Occupy Boston starts a New Constitution

Occupy Boston wants a New Constitution

I got to spend the morning at the occupy thing in Boston this weekend. I got myself a tour and took plenty of pics. Maybe I will write up a few posts from my notes in the coming days. For today, their thoughts about a new charter.

The Occupy Boston people don't seem to have much enthusiasm for the  United States Constitution.  They have plastered some paper on the sidewalk and invite you to add your thoughts about what the "new" constitution ought to say. Their invitation reads "We can do better. Here goes.....".

And what are the occupiers adding? The things they want in a new constitution seem to fall into a few general categories. Each bullet point entry is a quote from the poster.

STUFF WE ALREADY HAVE 

• Equal rights

NEW RIGHTS

RIGHT TO FOOD AND SHELTER. AND LOVE.

• Free Food!!

• Right to nourishing food

• Right to a home to live in

• Right to food,shelter, healthcare and more understanding/love!

RIGHT TO WAGES, EARNED OR NOT

• Right to a basic survival wage regardless of ability to work or access to waged work.

RIGHTS FOR THOSE WHO MAY NOT EVEN BE CITIZENS

• Access to ESOL lessons for new immigrants.

RIGHT TO HEALTH CARE 

• Healthcare for EVERYONE.
• Affodable healthcare
• A RIGHT to Healthcare.

PUNISHMENTS OF VARIOUS KINDS FOR THOSE IN AUTHORITY

• Police would face harsher penalties than the general public. No more crony cops.
• IRS should be outlawed!
• FED Abolished too!
• Term Limits!
• (S)he who does not contribute to the common good deserves no common good.

DREAMS OF THE IDEAL

• End America's cycle of poverty.
• Get $ out of politics. 
• We can end LGBTQ partner abuse....we can do this as a community.
• Stop violence.

GENERAL PABULUM

• Everyone is important.
• Free HUGS!
• The earth, air and water cannot be owned. They are free resources that must be preserved for use by all.
• A better tomorrow.
• Live Love Learn
• love
• more fishing poles
• Ministry of Partying
• Re-think the American Dream!

THE OBLIGATORY RAILING AGAINST CORPORATIONS AND LAW

• Corporations are not people.
• Corporations should not have the same (or more) rights than citizens.
• People before corporate profits. 
• A legal system not based on precedent.
• Keep jobs here. Stop outsourcing.
• No bailouts for corporations.

ONE PERSON seems to get that we can just amend the document we have. This contributor, however, might have missed the part where our founders inserted checks and balances and a balance of powers, precisely to make it harder for the powerful to find ways to subvert the Constitution. Here is what (s)he wrote:

New Ammendment (sic)

• Our political leaders should abide by the constitution instead of continuing to find ways to subvert it.

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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.

Don't Be Expecting the Poor

The poor won't rise up and swell the ranks of the Occupy Wall Street crowd. Why? Part of the reason is because they are not really all that poor. Yes, when you compare the poor in this country to the rich, they have a lot less. But most of the time they are sheltered and eating, which makes our "poor" very different from the desperate people in say, Tunisia, where the Arab riots began in December 2010 when Mohammed Bouazizi who had spent most of his life trying to make money by selling fruits and veggies refused to pay a bribe to  police.  He failed to produce any "permit". They confiscated his produce cart. He resisted. They beat him up. People have to eat, and when corruption and a general lack of plenty,  interferes with someone's ability to do that, they are going to summon up the energy to fight.

The fact that our poor are not even near destitute is due to our vast social programs. Today I stopped by the Occupy Chapel Hill encampment, and as is my habit I spoke with one of the passersby. She was ambling toward a bench, trying to read the sidewalk drawings, muttering under her breath "as long as they don't get violent." So I sat down with her to find out what she thinks about Occupy Chapel Hill and we talked for a long time. She had been a protester in the sixties, and was very proud of that. She even showed me a bracelet she was wearing reminiscent of that time. She said she has since grown up and learned that kind of protesting won't work. She voted for Obama, and is not sure if she'll do that again. She's a huge believer in capitalism and thinks the reason the OWS people are willing to sleep in tents to protest the injustice they see in the world is "because they are 18". She  knows "for sure" you can't change anything by screaming and fussing in the streets, you have to change things from within. 


Burdened with diabetes, this sweet and intelligent lady has been disabled for six years and  lives in an assisted living center; her net worth less than a dollar today. She opened her purse and showed me a bank receipt from this morning.  She had just been by the bank to take out 49 cents out of the 50 she had on deposit. (She left a penny to keep the account open.) To buy one stamp she had to make that withdrawal. After mailing an important letter, she now has the one penny in the bank, and another 30 cents in her purse. 

