Guest Post: An Occupy Wall Street Primer

I promised big news with the next blog post, but the news is so big that I can't wrap my head around how to best make it public. So in lieu of said "big news post," a guest post by my big sister, Eve Brown-Waite, author of "First Comes Love, Then Comes Malaria"  (Not to mention a super cool boxed text on Traveling in Taiwan with Teenagers in Lonely Planet Taiwan 8 ).

So without further Adieu, here's Eve...and I'm off to Los Angeles!

 

An Occupy Wall Street Primer (for those who still can’t figure out why)

By Eve Brown-Waite

For those of you who still don’t understand what all the shouting is about, here is a primer on what the Occupy Wall Street folks might be so upset about.

1. Who got the bailout and who didn’t? Remember when the major banks got bailed out because they were deemed too big to fail? Well you and I, my friend, are not too big too fail. In fact, we are the perfect size to fail and there are plenty of banks waiting for us to do just that. Or at least to teeter on the brink of failure just enough so we need to take out loans and use credit cards. And guess who makes money when we take out loans and use credit cards? The banks! And guess who makes money on an economy that is set up to push us into debt? The banks! And guess who makes money when business is set up so that we have to use services such ATMs, debit cards, wire transfers? The banks! And guess who sets the fees on all of these services and can raise them at will? The banks! (Guess who lets them do this? The government!)

These are the very banks that were bailed out with OUR tax dollars. And at the end of that year – the very year when they were on the brink of failure but we bailed them out – they gave themselves astronomical bonuses for doing so well.

How big was your bonus last year?

2. Just how do they keep their prices so low? Wal-mart – the nation’ largest private employer, just announced that their part-time employees will lose their health insurance benefits and that all other employees will pay a sharp increase in health insurance costs. According to Wal-Mart spokesman Greg Rossiter, "Our country needs to find a way to reduce the cost of healthcare, particularly in this economy." Wal-Mart, which posted profits of over $400 BILLION (yes billion) last year, has decided to help in that effort by passing on the cost of healthcare to their employees. (Way to go Wal-Mart!)

I pick on Wal-Mart here because it is such an easy – and huge – target. But Wal-Mart is not alone in this model of fleecing its employees in order to boost the bottom line. I hate to break this to you, but big businesses don’t necessarily care about you and me. They pledge allegiance to their profits and their shareholders. So if they can boost their profits by laying off workers, forcing their suppliers to cut cost, or by cutting benefits to their employees, they will. And they will be rewarded for this behavior by their shareholders. So it’s a win/win for them. The only ones who lose are the workers, the consumers and the community. Oh wait … that’d be us.

3. We are paying through the nose while they are posting banner profits. Remember BP’s huge oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico? Remember how millions of gallons of oil polluted the ocean and created a disaster for the environment, the wildlife, the fishing and tourism industry and just about everyone who lived and worked in that area? Well you’ll be glad to know that BP just posted a third quarter profit of $5.14 Billion – that’s triple what it made for that same quarter last year! And with the help of government subsidies and lobbyists, their future is looking rosier than ever. Yup, the US government just approved BP’s plan to drill again – up to four more wells – off the coast of Louisiana! Rewarding them, I suppose, for how well they did it last time! So there is no need to worry about the wellbeing of good ol’ BP. In fact, there’s no need to worry about any of the oil industry because it’s one of the most heavily government-subsidized industries that exists. Yes, it’s OUR tax dollars at work, once again. And they get this government largesse, despite the fact that the oil industry uses all sorts of loopholes to avoid paying taxes. (For example, the Deepwater Horizon was registered in the Marshall Islands – to avoid paying US taxes – when it set off the worst oil spill in American history.) So we can all sleep well, knowing that the government will always look after the oil industry.

But how about the rest of us? Well, we’re still paying close to four dollars a gallon at the gas pump, with no sign of the government bailing us out of that one. And how about all the little people whose lives and livelihood were nearly wiped out by BP’s carelessness and hubris and the government’s willingness to look the other way? How are our tax dollars being used to help them? (Notice that I’m assuming here that most of us actually DO pay taxes, because well, the little people actually DO pay taxes.) Well thankfully, we always have the social safety net. You know, things like unemployment insurance, Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare, public funding of education … you know things like that. Oh wait a minute … we can’t really afford to keep funding those sorts of things now, can we? Not with our soaring deficit and the ever-expanding demands for national defense – billions of which are regularly funneled into the deep pockets of defense contractors for wars that probably never needed to be started in the first place. (Yes, Virginia, that was a corporate bailout of a different sort.)

These might be just a few of things that are fueling the Occupy Wall Street anger. In short: government-enabled corporate greed at the expense of the rest of us. This isn’t about class warfare and it isn’t about lazy people asking for handouts. It’s about the hard-working, tax-paying citizens of this country, who have played by the rules and are now demanding that everyone play by the same rules. It’s about telling our government to stop bailing out, subsidizing, and passing legislation that favors huge corporations while ignoring the needs of the rest of us. It’s about lending a hand, for a change, to the millions of Americans who – through no fault of their own (see points 1, 2, & 3 above) – are drowning in debt as prices rise but salaries and benefits do not. It’s about stopping the fleecing of ordinary Americans at the hands of the corporations who now practically own the government.

It’s not about those who don’t want to work pitted against those who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps. It’s about the very sad and twisted situation that America has come to today: a nation of people who are tired of watching their government raid the pantry and give all the goodies to well-connected and never-satisfied corporations, while the rest of us hang on by our bootstraps and try to catch the crumbs.

And oh yeah, we stocked the pantry.

EveBrown-Waite is the author of FIRST COMES LOVE, THEN COMES MALARIA (Random House, 2009) and numerous political, social and humorous commentaries. She lives with her family in western Massachusetts.