When the #Occupy Wall Street movement rages against the so-called “one percent” this is, in reality, the middle class cannibalizing itself.
by John Young, European Americans United
I don’t know about you, but I get suspicious when a billionaire like Warren Buffet advocates higher income taxes. After all, on the surface anyway, he is saying that government should take his money from him by force. But, if he is truly so charitably minded and so supportive of what our government does with tax dollars, there is already nothing preventing him from writing out a large check to the government. In fact, there is a section right on the tax form that allows people to give extra if they so desire.
A lot of States allow this too. Massachusetts, for example, allows people to voluntarily elect to pay a higher tax rate if they feel such a thing to be just. So if billionaires like Warren Buffet feel they are insufficiently taxed, there are already mechanisms in place allowing them to pay more. They can literally put their money where their mouth is, and there is absolutely no need for any laws, government goon squads or anything of the sort to make him pay more money.
So why on earth would he, at least on the surface, seem to be advocating that the government should take his money from him at gunpoint? That’s a very interesting question, and we’ll come back to it in a minute.
Meanwhile, over on Wall Street, a bunch of protestors have set up camp. Similar groups have set up camp in Boston, Philadelphia and other major cities. Most of them sound like the standard Marxist zombies –awash in wealth-envy, they are carrying signs that seem to be wanting other people to just hand them jobs, give them food or even pay their college debts.
Interestingly, the funding of these protests comes primarily from billionaire financier George Soros.(1) One of George Soros’ favorite techniques is to bankroll movements in such a way as though they appear to be spontaneous uprisings from the grass roots of America. For example, he bankrolled the so-called Million Mom March to advocate against the right of self-defense, and also John McCain’s advocacy for so-called “campaign Finance Reform” among other causes.
One might wonder what interest a billionaire who strongly advocated handouts to bankers in 2009 would have in bankrolling a movement that ostensibly hates banks. It can hardly be argued that he has had a change of heart, as the Occupy Wall Street movement is far from spontaneous because Mr. Soros had the ball rolling well back in 2009. So what is going on? That is also an interesting question.
Let me tell you what is going on. The economy in this country is a disaster. The educational system in this country is a disaster. Wages in practically all fields have remained stagnant for a decade while inflation has outstripped buying power. We are now witnessing the first generation that has no reasonable prospect of bettering its economic situation compared to its parents, and when economic expectations of decent-paying jobs meet the reality of an economy dedicated to shuffling paperwork while all the wealth is created oversees and concentrated in a relative handful of people, the natives are bound to get restless.
When the natives get restless, its important to keep them diverted from the real issues so that their energy is expended at least on things that are of no risk to our true rulers, and preferably on things that will actually hurt the enemies of the rulers.
Let’s look at these movements for a moment.
The so-called “Million Mom March” advocated for the sorts of gun controls that would prevent citizens from having semi-automatic rifles and handguns for self-defense. Obviously, under duress, such weaponry would be far more effective than muskets or single-shot rifles if used to shake off the hand of tyranny. But, again, this would only be under extreme duress because even the most advanced of small arms, including machine guns, would be useless against an entity such as a government equipped with smart bombs that know your address.
The policies advocated by the Million Mom March would have done nothing to disarm the paramilitary raiders and drug syndicates that waltz across our Southern border as though it didn’t even exist. Most certainly they would not disarm the numerous private military contractors employed by this country and that are also employed by the likes of George Soros to protect themselves. But they would most assuredly have disarmed you and me; leaving us vulnerable to criminals and tyrants while people such as Soros and Kennedy who advocated the policies remained safe and secure in compounds patrolled by armed guards.
So-called “campaign Finance Reform”was a similar farce. Ostensibly, its purpose was to take the money out of politics so that our politicians would not be beholden to special interests. However, it did nothing about the politicians taking no-show jobs for millions of dollars with companies they were regulating once they left Congress, and most importantly it did nothing about so-called “27” organizations that –not coincidentally –were exempted from the legislation. George Soros and his ilk had, again not coincidentally, already setup 527 groups that were exempted from the legislation.
So in reality, all the same industries that wielded influence with Congress continued to do so, and people like George Soros continued their influence unimpeded. But groups representing citizens such as the NRA were seriously affected.
So just as with the Million Mom March, Soros and company funded what appeared to be a grass-roots movement that masqueraded to hold such people as Soros accountable while what it really did is muzzle citizens.
Taken in light of the foregoing, Occupy Wall Street and its various branches throughout the country has a similar purpose. It masquerades as an attempt to go after the super-wealthy when in reality it is nothing more than self-cannibalism. Furthermore, the core ideas tend to be band-aids based upon socialist premises of wealth-redistribution rather than looking at the core problems.