But she is not going to join the protest. No way. No how. Not only does she feel strongly that it won't change anything, but she has a place to sleep tonight. She's well enough clothed to deal with the weather, and she is going to keep getting her meals at the facility where she lives. This is all funded, no doubt,  through the largesse of the taxpayers of NC and the US. She'll be getting another check soon. She said the jobs plan may not work and parts of the stimulus were a little silly.  She was glad to get the $200.00 check Obama sent her; spent the money right away. That was supposed to help get the economy going, but in her opinion, most of the people who got that check wasted the money on stuff they did not really need.


She is not resentful that her next government check won't be a lot bigger.  She is glad she lives in the United States of America where people are tolerated when they set up tents in protest. I asked her if she is worried that the people of Occupy Chapel Hill are going to turn violent. She says if they do, it will only continue "if their daddies come and bail them out of jail".


When I told the lady I am a photojournalist for the MIddle Class Power website she sported a huge smile and held out an open hand. She told me I ought to take a picture of the Northface logo on one of the tents. Poor people have nowhere near enough money to buy Northface products, she noted, and therefore, she is pretty sure the person who brought that tent and is camped out at Peace and Justice Plaza on Franklin Street in Chapel Hill, NC, is not living in poverty. 

The woman senses most of the participants are doing pretty well in life. And maybe she is right. And where, then, are the poor? In some cases, they're not joining in to OWS, because they, like this lady, are not living in anything close to a state of desperation. I guess the lesson for the OWS crowd is this: its fine to demand the dismantling of the world as we know it in order to help the poor. But as you are moving on your goal, take a look behind you and see if life's most desperate characters are in such bad straits that they have decided to follow you.




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Occupy Chapel Hill-The Occupation Begins

Couldn't resist. I hauled out the camera and went down to check out the beginning of the Occupy Wall Street protest in Chapel Hill on October 15th.


Not being in the mood to talk to the attendees right away, I sat on the wall of McCorkle Place across the street and just watched for a little while.  Others sitting on the wall were trying to figure out what one of the signs said. It said "Top 1% Y U no pay taxes??"  That sign was just a little ironic, and I said so. The top one percent pays very close to forty percent of the federal taxes. 

One of the young men sitting with me looking at the gathering crowd  was shocked by this idea and told me that I had it all wrong. He went on to explain that "the rich" get capital gains, and pay a very low rate on capital gains. And capital gains are not included in those figures, he said. But capital gains taxes are reported on the income tax return, and the IRS analyzes actual tax returns and tells us that the top one percent pay a full 38.02 percent of the federal income tax--including capital gains taxes. The same table shows that 69.94% of the federal income tax is attributable to the top ten percent of returns filed.  On the other hand, some 47 percent of people pay no federal income tax at all.


There is no denying that there is a "fair share" issue underlying the payment of  federal income tax. But to say the rich are not paying their fair share is disingenuous. 


The young man went on to speak of other "unfairness".  He works for National Geographic and is doing pretty well, but wants to go back to school and can't afford to do so. This, he explained is because our invasion of Iraq drove up the cost of college. Yes, I see your jaw dragging down. I could not figure that one out either.  People are making all kinds of very odd associations lately, as the left throws out ridiculous figures and tries to convince us that we need to be taken care of by their growing and lucrative government structure.


It was Game Day in Chapel Hill so the place was bustling so I got up and followed various groups who were talking about the protest. They all struggled to remember the name of the thing. One lady was telling her daughter that these are the same people who poop on the cop cars on Wall Street. Another man was disgusted with the entire thing.....said the protesters will only drive voters to the Republicans in November.


There were some pretty sophisticated posters plastered all over Franklin Street, on phone polls and on vacant store fronts. Some were in Spanish. When I finally got to the protest area and started to mingle, I saw a huge table of literature. All leftist stuff, would you believe? 


There was a general feeling that the people in the top one percent each got there through cheating, stealing, exploitation  and general unfairness. I listened to a self-described anarchist being interviewed. He said he doesn't guess that these people are going to willingly give up that money; therefore, the protesters are going to need to forcibly remove the assets from the top one percent. For some reason, the reporter did not ask the salient question: HOW?


It seemed like a nice bunch of people, but some of the signs were just incorrect and misleading, and the literature was pretty scary. Hearing the anarchist speak made me understand why they thought it necessary to post a phone number for legal help on their agenda.

I did not see any tents when I was there during the preliminaries. But the next day when I happened to drive by, I did spot about a dozen tents set up, and a group of people sitting in a circle. So this could go on for awhile. If so, I will try to post some more information about the OWS at the post office on Franklin Street in Chapel Hill, NC. 



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