Good Morning!
View of the G-20 conference in Paris 11-3, 2011 Nice to think about, but keep our protest non-violent (Bonus points if you can spot the “corporate” items in use among the crowd)
First of all, to say that these “Occupy” protestors are spoiled kids is a flat out lie.
These protestors are a massive cross-section of all age groups and ethnicities.
Let’s face it. These “occupy” protests have brought out the best and sometimes the worst in all of us.
I can only relate my own experiences to try to make sense out of it.
It seems as if all these young people want is a fair shake.
The corporate media and their gullible minions keep beating this drum when the people demand jobs and change:
“They should have majored in something useful”
I’ve said it before and it bears repeating:
With that line of thinking, there would be no arts, no thinkers or philosophers, no entertainers, just a society of drones, all goose-stepping to the same drummer. We can’t all hit the “major in something useful” lottery. Some of us did our research before attending college and were either lied to by different departments at the university, or our “useful” skills were offshored 20 years later.
Here’s the new order, “citizen”!
I read this on a popular website yesterday:
“An awful lot of your “spoiled white kids” have NEGATIVE NET WORTH thanks to the system that told them to work hard, go to college, and get a good job afterward. The suckers bought it.”
“It’s not about these kids wanting a head start. They just want to start at the same starting line as the rest of you. They want to start from nothing like their parents did.”
“They want the opportunity you had–the opportunity at a good life if they just worked hard. By and large, they are willing to work hard.”
“There’s just no opportunity. You guys are just not hiring anymore.”
“You’ve sent their jobs overseas and used the profits to send even more jobs overseas. All the while, you keep telling the next generation, “Go to college! Work hard! Get a job! It’s the American dream!”
“So they will, and the cycle will continue.”
That sounds harsh, but in many ways it’s true. I will use myself as an example.
It would be easy for me to say that I went to college, worked my butt off and was really poor while working after classes in a liquor store and cutting firewood to make ends meet.
I could say that I lived in the dirt like a pig while working on my Graduate degree.
Both statements are true, but they are only half-truths.
Here is the full truth……
I was slaving away in a soulless job on a factory floor when I got word that my father died. He had a small insurance policy that was left to me.
THIS enabled me to quit the grind and go to college. It wasn’t enough money to make it all the way through, but it was a start.
My mother, who worked for the Navy, was able to help too. When the insurance money finally ran out, and the liquor and wood business wasn’t cutting it anymore, my mother allowed me to move back home until I got my degree.
Sorry dad. Corporate maximum profit comes before American Families
My father’s insurance policy was from the United Auto Workers Union. Today, the factory where he worked is shut down.
Today, there would have been no insurance policy.
It’s the fault of the UAW you say?
No it’s not.
It’s the fault of the maximum profit mentality that dictated the plant be shutdown in order to consolidate the workload at other locations across the country.
My father shouldn’t have belonged to the Union you say? Wrong again. My cousin worked at the same auto factory as my dad, only he was a non-union white-collar office worker.
HE was given the option of being laid off and losing his pension, or transferring to one of the “consolidated” factories in the Midwest, where he could work on the assembly line and retire at age 65.
No pension for you
He chose the Midwest.
So at age 61, my cousin moved to the Midwest and started working on “the line”, where, two months later, he died of a heart attack.
No pension, no job, no life.
Do you think the auto manufacturer cared about him and his family?
Or, were they happy they didn’t have to pay his pension?
My mother, on the other hand, had a “secure” job on a big Navy base and was able to work until she retired.
Today, that base has been closed for years. ALL the workers got laid off.
Today, she would not have been able to help me out with college.
What would they say about the lay-offs?
Yeah, I can say “I did it” and I can smugly tell young people to “Get a Job”, but it would be a lie.
I had OPPORTUNITY that the kids of today do not have.
I didn’t have to mortgage my future by having to take out large student loans.
The minority of kids today that were lucky or intelligent enough to hit the “major in something useful” lottery will find out their real value to Wall Street when their jobs get offshored.
Right now, their success stories are being trumpeted all over the web. It reminds me of the big flashing signs you see outside casinos that announce JOE BLOW HIT A $10,000 JACKPOT HERE!
The sign doesn’t say how many other people walked away broke.
They can’t take it with them!
Those “spoiled white kids” are fed up like the rest of us.
Fed up with a predatory system that allows for the heartless exploitation of the very people the Bill of Rights was supposed to protect.
We ask the question: When is enough enough?
So, let’s stop all this “Spoiled White Kids”, “Dirty Hippies”, “Union Thugs”, And other divisive BS.
Meanwhile, in the news this morning:
“Research shows the incomes of U.S. workers fell even more rapidly since the rebound began in the summer of 2009 than during the recession itself – just one of the reasons more and more people are joining anti-Wall Street protests. NBC’s Mara Schiavocampo reports.”
Calico Blackie says:
So, if our incomes fell, where in the heck was the “recovery”? Who recovered? It sure as heck wasn’t “We the People”.
I’ll be talking more about Unions tomorrow.
Yes, we can
We are tired of being lied to.
We are angry.
I am not a “Spoiled White Kid.” I am 56 years old and the companies will not hire me either.
OCCUPY WALL STREET
We are the 99%.
Calico Blackie
