Saturday, November 19, 2011
Why OWS Needs to Move Indoors
Soooo... since I don't write much anymore, it isn't reasonable to expect any visits from readers, save the odd accidental drop-by that comes from fiddling with the Next Blog arrow.Still, I wonder. Isn't it time for the Occupy Wall Street people to come indoors, away from the billy clubs and pepper sprays, the better to organize?
You can only talk about the One Per Cent for so long without needing to get very, very specific about what needs to happen.
The world has kissed the ass (and more--see below) of free market economics for long enough. The free market has had virtues projected onto it that people used to assign the Deity. No need to worry about extremes, since the market is self-correcting, right? Somehow it will know just when to swing in the other direction... right?
You bet.We live in such an interesting time. Corporations post record profits while people vie for the few jobs left here. I don't see much happening with stocks, especially mine, so I can only assume that the big-ass bonuses delivered to CEOs and their cheesy minions have gobbled up what investors might have hoped to recoup.
At the beginning of the Occupy Wall Street movement, journalists played dumb, as if they couldn't divine just what it was that protestors wanted. I guess it didn't occur to them that people who were available to staff encampments day after day were doing so because there weren't jobs to go to.
Even offshore jobs have been moved to new, cheaper offshore locations, lest a middle class expand in one of the developing countries. The target, having been hit once or twice, has started to swing back and forth again, and we learn that even former Democratic ethics junkie Nancy Pelosi (along with John Kerry) has had access to insider IPOs and such.
I guess I'm supposed to be happy for her, and him, and them.
I'm not.
There are no good deals for the little people. There are only lottery tickets and a hundred-million-to-one odds.
