This was a topic I had no intention of addressing on the blog. For the simple reason that for the most part it wasn't a story for me. Sure I had heard about it, and here in ye olde blogosphere there has been plenty of chatter about it, but for the most part the whole “Occupy Wall Street” protests have been a New York City problem, not something for me to worry about or concern myself with. So while they were on my radar, it would be akin to working an air traffic control tower and seeing two blips hundreds of miles apart, hardly worth mention. But that was before the stupidity came here to Pittsburgh.
Yes, I said it, the stupidity. Because at the end of the day, that is pretty much what this is. Maybe I am just missing out on something, but I really don't see the point of this whole “Occupy.....” movement. I get that corporations make lots of money, in a capitalistic society that happens, and if someone were to come to me and want to know about my feelings regarding the divide between the haves and the have nots, I would say that surely the disparity should not be as great as it is, but my complaints would be more along the lines of a tax code that provides so many loopholes that allow for the well to do to escape their civic responsibility than some kind of glorified paycheck envy because the CEO of XY Corporation makes more than I do working at Smithfield News.
So when the “Occupy......” movement came to Pittsburgh, I was less than enthralled. The fact that these protests were congesting things to the point that people who did have to work were now being inconvenienced by a movement that allegedly was there at least in part to protest on their behalf, and you start to get the irony of the situation. The protestors were doing a fascinatingly good job not of being a thorn in the side of over compensated CEOs, but of pissing off the people they claim to represent, at least if the informal poll I was taking outside at the bus stop is to be believed. Far more people were pissed at the fact that while they were trying to get to work, they were instead being made late for work, sometimes waiting as much as an extra hour for their bus to actually show up to take them to their place of employment. Meanwhile the objects of the protestors were enjoying a Saturday afternoon off, not being bothered in the least.
And I can't imagine whey Pittsburgh would even show up on the radar screen of this movement anyway, other than to be a pale copycat of what was taking place in New York, because Pittsburgh hasn't really been a corporate center for a good four decades now. Sure there was a time when many companies actually called Pittsburgh home, at one point in time it was the 5th largest corporate headquarters in the United States, but many of those companies have since moved on to far better financial climates. So protesting here is akin to showing up for a birthday party 5 days late and wondering why there is no cake to eat, because by and large the party is over here.
But let's get to the meat of the matter as it were. Many of the people in these protests are there for one reason and one reason only; they want handed something and it is much easier to just stand around stomping your feet about why you don't have it than it is to actually go out and work for it. It is a glorified temper tantrum, another by product of a generation of spoiled brats for kids who have no appreciation for anything. If they don't get their way they will just sit there and scream at the top of their lungs, because that behavior worked so well when they were kids. Yell loud and long enough and mom or dad will eventually cave in and give them what they want. The result is there is no appreciation for hard work, they complain about being have nots because for the first time in their pampered lives, they are starting to realize that mom or dad's credit card isn't there to be pulled out to buy them what they want. Because if it was and mom and dad could fix their problems with a simple swipe of a magnetic strip, these people wouldn't even be here.
In our lust to make sure that each generation has it better than the last we have come to the crossroads where now we have a generation of lazy fucks. People who expect things for doing nothing. Hell, even in those childhood endeavors like Little League baseball, where the ideas of teamwork, sportsmanship and the idea that at times there are winners and losers we have diluted it to the point that no one keeps score, everyone gets to play regardless of skill level and at the end of the day everybody gets a trophy, just so no one feels bad. It is about as far from reality as one could get.
Now, free from their parents nest, they face a world in which people do keep score, ability matters and not everybody is going to get a trophy. And no amount of stomping ones feet is going to change that. And don't get me started on how this is different because of the way social media is being used. I think we have heard my opinion on this before, but just like blogging the whole “I am tweeting while I am at the protest” nonsense is just an illusion of work. If I tweet it, or stream it, or tell my friends where to meet me, I must have done something. Trust me, you haven't and you are not. A circus isn't significantly better simply because it has 5 bearded ladies as opposed to one. It is just the WalMartification of the protest, everything is now under the same tent and you don't have to go as far to find what you wanted to see.
