"We are the 53%"

So there's now a Tumblr called "We Are the 53%" that's made as a rebuttal to the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Their argument is that people in America can be successful under the current system, and that poor people getting government help makes them "lazy" and "entitled."

I'll tell you why this is bullshit. First off, many of these success stories are from older individuals, who came from a time where you could easily become successful off of hard work alone. Because of Reagan, though, corporate practices have made it so that you can't do that anymore without being lucky. For every success story, there are ten stories of failure.

Second, just because these people become successful doesn't mean we should avoid helping those who can't.

Third, accusing someone of "entitlement issues" ignores that there are things that people should be entitled to, health insurance being the most prominent. You shouldn't have to die simply because you can't afford treatment.

It doesn't help that one of the starters' "three jobs" are all affluent high-paying ones. When you hear someone "works three jobs" you assume it's to pay the bills. In other words, he's not in the same boat as the people protesting, and yet is pretending he is.

The only remotely valid "it's the poor people's fault" argument, in terms of sociology, is the "cyclical poverty theory," as it relates to sociological thought processes.

In a nutshell, it goes like this: a generation becomes poor, usually in a large, broad area. The next generation grows up poor, and learns to believe that the system is utterly broken and that they have no chance. Thus, they don't bother trying. This goes on and on and it gets to the point where either the government intervenes, people scrape together enough to move and the area is left abandoned, or some people get lucky and come back to uplift the area, if they're nice.

However, this still really isn't "it's the poor people's fault," since there's the caveat that they had to become poor in the first place, and the vast majority of poor people are poor by virtue of the economic system we use being broken in one form or another, and not for lack of trying to make it work.

That's my take on the matter, anyhow. Basically, these people are buying too much into the bylines of hardline economic conservatives who think that everything can be solved with individual initiative, when it's actually group initiative that gets things changed... and as they rig the game by shoving groups that would enact change they don't like underwater while incentivizing moral hazard bullshit by groups that are partial to them due to favors they receive under the system espoused by the hardline economic conservatives.

TL;DR: These people Fail Sociology Forever.

Neither the Occupy Movement nor the "53%" website appear to be about entitlement programs. It's about who to blame for unemployment. The Occupy people are claiming that Wall Street is to blame for the fact that they lost their jobs and cant find another one, while the 53's are claiming that since they could find a job, anyone can.

Also, the 53's appear to conflate complaining about being unemployed with an attack on America and American Capitalism itself. In other words, they may be attacking a Straw Man.

I'm just worried how many more percents are going to spring up for me to keep track of. 99% I can handle, and I guess I can remember what 53% is. But my brain is like a goddamn sieve with things like this, it's not gonna hold much else.

edited 14th Oct '11 11:38:02 AM by Pykrete

I haven't looked at it much, but a lot of the ones I've seen re-posted elsewhere are from younger people—high school/college students who have never been independent before—declaring "I WILL be the 53%." I can't help but think these people are in for quite the rude awakening once they graduate.

From what I understand, the 53% refers to those who pay Federal Taxes. ie, those whose income puts them above the poverty line.

Hell, I fall into that category and I have more sympathy for OWS than this. "We are the 53%" isn't about solutions, it's about ignoring the problem.

America has a culture built around accountability and the image of the self-made man/woman; You can do whatever you want and you have the capability to make your dreams come true with your own two hands. As a result, there's a tendency to see people who aren't successful as "too lazy to do anything about it" because the mindset is that people would be successful if they just tried hard enough.

That, of course, completely disregards the fact that, sometimes, there are things that happen in life that people have absolutely no control over. That doesn't mean people should give up, but automatically writing people off as entitled and lazy is way too easy and just gets people pissed at you.

EDIT: As far as that one guy who is working three jobs, I think there shouldn't be a situation where anyone has to work three jobs in order to provide for their family.

edited 14th Oct '11 11:44:44 AM by RedViking

The 53 percenters strike me as wrong and/or arrogant with a 78% chance of astroturf.

edited 14th Oct '11 11:44:08 AM by Balmung

And how.

The American Individualist spirit has devolved into a free-for-all irrationally-based game of "who can be the biggest and most selfish jackass?"

Emile Durkheim's theory on anomie. A classic and fundamental part of sociology. As individual liberty increases, individual morality decreases. Even without the moral absolutism, it's true that liberty going up causes principles to go down, and it eventually hits a zenith at which point society implicitly decides that anything goes.

Either it gets fixed, or the whole thing implodes. Sadly, Durkheim (and Max Weber, for that matter) isn't around today to tell us what he thinks of the matter...

edited 14th Oct '11 11:45:00 AM by USAF713

I hear it all the time from people who make as much, or as little as I do, even from those who are currently in no position to start their own business, create something new, offer or seek any investments, or any of the things that you supposedly need to do to make it big. Many work for government jobs like myself, with no sign of quitting.

I can understand recognizing what it takes to make it big and respect that effort, but it's another thing entirely to put your time, money, and energy where your mouth is. At the risk of sounding hypocritical; yes I am attempting in my own way (I recently had the good fortune to talk about business plans 101 with a co-worker), and it's a long hard spiral to follow, that I can't possibly get into here. But I hold no illusions that those who don't do it are lazy, ignorant of success, or envious. If I did, I'd have to put all my wage-earning Libertarian friends in the same boat. :p

So, what Andrew Mellon and Henry Ford said. Same as it ever was.

Forgive me for not getting the premise here, but... rolling the sequence back, what was so unethical in the first place about closing down a park for a couple days? If the park is privately owned, then they should be able to do whatever they want with their own park, shouldn't they? Why does everyone apparently possess some sort inalienable right that guarantees their right to... camp out there?

If they aren't being violent and it's a public park, they do have every right to be there, via the First Amendment.

I don't know if it's actually a public park, though. If it's private property, the whole game changes...

I'm employed. I pay Federal income taxes. I've been laid off twice and twice I found re-employment. I've supported myself since college, and I think the Occupy Wall Street movement has a really important point to make. More power to them.

OWS isn't about "Hurr they want free money"

Its about holding giant megacorporations liable for their actions.

Specifically, for gambling with our money.

Exactly. However you slice it, there is something seriously wrong with an ostensible First World nation that has a 47% poverty rate. I mean, fuck.

...I think the actual poverty line is somewhere between 20-30%.

USA doesn't keep proper statistics on poverty rate and uses a standard of measure from just after WW 2, so it's hard to judge what the actual poverty rate is.

However, 47% people who make so little money as to not pay income tax is screwed up. How is arguing 53% in any way benefitting their argument? Just slightly half our population is so damn poor that they don't even meet the requirements for paying income tax! Therefore, protesting economic problems is silly!

Well, if the US Government is the standard, the poverty rate is about 15%.

Their standard for measuring is spectacularly shitty, however (they just set an annual income flatly and don't account for costs of living, it seems)...

Statistics fail?

Yeah Kara pretty much nailed it as far as I'm concerned.

Yes, it is a statistics fail, on the part of US Government accounting. They basically say "anybody who makes X amount of money or less across the country is poor," and ignore the fact that the figure is too low for the standard the US should be at and that costs of living vary widely across a nation the size of Europe.

Yeah, though, I agree with Karalora, the fact that only a little more than half the country can claim to have enough income to be proper citizens (IMO) is fucking depressing and should be rectified, posthaste...

Proper citizens even by the definition of the 53%'ers, even.

Though to be fair, the percentage paying Income Tax was much lower in the past (partly because hardly anyone qualified. See the Taxation Act of 1861-62). Even then filing was low.

edited 14th Oct '11 1:29:34 PM by Ratix