“I Am Wall Street”

A friend passes on this samizdat anti-Occupy one-pager, first found at Occupy Chicago. It’s amusing, but 1) it’s not original.* The text first appeared in a chain e-mail in 2010, sent around Wall Street, printed by (among other places) Business Insider. And 2) it suffers from the fatal conceit of most conservative anti-Occupy anger. There are diehard socialists and minarchists and (worst of all) Parecon devotees in the mob, but the demands they all agree on are ones that would put the wealth gap where it was 10 or 15 years ago. Slightly higher taxes on the rich. No loopholes for corporations. (This idea is actually embraced, in a different form, by Republicans.) If you got every Occupier to the table and forced him to choose only one demand, based on what I’ve seen here and at Rebuild the Dream events, I think they’d choose campaign finance reform and the undoing of Citizens United. That wouldn’t effect the average Wall Streeter in the adverse way described here. For now, anti-Occupiers still choose to view the movement in cartoon terms. While we’re on it: I don’t think the Wall Streeter stopping “buying the $80,000 car,” and instead buying one for $40,000, has the same adverse effect on the economy as a jobless person going off unemployment and ceasing to spend money on luxuries at all.
*Thanks to a couple of people for reminding me about this.