If things were as bad out there as the protestors would have us believe, I can assure you there would be a lot more businesses out there that would be getting a higher quality of applicant than what they continue to get, because at the end of the day it is work, regardless of how unmeaningful a protestor believes that work to be. The difference between this generation and generations past is many in previous generations realized that their responsibility to their family meant that they would have to take a job to make sure the household had money coming in, and not worry about how much they wanted to work at that particular vocation. Responsibility trumped personal satisfaction. But now we have a generation that is accustomed to no responsibility and bathed in a childhood of personal satisfaction and this is a result.
So let's not call these protestors “Occupiers” as it were, let's call them what they really are, homesteaders, people who want something but without actually paying for it. The problem is for every occupier out there, there are plenty of people who will pay for what an occupier wants for free.
The protest probably moved to Pittsburgh because of the college. Part of the complaint of college students is the universities themselves. State run schools who get state and federal funding to help with tuition and then stack on fees each semester for things students might not use, but have to pay the fee regardless. For my daughter these fees are over $1500 a year. Things like transportation fees - she doesn't use their buses, she's on one building all day. Lab fees - she doesn't have a lab class but pays $80 a semester. Sporting event fee - keep in mind you still pay as a student to get a ticket but it is a reduced price, yet you pay $50 a semester to have the right to pay less for a ticket. She's a senior and hasn't gone to a sporting event at her school. Then there is the book thing. That's a racket. A student pays $150 for a text book. At the end of the semester they can sell it back to the school. They get a $50 credit towards the purchase of another book. The USED book gets labeled USED and returned to the shelf for sale at $95. A student buy it and returns it at the end of the semester for $25 book store credit. So far off of one school year the school has made $170 off of this book (and we know the school paid whole sale for the book so it did not cost them the $150 to start with.) As long as students continue to buy it USED and return it at the end of the semester the book continues to make $70. Remember according to the university the book store is a not for profit venture for the school.
ReplyDeleteWell we all pay some fees for services that we never use, the idea isn't that everyone will use it, but that it makes the service available to everyone. If we simply paid for things based on use, my tax dollars would never go to schools or fire departments. I don't use them, but they are there not just for me, but for the overall public good. I can see where a bus or shuttle service is useful service for a campus, even if all of the students don't opt to use it.
ReplyDeleteThat being said, the protestors here weren't complaining about campus fees, they were squarely planted outside Mellon banks headquarters yammering about the 99% vs. 1% nonsense.
As far as I know both you and I are members of the 99%. I'm not worth a couple billion and when the banks were bailed out I didn't get a couple million dollar bonus from tax payer money for making bad business dealings and almost bankrupting the bank in the first place. Then I wasn't one of the bankers when congress asked them to account for the money told them none of your business. Maybe because I am on campus all the time I understand what they are saying. As the gap from middle class and upper class gets wider and the dissolution of the middle class into poverty continues the people sink farther down. No they don't have one agenda because there are many layers of problems.
ReplyDeleteExample - You live in Pennsylvania where the oil and gas companies are using horizontal drilling and fracking. Your water supply in Pittsburgh is bordering on no longer being fit to drink because of the toxic chemicals being injected into the rock in the northern part of the state. So while the oil company is getting rich your ground water and aquifers are growing dangerous levels of carcinogens. You face dying while they get rich and don't care. Right now because the agenda is drill baby drill, the price of gas and oil is too high, therefore your life means nothing to their profits and their continued agenda. Part of the Occupy movement is about environmental hazards. Every time you turn on your tap you unknowingly are dealing with part of their agenda. Do you support it? That depends on whether you think you have the right to turn on the tape and not have carcinogens in the water.
If that were the only issue, I would agree with you. And if I didn't agree I would at least like to hear the arguments from both sides. But what happens with these protest movements is that, in an effort to be more relevant, they let any organization glom onto their own cause, just so they can say how big the "movement" really is, when in fact it is just a bunch of people looking to use it to further their own specific agenda. Prime example was when Cindy Sheehan sat outside the Bush ranch after her son was killed in Iraq. A single person grieving the loss of of a son is a powerful statement. But instead it became all about Code Pink and every sort of political complaint they had, and Sheehan went from being a grieving mom to a political activist, proving through the course of that just how stupid she was and severely diminishing the thing that gave her a podium to begin with, the death of her son in a war she didn't believe needed to be fought. Crawford went from being a vigil to being a circus.
