Regarding the Occupy Wall Street protests, ABC News quotes presidential hopeful Herman Cain as saying that people who are not rich have only themselves to blame. "Don’t blame Wall Street," he told protesters, in an interview with the Wall St. Journal. "Don’t blame the big banks. If you don’t have a job and you’re not rich, blame yourself. It’s not a person’s fault because they succeeded. It is a person’s fault if they failed. And so this is why I don’t understand these demonstrations and what is it that they’re looking for."
In the same article, a Wall-Streeter tweets "A protester sees my Benz, and wants to rip me out of it. A real man sees my car, and wants to work hard so he can buy it one day."
I have been blessed with a personality that feels deeply about issues of social justice, and cursed with a personality that does not express or argue those feelings well. I tread lightly, keeping the peace and not wishing to provoke or offend people with different ideas, income levels, and value systems. I try to find areas of common ground, and centrist positions on which we can all agree. I don’t like to argue with friends, with family, or even with strangers when nothing good can come of it.
All of that stated, Mr. Cain and Mr. Wall Street, yours is the kind of horse shit that comes out of the flapping lips of people of means every day.
Say that you, reader, want a private jet and a house in the Bahamas. If you do not achieve this in your lifetime, have you failed, per Mr. Cain? Is it your fault? Do you just need to work harder until you can buy your jet? Is your inability to obtain this simply a factor of the choices that you made – because you became a cop rather than a Wall Street banker, or took a career in the military instead of becoming a hedge fund manager?
America is a place of dreams, and a place of opportunity. It is also a place in which social mobility has become harder and harder to achieve, where the middle class is evaporating, and in which jobs are harder to find. It’s a place where one working person in a family could buy a house in the 50’s, two in the 70’s, and maybe two in the 2000’s with the help of a no-doc jumbo mortgage that balloons in 3 years, with a HELOC buying the new appliances. After all, appliances are part and parcel of the middle class.
America is a place in which education is better for the upper-class who can afford private schools with better teachers and an Asian girl who can take their daughter’s SATs. If you live in the ghetto, you could be functionally illiterate when you graduate with straight A’s, and when you can’t write a college entrance essay, Community College won’t even look at you.
Anyway, about that Benz that I’m simply not working hard enough to achieve – it must be very easy to look through the windshield of it every day, instead of through the bars that you so richly deserve to be looking through, and tell the people who are upset at your existence to shut up.
I believe what Mr. Cain is saying is more so to stop whining and start trying. Failure is dictated by when you decide to give up. If you tried all of your life to be able to afford a private jet and at the end of your days you never achieved that goal, I don’t see that person as a failure but more one of the most persistent and driven individuals ever. It is not the responsibility of the rich to give money to those of us who are falling on hard times. That is a low-level and temporary solution to a much bigger problem. Entitlement is the biggest problem plaguing the United States, and I believe we need to really buckle down and attack this problem.
Cain says people who are not rich have only themselves to blame. “Don’t blame Wall Street,” he told protesters, in an interview with the Wall St. Journal. “Don’t blame the big banks. If you don’t have a job and you’re not rich, blame yourself. It’s not a person’s fault because they succeeded. It is a person’s fault if they failed. And so this is why I don’t understand these demonstrations and what is it that they’re looking for.”
====================
There is something fundamentally wrong with this argument put forward by the 1%. It is strikingly similar to Mary’s Queen of France before she was beheaded by the masses. “Let them eat Cake”. Which while the message actually means, “If you can’t afford to eat bread, find something else to eat”, on the outside is very derogatory.
Cain’s message, and the %1′s message, is no different. And while the 1% have have been telling us for years, the best way to make money, is to loan it out. What they haven’t been telling people, is that when loans go bad, you need to be the first in line to get paid. (ie .. protect your investment.)
Unfortunately, when the DOT COM collapse occurred, this shifted a lot of wealth out of the hands of middle class. Collapses that followed have been aftershocks of that initial collapse. People had to choose between their house or car, and initially they choose their cars. Then when the jobs didn’t return, they lost their houses.
Everyone wants to blame corporations for transferring jobs to foreign countries. But that’s not the real problem. The problem is that in order for corporations to survive, they have to acquire more and more. The larger the corporation, the great it’s chances of it’s success, as long as the markets it relies on remain stable. Or it is able to transition between markets.
Take Kodak. They have dominated the film and photography industry for decades. Until, the digital camera caught up with them. Their attempts to transition into the digital camera’s was a nice attempt, but then PDA’s, Cell Phones, Cameras, MP3 players and Game Boy’s merged. Then came the IPAD. Kodak was unable to keep up with the capital investments needed to merge the build the next generation of technology. Nor were they positioned to build such equipment.
Take AIG. They follow financial trends. They started betting on the possibility that the mortgages would fail. There wasn’t a possibility that the mortgages would fail, they knew that they would fail. People had to choose between their cars and their houses. They when the jobs didn’t return, the mortgages would fail.
But why didn’t the jobs return? Obama said it in his inauguration speech, “Entrepreneurs, will create the next generation of jobs for Americans.” In order for entrepreneurs to do this, they need money. They need someone to bet on them. Financially. So, without backing entrepreneurs can’t fund their next technological innovations, and can’t create American Jobs.
People who make the right turn are rewarded. People who make the wrong turn are penalized. And when groups are caught up in the decisions that giant corporations make, simple descriptions from politicians like Cain are inherent false. Their logic ignores the very fact when his bid for presidency fails, he will have to lay off his staff. But, will he tell them that it’s their own fault for choosing to follow him when his potential of winning was 35%?
No, just as in France, the rich are only concerned with one predilection. They are concerned with their own petty need to sustain their comfortable life style and status. And if the masses complain, then the rule of law, created by the wealthy, which ignores the needs of the many, will be enforced and imposed in order to sustain and order that maintains their status.
However, history has repeated this issue over and over again. Ba-steal, Soviet Union, China, Industrial Revolution, Rail Roads, and many more revolts between the rich and the poor. Those who have bought their way safety and security through legal means, rely on the populous to agree to the contract. However, when the fundamental integrity of the contract has been warped so far out of proportion and the true intent of the wealthy is not to help the poor live a decent life, then the poor (their masses) will rise up again, demanding, “Peace, Truth, Liberty, Fairness and Justice once again for all.”