We at The Confluence have always said that if you are not living off your investments, you are working class, regardless of your education, profession or delusions of grandeur. Tea Partiers amuse me when they pick on the next level down, as if the life of a Tea Partier counts to the bonus class. Tea Partiers don’t mean squat to them. They’re just useful idiots that distract the public while the bonus class plunders at will. If you are a Tea Partier, here’s news for you: The top 1% think YOU are a parasite who doesn’t deserve respect or a decent working wage. Yep, even if you are a hard working American, like I was until recently, you are just a ungrateful leech to them, sucking off their largess. They could replace you with somebody in China. And if the Chinese get uppity, there’s always Bangladesh.
But this message seems to get lost on the Tea Partiers. Oh, I understand how angry you are. But you are directing your anger in the wrong damn direction. You can’t get anything out of the poor because they don’t have anything. You need to start looking to the top of the food chain or you’re just wasting everyone’s time.
Sure, there will be people who abuse the system. Sure, everyone has a brother-in-law that should be out on his ass. Everyone knows a neighbor who visits the doctor a little too often. But there are also plenty of people who don’t earn the money they party with in the Hamptons. They fly to places we can only dream about on private jets that are paid for with your 401K management fees. And they think they are so much smarter than you because they got a job on Wall Street, eating what they kill and pocketing the cash, while YOU toil away day after day, year after year, in a job whose returns are diminishing at an ever increasing rate. You’ll never catch them doing your kind of work for the money you make. You might be a teacher or a firefighter or an accountant or a drug designer for oncology chemotherapy. Your worth, as a person and your contribution to society mean nothing to them. They are programmed and rewarded for one thing and one thing only: to make money no matter what.
The good news is that they can only buy ads, they cannot buy your votes (unless you’re a member of Congress or a superdelegate to the DNC). And the votes of the 99% swamp the votes of the 1%.
If you don’t like the way corporations are running things, don’t blame the corporations, blame the rulemakers and
Vote. Them. Out.
And now, for a musical interlude:
Filed under: General | Tagged: occupy wall street, theme song, We are the working poor |
The Confluence 
Best headline ever? Pretty close
😦 What does it say?
Hey, where did it go?? It was a pic of the Brooklyn Bridge protest from the front page of the NY Daily News that had the headline “S#!@ Hits the Span”
Too funny.
Wow. I can’t find it at the site. I guess we’re going to have to start using Screen Capture for these images. Things are getting erased as fast as they go up.
Honk, honk!
I see a flaw in the “vote them out” strategy.
Why can’t the Malefactors Of Great Wealth simply buy the new elected officials in the same way they bought the old elected officials? The VTO strategy depends upon the existence of a sufficient number of incorruptible humans.
Humans being what we are :evil:, any strategy that depends on humans behaving virtuously is doomed.
(Why yes, I am a misanthrope. Why do you ask?) 😈
What politicians really don’t like is losing power. Power is, er, more powerful than money. And you can’t stay in power if you don’t have votes. Sooner or later, the voters will get sick of the con game and the ridiculous TV ads and the Faux News. Well, enough of them anyway. Then it really won’t do politicians any good if they take the money.
Why can’t the Malefactors Of Great Wealth simply buy the new elected officials in the same way they bought the old elected officials?
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That’s exactly what happens and in fact they don’t get to be the newly elected officials if it hadn’t happened before they are sworn in, during the campaign . Before they have power, they gotta have the money to run …in fact money is power in this post democracy we’re in . I see the morgan bank gave the NYPD 4 mill….who will the NYPD obey? Morgaon Bank or Mayor for life, Mike Bloomburg …what’s the diff?
What about those easy-to-hack voting machines? Vote-flipping is child’s play these days.
from what I can understand the focus is Wall St because folks are done appealing to the clerks in DC….OWS is going pass the customer service desk , right to the Boss’s office.
OWS is going pass the customer service desk, right to the Boss’s office.
