Eliminating the ‘99%’ Can Lead to a Better Message for Social Justice
It’s time to retire the 99 percent.
Not the people, but the slogan that identifies the Occupy Movement.
“We’re the 99 percent” slogan focused upon two completely different groups of people.
The 99 percent are the masses, the impoverished, the disenfranchised, the middle class; the 1 percent refers to the concentration of wealth in the top one percent of the population and in the dominance of large corporate and global financial systems.
The Movement, following the Arab Spring, began in the late summer of 2011 with the Occupy Wall Street protest. Central to the Movement, which quickly expanded into more than 500 American cities and 82 countries, was a call for social and economic justice.
During the 2007 Great Recession, the accumulated wealth of the 1 percent decreased significantly less than the wealth of the 99 percent, large numbers of whom first became unemployed and then homeless because of the tactics of greed led by the financial empires.
Within the 1 percent are CEOs and executives of the banking industry that willingly took government bailout funds, and then used some of that money to give six and seven figure bonuses.
The 1 percent includes Ina R. Drew, chief investment officer for JPMorgan Chase, which lost $2 billion in funds through misguided investment policies. Drew, one of Wall Street’s power players—and widely recognized as one of the more brilliant financial managers—earned about $14 million in salary. Jamie Dimon, in a stockholder meeting this past week, humbled by the huge loss, told stockholders, “This should never have happened. I can’t justify it. Unfortunately, these mistakes were self-inflicted.” But, Dimon, both the chief executive officer and the chairman of the board, kept his job and its $23 million salary.
The 1 percent also includes Mitt Romney, who earned about $21 million in 2010, and has a net worth of about $230 million, according to Forbes, but hasn’t filed his 2011 taxes. Somehow, he wants the people to believe he will bring the nation out of the depths of the Great Recession, but needs an extension to file his own taxes.
The 1 percent also includes right-wing celebrity mouth Rush Limbaugh, who is in the middle of an eight year $400 million contract that allows him to spew lies, hate, and venom at anyone who doesn’t agree with his ultra-conservative philosophy, which includes Occupiers and just about anyone with a social, environmental, and economic conscience.
The 1 percent includes Sarah Palin, once an obscure politician who now has a net worth of about $14 million, most of it the result of her participation in the mainstream media, which she claims she despises.
The 1 percent includes the Kardashian Sisters whose souls are wrapped in self-adulation, and who are worshipped by millions who have enhanced their importance by watching reality shows and reading vapid celebrity “tell-all” newspapers and magazines.
But the 1 percent also includes billionaire Warren Buffet, who is leading a movement to reduce tax loopholes and increase taxes on the rich, while improving the tax structure for the 99 percent.
The 1 percent includes Bill and Melissa Gates who are spending most of their fortune to improve the education and health of people throughout the world.
The 1 percent includes George Clooney, who has been at the forefront of the fight for justice in Darfur, whose citizens have been the victims of genocide by the Sudanese government.
The 1 percent includes Angelina Jolie who is Special Envoy for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, and who has put her money and time into helping the world’s children.
The 1 percent includes Ed Asner, Bono, Mike Farrell, Bette Midler, Sean Penn, Rob Reiner, Tim Robbins, Susan Sarandon, Barbra Streisand, and thousands of other millionaire celebrities who have willingly put their reputations and money on the line to fight for the important social, economic, and political causes that should be the ones that define America as a land of freedom and opportunity, and which would be supported by most of the nation’s Founding Fathers.
In contrast, the 99 percent isn’t composed solely of the victims of the 1 percent. Millions are as uncaring, as greedy, as self-centered as some of those in the 1 percent. Millions are racist, sexist, homophobic, and anti-Semitic. Millions follow Tea Party philosophies that selfishly place the health and welfare of the people secondary to a belief that cutting spending, except for the military, will solve all problems. It is a philosophy that, if left unchallenged, would force even greater misery to the American Middle Class and underclass, and lead to destroying the balance of nature and the environment.
“We are the 99 percent” slogan, coupled with non-violent protest in the face of several violent police incidents, had served the Movement well, but its time is over. The Movement can no longer be an “us versus them” philosophy that has become divisive. It must now migrate to one that includes all people who are willing to fight for social, political, and economic justice in the Army of Conscience.
[Walter Brasch—as writer and activist—has been a part of the movement for social, political, and economic justice for more than four decades. His current book is the critically-acclaimed novel, Before the First Snow, the story of an activist and her relationship with a journalist from 1964 to 1991, the eve of the Persian Gulf War.]
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Idealism much Walter?
I don’t know. OWS is that burr under the saddle that turns a complacent ride into an uncomfortable one. If the 1% has changed in any way at all, it is almost undetectable.
You can usually judge the effectiveness of a social justice movement by the vitriol unleashed against it. By that measure, OWS is still doing the job they set out to do and good on them, I say. They can drop the 99% slogan if you want, but they are the same people (sometimes literally) that stopped a 11 year war in Vietnam. As long as they stick to non-violent protest they will have the moral high ground and will garner more support.
It would be nice if the celebrity 1% would openly join them, and though that would probably be labeled hypocritical by some, if they handle it properly (use the publicity machines they control) they could make a big difference.
The young always seem to come through no matter how many times we despair of them. And that’s a very good thing.
OWS is a good movement, but frankly they aren’t going to ever effect any real changes. From what I can tell, they are happy to sit in and cause a ruckus, but they don’t actually have any demands and are very disorganized. They succeeded in getting national attn, but since they were just a collection of individuals without any leadership, that was as far as it went, and as far as it will go unless they can change up their game.
What they need is some agreement on WHAT changes they’d like to see happen in order to change specific grievances. Namely, lets call out the deregulations that allowed this fiasco to happen, and the politicians that sponsored and backed it. This might be tough for many of the more partisan protesters as much of the deregulation while sponsored by Republicans, got bi-partisan support. Nevertheless, the elected officials need to see that they have national attention, and that they are pointing a finger at them specifically. Otherwise you can look forward to more pictures of executives popping champagne on the 21st floor of their glass towers and laughing at OWS as they beat out a song in their drum circles.
slam
OWS seems to find a “leader” anathema; not sure why except maybe they don’t want to be saddled with the flaws of any particular leader or don’t want to be confined by any set of demands. They seem to want to be an organic movement which can change rapidly and most of all wants to derive their goals as a consensus of all members.
They might look at the Polish parliment which required unanimous consent to pass any law – that was an atrocious idea – but they aren’t trying to pass laws. They’re trying to inform the public of what needs to be changed – not doing the changing.
It may be that any movement without a leader is doomed to failure. It’s never been tried before, as far as I know, so we don’t know yet.
Here is an essay by Melissa Harris-Perry.
http://www.thenation.com/article/164074/can-occupy-wall-street-succeed-leaderless-movement
Actually its been tried lots of times before. They just all failed. At some point getting people together is pointless if you are just going to have a few thousand individuals. They don’t need to elect “leaders” per se, but they do need to have some set of goals they can at least agree upon and someone to put those goals before our leaders and the nation. Just sitting around hoping Wall St. decides on its own to do something in the public interest is not going to get anything done.