If you turn on the evening news to get your daily dose current events, it comes as no surprise that you have heard little to nothing about the beginning of a grassroots movement coined "Occupy Wall Street". In mid-September, hundreds and then thousands of people began occupying the financial trading capital of the world, Wall St. New York. It is here that the leaderless movement began, and it is there for one central reason: To challenge the economic paradigm that has been forced upon the world for several decades. By way of greed, monetary incentive, as well as legal and political manoeuvring, the world’s elite have grown to be extremely concentrated financially. Unfortunately, most of these individuals have grown to be tremendously disconnected to the social needs that all human beings have in common... I'm writing this article to explain the root causes of this movement, to outline key aspects of citizen frustration, and give insight into the massive repercussions it could have in shaping an entirely different world.
I will start first with economic inequality. This is a measure of how the money that circulates in our society is distributed to the people, which in turn creates our social structure. (Lower Class, Middle Class, etc.). Over roughly the last 30 years, our social structures have changed significantly. However, this change has unfortunately only seemed to positively affect the real incomes of the rich and famous. For example, in 1996, Canada had 25 billionaires. By 2006, we claimed 55 of them. During the same time period, CEO compensation had risen at a rate of 555%. Yes, That's five hundred and fifty five percent. The middle class wage increase? A measly 6%. (Source: The Trouble with Billionaires by Linda Mcquaid). In other words, by way of tax reforms working in favour of the business class, the growth cycles that have been fostered through times of economic prosperity have largely created a very powerful and rich upper class, while leaving less and less for the middle class. My Mass Communication teacher said it succinctly to the class that I attended yesterday: "Your generation is going to be the first one that is worse off financially than your parents". It's true, and the trend is growing. It is no surprise service costs have spiked, businesses are trying to compensate for their lack of business (remember, with destroyed demand you can't expect the people to consume at the rates they did before) by upping costs on all levels. Insurance is up, food costs are up (This is also largely due to oil scarcity), taxes are up, toll rates are up. Almost every cost in society is going up, but the problem lies in the middle class's ability to actually afford these more than modest increases.
Tying into the problem with government infiltration of our political system, is our system of monetary distribution (the way money is created and circulated). In America, the main solution to the recession has been to print more money for the stimulus packages. This seems convenient, but it in fact creates a devaluation of that money. This is why China and other countries are moving to get their investments out of the American dollar, because the value of that money is declining. Canada is intrinsically connected to America in such a way that this devaluation also affects us.... As many see the Canadian dollar is now below the American dollar, even though Canada's economy is in much better shape. This is also due to the fact that Canada also prints money, albeit on a smaller scale. In America it is the Federal Reserve that prints money, in Canada it is the Bank of Canada.
Here's an easy way of looking at it: Say there's a trading group of just 5 people and they can only trade with each other. All have 10 dollars to spend. One trader decides to print out his own money in attempts to have greater spending abilities. Seems like a great idea! Until the other players catch on, and they recognize that he has an artificially inflated buying ability. These other 4 players knowing they now have a disadvantage; decide to up the price of their items that they sell. So even though this one trader upped his trading money to 20 dollars, the actual value of his money decreased. This is a prime description of inflation, and it is built into our system because of the constant creation of new currency.
This is precisely what is happening within the Western-style monetary system, and its effects are becoming more and more widespread due to the inter-connectivity of world economies. This is a global problem. When America sinks, Canada is not far behind. Neither is Australia, neither is France. Greece's debt problems alone might be enough to cause a financial panic in the global markets. In America, the solution to debt has been to just keep going deeper and deeper in debt. It never seems to end. Consumers in industrialized nations went through the same cycle of growth in the early 2000's when the housing bubble began. Housing prices skyrocketed because, due to financial deregulation in the US, mortgage firms were now allowed to lend money to anybody, no matter what their ability was to actually pay back that money. It was because banks were lending so easily and unconditionally that the housing prices began to spike. (Remember, the Federal Reserve doesn’t mind printing out money to lend because they make money from obligatory interest payments)People could not actually afford these huge increases, therefore people turned to credit. It is absolutely true that people were unknowingly forced to begin participation in a world-wide credit binge. It is because of this debt addiction cycle by both consumers and our national governments that both Americans and Canadian families are now swamped in more debt than they ever have been before.
And it is here that we lead back to the focal point of the OCCUPY WALL STREET protests. These ever-growing demonstrations, which have even spread to Vancouver, are unlikely to subside. The people are pissed right off, as we should be. Our government institutions have been sold out to corporate interests while we make small gains but at the same times the prices of the things we need are skyrocketing due to the inflationary nature built into this system. The housing bubble that burst in the US has created a world landscape where buying a house or even renting a decent apartment is increasingly out of reach. As well, food prices have gone up at a staggering pace.
