She Had Power

I was floating in a dream.
My ears were the branches,
and the birds gathered to perch.
I looked over the forest, and she
was there. She held the moon
with her eyes, while I
held the ground with my feet.

Her smile was a trigger.
I grew ten stories then,
but I grew prostrate,
for my trunk was set sideways.
I felt she kissed me,
but when magnetic darkness snatched her,
and I awoke to the bare white ceiling
above my bed, the fluttering
was merely a bluejay, who,
having made a nest in my hair,
stood over my face, smelling food
in my mouth.

"Tweet tweet?" it asked,
and cocked its head to the left.

See How You Peer

Here, senior, bend,
for your spine is weak,
your heart has lost weight
and you cannot pretend.

Your words are old,
the meanings grow sallow,
your shorelines grow sandy,
your path's bronzed where once gold.

But you say, NO, here,
my shallow pool bleak
does still carry, reflecting your freight,
and ah, see how you peer. 

My Senior Research Paper

On The Legitimacy of the Occupy Movement

            I was on the road just outside of New York City, heading for the airport after spending a week with a friend who lived upstate. My friend’s aunt was driving. We were making small talk. She asked me about my schooling, and how I liked the colleges in and around the Big Apple. By and by, I told her about my senior research paper. “I’m not sure what my topic will be just yet,” I said, “but I’d like to know more about this Occupy Movement.”

            She looked at me with a sudden clenching anger that sent shivers up my spine. “You mean those homeless bums out in the park who yelled at nothing as an excuse to fornicate in public and not contribute to society?” Oh God, I thought, here it comes. “Those guys were just looking for a handout. Why should we pay for them? They can’t just take money from us hard working, upstanding citizens. You know those unions are what’s bogging down our country? I see it every day: these people have no sense.” Hmmm. Indeed.

            After this instant tirade of right wing dogma at the very mention of Occupy Wall Street, I recognized the gravity of the situation. I certainly had my subject. So, what was the core, the true essence of this social movement? And why did conservatives get defensive so quickly? What were they defending? Capitalism? I didn’t know the particulars, but I did know that there was more to this than met the eye, or the mass media’s camera. After my research, I drew this conclusion. The Occupy Movement did and does have a purpose: civil disobedience is rising because it has become painfully obvious that the system no longer works for the majority of people, and a complete remodel is necessary… but first, citizens have to acknowledge the problems of capitalism, then unite against those problems.

It Started With Adbusters

            On July 13, 2011, a Canadian based non-profit magazine by the name of Adbusters issued a dare for those Americans who were dissatisfied with the United States. “Are you ready for a Tahrir moment? On Sept. 17, flood into lower Manhattan, set up tents, kitchens, peaceful barricades and occupy Wall Street” (Caren, Gaby).  Not a month later, a Facebook page for Occupy Wall Street was established, calling for the first General Assembly, a meeting where supporters could converse about the state of the nation and the world. The New York General Assembly described itself this way:

“…an open, participatory and horizontally organized process through which we are building the capacity to constitute ourselves in public as autonomous collective forces within and against the constant crises of our times” (Caren, Gaby).

This assembly to develop their own groups of self-governed people, to oppose the set structure of society.

            My friend’s aunt might have said, “Well, what’s wrong with our society?” And that’s a fair question that begets a very, very long answer. Adbusters’ editor, Kalle Lasn, says this: “At times, not even they (the protestors) are sure, perhaps because their cause for being there is so vast and miasmic that they can grab hold of any part of it and make a credible claim for anger.” (Eifling) At any time, Occupiers have more to say than can be fitted into one frame or division of national activity. In the 1960s when the last major social movements took place, you had a specific few things to talk about, i.e. the Vietnam War, civil rights, and women’s rights. Now-a-days, the protestors feel that the problem is everything. It is a system that’s set to fail everyone, not just the poor. In order to fully comprehend the frustration of Occupy, a more thorough knowledge of US politics and economics is required.

Capitalism since the Industrial Age

            The famous journalist and founder of Alternative Radio, David Barsamian, in Richard Wolff’s book Occupy the Economy, talks about the gradual rise and final stop of the ‘real wage,’ meaning the amount of money the individual takes home when taxes are done and the bills are paid. “Every decade between 1820 and 1970, the real wage kept rising” (Wolff, 13). Then, the real wage stagnated for several reasons: the invention of the computer dramatically lessened the need for workers; US employers realized that it was cheaper to hire outside the country; US employers didn’t have to keep raising the real wage; women joined the work force; and flocks of immigrants, both legal and illegal, entered the workforce in search of a better life (Wolff, 14-15). In short, the fall in the amount of jobs offered was catastrophically matched by the rise in demand for jobs, marking the start of a downward spiral in economic status where the rich got noticeably richer, and the poor equally poorer.

