Kimberly Emerson

Every once in a while, I have a new post formed in my head, have given it substantial thought and even done a little research, when suddenly I find my idea has been overridden – by me.  This week, I had a couple of different possibilities, had finally settled on one, and then all of a sudden a friend of mine asked, “What’s this Occupy Wall Street thing all about?”

The question surprised me, at this point.  We’ve been hearing about these protests for two months now.  After I gave it some thought, though, I abandoned my judgment.  Many folks in America have managed to ignore this massive movement – not so much out of apathy as self-preservation.  In these tight economic times, lots of people find that just keeping their lives together takes more time than they have.  If you’ve been laid off, your time is taken up looking for a new job or developing some latent skill (house painting, clothes mending, navigating unemployment lines) that might keep you and your family in food for another week.  If you still have a job, you’re very likely taking on extra projects and working overtime in order to remind the boss how vital you are to the organization.  If you don’t have time to go beyond the bold-type headlines – and sometimes even if you do – the Occupy Wall Street movement is indeed a puzzle.

I blame myself.  I’ve referred to the Occupy Wall Street movement in the past, but have avoided going into much depth because the thought of all that research was kind of exhausting.  I’m sorry.  To make up for my oversight, here’s the lowdown: basically, a bunch of people are in parks and colleges across the country, they’re angry at other people, and they want something.

Yes, I can hear everyone saying, we knew that already.  Which people, specifically?  And who are they angry at?  And what exactly do they want?

Well…it depends on who you ask.

Check with the Occupy Wall Street website, occupywallst.org, and you will find that the demonstrations are part of a “leaderless resistance movement with people of many colors, genders and political persuasions.”  Being leaderless, they lack a representative speaker, so even the website’s claims must be taken with a grain of salt.  The one thing that the website claims as a universal goal is that they “will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1%,”  and in order to bring about change they “encourage the use of nonviolence to maximize the safety of all participants.”  Try to trace the roots of the movement, and you find references to a Canadian activist organization called Adbusters sending out a Twitter message with the hashtag “#OccupyWallStreet,” calling for people to follow the example of the Arab Spring movement and take up residence in lower Manhattan.  The idea seemed to be that everyone unhappy with the status quo would come together and demand that the President take steps to separate Washington from corporate influence.  Somewhere in there – I can’t find a clear reference on how or when – the expression “We Are the 99%” became the movement’s catchphrase, with a blog by the same name featuring handwritten stories to show in vivid detail exactly what toll the Great Recession has taken.

Consult the webpage for the counter-movement, “We Are the 53%,” and you find a very different point of view.  According to their statistics, taxes are paid by only 53% of Americans. They seem to believe the OWS folks are part of the 47% that isn’t paying for anything and spend all their time whining about having been wronged.  I can’t find a cohesive statement, but one of the more flattering pieces about this backlash (from a publication called The Blaze) says the Occupy Wall Street folks are “camping out in parks around the country and demanding the entire capitalist system be destroyed.”  By contrast, the 53%ers pride themselves on being “one of the 53% of people who actually, like, pay taxes in America and don’t just, like, hang out protesting stuff all day.”  The webpage is maintained by filmmaker Mike Wilson, and was created by his friends Erick Erickson of Red State and Josh Trevino.

So, who’s right?  Really, the answer is “neither.” The OWS and “We Are the 99%” websites are created by people who are part of the movement, but as the protests have no hierarchy, we can’t take it as a given that they’re speaking for everyone.  “We Are the 53%” doesn’t claim to be part of the association, and in fact takes great pride in being outside of it.  Beyond that, both sites express an opinion of something they are watching unfold, and opinion is neither right nor wrong.  It is just point of view.  Failing a good objective barometer of rightness, we must establish criteria, and judge accordingly.  Here are the categories I have used, and how each side falls out.

1. Category: Syntax

Personally, being a writer, I judge everyone on grammar and spelling before anything else.  Many of you will tell me that these categories have nothing to do with the movement’s viability.  I tell you what your seventh grade English teacher probably said: spelling always counts.  The Occupy Wall Street webpage stands up to scrutiny.  Both pages featuring individual letters, however, leave something to be desired. The lack of familiarity with commas, misspelling of words and poor sense of sentence structure in America sometimes frightens me.  I saw fewer errors on the 99%ers’ page, but there were still more than I would have liked.  I will cut people some slack for the extreme emotion they obviously had while writing these treatises, but let’s do better next time.  I’m not asking for iambic pentameter, now am I?

Conclusion:  Our entire country needs to repeat English 101.  Point: OWS/99%ers, but only by a little.

