We Are The 99 Percent

Hey, you busy? Not doing much?

You feel like sobbing like a baby?

Then read the We Are The 99 Percent tumblr.

It’s just a collection of personal stories from people who have worked hard within this cruelly rigged system … people who went to school, sacrificed, did what they were supposed to do, and found that in modern America, being really smart and working really hard and making all the right choices just isn’t enough anymore.

That’s all it is.

It’s not arguing for a political party, it’s not pro- or anti- Obama, it’s just personal stories about how fucked and unsupportable our current level of inequality is.

Because, see, it’s not just that ‘this is a hard time for everyone.’ As Ezra Klein said, “There are a lot of people who are getting an unusually raw deal right now. There is a small group of people who are getting an unusually good deal right now. That doesn’t sound to me like a stable equilibrium.”

This is why Occupy Wall Street is gaining so much traction.

Just being alive shouldn’t be so fucking scary.

Selections from the tumblr and commentary beneath the cut.

A veteran:

I am a military brat and a veteran.
I have lost friends and family to wars fought to make other people rich.

FUCK YOU 1%

I want my Uncle John back.

WE ARE THE 99%

LOL GET A JOB, HIPPIE!

There are a lot of notes from veterans, actually. It turns out that after you get back from fighting an unnecessary war, the government would kind of like it if you would fuck off, please. There’s no place for you.

Of course, there’s no place for a lot of us. Here’s a woman who tried to play by the rules:

I’m a 33 Year Old Woman.

I did EVERYTHING RIGHT:

  • state college (low tuition)
  • worked to pay for my double degree
  • paid my credit card every month
  • got a modest car and paid off early
  • started a retirement account at age 26

BUT NOW

I’ve had no income for ~2 years.

I have no health insurance.

I’m watching my savings dwindle, + don’t know what I’ll do when my “retirement” is over!

The other day my car was stolen, and my first thought was relief that I might cross car insurance + gas off my expense list even though now I’ll have to walk 2 miles back and forth to the library to look for work.

I am no slacker.

I am the 99%.

occupywallstreet.org

LOL GET A JOB, HIPPIE!

See, for decades, when someone would fall through the cracks of society, we’d be told that it was their own fault … that if only they’d been smarter, more diligent, planned better, they wouldn’t be in this situation. That’s not the case any more. Not that it ever was, I guess.

A big part of what makes things scary, of course, is health care. A disproportionate number of the posts on the tumblr are about health care costs and availability. I don’t think people with good health care understand what a pipe dream it is for the rest of us. And also, I don’t think they understand how close to they edge they likely are. Here are two.

First a woman who wants to help a friend:

I am a match to donate a kidney to a friend.

I am also unemployed and have no health insurance (laid off of my job of 20 years).

Was told by the hospital, largest in MD, and friend’s health insurer, largest in the nation, that I must pay for pre-op exams.

The health of my friend should not depend on my lack of money & the greed of corporations.

I am the 99%.

occupywallstreet.org

THAT HIPPIE AND HER FRIEND SHOULD BOTH GET JOBS, LOLAMIRITE?

Next, the story of a mother’s death, accompanied by a picture of what I assume is a box containing her ashes:

My mother had no job, no home, and no healthcare to treat the mental and physical deterioration she suffered.

She committed suicide on 7/8/2010

She was the 99%.

As much as heath care, care for families plays a part. It’s tragic, really … we want so badly to take care of those we love, and often there’s just no way. I don’t know how these people handle it. Two stories of mothers on the edge.

First, a mother of five:

I am the mother of five children. I lost my job 2 years ago as the manager of a hair salon when the bad economy forced it to close. My husband left me and after a year long battle with the bank trying to get a loan modification, Citimortgage is foreclosing on my home. I live in fear everyday. No one will rent to an unemployed, single parent who survives solely on child support. I am the 99 percent. For pity’s sake, someone help us.

