COMMENTARY

Peter Burgess

Elisa Tammela - Oct 14, 2011 (edited) - Public The worst thing about the 99% movement is that it has collectively mobilised people into focussing on all the things they haven't got. I hear very, very little of people brainstorming or making moves to change things. I hear so much of whine, waaah, poor me, LOOK-AT-ME-LOOK-AT-ME, I am broke, banks take my money, waaah, poor me, I haven't got X, we can't afford Y, I've got a sign, I'm marching, I'm annoyed, I blame you, I blame him, I blame the world, I blame.

• Banks didn't prosper and take over the world by complaining.
• Walmart didn't send all the competition broke by waving a sign.
• Gas prices aren't going through the roof by reposting 37 news articles on Facebook.

Stop pissing into the wind and do something more effective. Vote with your wallet, vote with your ballot, vote by shopping elsewhere, vote by going solar, vote by using a credit union, vote by saving instead of borrowing, vote by carpooling, VOTE BY DOING SOMETHING. Do or do not, there is no whine.

+Elisa Tammela #OWS has people that merely complain, but the core, in my view, are pretty serious young people who understand that the modern US economy is rotten to the core. They also know that the idea that powerful leaders are going to fix the problem is a non-starter. Many people and small groups have their own modest agendas for change ... few, maybe none have a grand master plan for the change that is needed. This is not surprising, and also not particularly desirable. A starting point is to have some of the rot sorted out ... this ought to be possible using the justice system, but as a practical matter this is not easy because major white collar crime is not easy to prosecute simply because the rules make it so. Who makes the rules? What industry has one of the biggest lobbying effort in Washington and all the State Capitals?

Listening to much of the mainstream news and talk radio you hear reporting about the whining at OWS in Zuccotti Park and other Occupy's ... but this was not what I experienced in person when I spent the best part of three days at various Occupy events in New York. There were some people who the police described to me as professional protesters who turn up around the country with their signs to make a point, but these are not the core of the OWS community. The core of the protest is very serious, well educated and very determined. A few people have joined in who want to create mayhem. These are not part of the Occupy movement, let alone its core group. It is alleged that some people have been 'sent' to the Occupy camps to discredit them, but I have not been able to confirm this. In some cities, police have pretended to be OWS protesters, only to reappear later in police riot gear.

I am appalled at how the US economy has been gutted ... looted ... over the post 40 odd years. Career opportunities in the productive sector of the economy are minuscule now not compared to then. Now there are many jobs at very low pay and few jobs at insanely high pay ... but not too much any more in the middle. The valueadd from all the jobs in the US is small ... that part of the job is now outsourced to places where wages are low and working conditions awful, but profits are high. The capitalist market economy does not get resources allocated to things that are important for the productivity of the economy ,,, health, education, infrastructure, research and so on, but instead goes into doing things that make lots of profit whether or not it is good for the USA or whether or not is is good for the planet.

Nobody ... not even the bankers themselves ... have any idea how heavily invested the banks have become on assets that no longer have any intrinsic value. Some estimates are that this is perhaps more than $10 trillion ... which translates into the global banking system being bankrupt ... for the second time in the past few years. This is insane.

I am committed to supporting #OWS as much as I can until there is my version of transparency in the media, money, banking and financial services sectors because without transparency we are going to have a very serious crisis. Many in Occupy Movement know that something is terribly wrong ... they are not so sure what it is. Nobody does. I want to see major structural changes in the money, banking and financial services sector and I want to see accounting and financial reporting that people can understand. Banks were cutting corners and breaking the rules back in the 1970s ... now it is thousands of times bigger and millions of times faster.

Sorry this has been long ... but the subject is big!