Food prices are hugely important to the public, because food is a necessity that people will not often settle to go without. It is a human need, and when that need is not addressed, people resort to any means to which they will be able to satisfy that need. Thus, the crime rate!
Energy costs are going up, so even if you can afford a mortgage, the costs of living continue to increase.
Gas prices continue to rise. Yeah, they take occasional dips. But on a year by year basis, there has not been any substantial gas price decreases since the OPEC oil embargo of 1973. There's a reason for this: Oil is FINITE. It will not last forever. I encourage all who are unfamiliar with the peak oil movement to watch the films "Collapse" with Michael Ruppert and "Blind Spot". These will give a greater understanding of why oil prices are never going to fall substantially ever again, and why we're headed for a global oil crisis in correlation with the western addiction to consumption.
We are headed for hyperinflation unless the issues of resource scarcity and privatized money printing are unitarily reviewed and logically addressed. Hyperinflation sounds scary, and it is. But it’s happened many times before and it is looking like it will happen again.
As you see, it is unreasonable to assume that demonstrators of OCCUPY WALL STREET are just petty thugs looking to upset the establishment by waving some signs. This wave of protests is for a slur of reasons, and the anger will continue as the economies of the world collapse in front of our eyes. These protests represent change in the following ways:
1. Social - The people of this world are pissed off at having their human needs thrown aside in the name of profit. Working hard for an earning is one thing, but the massive wealth concentration is not justified when it does not leave enough for people to address their human needs. It is no surprise that we have crimes when so many people in society are growing up with their human needs NOT being met. If you look at financial equality on a nation-by-nation basis, it is the more unequal societies which have the greater rates of crime. People often do not realize that lack of wealth and criminal behaviour are related to each other in profound ways. More and more people are losing their buying power, thus it only makes sense that the people are fed up and willing to stand up to challenge this trend. As the slogan goes, "We are the 99%".
2. Economic - Small business has been destroyed in industrialized nations. When large companies such as Wal-Mart are able to open in emerging cities, their extremely low costs cause people to divert their buying to these cheap and often less durable products. Wal-mart outsources jobs overseas in profound ways, with a great number of their products coming from sweat shops in developing countries. This is why the products are cheaper, it's not because Wal-Mart is some saint of a company really looking out for the good of people, it is because they source the cheapest labour. Back to my point, big business has created a working environment that is looking more and more like a subservient pool of wage slaves. Most of the service jobs available to me as an 18 year old student are jobs available from companies whose CEO's I'll never know personally, and who's interests exclude me completely. But it's what the norm has become... personal potential is being greatly hindered because we're forced to spend 40 hours a week at a job we hate. It's become a terrible delusion that working just to be able to feed yourself for 40 years can be considered the best life a person can get just because they worked hard at it. What happened to doing things that define us, and spending time on the people we love? You can call it laziness, but that really isn't the case. One of my favourite artists puts it this way:
"We the American working population
Hate the fact that eight hours a day
Is wasted on chasing the dream of someone that isn't us
And we may not hate our jobs,
But we hate jobs in general
That don't have to do with fighting our own causes.
We the American working population
Hate the nine-to-five day-in/day-out
When we'd rather be supporting ourselves
By being paid to perfect the past-times
That we have harbored based solely on the fact
That it makes us smile if it sounds dope..."
- Aesop Rock
And to make matters worse, the money we do earn really doesn't do much for us anymore...
3. Environment - Through quest for profit and satisfaction of shareholders, which is essentially a bare bones description of Capitalism, the environment has become a waste land. Through desertification we are destroying our land base, through deforestation we are destroying our forests and the ecosystems associated with them, through oil exploration and weak environmental regulations on business we have managed to destroy our water base, and through carbon emissions we have polluted our air significantly. It is quite difficult to understand why more businessmen, particularly in the food production sector have not pushed for greater sustainability policies. Without the earth acting as a replenishing mechanism for the soil, water and other natural processes, how can we expect to live the same lives with the same access to the same resources for much longer? The earth is similar to the human body in that, if you stress it out, it's natural reactions will not be favourable; Especially when we create an entire economic system that is based on the premise of infinite growth and an infinite supply chain of oil, natural gas etc. The world has lost touch with these natural processes that are vital to our plentiful living, and it's time the earth has a meaningful part in the discussion as well. After all, the earth will be fine. It is us humans who will go extinct with the naive mindset that we can keep exploiting the earth at the pace that we have been...
4. Media - One reason I'm writing such a detailed note is because I believe there is little other way than social networking to get people informed about this event. Mainstream media is entirely centered on business principles. Ie: Profit-making. it is amazing to see how big these protests have got given the pathetic coverage offered by bigger news companies. The protest itself will seek to gain attention through massive amounts of social networking, because it is one of the only effective ways. I watch economic news everyday from the Wall Street Journal wesbite, and in the last two weeks I have seen only one article about the protests. It should be front page news. One of the central premises of a democracy is the full functioning and fair flow of information. The fact that media businesses rely on advertising money by large and often multinational corporations for funding should be incentive enough to realize that mainstream media is basically watered down news with the intent of keeping the status quo. This is media infiltration, and it has and will continue to be challenged by protesters.
