Occupy Underground

And by the by, Occupy was in no way the first to speak openly about income "inequality" (yup, spell checker didn't fix your line "BECAUSE they were the first to speak openly about Income Equality". I assume you would have preferred to have typed "inequality", yes?)

Occupy, at least so far, has been about as effective as everyone else. And gotten a few people hurt, for what I am not sure yet, (Hint: Just being against something is not a goal). I am supportive of the effort, but this is a grown-up world, and grown ups have business plans and goals, or at least a proposal that people don't laugh at. I haven't heard anything from Occupy that is nearly serious enough to affect change at a very high level. I suspect the message is not refined enough, because these demonstrations should be garnering 5 and 10 million people who I know think like you do. They aren't, and that's a problem.

Our trade with other people has brought us language, art, music, dance, other foods, cultures, and inventions that the people here never would have dreamed of. Adoptions of kids. Medicines. Materials we don't have. The list is long. It brought an improved standard of living for hundreds of millions of people who previously only had disagreements, poverty, and war to look forward to. Trade helped some of them, and transformed a few of them into obese people who argue about money. More like Americans. We still have all those ills, of course. Trade was and is not a magic cookie, but it has changed life for the better for many. And if you MUST reduce it to money, we sell a couple hundred billion dollars worth of stuff "out there" every year, much of which is just standard trade, because they need what we got. I am assuming that you don't want to destroy those? (A lot may be in weapons, but maybe they could beat 'em into plowshares or something. Surely they need plowshares somewhere.)

If you can't see the good, and don't see that we are richer for it, your problems include more than your spelling. We are more secure, too. We don't pick up the bat phone and threaten missile strikes, we have people over for dinner so the press can report on how they didn't hug like long-lost cousins. Am I hoping against hope that you can understand we are more secure because of that?

I stand by what I say, we are richer for it, not all trade is bad.

That said, income inequality is an unmitigated evil perpetuated by the fraud of greedy people. Pretty graphs above, but you aren't telling me anything new. ( btw, I don't need your permission, not do I care if I have your approval, to post here, It's an opinion, like yours, but in black and white, on an Internet bulletin board, not a refereed journal). I've quoted all the same stuff. I suspect most people who read this have it more or less memorized by now.

The real problem is that the people who are perpetuating the fraudulent behavior have a plan. The people who are against it don't seem to. Well, other than "they are bad, and need to stop doing it, or we are gonna, uh, march. Or pass some laws. Or throw rocks. Or hit cops in the flashlight with our heads".

Sigh.

It took us about 40 years to get to this point, beginning with Reagan who conned the American people into not living with the short-term pain that Carter proposed to get the economy back under control. (That was back when we had a thing called "Opportunity". Get someone over 50 to tell you about what WPA and CETA and full tuition paid by the government for millions and people building domes inspired by Buckminster Fuller on college campuses did for them or theri life. It was a great time.). From that point on we have been selling off and undermining labor at every turn. To some, capital has always been more valuable than people. But around that time the "neoliberals", AKA greedy bastards, started infecting this country with their disease, and it has reached nearly a fever pitch.

We spent the past 40 years selling off most of what we own, along with much of our human spirit, it seems. Those excesses need to be curbed. But if you bring all that stuff back, who says anyone will buy from us? They can and already are buying all the stuff we would then be making from their current suppliers. It would take us at least 10 years, probably more like 25, and, I don't know, 30, 40 trillion dollars to rebuild WHAT WE HAD IN THE PAST. (And the same bad guys will still be screwing everyone they can).

Some things would work out ok, but I suspect there's a lot of old stuff we can't rebuild. It very likely would not be competitive against the rest of the world at their wages. We would wind up shrinking our markets, selling insurance to each other. You think it's bad now, try that world on. On the other hand, we could create a plan that invests in our people, so our country becomes stronger and more literate, more able to invent the future, more able to battle bad guys,and then we would have, again, things other people want. It's probably gonna be just as expensive, but look at what we did with the GI bill after WWII, Korea, Vietnam. We didn't wall ourselves off, we engaged the world in rebuilding, and began to educate our people to go to the moon. We invented the Internet. That flush feeling of having money in our pockets came from that investment we made in people, and infrastructure, and it paid off. In spades.

We forgot about investing in people. We started selling all the wealth created by all the labor, and taught by example that the only value in something was what it could be sold for. The greedy bastards know this well, and they only care about one thing. Assets. They are not scared of protest parades, force. They buy politicians and cops for sport. The only thing greedy bastards care about is assets. (Btw, the reason I like cooperatives - if you and some friends can put something together you can own the assets. And you don't have to sell them if you don't want to, even if they would make you fabulously wealthy at the expense of a lot of other people).

I think Occupy needs to affect those bigger issues.

The game is rigged. Nearly every action that I have seen people take is framed by our opponents. And they are taking a greater percentage of the money every day. People can walk away from jobs, march in the streets, put up tariffs, yada, yada, yada, but that is still the game played by the opponent, and seems suspiciously like trying to re-create an imaginary past. (That last thing is a favorite pastime of loser Rethugs, btw).

Where is the movement toward the future? Where is organizing, and teaching people to be autonomous and smart and strong enough to beat those people AT SOMEONES ELSE'S GAME?

de La Botie wrote " you can deliver yourselves if you try, not by taking action, but merely by willing to be free. Resolve to serve
no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break into pieces?"

I'm big fan of the "spirit" of Occupy, (I went to our local one, provided some support) but not of the behavior I have seen so far. We need demand, but perhaps a new way to achieve it. There are sustainable, practical ways to move forward, such as co-ops, sustainable agriculture, throwing away the banking model for teaching and replacing it with more experiential learning and philosophy, things that would take the game away from the greedy bastards. I don't hear about nearly enough of that, if Occupy is working at that level.

What's the plan, Stan?