How can that not break your heart? “For pity’s sake, someone help us.” You can hear the desperation. Of course, as we all know, that hippie should just get a job.

Finally, the one that sent me out of the room, sobbing. The one that made me write this post:

I am 4 years old. My mom can’t afford to buy me winter clothes, even from the thrift store. She couldn’t buy me a birthday present either. I have never seen her cry so hard!

I am the 99%

occupywallst.org

I can’t even imagine. Jesus. “Get a job, hippie,” seems inappropriate here, so instead I’ll express the same sentiment in some slightly different language:

“If they would rather die,’ said Scrooge, ‘they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”

I’ll end this with something I wrote a while back on Metafilter. It’s my own story.

[This] makes me think of my 23 year old girlfriend who just graduated from college.

She put herself through with zero help from her parents, the first in her family to attend college, was actually thrown out of her home junior year for no longer being a Jehovah’s Witness, graduated with a double major and a minor … all in all, she’s a fucking bad-ass.

Her bad-assery faded though when she was dumped from her office job without explanation about 6 months before graduation, though. And of course, since she was attending college full time, no unemployment for her.

Sure, she sort of managed to kinda/sorta/almost make ends meet through a string of shitty, illegally exploitative part time jobs (WHOOPS! Looks like we forgot to pay you for 2 months! Over Christmas! And didn’t answer our phones! Oh well. I guess if you want to keep working for us you’ll need to endure the ritual humiliation and debasement of us lecturing you on how unprofessional it was to get upset about that.), but mostly it was my assistance that kept the lights on and the water flowing.

And I’ll tell you, I went into debt and it wrecked my credit. She went into debt and it wrecked her credit. She had to blow off her student loan payments for months on end. Neither of us are pot-and-PBR types. We’re hard workers. we just got unlucky enough to live in the Bay Area in the late 2000’s. Of course, the crowning blow was a late-night trip to the emergency room after she passed out randomly one afternoon. No insurance + ER trip = $10,000 neither of us have.

And look … we’re going to be okay. She has a mostly decent job now. We’ve had a lot of help from my parents. Student loans are a godsend for me. She’s very talented, and we’re both smarter than most people. She’s paying off her student loans and her ER bill, and luckily her passing out wasn’t life-threatening or the sort of thing that requires long-term care. We’re putting it all back together. We were very lucky.

BUT, that’s the point.

WE WERE VERY LUCKY.

But there are a lot of people who don’t have a boyfriend or girlfriend who can help carry the load.

There are a lot of people who don’t have parents who are willing or able to help.

There are a lot of people who aren’t smarter or prettier or more talented than the people around them.

There are a lot of people who to to the ER and discover that they’ve got a condition that requires daily treatment that they’ll never be able to afford.

We’re hard fucking workers, but if you think that’s enough anymore, you’re delusional.

We got lucky.

We are the 99%

And, almost certainly, you are too.

This entry was posted in Class, poverty, labor, & related issues, Economics and the like, Education, Health Care and Related Issues. Bookmark the permalink.

117 Responses to We Are The 99 Percent

  1. Robert says:

    “If it takes the labor of .1 farmworkers to produce a ton of food, and the worker is being paid $5 an hour, paying him or her $15 an hour will only raise the price of that ton by $10. If the ton of food is worth $1000 on the market, that’s a 1% raise in the price, or from $1000 to $1010.”

    Yes, if those numbers meant anything, that would be true. But those numbers are not connected to reality. In reality, the labor component of agricultural costs is between 40 and 70 percent, depending on the product, sector, etc. Let’s use 50% as an easily-manipulated back-of-the-envelope guess.

    So in making the ton of food that has a cost of $1000, about $500 went to labor. Doubling that means that the cost of the food goes from $1000 to $1500, and the result on the store shelf is a 50% increase in retail price.

    “Your position seems to be that paying agricultural laborers so little that the only people who will take these jobs are third world illegals who have nothing. This would be OK why?”

