Seriously, How Hard Is It To Understand?
First of all, I SO wish I could be out there at Occupy Wall Street, (or any Occupy _______, really). But, alas, as part of the 99%, one who’s had to deal with crushing financial issues in the last two years, I have to be at work. I’m with them in spirit, if not in fact.
That said: can I just say how glad I am that, for once, we have a pretty cohesive protest from the Left? I remember a conversation held on the off-topic forums of RPG.net about how street protests may or may not work, and how especially the Left tends to let itself get off message really fast–you start out organizing an anti-war protest, and you wind up attracting people who insist that ”Free Mumia“ also be part of the message.
OWS doesn’t seem to have that problem, so I really don’t understand the people who’re saying that the movement’s unwilling to put out a coherent platform of demands. Anyone who thinks there is a lack of focus isn’t paying attention. Maybe the discontent is a little broad, but the problems many of us face today aren’t as simple as “end the Vietnam War.” It’s obvious that many are unhappy about:
- US corporate greed
- corporation and big business influence in government policy
- the bank bailout
- unemployment
- laws which favor the wealthy and corporations
- and the general injustice of the American financial system.
And a list of issues has been released by the New York City General Assembly, the loose leadership of OWS. Note that it is not a list of demands, but it does articulate what the problem is.
And can I just say how brilliant a slogan “The 99 Percent” is? It takes a complex and immense amount of corruption, injustice, cynicism, raw greed and gives it vivid, accurate form.
Occupy Wall Street’s focus seems crystal-clear to me: reduce the influence of corporate finance on the Republic. I articulate it as “Wall Street Got Bailed Out, and We Got Sold Out”, myself. But I guess the Wall Street protestors just lack the razor-sharp focus and carefully articulated demands that the Tea Party has. Or something.
I’m starting to think don’t think a lot of journalists aren’t smart enough to figure it out. Not all of them, mind you. Just look at this editorial from the New York Times:
…The message — and the solutions — should be obvious to anyone who has been paying attention since the economy went into a recession that continues to sock the middle class while the rich have recovered and prospered. The problem is that no one in Washington has been listening. At this point, protest is the message: income inequality is grinding down that middle class, increasing the ranks of the poor, and threatening to create a permanent underclass of able, willing but jobless people….
And yet we continued to hear from many in the Mainstream Media that they’re unsure what the message is. (The take on the Right, of course, is that Occupy Wall Street is the same old riff-raff of leftist anarchists, unlike the grassroots conservative Tea Party.) Really?
Some years ago there was a letter posted to the old Romenesko forums (Poynter has since re-organized the site, and so the letter is lost to me) by a moderately conservative journalist who was leaving her job in pursuit of greener pastures. She wrote the letter as an explanation of why she was a conservative in a field overrun with liberals.
I wish I had the letter, because she was quite articulate, but basically she said that when she grew up, journalism was a blue-collar job. You didn’t go to college or grad school to learn how to be a journalist. Back then, you weren’t a journalist, you were a reporter. You took some writing samples into the local paper, got the job on the strength of those, and then hit the streets hunting down the news. You got a reporter’s salary, which meant you lived in the same neighborhoods as firemen and police officers and factory workers who made similar money. In many instances you shared the same values, which were typically moderate to conservative.
But somewhere along the line, that changed. People stopped being reporters and becames journalists. Journalism began to be offered as a field of study at universities, which meant that salaries for journalists increased. Soon news outlets began to require a journalism degree to interview for their entry-level jobs. That meant journalism shifted from being a job that talented people from any walk of life could do, to being a job that only talented people who could also afford a college education were able to do. That, in turn, meant an inevitable shift to journalists coming from wealthier, white-collar neighborhoods, which tend towards liberal politics.
I thought the letter-writer made an excellent point. What’s more, I think her point isn’t just about the liberal-conservative divide in journalism. I think that since many journalists in media gatekeeper positions make really good salaries (and have for decades), they’re disconnected from the financial struggles of the people that OWS represent. They don’t have to worry about paying for child care, or making their rent, or hoping that they can juggle two jobs just to make it. They don’t live next to people who do. And so they don’t understand the viewpoint of people living that way. Worse yet, they aren’t smart enough to realize it.
