Why Occupy?

I feel like a failed liberal sometimes. Or maybe it’s just turning 40… and the natural exuberance of youth finally petering out as I crest the hill of middle age.

I don’t like the Occupy movement.

First of all… semantics. Occupation has overtones of when a larger, more powerful government or people… subjugates, exploits, colonizes or marginalizes another people. Most of the Age of Exploration was people from one country amazingly “discovering” another people... and new real estate... and then taking it because they could.

Poor choice of words people….

And I have direct personal reasons…for one… they tend to like to occupy downtown Chicago which I have to drive through twice daily to get to and from work. And I’ve heard stories from friends and other coworkers who go to downtown meetings about getting shouted at… spat on… and harassed because they happen to be in business attire and walking into an office building. Does the Occupy Movement not realize that 99% of the folks who work in finance… are ALSO the 99%? And can't they tell the difference between a custom and off the rack suit? What… are the people who work in finance supposed to throw away their CPA license and become hairdressers?

My Mother worked downtown for years… and my Great Aunt Helen. Both at Continental Bank, which enjoyed its own financial scandal back in the early 1980’s after it snapped up a bunch of bad oil and gas investments from Penn Square. She was a computer operator… back when computers looked like storage furniture from Ikea. Which meant she spent most of her time mounting and dismounting data reels and pulling reports off of the printers. Not what I’d call a career... but it was a decent job.

Until I was about 10, she worked the night shift and I saw her as this sleeping lump in the bed most of the time. And then the bank started to collapse… and Mom’s hours got kind of crazy for a while until she was doing more “part-time” maid work for Phone-A-Maid than she was working at the bank. Then she started doing full-time maid work because it paid better than WORKING AT A BANK.

I digress…

The thing is… corporations are some of the largest employers of the 99%. YOU know or are related to someone who works in the financial sector. I work for a corporation… though not a publicly held one. If people started protesting outside my workplace…I’d have to say…”Hey…what gives? It’s a pretty decent place to work. Good benefits. Good wages. So it’s a little quirky at times… what company isn’t?”

And I imagine most people who work for BoA and Chase and La Salle feel the same way. And the liberal (mostly white…and college-aged… i.e. people who have probably never held down a job before) youth of America is beating wash pail drums outside of their office window and shouting slogans like…”This is what a police state looks like.” Meanwhile… the greedy Mr. Potter that they really should be shouting at probably lives in another state…probably somewhere with less traffic. This isn’t freaking Bedford Falls… it’s Chicago. If you were rich beyond belief… would you live here… or somewhere else where the sandy beaches didn’t freeze solid every December? Hmmmm?

In the meantime… I’m stuck in traffic while the police try to clear protesters off of Michigan Avenue… anxiously looking at my gas gauge hoping I have enough to get me home. Gas that I’m paying for. And we ALL pay taxes for the overtime required for the police… and trash removal folks who have to clean up after the police state we all apparently live in. You wanna see a police state? Visit North Korea. Go to western Africa. Send me a postcard from Somalia.

We are SO FUCKING LUCKY to be living in this police state… there are people in other countries who… after walking two days into town for food, water and medical supplies… will look at those silly Americans on the town’s only working television set… fat with warm coats and the best REI camping equipment money can buy… and here’s what they think…

"What are they so upset about? I can’t leave my house because I may get raped. Three of my children have died. Two of my teenage sons have been taken and forced into the army. I have AIDS… and who will take care of my kids when I’m gone?"

This might be the message to send to corporate America… but what kind of message does it send to everyone else? To the REAL 99%. It’s like we’re fucking shouting “I want my MTV!”

Unbelievable.

And these campouts… are not the bucolic Woodstock love and flowers places that we think they are. I was freaking scared out of my mind sitting in my Toyota while protesters flooded around me. I had momentary visions of the LA riots and having my car flipped over. And Chicago is TAME compared to the Oakland folks… where the Occupy movement has become a breeding ground for crime… and a “fuck the police” mentality that doesn’t take into account that the police thanklessly do one of the crappiest jobs on the planet. Imagine if you were the cashier at Wal-Mart… and every customer who came by heckled you for even lower prices… or spat at you because your job supported child labor in China… or you had to tackle them to get them to pay for their stuff? And then when it was closing time… they WOULDN’T LEAVE. And then they decided to move into the home and garden section like Natalie Portman in “Where the Heart Is.” How does that police officer feel when they tell you to move along… tell you to get back on the sidewalk…try to let traffic pass… and you flip them off… call them a pig… and then get angry with them when in order to do their jobs… they have to muscle you around. Because protesting is perfectly legal… and the police know that. Squatting on someone else’s property… is NOT. Even public property. And if it is… sweet!! I’m plunking a mobile home down in Warren Park and cutting my commute down to a five minute walk. And I expect the taxpayers to pay for my water and sewage hookup…

I'm not against protesting... not by a long shot. Every Thursday morning I see the same group of people... protesting the Iraq war... standing at the overpass on Austin and 290. Every week... a visible reminder that we're still at war. That American Soldiers are overseas when they should be here... with their families. Peaceful. Non-disruptive. And very poignant. At first... I thought they were annoying. Then silly. Now... YEARS later... I have a LOT of respect for them. I spend my morning swearing in traffic. These retired hippies spend theirs reminding me of the real cost of war.