    Your position seems to be that we should take jobs away from third world illegals who have nothing, and instead give those jobs to the most privileged and wealthy of the world’s citizens. How is that OK?

    The answer, of course, is that the way we assess whether a transaction is “OK” is to determine whether each party to the transaction is voluntarily engaging in it. Whether we think the decisions of these third parties are “correct” or not is irrelevant; what is relevant is whether they are free to choose.

    Businesses (almost) always take the lowest-cost alternative that yields an acceptable outcome. If labor is available for $10/hour, they’ll use that labor. If labor is available for $1/hour, they’ll use that labor instead (if its productivity is at least 10% of the more-compensated worker).

    If you want to raise wages for farmworkers, deport a few million more illegal immigrants and seal the border. (I know, and reject, Amp’s request for less accurate language.) That will strike many (including me) as somewhat inhumane. However, the alternative strategies (like raising the agricultural minimum wage and pouring money into enforcement) are much less likely to succeed. It’s far better (and easier) to make a crime impossible than it is to make a crime expensive.

  2. Elusis says:

    I have no doubt that in some industries — the US auto industry is the obvious example — unions have decreased productivity. But there are also cases where unions increase productivity.

    I’d also like to put on the table that “productivity” isn’t the only worthwhile measure of union effects. Teacher’s unions and nurse’s unions have (tried) to advocate for better (lower) ratios of providers to those they service. This looks like a “decline in productivity” but a teacher is more effective with 20 students than 30, and a nurse can provide safer, better care with 8 ICU patients than with 18.

  3. Sebastian H says:

    Amp, I’m really confused. You appear to be agreeing with me that the scientific literature on the matter DOES NOT show that on average union members are more skilled and/or more productive than non-union members.

    You cited it as if it disagreed with me, but it agrees with my statement.

  4. gin-and-whiskey says:

    Ampersand says:
    November 1, 2011 at 12:48 pm

    G&W, thanks for clarifying the context.

    Sebastian:

    In any case, anyone who thinks that union workers are more skilled, even on average, is wrong.

    To believe this, you’d have to believe either that a) Unions do not successfully improve pay or working conditions, or b) more skilled workers do not gravitate towards better pay or working conditions. I don’t think either of those ideas are plausible.

    Why would you have to believe either of those things, at all?

    Unions moderate. they act as a group. they share group interests.

    Much like buying insurance, making a safe investment, traveling in a group, unions make use of solidarity.

    But of course unions also limit advancement: it’s part of the groupthink. I can find you cites where someone will get elected “best teacher of the year” and promptly get laid off in favor of others who didn’t get that award, due to seniority.

    If you’re the best teacher/electrician/etc in the world, you don’t want to be in a union. You want to be somewhere that you get paid for your excellence–and usually that means that the folks who AREN’T excellent get paid less. there’s a reason that Apple isn’t unionized.

    Skilled workers DO gravitate towards better pay and conditions. It’s just that if you’re a really skilled worker, you don’t need the union, because you’re capable of getting more money based on your skill level.

  5. Eytan Zweig says:

    When I lived in the US, I found it very surprising how people tended to have very categorical views of unions. It was the Bush years, and I was in grad school in New York – almost all my American friends were very politically astute and very critical of the power structures around them, quick to point out that even if an authority does good, it can also do wrong in the same time.

    But – in almost all cases – not unions. I can think of at least three examples of people who I have a lot of respect for, who were able to deconstruct nuances of race and gender politics far better than me, who treated unions like dogma. I was at NYU during the graduate student strike of 2005, a fight for postgrad’s right to unionize. I supported the cause. I also thought that the actual union in question – the United Auto Workers union, to which NYU grad students belonged – mismanaged the whole thing from beginning to end. Not just the fight – even before the whole thing began, there were more and more signs that the union simply had no idea what the realities of grad student life were about. The culture of the union was totally wrong, and in more than one case the student body as a whole had to give up benefits because the union argued that they can’t allow one chapter to have a benefit that would not apply in other chapters.