Let’s cut to the chase. Nobody owes anyone else a job. I am reminded of the famous quote by Stephen Crane: “A man said to the universe: “Sir, I exist!” “However,” replied the universe, “The fact has not created in me a sense of obligation.”
But even though nobody owes anyone else a job, there are some core reasons why people graduating from college have difficulty finding employment. Chief among these is the fact our Congress has preferentially adopted legislation allowing for massive off-shoring. This benefits a handful of already wealthy people and their minions while impoverishing not just Americans as a whole, but even our national government. Just witness the fact that it is foreign countries that hold our national debt. At the behest of a handful of globalist billionaires who have a vision of essentially ruling the world, our Congress has acted on behalf of capital rather than safeguarding the well being of the American people as a whole.
The problem of a lack of jobs cannot be fixed so long as we continue to import H1-B workers even with real unemployment topping 16%. It cannot be fixed so long as we leave our borders with the Third World wide open and give people checks if they happen to have an anchor baby. It cannot be fixed so long as we participate in NAFTA, GATT and the World Trade Organization. It cannot be fixed so long as we allow a handful of people to benefit from America while avoiding corresponding obligations by off-shoring jobs to child slave labor in Indonesia.
These are core issues, and they are practically unaddressed by an Occupy Wall Street crowd that seems to think the problem can be solved by taking away someone else’s money and distributing it among themselves.
The same applies to their desire for forgiveness of college loan debt. Instead of looking to be bailed out by taxpayers who are already overtaxed, they should instead be questioning why a college education is so expensive to start with, and they should further examine very carefully whether college in the modern era provides value that corresponds to what is being charged.
Post-secondary education costs have consistently risen at multiples of the reported rate of inflation. One reason for this is because the reported rate of inflation is artificially low. The reported rate of inflation is also kept down as work is increasingly outsourced to low or no-wage areas so that the price of goods does not reflect true costs. Because we have not yet figured out how to outsource the jobs of the tenured Marxists who inhabit our universities to child slave labor (though, given how poorly these professors perform perhaps a non-English-speaking child held in bondage would do a better job) … but because we have not outsourced them, the wages and costs in academia actually reflect TRUE inflation, while wages increase at the rate of REPORTED inflation. Because the gap between TRUE inflation and REPORTED inflation is often more than double, over time the ability to afford an education becomes diminished.
Another reason is because the culture of academia has largely had it made in the shade because the existence of student loans has done for them what the existence of zero-money-down mortgages did for the housing market: it has allowed them to stash away hordes of hacks, relatives, do-nothings and connected individuals on the payroll. Look at a college payroll in 1970 and you will find there was about one non-teaching position for every ten teaching positions. Look at the same payroll today for the same college, and you’ll find that ratio has reversed with nine out of ten people on the payroll not being involved in actually teaching students.
The existence of federally guaranteed student loans allowed them to increase their fees dramatically without decreasing the number of people who would attend. Likewise, a variety of other sources of subsidy allowed this too. So now you have offices of “campus diversity”that are extremely well-staffed and active, but contribute nothing of value to the academic experience that will help someone get a job.
And along with this, they have also padded their courses with entire departments of Marxist-inspired garbage. Whether it be the anthropology departments that have become little more than pseudo-science in the wake of the take-over by the Boasian school of cultural anthropology or the Women’s Studies departments whose sole purpose seems to be to teach students to abdicate personal responsibility and blame men for every failure in their lives. The list of garbage in colleges is nearly endless. And as long as the bill for it can be deferred, students sign up for it … further supporting a bloated and useless academic system.
Another reason is that demand for college is very high compared to supply. Employers increasingly demand college degrees, so people seek those degrees.
But has anyone ever stopped to ask why employers are looking for college degrees for data entry clerks and paper-shufflers? The reason is because in the wake of Brown v Board of Education that integrated our schools, there has been a constant lowering of standards in order to propagate the myth of “equality”by artificially creating equal outcomes. Unfortunately, all this means is that increasing numbers of people of all races are graduating high school as functional illiterates. So, in order for employers to actually have literate employees who can read the papers they shuffle, whereas at one time only a sixth grade education was needed to meet that standard, now college is required. So the failure of our public schools in general has artificially increased demand for college.
Of course, colleges are going down the same path. Along with larding the curriculum with useless classes intended to do little more than foster undeserved guilt among white students or propagate Marxist ideas such as Women’s Studies, they have also constantly lowered their standards in order to avoid disproportionately flunking students of certain ethnic backgrounds. These standards are lowered for everyone. At this point, and I am not kidding, the standards are so low that the competency test for becoming a teacher in Massachusetts only requires demonstrable English skills at a tenth grade level. Yes, you heard me correctly. Graduates from teaching school with Bachelor’s degrees are only required to demonstrate competency in English up to a tenth grade level in order to qualify as teachers. And even with standards so low, a third of graduates from teaching school fail.