            The American people had grown used to the idea that the US was a place where the sweat of a person’s brow paralleled the money in that person’s pocket… and as these corporate decisions (to stop raising wages, to outsource employees, or to replace them with computers) were made in private by a small board of directors and major shareholders, the average citizens thought that their wages had stopped growing because they weren’t working hard enough. Therefore, productivity continued to rise, as did the profits, yet the vast majority of people saw no reward for their efforts. As Barsamian puts it, “…the freedom of one part of our population (i.e. the richest 1%) deprived another part of the population of its freedom to prosper from its own work” (Wolff 23). Collectively, as a country, we have believed that self determination is boundless; that, as in Game Theory, to work for one’s interests can never be a bad thing. However, there is strong evidence to the contrary.

 

            Figure 1: A graph showing the gap in growth between the highest and lowest classes after taxes. Data from “Trends in the Distribution of Household Income, 1979-2007: Presentation to the National Tax Association 2012 Spring Symposium” (Congressional Budget Office 2) Web, 7 Dec., 2012.

 

            Figure 2: Another chart, showing the average total income before taxes. Chart generated on the World Top Incomes Database, “Average Incomes, United States, 1970-2010” Web, 10 Dec., 2012. 

The charts above are drawn directly from the Congressional Budget Office and The World Top Incomes database. Notice the growth in the household income of the wealthiest .01% and .1%, where the bottom 90% of incomes reached a flat-line average of around $30,000 annually (the standard deviation is about $1,000). As you can see, the majority of wealth isn’t even distributed somewhat equally between those in the 1%... instead, .01% of the population, or about 31,159 individuals, possessed roughly 76.5% of the United States’ money in 2007. The discrepancy is staggering, especially if all our recent economic chaos is taken into account. Even during the 2008 crash, the average person belonging to the 1% made $1.137 million.

            Since the 1970s, we as a nation have catered to the “needs” of these CEOs and stock holders, despite it not being in our best interest. Barsamian said of the Obama stimulus plan, “We did have a recovery, from early 2009 to 2011, but only for banks, insurance companies, large corporations, and the stock market… for the majority of Americans, there was no recovery” (Wolff 24). Both Democrats and Republicans, and right wing movements such as the Tea Party (the very antithesis of Occupy), campaign vigorously for the renewal of the system that, by the books, no longer works for most people. It’s as if they feel that giving money to the cause of the problem will somehow miraculously fix the problem. Why? It would seem that there is a stigma against questioning capitalism. And such a strong stigma that though “between 1979 and 2007 the share of income of the bottom 80% of the population fell between 10 and 30%, while that of the top 1% increased by 130%” (Trudell), capitalism persists today in much the same fashion.

The Tyranny of ‘Being Right,’ and the Tea Party

            In fact, as in an Orwellian nightmare, Americans choose to shut out opposition to a system they only think is right. They build a protective wall around capitalism to avoid difficult thinking. As Barsamian says, “Those few who have dared to raise questions or criticisms about capitalism have been either ignored or told to go live in North Korea, China, or Cuba as if that were the only alternative to pro-capitalism cheerleading” (Wolff 7). I’ve seen this demonstrated personally, by my friends’ aunt, my hyper-conservative Evangelical Christian aunt, my much-loved grandfather (all of whom are oppressed by the very systems they defend), and countless politicians such as Mitt Romney, and Wisconsin’s governor, Scott Walker (who assaulted workers’ rights in 2011) (Bauer).

            The danger of the Tea Party is that it formed in order to manipulate the masses to push for a strict interpretation of the Constitution model of government, allowing a temporary escape for Corporate America, at whatever cost to public rights. Tea Partiers masked this goal by proclaiming themselves a popular movement over the mass media. They utilized two ingenious lies to pull supporters in from the generally languishing public.

