It's About Time

I write about Occupy Wall Street. I haven't been following it, because I haven't been paying much attention to the news in general lately, but I have been talking to people and I have been slowly growing an opinion about it. The first thing that I have learned is that the best question, the most relevant question to ask is "why are you going down there?" Because the nature of this event is that there is no clear agenda. When people try to create an agenda they are considered to be sabotaging the event, or at the very least their momentum gains no following. That is because, from my observations, everyone going down there does so for a different reason. And the only unifying factor, far above the 99% slogan, is a general unrest, disgust, unhappiness with the powers that be. I talked to a guy and his wife at a party and they had some interesting takes on the event, and I've been talking to a co-worker, so I'll try and describe their ideas here.

The guy. "Consolidation of wealth into corporations. When a single corporation has more power than a country we are in trouble. It gets even worse. Take the situation with greece. Corporations are investing in insurance against Greece defaulting on its loans. The more money that is invested in this insurance, the lower confidence there is that Greece won't default on its loans, and the more likely that country is to default. When a corporation has the money and power to do this single handedly, we are in trouble. When money is to be made in this fashion, we have a large problem of our moral scruples. New technology (computerized trading) and deregulation of the stock market has led us to trouble. The ideal of the stock market, and this was true up until several decades ago, was that it is there in order to generate money for investment into a company. Today you don't have that. You have people who have found a way to make enormous amounts of money by skimming off the top, and who invest none of that money into the businesses. The stock market is operating in a faulty manner. We need to get it back to its original intention. Originally corporations were granted the right to perform some business venture according to a charter. This charter was granted by a king and after a certain amount of time it expired and had to be reapplied for. This was completely top down. Mercantilism. Eventually corporations gained the freedom to organize of their own behalf, without the consent of the government, and conduct business freely. I think this was a good thing. We have come to a point that businesses operate so freely that they are beholden to no governmental laws or regulation. Globalization has created an environment in which, if a corporation does not like the laws somewhere, then it can just move somewhere else. In this way they are not answerable to anybody for their actions. Corporations are global while governments are still local. We need to recognize this problem and address it with some kind of international regulating committee. A lot of people are scared by this idea, but I think it is necessary."

His wife had a different take. "When I went down there there were a lot of people that I felt like represented the freegan movement. At least these are the hard core people who are able to go down there every day. I ended up feeling kind of isolated. Finally a woman got on a microphone and started talking about middle class problems. I agree with a lot of the freegan issues, but I draw a line somewhere. I mean, I still want to go to work, and drive a car and things like that.

"Something else that I found interesting was in this slogan 'we are the 99%.' I started thinking, who are the 1%. I went to the 99% web site and found a lot of disturbing things. A lot of Fox News style arguing, very emotional. Then I went and did my own research and figured out that the 1% are people who make $350,000 a year or more. When I think about this 1% I'm thinking about these dangerously wealthy and powerful people. $350,000 a lot, but that's not that much. Those people are still living, relatively similarly to us. What a lot of the anger is towards is really the .1%. I want to go to these people in the 1% and somehow make them realize that it is them that all of these people are angry about. These people need to recognize that and do something about it.

I'm going to have to talk to Peter again. He has a complicated and interesting view of history, capitalism, and anarchy. Much of what he sees in this is a traditional power struggle. In this general movement he wants to take the time to point out older issues. That power struggles have taken place between groups for a long time, that they need to be addressed here, now. That's not it, or nearly all of it.