Occupy is NOT a movement, not even close. Movements have organizations, 'leaders', goals and all that kind of stuff. Occupy has none of that. What Occupy is though is a shot across the bow and people can ignore it - or casually dismiss it - but like ignoring the navy cutter who just did that to your sailboat, you're moving into an area of great peril. Most revolutions and uprisings start not out of some fervent ideological premise with clear goals and objectives, but far more along the line of Howard Beale in Network, they tend to start because of bunch of people who are 'mad as hell and are not going to take it anymore' start saying exactly that, and finding others who agree.
But they do find common ground and there are issues that Occupy supporters are beginning to organize around including:
- Corporate 'personhood' - specifically in regards to access to government, manipulation of legislation, and subversion of the basic democratic process
- Corporate bailouts - specifically for the high-flying financial manipulators who got the bail outs, while being the exact cause of the problem in the first place
- A lack of justice - specifically regarding those financial manipulations. Sure everyone remembers 9-11, the one in 2001, but do you remember 9-11 in 2008? There was a run began on that day, one that lead to the current economic collapse, yet were are the investigations and hearings? Where are the indictments? Only large financial corporations could have done that, it's beyond the ability of any individuals to make a run on the Treasury of the United States, and even people as high up as Tim Geithner, the Secretary of the Treasury, say so.
Paul Krugman wrote in The New York Times article "The Panic of the Plutocrats."
What's going on here? The answer, surely, is that Wall Street's masters of the universe realize deep down how morally indefensible their position is. They're not John Galt. They're not even Steve Jobs. They're people who got rich peddling complex financial schemes, that far from delivering clear benefits to the American people, helped push us into a crisis whose aftereffects continue to blight the lives of tens of millions of their fellow citizens. Yet they paid no price.
Their institutions were bailed out by taxpayers with few strings attached. They continue to benefit from explicit and implicit federal guarantees. Basically, they're still in a game of heads they win; tails, taxpayers lose. And they benefit from tax loopholes that in many cases have put people with multimillion-dollar incomes paying lower tax rates than middle-class families. This special treatment can't bear close scrutiny, and therefore, as they see it, there must be no close scrutiny.
Or even a simpler form of justice, I mean if you want to do a urinalysis on all of the "occupiers" to see if they could pass a drug screen which most good jobs require, how about running the same tests on the brokers, financiers and racketeers who set all of that up? How about a making all the members of the boards of directors pee in a cup in order to get their bail-out? Think all of them would pass? Or were they just doing more expensive drugs?
There is a reason why they occupied Wall Street and not Lenox Ave and W. 125th Street.
- Below the surface much of this is also driven by something that has been going on since the 1980s, and that's a steady and growing inequality of wealth distribution. This lies at the heart of the problem and driving much of the dissatisfaction and as it continues to grow, so too will the number of people who feel like they've been cheated. We've gone from a largely middle-class nation to one where a constantly increasing underclass seems to be a permanent feature.
And the fact that it's not organized, that it happened organically all over the US and in many places throughout the world ought to be most concerning. What exactly happens if they do get organized?
There is so much HATE for large business' and corporations but (in my opinion) that hate is misplaced. The prime objective of any incorporated "for profit" business is to maximize the return on investment to it's investors.
If that is true (and I don't think it is, it's a narrow and short-sighted view of basic economics) then it's good to remember that maximizing the return on investment to it's investors is ONLY an extremely limited corporate objective. It is NOT the central objective of American society and culture and certainly NOT the goal of the government of the United States, nor has it ever been.
(Just to review, the actual goals of the government of the United States are: to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity - somehow our Founding Fathers missed the entire maximizing profits deal entirely.)
So a lot of the dissent comes exactly from the fact that the only thing that some people - many in government - seem to care about is profits first, people second, when we can and do have many other problems and goals to address. We need a lot more general welfare and a lot less corporate welfare - or at least some equalization between the two.
There are a lot of other misleading claims, so I'll just do one.
And for anyone who want's to blame lack of education on the funding of school (the districts with the highest $ spent per student do the very worst)
Well for sure this explains why Harvard, Yale and Princeton spend a whole lot less per student than the five or so glorified community colleges that Sara Palin went to and get world class scholars and scientists, top jurists, and captains of industry while those glorified community colleges get, well, Sara Palin. Except we both know that's not true, Harvard et.all. are spending a lot more per student than North Idaho College and Matanuska-Susitna College.
From someone who crunched the numbers a few years ago here is what the top US schools spend per student.