2.  Category: Statistics

Perhaps we can judge by relevant statistics.  The 99%ers base their slogan on the idea that the wealthiest one percent of Americans have increased their share of the national wealth over the last thirty years, leaving less for the remaining ninety-nine.  This can be substantiated by data from the Congressional Budget Office.  Since 1979, the bottom 99% has seen net income rise by an average of 40%.  The top 1%, however, has experienced a 275% jump in their net income.  The OWS camp states that the 1% are greedy and corrupt.  The definition of greed may be somewhat fluid, but corruption can be judged by adherence to the rules of contracts in which they are engaged.  Many of the institutions owned and operated by the 1% filed for TARP funds.  According to the Special Inspector General for TARP, eighty-six civil and criminal investigations for fraudulent use of TARP funds had been filed as of 2009.  (See page 10 of the attached report.)

By contrast, the 53%ers take their moniker from the premise that 53% of people in America pay all the taxes, while the remaining 47% pay none.  According to FactCheck.org, this is slightly off: 38% of households will end the year with no tax liability (most of which, at least according to 2009 statistics, made less than $20,000.00 for the year).  This would appear to be only nine percentage points off the 53%ers’ claim, but according to FactCheck, this statistic is only for income tax.  It fails to take into account payroll and sales tax.  In these two categories of tax, the bottom 20% of earners pay a disproportionately high portion of their income.

Conclusion: The OWS and 99%ers cite the clearer set of numbers.  Point: OWS/99%ers.

3.  Category: Logic of Argument

We might also judge each party by the cohesiveness of their argument.

The blog page for We Are the 99% claims that the 1% are favored by the government with help when they need it, and are then praised as job creators.  This is true:  the U.S. government did indeed lend large financial institutions $432 billion in the 2008 financial crisis, according to the Congressional Budget Office.  The letters submitted offer personal stories of hard times.  Most do not say what they are specifically after, only that hard work does not seem to be getting them anywhere, and that they’d like the overall system in our country to reward more than just the 1%.  The OWS page, aside of the claims of corruption (see Category 2), says that the richest 1% of society is “writing the rules of an unfair global economy.”  This statement is mostly supported by this paper from sociology professor G. William Domhoff at UC Santa Cruz.  I say mostly, because he disagrees about the percentages – he thinks the rules are written by the top .1%.

The website for We Are the 53% features letters from people who are angry with the 99%ers for complaining.  The 53% page shows many statements from people that they never took anything from anyone, that they do not depend on the government.  However, they also make numerous references to having “worked” their way through college, and not having “taken” anything from anyone, especially the government.  Here, I have doubts.  I have heard no credible stories of anyone having “worked” her way through Harvard.  (Student loans, grants and scholarships all count as “taking” from someone in my eyes.  Each gives you money up front that you did not earn.  Even student loans.  You may be good for the money, but unless they have ESP, no one can be certain of that when the funds are initially given.  Also, payments for these loans may be deferred until graduation.  Putting off payments for several years is not an option with many other kinds of loans.)  Thus, I can make a reasonable guess that the people who “worked” their way through college – i.e., paid for their own tuition and books with money they earned themselves through gainful employment – attended a state university.  This means that the college they attended was in fact funded by taxes paid by all the rest of us, and the tuition they paid was less than it actually cost the college to educate them.  So whether they intended to or not, they all “took” from every taxpayer who ever worked since the state college system was established.  Even the ones that didn’t go to college usually cite some level of education, which makes it very likely they benefited from at least some level of state-funded education.

Conclusion: The 99%ers argue that the 1% have benefited from governmental assistance.  This appears to be true.  OWS argues that the top 1% of society write the rules by which the rest of us live.  An academic case has been made for this.  Both the 99%ers and the 53%ers have letters with personal stories that can’t be verified.  However, the 53%ers demonstrate many more inherent contradictions in their statements, or at least a lack of clarity as to what constitutes earning one’s own way.  Point: 99%ers.

The final score is:

OWS/99%ers: 3
53%ers: 0

Okay, it’s really only 2.5 for the OWS/99%ers, because I can only credit the OWS site with good grammar and spelling, but still.  The OWS/99%ers team comes out ahead.

So, by as objective a scale as I can manage, I must endorse the Occupy Wall Street/We Are the 99% point of view of this uprising.  Thus, according to their websites, here are the answers to the questions we started with:

What is Occupy Wall Street?
“a leaderless resistance movement with people of many colors, genders and political persuasions.”

Who are they angry at?
“The richest 1% of people.”

What exactly do they want?
(Take your pick)
“to expose how the richest 1% of people are writing the rules of an unfair global economy”
“to let the 1 percent know just how frustrated they are with living in a world made for someone else”

Now you know.

Kimberly finds the discrepancy of wealth distribution in our country disquieting, but that’s just her.  She is dying to know what you think.

Tags: Adbusters, Arab Spring, Congressional Budget Office, Erick Erickson, FactCheck, Josh Trevino, Mike Wilson, Occupy Wall Street, protests, Red State, The Blaze, We Are the 53%, We Are the 99%