5. Social & Cultural Values - Because we live in a society where material wealth determines class structure, we have become a very individualist culture. We tend to view things like addiction and unemployment as "problems of the user" rather than "by products of the system". This is a fundamental problem, because it disconnects us from the social needs of each other and denounces empathy towards them all at the same time. We need to release ourselves from the assumption that money can buy us happiness. We need to focus on the things that matter, and that is the well-being, safety, and happiness of everybody. Until fundamental human needs are met, we cannot expect any real inter-personal harmony.
6. Food - Business has also affected us negatively in a way that many people go day to day without realizing, and that is our food production system. You see, it is strange to note that the sicker people are, the more money the health system makes. These people are not idiots, they know very well that the more patients they help, the more money there is in their pockets, or for the system overall anyway. We have, in the last 30-40 years, undergone an immensely crude way of producing food, whereby organic and plant based diets are demonized and the most unhealthy of choices are celebrated. It is no coincidence that McDonalds shares have been steadily increasing as peoples wallets become less dense. It is cheap, it is quick, it is convenient, and tastes unusually good to most people. The problem is these institutions are not as threatened by economic collapse as others, because their cost schemes are so much more sophisticated. They know they're too big to fail, and they know their unhealthy food will continue to sell. It is because of this that we see a disgusting amount of processed food, genetically modified food, with a particular reliance on other cheap foods such as sugar. Foods that are high in carbohydrates, sugar, and sodium are most often the cheapest. These production methods are cost-effective and profitable, but they have rendered us an obese generation with an unusual amount of completely avoidable health problems. (The fact that cancer rates have exponentially risen since the 60's is no coincidence).
As you see, business the way it has been running is not sustainable and CAN NOT continue to be supported. We're in a vicious political cycle, and that cycle is present in almost every single industrialized nation on the planet: Conservatives want to cut deficits, and they do this by cutting social spending. Conclusion: Modest business savings, but decreased buying power and social health. Liberals want to keep existing social safety net structures, but spend money on stimulus. Conclusion: Businesses cannot keep up with rising taxes and costs, while the buying power of the middle class becomes slightly greater and the social safety net still somewhat intact. The problem with this attempt at a solution is it does not address the debt at all (Not that Conservative deficit policies would ever come close either). We're wasting our time by arguing over left vs. right politics. No major political party in North America comes close to addressing the real changes needed for a sustainable generation, because neither of them predicts the end of the availability of oil. It is that simple. Without oil, everything will change. Not only that, but we also have interest (Which many people believe to be the foremost root cause of these issues). The concept of compound interest is a form of slavery; it is essentially creating money out of thin air. It is not based on anything tangible. Interest is a way of keeping the people subservient, because it forces them to continue to work no matter what the cost is to them or their family. Debt is a massive stressor, and as you know stress is related to majority of illness and disease. Until the debt issue is seriously taken up, we will continue to have a very stressed out and pissed off workforce. Not to mention the ridiculous amount of debt it can take students in University just to get into the workforce....
And it is here that I conclude. I know you're probably saying something like "thank goodness" or "goddamn that was long". However I felt like I had to write it. I am very concerned for our generation, and even more so for the generations that succeed us. The elite and powerful of this world have done a wicked job of justifying greed, and setting up institutions to protect these ideals (ie. Police, The Market). The elite, through our apathy, have managed to protect themselves very well...
But not for much longer. The change is on Wall Street, where what started out as an occupation of hundreds has sparked a movement of several thousand all over the world. The one thing that we the people have going for us is the sheer size of our army. But this army does not want to kill, it does not want to harm, and it does not want to take all and leave nothing for anybody else. This army wants to free, wants to spread the love that is within all of us. I have a tremendous faith in the good nature of people. It is this good nature that will wake up the world from it's apathetic sleep, and hopefully foster a generation that looks after each other and after the earth in which we inhabit. New paradigms will emerge, and new norms will be formed. Along the way we are going to face resistance from those who wish to preserve this terrible and unsustainable way of life. Let it come. One thing is for sure though, this movement is just getting started....
"In a decaying society, art, if it is truthful,
Must also reflect decay.
And unless it wants to break faith with its social function,
Art must show the world as changeable,
And help to change it"
- Ernst Fischer
© Shelby Bouchard
Follow me on twitter: @SBtheradical
here is one for Ernst, great blog! http://www.metalvideo.com/nomessiah/fractured-dreams-video_8a4d885d6.html
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