The Fortnightly Rant for September 23, 2011, from The New Hampshire Gazette, Volume 256, No. 1, posted on Saturday, October 15, 2011. [Note: When we originally posted this Rant we gave the wrong Volume, Number, and date. It is now correct. — The Ed., 10/17/11]
More than a thousand protestors assembled at Liberty Plaza in New York City on Saturday, September 17th, vowing to Occupy Wall Street indefinitely. To the extent that the nation’s corporate news media covered the event at all, typically they noted the Occupation’s alleged lack of focus. The news directors, for all they ended up seeing, might as well have sent their cameras out with opaque caps covering the lenses.
To paraphrase Marshall McLuhan, the location was the message. The Occupiers could have assembled, as others have before them, in Washington, D.C., the nominal heart of our democracy. But instead they did something brilliant. They cut out the middle man and went directly to the nation’s seat of power.
That afternoon several hundred Occupiers marched from Liberty Plaza towards their ultimate objective, the New York Stock Exchange. Police prevented them from reaching that location. Their march was halted at 55 Wall Street, an equally appropriate destination.
About a century ago the prestigious architectural firm of McKim, Mead & White renovated 55 Wall Street to serve as headquarters for the National City Bank. Already the biggest bank in the nation, National City continued growing rapidly throughout the 1920s under the freewheeling policies of its President and later Chairman, “Sunshine Charley” Mitchell. Then, in 1929, things went a little sour. Following the U.S. Senate’s Pecora Investigation in 1932-34, Senator Carter Glass [D-VA] said Sunshine Charley was “more than any 50 men” responsible for the Crash of 1929.*
The building has since been converted to luxury apartments; studios start at $5,000 a month. A video clip taken that day shows the lofty, leafy balcony of the grandly colonnaded building, its bemused residents smiling condescendingly on the marchers below. Some of the well-dressed observers held champagne flutes while others used their cell phones to photograph the intruders. Their photos might have captured signs saying “Commodity Inflation Causes Starvation,” and “Corporations Are Psychopaths, My Friend,” and “We Represent the 99 Percent.”
Organic Chemistry
So here we are: the same building, housing what could well be the same smug, smiling faces, and we’re in the same damned situation about eighty years after the ’29 Crash. No wonder people are aggravated.
Dissolve enough of anything in a quantity of liquid, and eventually something will precipitate out. The unbridled greed of the haves and the increasing efficiency of their various nefarious organizations, gradually altered the chemistry of the country until the have-nots have — finally — formed a precipitate: it is called Occupy Wall Street.
There is only one way to neutralize it, and that is to change the conditions that brought it about.
Can’t See If You Don’t Look
The corporate news media, which have hitherto shown a remarkable capability to perceive deep meaning in the unending stream of unsubstantiated babble from the followers of Milton Friedman, now profess that they cannot fathom what these protestors could possibly be after.
This strikes us as odd, because it’s really pretty simple. What the protestors are saying is that the system is not working for 99 percent of the people.
That’s their bottom line. You might think that corporate news organizations — whose fundamental concern is the bottom line — ought to be able to understand that. But, then, as Upton Sinclair said a century ago, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.”
From Zeros to Heroes
For a week, the Occupation drew little notice from the corporate media — or anyone else.†
Coverage increased markedly on September 24th after police “kettled” a group of demonstrators and a Deputy Inspector pepper sprayed one of them in the face in front of video cameras.
Occupiers got another lucky break on October 1st. About 5,000 people were marching towards the Brooklyn Bridge, led to believe by the police that they could use the roadway. Police arrested 700 of them, greatly increasing both media coverage and public sympathy. City bus drivers commandeered by police to haul off protestors registered their own protest, saying that wasn’t their job.
Organized labor began to see merit in the exercise. Striking airline pilots may have been the first to march with the Occupiers. The Communications Workers of America and the United Steelworkers, United Federation of Teachers, Amalgamated Transit Union, and the AFL-CIO’s President Dick Trumka voiced their support. Other cities around the country: Boston, Chicago, Denver, LA, San Francisco, and more, now have Occupations of their own.
“This is the economic civil rights movement,” a sign accurately states: one percent of the population is depriving the other 99 percent of their rights. They act as if the bottom line were more important than the Constitution.
The other 99 percent understand — the bottom line is the Constitution.
– 30 –
* National City Bank survived the Crash that it did so much to create and evolved into Citigroup. Citigroup analysts issued enthusiastic reports to clients in 2005-6 extolling the virtues of “plutonomies” — economies powered by the wealthy. One October 16, 2005 report noted that “the top 1 percent of households in the U.S., (about 1 million households) accounted for about 20 percent of overall U.S. income in 2000, slightly smaller than the share of income of the bottom 60 percent of households put together. That’s about 1 million households compared with 60 million households, both with similar slices of the income pie! …. The top 1 percent of households also account for 33 percent of net worth, greater than the bottom 90 percent of households put together. It gets better (or worse, depending on your political stripe) — the top 1 percent of households account for 40 percent of financial net worth, more than the bottom 95 percent of households put together.” [Emphases added.]
† Readers of this newspaper were informed about the Occupation eight days before it began.