ReplyDeleteWhile I am not a huge fan of the bailouts the banks got, I am not sure what else could have been done. Sure we could have just let them fail outright, but if you want to create a gap between the upper and middle class I can think of no better way then telling them that all of the money that they have saved and scraped together is now gone, through no fault of their own, but because the financial institution in which they placed it no longer exists. So to a degree the bailouts became an almost necessary evil. And many of those questionable investments the banks made were in people, and their ability to attempt to avail themselves of part of the American dream, that being to own their own home. So mortgages were issued to people who had no way of paying them back, or if originally had a way, that way was severely hindered through layoffs and job losses.
None of the people I see at these rallies are part of that group however, they are just pissed off that someone is making more money than they are, and that they have no desire to work there way up, but want some form of instant gratification from the moment they entered the job market. They take their degree and their resume into an interview and are shocked when someone isn't going to pay them 6 figures a year to start. And I hate to break it to them, not that many people ever make 6 figures a year, and those that do usually are with their employer for quite some time. But when you spend your life being coddled, it just makes life harder when coddling is no longer the rule, but the exception. People can and do say no, regardless of what their parents led them to believe in their sheltered childhoods. So they better get used to it really damn fast.
First everyone I have talked to who is at an Occupy site is employed. People have the impression these people are sitting in the park day and night. They aren't. People come and go. Some to work and some to school. But look at my daughter. She lives at home to save money. She doesn't have a car because she can't afford one. She is at school right now - at 530 on a Sunday night working on a project. She has been there since before noon and will probably be there until about 9 pm. She will graduate next year with a BA in Fine Arts with a concentration in 3D Rapid Prototyping and a minor in metal smithing. She works at Best Buy part time. She is lucky that between us we have paid for her tuition, books, fees and supplies. She will have no debt. She also has no job prospects when she graduates. Even though she is in a major that is cutting edge and new to the market place she has absolutely no job prospects. She's afraid she will be stuck working at Best Buy for a couple years before she can find a job in her field. Now what would have happened to her if she had say $60,000 in debt from school? She would be expected to start paying that back monthly at graduation. If she can't get a job and can't pay it...too bad. Then it goes against her credit. Meanwhile, guess what. Lending institutions and Credit Bureaus don't recognize payment of student loans in evaluating credit. But miss a payment and it goes on your record. So nothing positive, only the potential of a negative ding. Carry that out. Say she had to pay off $60,000. She goes to buy a house. They credit institutions will look at that $60,000 debt and include it in their formula to determine if she makes enough to pay the mortgage. Not at the $50 a month but at $20,000 a year pay out.
ReplyDeleteNow are you starting to see why this is important on college campuses? It isn't that they don't want to work. There are no jobs. They have enormous college debt because if you don't continue your education you can't expect to make enough money to own a home or qualify for a car loan. Meanwhile the part time jobs they are working are laying off or cutting back because the economy is horrible. My daughter went from 30 hours a week to 18. Best Buy is not hiring seasonal help this year because they don't have the money in payroll to pay them. My daughter is just one case. I understand that. But I look at her friends, many who are in the studio working with her right now and they are all in the same place.
I will say that your daughter would be the exception to the rule I experience on a daily basis living on a college campus and working at a business that employs college kids for part of its staffing. Living around them, partying is the rule most nights of the week. It is not uncommon for me to wake up on a Saturday or Sunday morning and on my travails to breakfast, find myself walking up streets littered with empty beer bottles and cans from parties the nights before, and dodging the occasional pile of vomit that is on the sidewalk. Come late spring, when most of them leave for the summer, I have previously blogged about the amount of things that can be found simply by dumpster diving around here, because those very same kids are just too lazy to pack. Not small items either, we are talking computers and furnituire and the like. And why bother if mom and dad will go ahead and replace it for you anyway.
ReplyDeleteAnd don't get me started on working with them, which is another treat in and of itself. When they are on the schedule you hope that they show up, then if they do bother to arrive for their job (a questionable proposition at best), you are lucky if you get any work out of them. They are there simply to get a paycheck, not to actually do anything. It is if actual work, honest to goodness work, is somehow beneath them.
Wow. It really isn't like that at Towson University. There are the problem kids and campus police have their hands full. Maybe it's also her major because she and most of her class were in the studio today for 8 1/2 hours working on stuff that is due this week. I look at her boyfriend - who's at Penn State - he did take a break to watch the Steeler game but they are back to working on projects. He's a mechanical engineering student and they have a task based project due on Wednesday so they watched the game from the lab. I just hope the kid who are trying to make the most of their college education are recognized.