    But my friends did not care about that. Unions were sacrosanct to them – if the union said jump, they jumped.

    The same applies on the opposite side of the political spectrum, obviously. Unions are viewed as bad, period. No nuance, no discussion.

    In my opinion – well, one thing we can learn from the history of popular revolution in the 20th century is that there’s a general pattern. An oppressive regime is toppled by the power of people, and a new power structure is established. This power structure starts out ideological, but as it settles in to its role, it turns to self-preservation. The powerful are conservative – they seek to maintain the status quo. Often at the expense of the people whose support was necessary for the power.

    Unions are much the same. In situtations where unions are actively fighting injustice for the workers, they are powerful tools. In situations where the union has become powerful and has control over the situation, it establishes structures that are often inemical to the very workers that form it. Sometimes this is the lesser evil, compared to what the absence of the union will bring. Sometimes it is the greater evil.

    I believe that unions are necessary – but unions are first and foremost tools, not ideals. I think it’s extremely important to allow workers to self organize – and at the same time, it’s extremely important that people push back against unions as they stagnate.

  6. Robert says:

    The other structural feature of a power shift, Eytan, is a scramble for power among a new class of power-seekers. Under the previous status quo, power seekers had sought and obtained all the power and were holding/enjoying/exploiting it. Then there’s a revolution, and a whole group of power-seekers who had previously been excluded or held down sees their chance, and (usually) relatively quickly these people displace the sincere idealists who likely led or fought the revolution. The power-seekers win, because power-seekers are better at getting power than idealists are, and set up a new hierarchy with themselves at the top.

  7. RonF says:

    Speaking of power structures and how people scramble where there are changes therein, here’s something that the OWS and the Tea Party can join hands to praise:

    Insider Cellini convicted on corruption charges

    Mr. Cellini is part of the 1%. In fact, he’s probably part of the 0.1%. Nominally he was a Republican. But when Democrats that were part of the power structure needed help he was there with his checkbook. Whether or not you were part of the Combine, the people in power who want to stay there and amass wealth while they’re doing it, was far more important than party or ideology.

    William Cellini, Illinois’ ultimate political insider who for more than four decades worked quietly behind the scenes to amass wealth and power, was convicted Tuesday for joining an age-old conspiracy scheme that demanded campaign cash for access.

    A federal jury convicted the 76-year-old longtime Republican lobbyist and fundraiser of agreeing to use his considerable power at an Illinois teachers pension board to help put the squeeze on a Hollywood producer who wanted to continue to do business with the state.

    He got on the Illinois teacher pension board because he did a great job fundraising for the Combine and it was to the pension board’s advantage to hire him to use his influence on their behalf. He got wealthy in part by being rewarded with bonuses and finder’s fees in convincing the pension board to invest in businesses owned by people who wanted him to use his influence on their behalf. He also got money, as can be seen above, by convincing Illinois’ State officials to give contracts and grants to the right people.

    So. Now. The 77-year-old Mr. Cellini has got a couple of choices. Spend the rest of your life in jail. Or, talk. And turn in the people who paid him the bribes and the people who benefited when he earned them. This man has for decades been at the dead center of the market place where the public interest is bought and sold by politicians, corporations and unions. It’s no coincidence that 4 of our last 8 governors have done or are doing time for felonies relating to bribes and influence peddling. One of the 1% is going to jail, folks – and with any luck he’ll take a few more of them with him.

    The charges against Cellini centered on his longtime influence at the Illinois Teachers’ Retirement System, the state pension fund for public school teachers outside Chicago. To keep from losing his clout there after Blagojevich became the first Democratic governor of Illinois in more than a quarter-century, prosecutors alleged, the multimillionaire Republican fundraiser agreed to pick firms to manage TRS’ hundreds of millions of dollars in investments on one key condition — that they had contributed to Blagojevich’s campaign.