One: the Tea Party is a grassroots movement that spreads because of public outrage. Indeed, “The (Tea Party) movement grew rapidly, but it was not as spontaneous as it appeared on the surface; it was heavily promoted by two right-wing organizations, FreedomWorks and Fox News” (Berg 5). Participants who either weren’t aware or refused to become aware that the news agencies were in the back pockets of wealthy promoters took the reporting at face value and assumed that the Party was growing because it was a legitimate movement.

The second lie: government control is the root of your problems, so let’s stop them, as “The idea of a group of ordinary citizens coming together spontaneously to demand that government get off their backs resonated powerfully in American popular consciousness” (Berg 5-6). Coming from the background of once being ruled by a harsh British Monarchy, it is apparently easier to believe that any difficulties arise because of improper governing. This plays right into the hands of the wealthiest Americans who, finding their standard of living in decline along with the economy, advocate for the loosening of the free market to their own gain, while enforcing austerities on a public that is blinded by faith in the American Dream.

The Santelli Rant

The name “Tea Party” came from a speech by Rick Santelli, known as the Santelli Rant (Berg 2), in response to a provision in the ARRA that would help homeowners in mortgage-related financial crisis. He famously said, “This is America! How many of you people want to pay for your neighbors’ mortgage that has an extra bathroom and can’t pay their bills? … President Obama, are you listening” (Rosenthal)? It was an ironic statement, considering that he himself made enough money to have more than one spare bathroom, and most likely his entire audience had that many bathrooms too. Yet Santelli maintained that his audience was “a pretty good statistical cross section of America” (Zernike 21), “with average incomes of equal to 366% of the average for the US as a whole (down from 409% just before the crash)” (Berg 3). He was dishing misinformation, which began and sustained the Tea Party’s campaign against the modern worker.

            As Berg notes, “the Tea Party tells a story of a nation collapsing under the weight of people who demand government support, rather than earning their keep through their own efforts” (Berg 3). There is another irony here, because the facts prove that no matter how hard a middle class person works, their wages won’t rise, yet their wages aren’t enough to pay their mortgages. Disregard those (of which there are millions) unfortunate enough to be laid off from a specialized position—they have to get a low-budget job, or they won’t have any source of income whatsoever, if the Tea Party philosophy were made government policy.

Another problem is the limited number of low-budget jobs, considering that since the 1970s, women, immigrants, and computers have entered the work force. Plus, how demoralizing would it be to work at McDonalds after losing a high paying office job with benefits?

Supporters of the Tea Party therefore have a very limited perspective on the origins of foreclosure and poverty, and a forced inability to change.

              The shortsightedness affects every aspect of American culture, as Berg postulates,

“Once these mental categories have been established, government policies from health care to the bailout can be framed as taking from the deserving to give to the undeserving. Democrats (or perhaps “socialists”) want to take your money to give to irresponsible people: poor African Americans who live in a culture of dependency, overpaid bureaucrats, and a variety of contractors who have learned to get federal subsidies for shoddy goods, ineffective services, and “bridges to nowhere”” (Berg 4).

            America’s problems are ignored, shifted by politicians, distorted by the mass media, and ubiquitous none-the-less. The statistics show that the wealthy are consistently favoring themselves over the common man (World Top Incomes…). So what of the massive unemployed or meanly employed population and those who lack the ‘three H’s,’ (heat, home, and health care for themselves and their families)? They have find a voice and express dissatisfaction for themselves, and Occupy is the first step. 

Occupy: Rebels in Autonomous, Holistic Free Thinking

            What can be done when the entire system seems bent on objectifying the average worker? Occupy’s answer is simple: come together, and through peaceful means, display your solidarity. Using peaceful protests, the Occupy movement is effectively directing the center of attention away from petty bickering in politics to the natural rights of citizens in a modern society. Dan La Botz, a teacher in Cincinnati and active member of Occupy, reported on “labornotes.org” that in November of 2011, an assault on worker’s rights to bargain for wage change, collect dues, and go on strike, was prevented by Occupiers and local unions (La Botz). The Occupiers in the major cities of the West Coast teamed with dock workers to shut down every port in December of 2011, to remind the government and sea-faring companies of who they were meant to serve (Trudell 8).