So soon a Master’s degree will be required to be a data entry clerk. If this keeps up, a PhD will soon be needed to qualify as dog catcher because anyone with less education than that won’t be literate enough to file the requisite forms.
And these are the reasons why the protestors have such high student loan burdens. Of course, the Occupy Wall Street protestors are not advocating a return to high standards in our public schools, that colleges tighten their belts and dispense with the fluff or that public colleges consider laying off the Senior Assistant Deputy Director of Public Relations in order to bring tuition costs into line. Nor are they advocating that the monetary system run by a private Federal Reserve that caused these escalating costs in the first place be overhauled.
Instead, they are advocating that their college loan debts be forgiven or subsidized. In practice, this means advocating that those of us who are already over-taxed and under-payed shoulder an even higher burden of taxes. They are essentially advocating socialism as a cure for problems caused by socialism. It won’t and can’t work.
But what it DOES do is, just like the advocacy of the Million Mom March and Campaign Finance Reform, is cannibalize the middle.
I want to expand a bit on this concept of the middle. Occupy Wall Street makes a big deal about the so-called “one percent.”This is a serious serious logical error. This mindset is such that someone who is earning 25 thousand a year thinks someone who earns 50 thousand a year must be rich, or is at least twice as well off as they are. It is a mindset that would have us believe that someone earning 100 thousand a year is necessarily four times as well off as someone earning 25 thousand a year. Nothing could be further from the truth.
There are vast differences in the cost of living in different areas in this country. For example, you can rent a three bedroom single family house in Pelham, Alabama for $830/month. In Brooklyn, NY, a three bedroom apartment would cost $3,300/month. In Asheboro, North Carolina, three bedrooms will cost $630/month; but in Newton, Massachusetts three bedrooms will cost nearly $3,400.
Obviously, these differences in cost for a place to live are also reflected in differences in the cost of eating out for lunch, buying insurance for your car and more. In essence, for someone to live as well in Newton, MA as they could on $40,000 a year in Asheboro, North Carolina; he would have to be earning almost $216,000 annually.
I want to stress this point because it is important. Someone earning $216,000 a year and living in Newton, Massachusetts, because of the increased costs of living, is no better off in terms of his quality of life than someone earning $40,000 in Asheboro, North Carolina. He still has to show up to work everyday, live in fear of losing his job, and worry where he is going to get the money to fix the water damage from a leaking toilet. Plumbers charge a lot more in Massachusetts than they do in North Carolina.
A person earning $216,000 annually is not quite in the top 1%. According to the Congressional Budget Office, an income of $252,000 will put you in that top 1%. But as we just discussed, depending upon the cost of living where someone lives, in all likelihood, in terms of actual disposable income after paying taxes, rent, car payments and other bills, someone making that much money isn’t really any better off than someone making a fraction of that income in a less inflated market area such as North Carolina or Alabama.
So when the Occupy Wall Street movement rages against the so-called “one percent” this is, in reality, the middle class cannibalizing itself. It is a mechanic from Asheboro raging against a mechanic from Charlotte. It is an engineer from Roanoke raging against an engineer in Brooklyn. It is a teacher in Jacksonville raging against a teacher in Boston.
So again, the bad guys accomplish their objective. Those following his lead believe they are advocating against people like George Soros, when really they are advocating more government-backed violence against themselves. It is an absolutely classic strategy, and it works every time because people are not expecting a deception that is so insidious, and let’s face it, it’s really easy to appeal to people on the basis of envy and insecurities.
Meanwhile, politicians in Washington –who already knew this was coming –nod their heads sagely and act as though their next piece of legislation that will screw us yet again is a response to popular sentiment and the “will of the people”when it was really just an orchestrated game all along.
These movements, appearing to be spontaneous and well-organized, attract others who feel they need a voice or, sometimes, just merely want to join something so that they can feel useful through mere association. So they attract quite a mix. Sometimes, quite by accident, they will attract someone whose advocacy runs quite contrary to the end game, but the rank and file people who are attracted tend to be less than inspiring, not very articulate, and not even conscious of how ridiculous they sound.
George Soros is quite wealthy– so wealthy that if he truly wished, he could pay off the student loans of all the protestors and barely notice a blip in his budget. Yet, instead of putting his money where his mouth is, he continues to directly and indirectly push for policies that will reallocate resources from people who are just barely getting by to those who are destitute.
But whether you are just an observer or someone who has been duped into participating in Occupy Wall Street, now that you know and understand what is really going on, it is time for you to start paying attention to REAL issues and REAL advocacies that would REALLY make a difference.
(1) http://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/politics/9269-big-soros-money-linked-to-occupy-wall-street