1 Yale $ 95,549
2 Caltech $ 87,892
3 Wake Forest $ 68,863
4 Wash U $ 59,634
5 MIT $ 59,061
6 Stanford $ 55,399
7 Johns Hopkins $ 54,346
8 Harvard $ 50,878
9 Vanderbilt $ 45,485
10 U Chicago $ 42,313
11 Princeton $ 38,327
12 Dartmouth $ 37,888
13 Columbia $ 34,549
Silly schools, don't they listen to you and know that they could spend a lot less and get the same high-quality results as North Idaho College ($4654 spent per student for students like Palin) and Matanuska-Susitna College ($3347 per student) get? I mean really is a degree from Yale really almost 30X better than Matanuska-Susitna College? Which school has more ex-Presidents, Federal Judges, corporate leaders, Pulitzer Prize and Noble Prize nominees? Is a top Yale graduate likely to earn 30X more money than a graduate of Matanuska-Susitna College? I'll bet that a student at Yale does 30X more quality work when at school.
And you would think rich people would at least know better? What with them wasting all that money to send their kids to private schools, like going to a school (like the one I went to and still serve on committees and boards so I can speak authoritatively about these numbers and costs) that currently costs $12,680 a year for a 4 year high school. (That's $50K+ for a high school diploma) Don't they realize that they could cut that money to the bone and their kids would then be able to compete with the public school kids? I'm sure that your metric the public HS in my town would have a lot more National Merit Scholars per capita then my silly - and very expensive - HS does. Oh wait, my high school has more National Merit Scholars with less than 1000 students then do the 3 public 3 year HS (total student population 10K+) COMBINED. Year in and year out. For the last 43 years. (Oddly enough the school is exactly 43 years old.)
Moreover, and as a business person I'm sure you know, that all expenditures are not equal. Many of those very expensive and poorly performing districts are forced to outlay much larger sums of money on things like security, transportation, mandatory lunch programs, special ed, and basic repairs to the physical plant then their counterparts who are in safer areas and whose schools have not suffered from years (if not decades) of 'deferred maintenance' and outright neglect.
For example, my HS - that of the $12K tuition - spends zero on daily transportation, though rather tragically there is (and always has been) a huge parking problem as most students have cars, some of whom are forced to park in a dirt (now gravel) lot and not a paved one. Nor does it have any costs in providing basic nutrition for it's students. Our school lunch program is/was pretty much handled by mom making you lunch and/or the local restaurants and fast food joints. And the only 'free school lunch' that ever went down there was getting one of your pals to put it on his mom's credit card and not your mom's credit card. The security costs are pretty low too when you can just get rid of trouble-makers and non-performers, a luxury public schools not only don't have, in fact they are mandated under law to do the exact opposite.
Care to know how much money my old HS spends on special ed/special needs students, on remedial programs, or how much they spend on students with behavior/conduct problems, or on kids who don't speak English? Hey that's easy. In 43 years they have not spend one single cent on all those things combined. There simply are no students there who are special ed, or who have behavior problems, or who need remedial work. If you can't do the work you don't get help, you get out. But the poorly performing public schools tend to have large programs in those areas, programs that are far more expensive than regular education, and yet have far lower test/SAT/ACT/college graduation rates. So that each and ever every special ed/needs student radically boosts the costs of per student spending while dragging down any and all performance metrics.
We also have none of the nuisance lawsuits that public school face on a constant basis either (nor the costs involved in dealing with them). If you don't like the rules and the way the school is run you don't sue, you don't let the door hit you in the ass on your way out.
Nor are all costs relative. Note that 2 of the largest spending schools are engineering/science schools. Is that some sort of fluke, or is it that in order to have a literature class all you need are some used books and motivated students who did the required reading, (and no amount of money can counter having unmotivated students who didn't do the work) but in order to train nuclear engineers you need nuclear reactors, or a cyclotrons, or liner particle accelerators.
But even that stuff can be relative too. Every student at my HS last year had a computer. Not 'access' to a computer, each and every student had their own personal computer, yet they spent less than $4K on computers last year. How the hell can a top school spend so little on what is for most schools a necessity? Easy. They require - REQUIRE - all students to have a laptop. The $4K was spent mostly on printers and high-speed wireless networks. Back in the Dark Ages when I was there we were all required to have our own 10x-15x microscopes. Because they did not have to provide 30 basic scopes for the science lab they were able to use that money to buy very, very expensive stereoscopic instrument capable of 100x magnification and other lab equipment. (cool toy that)
At any rate, any claim that the districts with the highest $ spent per student do the very worst) is either deliberately misleading, or intentionally simplistic and designed to persuade people who don't know better. Otherwise why would you spend $50K on a college degree from a good school when you could have gone to a community college and only been in debt for $5K all other things (as you imply) being equal.
Oh yeah...not looking for ways to get money out of the government (tax money earned by someone elses labor) is way wrong, only about 40% of federal revenue comes from individual taxes. So you need about 60% less butthurt about expenditures.