    Prosecutors alleged that two key Blagojevich advisers, Antoin “Tony” Rezko and Christopher Kelly, targeted Hollywood producer Thomas Rosenberg after learning he had not made any contributions to the then-governor’s campaign even though his investment firm had a lucrative deal with TRS.

    Cellini, working with corrupt TRS board member Stuart Levine, was to relay the message to Rosenberg that a $220 million allocation from TRS would be held up until he made a campaign contribution.

    That’s how these people stay in power, folks. The most amazing thing about it is that when they get arrested and tried they keep saying “But that’s how it works. Everyone does that. That’s politics.” That may be how it works, but so far no jury has agreed that it’s legal. To give you an idea of how hard this guy was to pin down, the prosecutor had to convict our last two governors before they could get the goods on him.

  8. RonF says:

    In my opinion – well, one thing we can learn from the history of popular revolution in the 20th century is that there’s a general pattern. An oppressive regime is toppled by the power of people, and a new power structure is established. This power structure starts out ideological, but as it settles in to its role, it turns to self-preservation. The powerful are conservative – they seek to maintain the status quo. Often at the expense of the people whose support was necessary for the power.

    This is a specific sub-set of a more general case of power structure changes that goes back to antiquity. There’s nothing special about the power change having happened through the agency of popular revolution. Something that the founders of this country though their study of history (especially Greek and Roman) knew quite well. That’s why they split power up both among levels of government and among branches within each level. The inefficiency that many decry once their favorite gets into power was built in so that said favorite would be easier to dislodge should he or she try to consolidate and perpetuate power.

  9. Angela Kirsch says:

    My parents immigrated to Canada in 1960. Both spoke no English and took minimum wage jobs in the restaurant industry. In less than a year they managed to put enough money aside to buy a house (14,000 dollars) same house now worth about 400,000 dollars, and also buy a year old car. Nowadays minimum wage means you can barely afford rent, let alone food and other necesities. They had 2 children at the time as well, and none of us went hungry.
    I don’t think most people care about what the rich have, all of us have the dream that we might be rich someday, but I think what we all really want is to be able to have a home and the necesities in life without having daily stress and having to spend more and more time working to just maintain ourselves. I remember my parents always had weekends off, nothing was open Sunday and most businesses were closed Saturday too. We actually had family time.
    It’s sad to see how it is now considered a virtue to work as much as you can, no thought given to how you can sustain a family with so little time to spend. Whatever happened to the pursuit of happiness? Does it really make anyone happy to spend every day working? Someone said recently that that was how to achieve the American dream. Is that dream to die working?
    People seem to spend their lives afraid, there are less jobs, standards of living are dropping and you can’t just live anymore. It’s sad to watch morning traffic reports, the roads fill earlier and earlier and the traffic goes later and later. Does anyone have time to enjoy life anymore?
    We’re told it’s our fault if we’re not rich, if we can’t find a job, if we didn’t get lucky, it’s like winning the lotto, if you can find a job that will pay you a living wage and be able to keep it long enough so that you might be able to retire someday. A lot of jobs would be freed for younger people if older people could retire. We live longer now, and that’s supposed to be good, but what is our life really like and is it really good to live longer if your life is filled with fear and uncertainty?
    We need to go back to the time when minimum wage gave you what was minimally required for a decent and happy life, a home, a family and the ability to live and be able to enjoy it.

  10. Karen Wickman says:

    Keeping Them Honest: Republican policy has proven over the past decade to be a failed economic policy. Over the past ten years, they have spent billions in Medicare and military spending, and lowered taxes. It’s why we’re in debt! They keep stating that they want economic growth to pay for the government spending, but that policy hasn’t worked over the past decade. We’re trillions of dollars in debt. We need to raise revenue by increasing taxes on the 1%, and by enforcing and closing corporate tax loopholes. The middle class keeps losing ground due to these failed policies. Why don’t republicans offer a new policy and stop the insanity of trying the same policies that haven’t worked for America?