Also, on that same day in December, Occupiers gathered with the employees of Walmart to protest its many infringements on human rights around the world (Trudell 9-10). This is what the Occupy Denver General Assembly had to say about the issue: the relentless pursuits of higher profits by corporations like Walmart have damaged the work force at home, and ignored the natural rights of countless foreigners. Therefore, we must organize on December 12^th to shut down Walmart “in support of the actions taken across the US, especially those on the West Coast against Goldman Sachs and other bankers” (“12/12 Walmart Action…”). Protests are still being staged by Occupy in Colorado. The most recent one was on Black Friday. Walmart actually tried to deter participants by convincing them that their actions are illegal. As Walmart has never directly addressed protesting organizations like ‘OUR Wal-Mart,’ it is evident that Occupy’s philosophy has spread enough to pose a threat (Greenhouse, Clifford).

Occupy web pages are loaded with ideas and printable fliers for advertising community action. Far from dead, the Movement seems to have moved from the city parks primarily into the land of social media and impermanent meeting places. Special attention is given to Facebook and Twitter. I ‘liked’ Occupy Wall Street’s Facebook, and now I receive daily updates on every subject from the economy to the progress of legislation that could potentially affect the rights of the 99%. The dates and locations for General Assemblies are listed online, so that people can still gather and debate in person.

Occupy survives as autonomous groups of concerned individuals who refuse to be reigned into any political party. They disbelieve in the legitimacy of any “pseudo-leftist” groups like the ISO (International Socialist Organization), the American division of which actually assists the Democratic Party (Beams 1). Doug Singsen, a writer for SocialistWorker.org and effectively a representative of the ISO insofar as point-of-view, wrote a clever piece to convince Occupiers that, as true autonomy is impossible unless we revert to the Neolithic Age, and real change is virtually impossible in society as we know it, Occupy should just strive to make changes in the system as it stands. He claimed that revolution began with demands that were met by the authority; that power was claimed, historically, bit by bit (Singsen). But that’s entirely false. Take our own independence, for example. We claimed all of our freedom at once, not one piece at a time. We didn’t bother to fix a flawed system then, but instead disavowed and redefined a good system entirely. The only difference between then and now is the weapon. Occupy doesn’t need physical strength, but solidarity: peaceful retaliation in the form of civil disobedience.

Nick Beams of the World Socialist Web Site (or wsws.org) says that if Occupy admitted to Singsen’s so-called ‘realism,’ any expression of dissatisfaction would be turned into “so much hot air aimed at turning youth and students away from a struggle in the working class and bringing them back under the wing of the Democratic Party” (Beams 1). The Democrats have proven themselves unable to pull through on their promises for reform, and Occupy refuses to become involved any more. They network and protest, and the numbers of conscious individuals can only grow. Even in the time between when I ‘liked’ the Facebook page for Occupy Salt Lake City and now (about an hour), twelve more people have ‘liked’ the page.

In a short two years, the Occupy Movement has grown from a single event in New York City’s Zuccotti Park into a worldwide opposition to capitalism, a general longing for some higher societal standard. It is not like any movement in our history, because everything we know is under question. But the future of the world is still in our hands. We can choose not to prolong the global economic collapse and rip off the bandage of the 1%. It is my hope that the struggle will stimulate the evolution of mankind, a growth into greater spiritual kinship between all human beings. Perhaps when the dust settles, people will camp in the parks for fun instead!

Works Cited

Bauer, Scott. “Scott Walker, Wisconsin GOP Poised To Cut Worker Rights In Budget Fix.”      

Huffington Post, 15 Feb. 2011. Web. 10 Dec. 2012.

Beams, Nick. “Critical political issues raised by the Occupy movement.” World Socialist Website,

22 Oct. 2011. Web. 5 Dec. 2012.

Berg, John C. “Occupy Wall Street: Does Changing the Story Change Votes?” Suffolk University.,  Web. 26 Nov. 2012.

Caren, Neal; Gaby, Sarah. “Occupy Online: Facebook and the Spread of Occupy Wall Street.”

University of North Carolina. 24 Oct. 2011. Web. 10 Nov. 2012.

Eifling, Sam. “Adbusters’ Kalle Lasn Talks About Occupy Wall Street.” The Tyee. 11 Oct. 2011.

Web, 28 Nov. 2012.

Greenhouse, Steven; Clifford, Stephanie. “Protests Backed by Union Get Wal-Mart’s Attention.”

The New York Times. 18 Nov. 2012. Web. 29 Nov. 2012.

Rosenthal, Phil. “Rant raises profile of CNBC on air personality Rick Santelli.” Chicago Tribune.

