, much like how buying a used ipod is today. Overall wealth of the whole population has a limit at any given moment but can “change” from year to year depending on whether or not people work and innovate. Capitalism eventually eliminates the ethical issues through prosperity. (besides the issue of inequality of wealth)
What happened? If your movement isn’t something you truly believe in (or understand), then it’s probably a real pain in the ass to live like a sexy homeless person for months on end. Half these people (maybe more) were just there because they had nothing better to do and were developing their college-age political identities. Once they found themselves, a pretty good portion were probably like, “This is absurd.” And it’s a lot easier to collect unemployment or work a shitty job than it is to sit around spouting empty clichés about corporatism, capitalism, greed, etc. Plus did people read the Occupy Wall Street list of demands? It was an embarrassment to any thinking person who was earnest about the movement. I think that may have been when it jumped the shark. Nobody knew what the hell they wanted, then this bizarre, childishly comedic list of demands circulated.
If you assume it failed maybe you just had a different idea of its purpose. Mainstream discourse blacked out issues of economic inequality and Wall Street rule of politics and now that’s changing. Check back in a decade then we’ll see what was effective or not.
The standard of living has gone up from major innovation (Industrial and Technical revolutions/advances) and women and minorities entering the work place. Who knows what the next industry side revolution will be, but as near as I can tell short of child labor there is no where else for the supply of jobs to grow. Dual income families became the norm and helped pull a lot of families a ring or two up the economic ladder but as a society the middle class has very clearly plateaued and as a nation we face the very real likely hood of producing more than ever before while be squeezed out of the economic picture at an ever increasing rate. Equally alarming is that the institutions that helped to create the better living conditions (namely unions) are being legislated out of existence. Without a counter balance to corporations, be it unions or government, there is no safe guard or protection for the country as a whole and corporations would be allowed to run wild(er) than they all ready do.
While OWS was always going to disappoint in the long run at least for a split second in this country income inequality was something that the average person on the street thought about. While no one understands what the goals of OWS were/are at least they tried to change the national dialogue and make people reconsider that maybe as society we should try and plan for the future if the current economic climate will remain the same or become the economic future instead of just saying fuck you got mine/free market regulates itself/trickle down/whatever else.
Also keep in mind that it took revolutions to replace monarchies that ran around doing what ever the fuck they wanted with governments with rule of law and other protections that the homeless man can now have a better music standard of living than royalty in the 1850s. If it wasnt for people overthrowing the elites of the time we would all still be shit eating peasants. None of those people said thanks but we will wait around Im sure that the economic overlords will grant us most of the same liberties they enjoy currently out of the goodness of their hearts.
Emma Goldman > Marx
I would like to take a moment to briefly blame all muslims for their stupid muslim bullshit. Mohamed eat a dick.
I think this piece may have been written by an angry rich person