Rain on Occupy Wall Street

It's raining on Occupy Chapel Hill. But the occupiers have a plan. You might be able to enlarge this photo and read it. 

They also have a plan for the what to do about the  bathroom. The occupiers are welcome over at The Chapel of the Cross and at University United Methodist Church, which are keeping their doors open from 8:00AM to 9:30PM. These churches and their congregations apparently are very happy to support the group which thinks it's a good idea to offer a table full of extreme literature, including quite a large stack of  free copies of Ted Kaczynski's Unabomber Manifesto.




Did I mention the group feels it imperative to have a Legal Help Phone Line? They keep a lawyer's phone number posted on the daily agenda.

The post office doesn't seem to mind having the walls of their edifice defaced with all kinds of signs affixed with all manner of sticky substances. If you enlarge this pic, you might see that one of the signs decries that CEO salaries have gone up a great deal in the same time period that middle class salaries have gone up to a lesser degree. This protest is targeting "the one percent". Do the protesters think there are over three million CEOs in the country? Or do they understand that the top one percent subsumes a much broader group than that? Maybe not. 

According to..research...A category called “executives, managers and supervisors (non-finance)" make up the greatest concentration (of the one percenters)_ at 6.35 percent. Financial professionals are next at 2.77 percent, while doctors make up 1.85 percent and lawyers 1.22 percent.The rest of the table shows a wide variety of skills, from real estate professionals to celebrities, from government workers to farmers and pilots, each comprising about 0.5 percent of the 1 Percenters. 

You can read more about the composition of the one percent at http://www.cnbc.com/id/44960983. The much maligned rich one percenters even include pilots. And farmers! Apparently, the occupiers ought to be occupying Hollywood, and hip hop studios,  and sports arenas, and all kinds of places--doctors' and lawyers' offices too--but  no, they have chosen to focus their wrath just on the financial sector. But not the government. Think of the irony there. The government played a massive role in bringing about the housing crisis. 

...the politicians clearly had as their political goal homeownership as “a good thing” and persisted—and for that matter persist to this moment in pushing it. The Federal Housing Administration last I checked was promoting supporting mortgages that have less than 4 percent down payment. We all make mistakes, but politicians have persisted in their mistakes, and in the pointing of fingers in other directions.----Thomas Sowell 

People in Chapel Hill are pretty well educated and perhaps have a sophisticated and accurate grasp of the pernicious interplay between the government and Wall Street and banks and major corporations. Area citizens surely wonder why the occupiers are willing to storm the banks and vilify the people who work there, but have no interest in investigating the government connections behind all this crony capitalism which arose to solve a problem which some say did not even exist. 


Maybe that is why there were very few tents and even fewer people on hand yesterday when I went over to check on the growth of the Occupy thing in Chapel Hill. It had not grown since the first day. In fact it was quite a bit smaller.