23 Feb. 2009

Singsen, Doug. “Autonomous Zone on Wall Street?” Socialist Worker. 11 Oct. 2011.               

Web. 2 Dec. 2012.

Trudell, Megan. “The Occupy Movement and Class Politics in the U.S.” International Socialism:

The Occupy Movement and class politics in the U.S., Issue 133. 9 Jan. 2012.                 Web. 7 Nov. 2012.

12/12 Walmart Action, In Solidarity With West Coast Port Shutdowns. Occupy Denver.               

2 Dec. 2011. Web. 7 Dec. 2012.

Wolff, Richard. Occupy The Economy: Challenging Capitalism (in conversation with David

Barsamian). Open Media Series, City Lights Books, 2012. Print.

Zernike, Kate. Boiling Mad: Inside Tea Party America. BiasAlerts, 2010. Print.

The letters i'm too tired to write

Because my eyes fought their lids,

I closed them instead of writing

in the open notebook before me.

The other three students, all three of them

girls, and I the only man,

continued scribbling.

Like a top set in motion on a wide flat table,

winding down. I was already wound down.

But the sound of pencils could have been

the crawling of landed flies,

searching for food with loose feelers

on a tree ten feet from me—

with my eyes closed.

The busy scratching. Foraging.

I imagined old parchment and inkwells.

I smelled the newly spouting fountain,

over the winged shoulders of cherubs.

Water does have a scent, and cherubs…

they smell like furious pencils,

writing letters to nobody.

Believe it or not, Nobody has a address.

Don’t ask me what it is.

My eyes were closed, remember.

If you want to write a letter to Nobody,

take a sheet of paper and scribble,

until you’ve sharpened three times.

Then fold your paper into an airplane,

and just throw it into the wind.

Oh, and don’t look either. You don’t need your eyes

to find nothing. Just send it out, and on.

That’s just what I did, sitting back in my chair.

I felt the pencil scratches were mine.

Anything is me when my eyes are shut.

Stratum: Some Red Place

It was my assumption that the internet did not

make a sound. My fingers typed

while I watched from a sporting bleacher,

cheering my hurrah like a beached seal.

Whatever I was looking up, it was sandy.

It had to be wrought in pieces,

for soft feet like a yielding surface to tread.

I vaguely remember searching my candy bag

When my tongue got hungry, and finding nothing.

I remember when my hands learned

        to follow lines,         to lag,

               and my head trail

                      knew not

                           to trail, to lag

               knew not trail

     and my head lag—

to follow lines

I grew stiff like cardboard

and got wet in the rain

I hadn’t noticed.

My skull molded to the pressure of the wind.

It was like a soft hammer thump.

Loose particles jumped from the red rock

Of the arch I stood beneath

  In Southern Utah or some red place

  In which I laid with my body

  searing the connected sandstone

that concealed the yawning blue sky

onto the backs of my eyes.

  I see it even when I don’t look,

  like the words inked on a prize page

  neatly sandwiched by hard bookends.

On the internet, I caught Delicate Arch.

I halted my search, lingered on the strata.

The window of the arms was carved, supported.

Ah, the shape was crafted, but not the stone.

The stone was in the bleachers.

My assumption was right:

the breath exhaling from the internet

had truly come from me.

One thing overlooked

I was building a circuit.

There were resistors, capacitors,

and wires of blue, green, white, red

to connect each component.

I soldered for hours,

drew conduits about the central chip,

and created a spaghetti mess

of worms writhing together, 

breathing together, trading electrons

first through the white wire,

then the black, then the red

and through the switch, 

and by the time it reached

the green wire, I hadn't a clue

where the electricity had really gone.

I followed the schematic, 

until there was no more wire

and nothing to solder. 

I flipped the switch, and wasn't surprised

when the circuit didn't work.

Firestarters

I watched the hair model burn.

Her face lifted ashen into her hair.

The clean shaven guy

in the cut black jacket said his last

"Can you hear me now?"

I said, Can YOU hear me now?

I tossed the Costco ads

in the Walmart ads

and watched those new TVs burn,

their price tags curling up

into the screens like a cocoon

in reverse. Spandex

and jeans and denim,

new and used Honda Civics,

watches, shampoos, guitars,

the get-rich-quick schemes,

the new pharmaceuticals 

and the ads for lawyers 

to sue the old pharmaceuticals,

the dentists and cheeky fake suited philanthropists,

feed my fire, 

at least keep me warm tonight.