The Guys in the 1% Brought This On | Barbara Ehrenreich
By Barbara Ehrenreich, October 12, 2011
At the risk of being pedantic, let me point out that “99% versus 1%” is not a class analysis, not in any respectable sociological sense. Shave off the top 1% and you’re still left with some awfully steep divides of wealth, income and opportunity. The 99% includes the ordinary rich, for example, who may lack private jets but do have swimming pools and second homes. It also includes the immigrant workers who mow their lawns and clean their houses for them. This is not a class. It’s just the default category left after you subtract the billionaires.
Some of the diversity of the 99% is clearly on display at the variations occupations around the country. I’ve seen occupiers who look like they picked up their camping skills on vacations in the national parks, as well as those who normally make their homes on the streets, even when they’re not protesting. Occupy Wall Street has attracted contingents of airplane pilots, electricians and construction workers -– the latter often from the new World Trade Center being built a block away. You’ll also find schoolteachers, professors, therapists, office workers and, of course, the usual crusty punks of indistinct provenance and profession. In Washington, I met one occupier wearing a crisp blue dress shirt and a tie emblazoned with tiny elephants. He said he was a Republican, a lawyer, and he’d had enough.
Then there are the poorest of the poor – the unemployed, the foreclosed upon, the chronically homeless. In Los Angeles, traditional residents of Skid Row have begun to join the occupation encampment. When about 150 people met to plan their local occupation in a union hall in Fort Wayne earlier this week, they solicited advice from already-homeless people in the crowd, who had first-hand experience of where the police are most heavy-handed and where you’re most likely to find a nutritious dumpster or a public toilet. For the homeless, joining an occupation brings instant upward mobility: free food -- not entirely vegan, I have been relieved to discover -- and, in some cases, Port-a-potties and the rudiments of medical care.
The evident poverty of so many of the occupiers has left the right sputtering for apt denunciations. In the ’60s, neoconservative intellectuals looked at student protesters and saw the political avant-garde of a “new class” or “liberal elite,” bent on taking power and imposing their own twisted combination of sexual libertarianism and Soviet-style Communism. The neocons accused the protestors of being the privileged, “spoiled” children of a “permissive” upper middle class, and utterly alien to salt-of-the-earth working class Americans. There was just enough truth to this accusation to make a few of us young radicals flinch. .............(more)
The complete piece is at:
http://www.progressive.org/one_percent_barbara_ehrenreich.html
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