Today I received three heartfelt polemics from Occupy Movement supporters. They were filled with fear, anguish, desperation and obvious lack of an attainable goal. The opening piece was entitled Where Were You When They Crucified My Movement? by Chris Hedges. It could have been written back in the May Day celebrations of 1886 when the Haymarket Bombing in Chicago killed seven policemen and several civilians, which resulted in the legal hanging of several obviously innocent people like Albert Parsons. Way back then the plea was the same, that the rich people ought to share the wealth created by the workers with the workers. In October 2010, I attended a lecture The Collapse of the American Empire by Paul Atwood which was a precursor to the Occupy Movement.
I am for that sharing of wealth and it appears that our country is already doing quite a lot of that, but it goes unrecognized as sharing of the means of production. Most American workers these days have various retirement investment requirements as part of their employment pay. Many people consider this a theft of part of their rightful pay, but those investments are on average returned to the workers or their spouses later in life. These workers may not consider themselves as part of the Wall Street investment community, but that’s where much of their money gets funneled.
The impending tragedy is for those people who never find work where they can develop an investment portfolio, even by the time they retired. Especially disturbing are young people who can’t find employment even though they have educated themselves and are seemingly well qualified and are willing to work. These people will grow increasingly poor as the years roll by because they will be eating into whatever stored capital they inherited from their parents or from our government, and when that is gone they will be destitute.
The Occupy Movement, with a new name, will eventually devolve into a violent response to the perceived theft by the 1% from the 99%. The real problem came about because those investment bankers could make more money for their investors by investing abroad. But in part that money is workers’ retirement funds. That investment strategy takes jobs away from American workers and puts them abroad where products can be manufactured cheaper and sold everywhere in the world. This makes money for the wealthy, who have money to invest, but it also makes money for those workers who have had retirement plans.
The bottom employment level of Americans won’t have any of these benefits, except access to the cheap products coming from abroad, but they won’t have any money to purchase these products. Things will get much worse for these people as the population of the world goes continues to expand and with that increased population the price of food goes up too. That will really start biting into the bellies of Americans who don’t have access to their own money.
Welfare will keep coming but it will become an shrinking portion of what is needed to eat. In a decade or two or perhaps less, people without money will be desperate for food. The very poor might have access to wonderful technology, far surpassing our present iPhone and 3D HDTV, but they won’t have food. They may literally starve to death while watching a Super Bowl on a fabulous TV.
The Occupy Movement shouldn’t be asking for the rich to share their wealth as their goal — it won’t happen; they should be demanding the creation of jobs for every single American – every single American because that might be possible to implement, at least as an acceptable strategy. Everyone should have a job and even adult students should be considered as employed and earn a stipend. Even invalids should have socially productive jobs. Even fabulously rich people living primarily on inherited wealth should be required to have productive jobs. The government now talks about job creation but doesn’t deliver. The unemployed and presently unemployable can and must demand employment. That would force those who are responsible for creating jobs to deliver them. What the Occupy Movement can demand and get is to:
Create productive and paid jobs for every American.