    May I remind you of the definition of insanity: doing the same thing and expecting a different result?

    Sincerely,
    Karen Wickman

  11. Susan says:

    Angela #109 this is a fabulous post.

    I grew up in this kind of world too, about ten years earlier. My father was a professional (accountant) but people who didn’t make as much money as he did did well too, as you describe. What used to be called working class. My mom did not work outside the home, most moms didn’t, and my dad worked regular hours, home for dinner, no weekends. We had one car – only the mega-rich had more than one car – and my mom saved for months to buy an electric mixer…I guess I’m saying there weren’t as many material goods around, but we did have security, and a modest job was enough to raise a family on.

    And we had time to be a family.

    What has happened in the last generation, as it has been described to me, is that real wages were flat or slightly declining while prices continued to rise. So first, the wives went to work, not usually as hot-shot lawyers like myself, but mostly in more boring and less rewarding occupations; then lots of people started working more than one job to keep up; then people borrowed huge amounts of money. Now this entire structure has fallen down, and too many people cannot find work at all, and even more frequently what work they can find is not adequate to support a family.

    I think you’re right. Most people do not think they are going to get rich, or really want to even; and we don’t “have it in for” the rich necessarily, but we feel that something is wrong with the situation you and I have described here.

    I am not an economist, and there is a lot here that I don’t understand, but I believe that we can and should structure our collective life so that, as you put it so well, ordinary working people have “what [is] minimally required for a decent and happy life, a home, a family and the ability to live and be able to enjoy it.”

  12. Nordic Cruz says:

    Slavery is a violation of the 13th amendment. Food, shelter, clothes and transportation to labor. It’s 1444 all over again. Why does everyone pay the same amount for finite products? (Gas, Food, Water, etc). This practice creates inflation, because of increased demand on the part of the wealthy. Why does the person making $1,600.00 a month pay $3.50 a gallon for gas and the person making $100,000.00 a month pay $3.50 a gallon for gas? Shouldn’t the $100,000.00 a month person pay $219.00 a gallon? By % that’s what the $1,600.00 a month person is paying. We all have to breathe the exhaust. Democracy?

  13. Pingback: The Fifteen Most Popular “Alas” Posts of 2011 | Alas, a Blog

  14. Matt Salisbury says:

    I think we should remember that as consumers we hold a powerful position, similar to that when protesters unite to form a single loud voice. I think we should unite with our consuming as one voice and let companies sell themselves to us. For example we could agree to boycott any company that does not agree to our consumer requirements. Perhaps we could only trade with companies that operated below 10% profits and shared the rest among their employees, or companies where there is no single employee being paid more than 100k. We could unite to form a voice representing millions of consumers and force the money to be spread out with our massive buying power. This is only the skeleton of the idea but I am sure the only way to bring down the 1% is to control where our money goes in large numbers.

  15. Robert says:

    It’s not a terrible idea, Matt, but do recall that lots – by no means all – of the 1% are in their position because they are really, really good at persuading people (whether legitimately or otherwise) that they’re the ones offering the best deals, value, ethical consumer choice, customer experience, etc.

    Steve Jobs wasn’t rich because he robbed orphanages, he was rich because he convinced huge numbers of the 99% to send him thousands of dollars for fancy white gadgets.

  16. Desmond says:

    If every one of the 99% want to have the respect and support from our representatives in the house and senate, all we have to do is to change your voter’s registration from: Republican or Democrat to Independent, This will show we are no longer voting for any party, but only for any person that will do good for America and all Americans, it will also show that it is not necessary to support the need, and reason to form a third party, because we will all be voting for the person of our choice that will represent the wishes of all Americans.

    If all of the 99% with money in the stock market, bonds, mutual funds, or any banks, immediately remove your money, to credit unions or any other avenue. By doing so this would be an effective action that will show the establishments that you disagree with them and how they are currently handling our money.

    If we all exercise these simple actions we will achieve great results.

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