Not all journalists are rolling in it, of course. I’ve posted before about how entry-level journalist’s salaries have fallen to criminal levels in traditional media outlets. But the ones who make the decisions on what stories will get reported, and how? They’re usually doing okay for themselves. And they’re the ones who just don’t get it.
One journalist who does get it is the redoubtable Margot Adler of NPR News. She had this to say about OWS versus past protests (emphasis mine):
ADLER: Okay, so in 1983, I’m covering the Seneca Women’s Encampment for Peace and Justice. It’s in Upstate New York. It’s a group of very, very radical women who have encamped, very much like Greenham Common. They basically are camping out, and they want to protest militarism.
And they’re doing all these things that were sort of these cultural ’70s civil disobedience things. So there was street theater, and there was chanting, and they were painting themselves green and black, and they were having die-ins. And I spent three days with these women, and it felt very interesting and very transformative, and very unusual, you know, and I felt really actually that a lot of stuff was happening.
And then there was this big march. And the big march was on July 4th, and it was on the military base, and I got into a little skirt and a blouse, and I went and stood with the townspeople and watched this march that I had been living with for three days.
And as they marched to the military base and to the town, I realized that from the point of view of the townspeople that I was among, they looked totally crazy. They looked like total – you know, I mean, they really looked weird, they looked bizarre. There was no understanding. They were painted black and green. They looked really crazy.
Now translate that to Wall Street, Occupy Wall Street, and what’s different and what I really think is interesting about Occupy Wall Street, is that it’s porous. So what you have in Occupy Wall Street is you have all these people milling around and hanging out, and you have free food, and you have some of the Wall Street guys in their suits and ties coming in and eating the free lunch and talking with the people.
And so you actually have more of an encounter that’s actually changing, where those two sides sort of come together and see each other…And so I’m beginning to think that maybe this whole notion that oh, let’s have a goal, let’s have a focus, maybe that’s not the idea. Maybe we’re really – you know, they’re really trying to say let’s change the conversation.
She adds:
ADLER: …what was interesting to me was I thought there was more focus than I thought there would be. If you looked around, the signs that you saw were all very much focused on the economy. There was – they were very much, you know, end corporate greed, end, you know, basically the 99 percent.
They weren’t – you know, very often you’ll go to a kind of traditional left demonstration, and there’ll be 60,000 different causes. And I even saw a very weird thing while I was there…So Peter Yarrow comes down there, from Peter, Paul & Mary, and he gets up on the stage, and he starts singing, and he also starts talking. And he is – in his talk, what I heard was the laundry list of every left cause. So he’s talking about blacks in prison, he’s talking about militarism, he’s talking …And I realized it was completely different from what I was actually experiencing, that in a sense I thought he was off the mark.
Thanks, Ms. Adler, for noticing the difference. I hear that some of the old progressives like Pete Seeger and Arlo Guthrie are showing up at Occupy Wall Street, too. Let’s hope that they hear Margot’s take on Peter Yarrow and stay on message, and don’t try to drag in every cause under the sun.
Occupy Wall Street has a coordinated meeting planned for July of 2012. I really, really hope that this movement finds its legs, and becomes the Left’s answer to the Tea Party. From what I can tell ,many of the protestors are young people who realize their economic future is bleak, thanks to mismanagement and outright fraud (packaging bad home loan debt so that any profit is privatized for banks and any loss is made public for homeowners and taxpayers in general, to name just one thing for which many bankers should be rotting in jails as we speak).
In the meantime:
Executive Paywatch : And I hasten to point out – OWS supporters aren’t mad that a CEO makes hundreds of dollars for every one dollar that an employee makes. They’re mad because, while doing so, the CEO and his management staff are cutting salaries and benefits to the employee. Even better, when executives make decisions that actively hurt a company (like at Gannett, or Bank of America, or any number of companies–seriously, my career goal at one point was to get fired by Disney), they get paid big bonuses to be shown the door. Think that would happen if you got fired?
The Dodd-Frank Act requires publicly-held companies to make the ratio public — CEO-to-average pay within the company. The House is trying to repeal this part of the Act, as well as other parts. Gee, I wonder why?
