I have been watching with great interest the Occupy Wall Street protests and their growing offshoots and wishing dearly I could ditch my sun sensitivity and get out there. I have no doubt that if there isn’t a protest over at Stanford yet, there will be. There should be.
The reactions of Wall Street, the New York police, several DC politicians in particular…
Some here may remember what I said (though I gave few details at the time as to why) after a guy in Stanford Hospital’s billing department stole my name and number and tried to make me give him my credit card information over the phone for a supposed bill collection agency for an amount that, actually, I had overpaid my account by because they were slow to update their system and had re-billed it. So clearly he thought I was an easy target. The man was sufficiently vicious in tone that I considered calling the police.
What I wrote was: “The angrier someone gets over something that is unreasonable, the more you know they know they’re in the wrong.”
The protesters have my admiration for their efforts not to show anger, not to give any justification for the crackdowns that have happened, but simply to demand that the laws favoring the 1% change in order for us to have a more just society that creates hope for our future. My favorites so far:
1. A sign held up saying, “Obama is not a brown-skinned anti-war socialist who believes in free health care for all. You’re thinking of Jesus.”
2. Here is the long version by Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel laureate in economics, professor at Columbia University, writing for Vanity Fair; below is what he said to the protestors in person. He noted that he and they were not allowed to use a bullhorn to address the crowd, not allowed to make themselves heard by any means other than the crowd repeating his phrases loudly to try to pass them towards the back. He wondered to them why this should be so.
But there are video cameras in smartphones and there is YouTube. (Blessings on those at that link who offer a transcription for those of us who need it.)
“Our financial markets have an important role to play. They’re supposed to allocate capital and manage risk, but they’ve misallocated capital and created risk. We are bearing the cost of their misdeeds. There’s a system where we’ve socialized losses and privatized gains. That’s not capitalism! That’s not a market economy. That’s a distorted economy, and if we continue with that, we won’t succeed in growing, and we won’t succeed in creating a just society.”
Amen.