ReplyDeleteI don't want to suggest that all college students are the same, I would argue that there is a difference between the University of Pittsburgh students and those right up the street from them at Carnegie Mellon. Maybe it has to do with the students they attract, maybe because a larger percentage of CMU students tend to be foreign students (or American students of a noticeable foreign lineage), but here there is a lot of of kids who believe that they are entitled here.
ReplyDeleteCome tomorrow morning I will probably get the honor of firing another one of these college aged kids. His mom is the owner of the 110 Bar across the street from us and Saturday he just decided not to come in to work. No call, no show. An all too familiar theme.
Ahh yes, we here in DC ended up with some as well! Of course we did. I did find it amusing that when it was storming they 'occupiers' were thinned down. lame. can't even commit. I say if you're going to protest, you should do it no matter the weather. But whatever. I'm just fed the hell up with them. It seems like a lot of whiners. I mean, shit my life isn't perfect, but I feel like a lot of these people have misplaced blame. No one ever said shit was going to be easy. Anyway I just wanted to chime in because you wrote a compelling blog. I don't actually have anything intelligent to say.
ReplyDeleteYou may be right about that but possibly not because of where the students country of origin but their average intelligence. The SAT scores for Carnegie are •SAT Critical Reading: 620 / 720 •SAT Math: 680 / 780 •SAT Writing: 630 / 730
ReplyDeletePitt - •SAT Critical Reading: 570 / 680 •SAT Math: 590 / 680 •SAT Writing: 560 / 660
Well we could start a whole new discussion here on that point, 14% of CMU's students are international versus just 6% for Pitt, so one could question whether higher testing scores might be attributable to a failing education system in the states, but that would be pulling this way off topic.
ReplyDeleteWell Carnegie Mellon is also recognized world wide for it's business school. I don't really consider 14% international to be that much of the student body. At least not significant enough to change the character of the school.
ReplyDeleteAnd actually the education system in this county is not really pulling it far off topic. Part of the complain is that college students are prepared for college, or maybe some shouldn't have gone to college in the first place. There's a kid in my neighborhood who is in his second year of community college and still taking 50 level classes. He has to pass high school equivalency standards before he can move to the 100 level college classes.
That was why I included American students of foreign decent, 14% of the student body is international, but another 20% is Asian American, combined that makes up over one third of the entire student body.
ReplyDeleteI would agree that there are people in college who have no business in being there, because we have convinced people that a college degree is the holy grail in the job market. We would be far better off directing some of these students into trades than in pursuit of a degree which will not help them in the long run. If everyone has a degree, it just means that all of our unemployed will have them.
My favorite was today when a woman marched by my place of business carrying a sign that read "I need a job now". To which I asked, how many applications did she actually pick up while marching around town? I know we are hiring, but I can tell you she didn't come inside and ask for one. As I was talking to Sammy outside while these protestors marched by, I suggested they get a job. One of the marchers proceeded to tell me it wasn't all about jobs, it was about corporations and how they treat their people and the environment, to which I replied back perhaps you shouldn't be addressing me in such a manner while you are wearing clothes stitched together by Indonesian children for $2 a day.
ReplyDeleteOMG too funny. Side bar. When I was coaching cheerleading I had coached one sister a couple years earlier. She was very smart. Then I get her little sister. To quote the older sister "OMG Kalie! What do you mean you don't get math. You failed Asian!"
ReplyDeleteBack to the subject. I agree there are those who should go to trade school rather then college. The problem is that most trade schools have either closed or moved to a college campus. The community college had everything from plumbing and heating to auto mechanic.
We still have trade and technical schools here, whether they be places like those that pop up on late night TV or ones run by the unions like the bricklayers. And I would argue many of those end up putting people in jobs that pay very well compared to those people chasing a four year (or more) degree. When was the last time someone went to the mechanic, looked at the bill for labor and said that it was cheap? I know when I first signed up for my landline many moons ago, for them to fix anything inside my house was $16 for every 15 minutes just for labor and it was always rounded to the next 15, so 17 minutes would count as 30. That is good money by any standard. We have bus drivers in Pittsburgh that have been on the job long enough and log enough OT that they pull almost $100,000 a year. Sometimes it isn't about the degree, it is just about getting a job and being good at it for long enough.