LOL!! Perfect.
honk honk !!! 🙂
I hope this all continues, gets bigger, and spreads. Even those with jobs they dare not leave and lose in order to join a campin directly can
show sympathy and support in more and more ways which will become more and more evident over time.
We don’t need to “act virtuously” or “be virtuous” to get something done. All we need to do is awaken to our mutual shared social-class membership and then develop a sense of shared social-class selfishness. Then we could perhaps “outvote the money” and align the self-interest of politicians who selfishly want to get elected and re-elected with our own selfish demands that they serve OUR social class interest aGAINST the social class interest of our social class enemies.
“The quest for virtue” need not enter into it at all.
Some states’s electoral systems are more hackable than others. If I lived in a state with electronic touch-screen voting I would boycott all the elections held in that state on the principle that there is no proof of how I or anyone voted in such a system and the outcomes are infinitely hackable. But I live in a state with Opti-Scan machine voting whereby I make ink marks on a paperboard ballot which the machine then eats and reads. Everything is hackable or fraudable downstream from there BUT . . . the first step is an actual physical step in the actual physical world. That paperboard with marks is what is called a “legal paper ballot” and is the unhackable first footprint. If the election seems hacked to some, all the legal paper ballots can be counted by hand to see how the vote really came out.
I hear the cynical saying: “if voting could change anything they would make it illegal”. I note that the upper-class servant Republicans are trying to make voting illegal for millions of people all over America.
They must think that “voting can change things” and therefor they want to prevent millions of “voters for change” from voting at all.
Meanwhile, nobody with a job thinks unemployment is for them. Unemployment is always for the other person. Until they themselves get their job fired out from under them. So everyone who still has a job should think of themselves as the Future Unemployed. Every future Unemployed Person should think about how they would/will survive without a money-income and take those survival steps, if they can. Not everyone can. But those who can, really should.
Cutting off the money supply needs to be a priority. I’m wondering how fast accounts are closing at BofA with the new $5 a month fee for using a debit card? We’ll see how resistent people are to change if they allow that huge bank to take $60 a year just for the privilege of letting you have easy access to purchasing necessities with your own money. Think about the people who carry almost no balance in their accounts and that’s one heck of a service fee.
So, how do we take back our money from the hands of the people who keep taking our lives away from us? Close our 401Ks? Cancel our insurances? Move our money to credit unions? Stop making all but absolutely necessary purchases for a week? Sounds good until we realize how many innocent, hard-working people will lose their jobs if we do that.
Campaign reform and stopping the lobbyists who buy our representative votes seem like one obvious answer, but how do we get it done? Record-setting campaign spending last election, and look what it bought us.
If our personal re-direction of our spending and getting behavior spares or even helps as many innocent workers in one place as it hurts in another, then we are not causing any net pain to the innocent.
“No net damage” may be the best we can do.
If moving significant money from big to small banks or credit unions protects or creates as many jobs in the small banks and credit unions as it loses in the big banks, then we have done no net harm to job numbers. And if the big banks are a threat to our future in a way that the small banks and credit unions are not, then we are protecting ourselves by weakening the big banks at no net overall job loss suffering imposed on innocent workers overall. If it turns out that small banks and credit unions hire more people per million-dollars-of-deposit than big banks do, then moving our money to the small institutions would even decrease net suffering to innocent workers. It would also decrease the suffering that big banks use our money to impose on us and our society overall.
Such logic may obtain elsewhere in the political economy. If Floyd’s Corner Pizza hires more people per thousand pizzas than Domino’s Piza hires, then switching all our pizza purchases from Domino’s to Floyd’s would increase overall employment in the pizza sector. If we keep getting the same old bicycle fixed over and over and over again, we maintain more employment and small bussiness ownership in the bicycle-repair-shop sector here in America. Whereas if we buy a new semi-slave-labor bike from Most Favored Nation China every time our current semi-slave-labor bike breaks, then we are maintaining employment in the semi-slavery sweatshop factories of China to the detriment of America.
Maybe we don’t have to settle for “follow the money”. Maybe we can reach out and “lead the money around by the nose”.