In contrast... at first I was thumbs up for the Occupy Movement... until its underbelly started to show. OK... you have everyone's attention. Now what? You don't want to pick representatives to negotiate because you're a "true democracy" and negotiation means consensus...blah, blah... Have you EVER tried to get anything done when all decisions are made by a committee before? What are you smoking?

There are people all over the world who have no choice but to live in tent cities. You're not proving anything by doing it too. Even if yours has free daycare (scary...stranger daycare) and a yoga tent.

So… since it’s not good to critique something without proposing an alternate solution… here goes:

Back in the day… and that day is the 1980’s… “health food stores” sold dusty boxes of dehydrated hummus… and all sorts of weirdness coated with carob. A few bags of unusual grain… maybe a case or two of frozen food… and three to four aisles of supplements. Occasionally… they carried this strange thing called “organic produce” which was still pretty much in its embryonic stage in development. Did organic mean grown without spraying? Added cow poop? Something I needed to wash extra well before eating? Now… I can shop at Whole Foods… for organic, vegan, sustainable, shade grown…fair trade everything. An idea… has become an industry. And a pretty well managed one. And it did it because someone got tired of carob rice cakes and protein powder that smelled like the inside of a gym locker… and decided to take organic… corporate. Now we have “locally grown” movements… slow food… eating in season. More people give a crap about where their food comes from NOW then they have since we all pretty much grew it ourselves. The health food nuts… have an industry built around their wants and needs for handmade soap and tofu. They wanted better choices… and voila!

And I think that’s what finance needs… we need to demand something DIFFERENT from our financial institutions. We wanted easy home loans and home equity loans... and look where that got us? Right now all we want is free checking and low ATM fees. So… the OM had “move your money to a small bank day.” And every large bank in America that had free checking and e-deposit consumer accounts was probably saying…”THANK YOU JESUS” because now the customers who are annoying them for very little profit have gone off to bother the folks at the small local bank where you have to pay forty cents per check. Buh-by now… and don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out…

*chuckle*

The thing about the housing bubble…at least that I noticed when my Corus Bank account mysteriously changed to MB Financial… is that a lot of those small local banks failed… sometimes in more spectacular ways than the larger banks who were considered “too big to fail.” And I’m going to go back to” It’s a Wonderful Life” and Bedford Falls... because my first lesson about finance was watching the movie one Christmas...remember the run on the Building and Loan scene? Where is my money? Is it in my neighbor’s home and business when I deposit it into my savings account? Is it paving the road outside of my house?

Yeah…right. It’s bundled into some sort of interest asset portfolio… when it’s making any interest at all. Probably invested in Mutual Funds… or some such financial gibberdy-flibbit that I couldn’t pronounce much less understand. If you want to bank with the Bailey Building and Loan… you need to join a Credit Union. (I belong to one...FYI.) You'll get higher interest rates on your savings… AND your money will be helping to buy another member of the CU a new car, house … or send their kid to Lincoln Tech. Because they give out pretty sensible loans, at reasonable interest rates… and do a pretty good job of scoping out what you want to DO with the money… and make sure it has nothing to do with Las Vegas. No easy money or 10k limit credit card.

The other thing that bothers me is… a lot of the 1% worked pretty fucking hard to get that money. Bill Gates could have been a complete grease spot on the road to riches… you know? Bigger risks… bigger rewards… and if you look at some of the “ultra-rich” … they’re not. I’m in better financial shape than Donald Trump where debt to income ratio is concerned. AND I’ll never have to worry about Hair Club for Men. Even where I work...I’ve met our company president… actually had breakfast with him once. (I won breakfast in a company contest...I don't have THAT fancy of a job where I eat breakfast with our CEO on a daily basis.) And for one… he’s REALLY smart. Really smart. And a very interesting person to listen to. For two… I know he’s probably the hardest working person in the company. Sure… he flies planes as a hobby… and that’s the sort of hobby you have to have more than “disposable income” to do. But he also... I think... really believes that our company is here FIRST to make great stuff for our customers... SECOND to provide great jobs for it's employees... and THIRD... to give back to the shareholders and community. And I’d like to say he’s unique and that I live in la-la never-never land...but with the exception of one job I’ve had… the company presidents have never been amoral asshats. (The ONE would be the philandering president of my first job out of college… who will remain nameless.)

I’d like to see the Occupy Movement start supporting an alternative financial system… or SPECIFIC REFORM to our current system. Social equity…ok…HOW? What do you want the other half of the 1%... who got their money manipulating the system… to do? You think they care? What would you like our government to do to them… or for us? Tax them all the way to a new home-office in the Caribbean? Slime will always ooze. And yeah... for every decent CEO there's someone who has dollar signs tattooed to the inside of their eyelids. But Bill Gates and my company’s CEO… they deserve every penny they make as far as I’m concerned. A lot of the Chicago-based companies...seem pretty decent. It's hard enough to want to get people to move their business to Chicago... and here we are beating drums while they're trying to work.

There has to be a way to build a Whole Foods out of the carob snack shack here somewhere… but Occupy isn’t doing much more than making noise… trash… and will possibly someday incite a riot.