I stand by my post. All I see from the OWS is jealousy, envy, (you 1% have more than we do!!) and a sense of entitlement (give us some of your money!!).
if jealousy and entitlement is all you wish to see in these people, if it makes dismissing their cries easier, then no truth will necessarily persuade your heart.
It’s not simplistically “give us your money, rich people”.
It’s “give us back our democracy, wall street”.
it’s “give us our productive resources, hoarders”
It’s “stop lying about job creation”
It’s also a lot of “we don’t know what the answer is, but something’s wrong and our plight is being ignored by the powerful, and we refuse to let them ignore us”
This is an honest swell of frustration from a people who have had the rug of opportunity and democracy yanked out from under them by a funneling elite who continue to take advantage of the system at everyone else’s expense.
I’m sure most of those people have no problem with the idea that other people are richer than them. It’s the extremes of disparity, the injustices related to it, and the lies involved.
And no, the question in parenthesis wasn’t either. Many corporate CEOs worked their way to the top, many rich people*** worked ***for what they have. Did you read my whole post?
nobody’s saying the rich didn’t work for it. i could care less whether they did. but you said to the people in pain, need and frustration who can’t find any living-wage jobs “why not work for money” as if a huge part of their frustration isn’t the fact that the opportunities to earn a living have disappeared.
Many corporations started out as small businesses and are the fulfillment of dreams of struggling entrepeneurs and do contribute to charitable groups and activities, even if only as good PR. Many CEOs and other Wall Street workers started out at the bottum and worked their way up and are good people.
Nobody’s debating that there are many very good people among the very wealthy. Nor is anyone debating that greed and selfish ambition often requires hard work. I guess so long as hard work is attached to something, it makes it good?
Jobs are few and far between, since I was recently unemployed for up to almost a year and until a year ago, I know that for a fact. But there are some out there. In Alabama, there was a story that many farmers can not find laborers because of the recent anti-illegal immigration laws there.
This anecdote doesn’t solve the problem for the vast majority of unemployed people who greatly outnumber the jobs available, even with these farmers’ story.
While being a farm laborer is not a dream job, one should accept any job in this economy, while hoping that that less desirable job is only temporary.
Absolutely not. If the job will not pay a living wage, if you cannot support yourself and your family on it, then no: the desperate laboring class should not line up to beg to be taken advantage of.
The more desperate the proletariat becomes, the easier it is to squeeze them for cheap labor.
The only thing the average working-class person has to bargain with is their labor. In an employer/employee dominated economy, the owning class offer money for work to the workers who offer work for money. The chips and needs of these 2 sides are innately mirror opposites. If the owning class refuses to offer reasonable wages, then the workers rightly should refuse to offer reasonable labor.
But even if all the working class were to play into this trap of desperation and line up at these farms, the ratio of available jobs to jobless people would barely budge if at all.
There have been strories, backed up with evidence, of minimum-wage jobs being turned down by job seekers, even those on unemployment, because either unemployment paid more than that job would have, or they just don’t want to take a pay that was considerably less than what they were used to (even if only temporary), or both.
Those stories are anecdotal at best and do not represent the large scale situation, but I guess you’re right. Shame on the peasants for wanting a roof over their head, 3 square meals, and a means of transportation in this intentionally car-scaled environment that the corporate elite of the last century forced the populace into (a whole extra conversation in it’s own right).
What’s the solution to desperate people losing control of their government, civilization, economy and unable to find access to a decent living? Obviously threaten to take even more from them until they’re willing to do whatever you ask of them.
Until they fall in line: just keep blaming poverty on the poor.
Instead of camping out at a park for months and months (if not in perpetuity) (which is illegal, by the way), these “Occupiers” would be better off looking for work or continuing to look for work.
No they wouldn’t. Or at least the millions of people that they’re representing wouldn’t be better off. When the jobs-to-people-looking-for-jobs ratio is about 5:1, not counting those discouraged people who have given up searching, doing the phantom job-hunt dance and shutting up is to simply play along with a charade.
They brought attention to the plight of the economy (not that there wasn’t already attention to and frustration of it), now it is time to go home.
The cries of the poor is all they have. Telling them to go home now, shut up, and play along will not do them any good.