ReplyDeleteI think that is my problem. I went to college, got the degrees and I'm over qualified for everything and no one wants to pay me. So I'm in a fall back dead end job.
ReplyDeleteI am not making great money by any measure and my former job I got after interning at a station and being good enough at it to stick around. Still after 12 years there I was making shit for money and even that pittance didn't keep me from being the first laid off. So I work a job that I certainly didn't go to school for but that I would like to think I am getting better at each day. But I had to start somewhere and all it took was filling out the application, which is something I don't see a lot of people doing, like the lady who marched by the store today. Would it be the best job she ever had, maybe, maybe not but it was easier for her to march around with a sign than to even try. That is my issue with some of the people who are marching around right now. They can't be bothered with a job that they view as beneath them. If it is me, I am busting my ass to make whatever money I can. I can always look for something better, but I would rather be doing something than just complaining about how sorry my lot in life is.
ReplyDeleteAnd what I am telling you is that a lot of people at the Occupy sites ARE employed. You are listening to the talking heads that they are unemployed. One of the people arrested in NYC over the weekend was a lawyer. She went to the group from the park to Chase to close her account. The bank manager told them to leave and she went out on the street. As they were arresting people she was yelling for them to give her their names. The cops came out of the bank and grabbed her. They carried her back into the bank as she waved her check book screaming she was a customer. She was carried back into the bank and arrested for being in the bank protesting. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6svA6Qvq1U&feature=share
ReplyDeleteActually I have watched zero coverage of this because if the copycats weren't here in Pittsburgh I really wouldn't care at all. That is pretty much how far down the list of priorities I find this movement, no better than the tea partiers really, just of a different political bent. I listened to a group march past today chanting "Oh no, (Pat) Toomey must go" to which I yelled back, that is what you get for pissing on Arlen Specter in the primary. Moonbats of either political persuasion are a complete and utter turnoff for me.
ReplyDeleteHow many people chanting could have voted in the last election? My daughter is a 22 year old senior and just made it to vote for the last Presidential election and has voted in one state election since then. If they are college kids they may not have had an opportunity to vote yet.
ReplyDeleteAnd I don't know if I would call them copy cats. Throughout history it has been the youth who have instituted change. Back to the Boston Tea Party it was the 20 something that took action. The older generation has always looked at them as youthful rebels who should leave well enough alone. We become complacent and accept what has been dealt to us, where youth think they can make a stand and institute change.
It isn't the youth versus old for me, it is that the same exact adjectives that were (and to a degree still are) bandied about regarding the Tea Baggers are now being used in describing the Occupiers. There leaderless, they are a grassroots movement, blah, blah, blah. Guess what, I don't care about either group. I don't care if they are leaderless or are run by a dictator, makes no difference whatsoever. At the end of the day, neither one is going to amount to anything so I am not going to spend my day kissing the asses of either irrelevant group. They will have their moment in the sun and then fade off into obscurity like so many other groups before them.
ReplyDeleteYou say that but the Occupy movement has been picked up all over the world. This isn't a polictical party. They are not running candidates. They are motivating people to stand up and speak out on what they feel are the issues of the day. Unemployment, poverty and the separation of the wealthiest to the middle class is a world wide issue. The greed of corporate over the health of a company has taken down the economy of the world, not just the US.
ReplyDeleteI guess I have said enough. I understand what they are saying and why they are trying to get people to wake up to what is happening. You have already taken your stand on it and you can't be swayed. That's fine. If you feel either you have no control over taking power away from the corporations and back into the hands of the people, or you are ok with having a few companies controlling your every move, that's your opinion. I choose to draw a line in the sand and say the country needs to be given back to the people and the rights and desires of corporate America should not be recognized above the people.
The anti war movement against our involvement in Iraq was worldwide too, last I checked we were still there. So you will have to excuse me if I am non plussed simply by the fact someone can take a camera and film protestors in another country to fill an extra minute of news time during a 24 hour news cycle.
ReplyDeleteI stand where I stood on Saturday, when a protest ends up doing more harm to people actually trying to make a living by getting to and from work as opposed to the people who they claim they are protesting against, then I would say you have a problem. I do believe the words "fucking protestors" were being uttered by more than a few of them, not the way to convert people to one's cause. As for how relevant they are, here in Pittsburgh they are camped out in a green area outside Mellon Bank on bank property and the bank actually lets them stay there, because they like me find them to be irrelevant.