The One Thing OWS Almost Gets Right

Thanksgiving finds us supremely grateful for having lived in the time and place that we have, and despite how exasperating the Market has been of late, feeling blessed to have spent a working life in the Great Game of Buy Low and Sell High. (I am quite certain that habitual gratitude all but surely enhances one’s mental and physical health.) We can and should count our blessings every day, especially if our gratitude has an Object (can one really be grateful toward no one in particular?), but designating a day to do so publicly and communally is a not bad idea.

Public and communal expression has taken an unexpected turn of late with the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement. It iss tempting to dismiss what is probably best understood as its participants’ infantile reaction to that reality of life that their cosseted upbringings apparently shielded them from, that life is not fair. However, there is a sense in which they do have a point, and it is a point worth exploring. I had initially expected OWS to last until about the time when wintry weather puts an end to that season when NYC is a glorious place to visit, but something is sustaining it as more than a collective tantrum of variously clueless and hapless crybabies. Part of it is money, funding that has been funneled in to keep the narrative alive and growing (where is the outcry about “Astroturf” grassroots that greeted the TEA Party, is if some Doctor Evil in Denver or Pittsburgh or Wichita was fronting thousands of people the expense of showing up at a protest?) That narrative is the sense of class divide that is about the only identifiable theme that can be divined from the whole OWS exercise, that there is this evil 1% and then there are the rest of us. Trace back the money flows that have kept it going and I am sure that much of it comes from sources that could fairly be classed under the 1%.

As if there really was a 1%! Whoever wants to foster this notion that 99% of us have common cause against the kulaks, I mean, fat cats, going probably stands to benefit from this artificial construct and the divisiveness it entails. There is no 1%. Just as has been well documented with respect to both top and bottom income deciles, many who are in the top 1% of earners this year were not there a few years ago and will not be there indefinitely. I know this because I have lived it, having been at or very near the top 1% in years like 1988, 1999 or 2006 and not far from the poverty line in some years since (and probably below the median based on earned income of late, net worth being a totally different measure). This 1% that is the object of OWS’s umbrage does not exist as such.

Where I think the outrage of OWS might be on to something is that life’s inherent unfairness has gotten at least a bit out of hand, and there is indeed a culprit. It’s just that identifying the culprit by either a being a top earner or a part of a particular industry is way off the mark. The OWS crowd is not the first crop of young people to find that life in the world can be understood as a bunch of games, that those games tend to be rigged in someone’s favor, and that someone is not them. There is nothing new about those who have political power trying to stack the odds of enterprise in their favor. Advantage tends to accumulate in ways that harden the lines we call Class, unless or until the discontinuities of history disrupt them. There hasn’t been much truly disruptive history in the US in the past sixty five years (as most people who have ever lived would reckon disruption), so the power to distort probable outcomes to benefit of a favored few has accumulated way beyond what most of us reckon as fair. It is quite likely that the rising tide of debt fueled prosperity that marked the late decades of the 20th Century substantially mitigated this, but all that ended when the music stopped in mid 2007, and now we get to live through a protracted and and bitterly disputed adjustment period.

Wall Street is a convenient target because the banks got bailed out whether they asked for it or not (as if we had a choice but to throw money at the problem and hope the panic subsided) and their compensation is so public and “winner take most”. Left unsaid is that most people who work “on Wall Street”, which is to say in banking or investing, are not earning anything like in that 1%, and many of the beneficiaries of a system that has become too politically rigged for its own good have nothing to do with Wall Street or even commercial enterprise. It is a problem not of unbridled, free market capitalism, as if such a thing ever existed for more than a fleeting moment, but of political machinations that produce crony capitalism and similar corruptions that favor the well-connected. “Capitalism” as practiced of late, where lobbying, campaign contributions, revolving doors between government and industry jobs and who you knew in school, has produced outcomes (i.e., paydays) that are increasingly difficult to defend. OWS has staying power because while in most respects they couldn’t have their collective head any further up their collective arse, they have given voice to what millions of others have sensed about how the Game of Life seems to have gotten too rigged for its own good. It’s just that owing to the misinformation that was included in what they were scandalously duped into thinking was an education (and even more scandalously duped into borrowing money to pay for), they are unable to accurately identify the perpetrators. The message resonates anyway because it is intuitively obviously that if the corruption in the system isn’t rooted out or at least dialed down, the whole thing will eventually break down and hurt us all. (The fable about goose that laid the golden eggs comes to mind here.)

Indeed, it is no small irony that said perpetrators are no doubt the source of that funds that allowed the days of rage to linger into months of incoherence. A narrative which fosters class division is useful to those who own or influence the seats of power as long as it misdirects anger and weakens potential rivals. To the degree they are successful in the year ahead, the political change necessary for genuine economic recovery will be at risk. I don’t believe that a preponderance of voters will fall for the lie that one party is “for the 1%” and the other looks out for the rest of us, but the introduction of this phony narrative can’t help but add to political uncertainty in the months ahead.

About fifteen years ago, a thought came to me that had a certain prophetic feel. At that time I was working with a lot of other men who all had sons the same age as mine or a little younger. They were not quite teenagers. It occurred to me that in their time, when they reached manhood, that our society would no longer be riven by race the way it was a generation ago, so much as that Class would emerge as a great divider. That has not come to pass in the stark sense recognizable in, say, Edwardian England, but absent some change from recent trends, we seem to heading in that direction. We should not be so foolish as to imagine that we can create truly “level playing fields”, let alone equality of outcome, but there are risks attendant with a failure to check the power of the politically well connection to stack odds in their favor to the perceived detriment of practically everyone else. The corruptions that have accrued in recent years will have to be addressed by political change. OWS is kinda, sorta onto something, they just don’t have a clue that the real perpetrators are the ones who have been picking up the tab for all their months long party.