Photo: Stacy Lanyon
I heard about it online. I was going upstate to see my family that weekend, that Saturday when the first march took place on September 17th. I came down after that weekend and went right away, which was on day four.
I’m a political creature, and I don’t think that anyone is not aware of the state that the economy is in. It’s
incredibly frustrating when you deal with a political artifice that doesn’t
want to talk about issues that affect the average person. They want to talk
about deficits and corporate tax rates and free trade deals to Columbia . When it comes to job creation,
neither party has a plan. It’s not in their interest. There’s no one lobbying
them with tons of money saying, “Hey, let’s create jobs with decent wages and
job security.” Occupy to me was an expression of that frustration, and I think
it’s obvious that so many people who joined in have so many different issues
that they’re frustrated about, that our stagnant, broken system just isn’t
addressing. I think on a certain level, it does require people to get into the
streets to force that action, to really draw attention to it, to be like, “You
can’t just ignore this thing forever.” For me, I just felt like I wanted to be
there. As a journalist, I thought it was something I wanted to cover. Also, as
an activist, it was something that I really agreed with. Nobody is holding
these guys accountable.
It’s important for so many reasons. When you look at the
sustainability of the construct that we have, it’s not even a consideration.
The banks are too big to fail, and that pretty much puts them at the apex of an
oligarchy. You can’t have an industry that’s favored over the other industries
and really call it a free market. I think any commerce system that we have has
to foster both competition as well as combination to be vibrant. You need a
public sector. You need a private sector. You need all these different things
working together. The idea that one sector of the economy is just too big to
fail, that they’re can’t be accountability there, that that is set in place, means that their profits are protected by the tax payers. That is the
dumbest form of socialism ever. We’re going to protect the people who don’t
need any protection and let everybody else fend for themselves?
Right now, we
have a system that keeps you poor on purpose. It’s not like we got here on
accident. There’s a reason that wages have been stagnant for 30 years. That’s
by design. It puts you in a poverty situation, which requires you to go into
debt, which makes you a debt slave for the friggin banksters. People look at it
like it’s your fault that you’re poor, and it’s his success that he’s rich. 1 out of 6
of the children in this country are born into poverty. Are they born into
fault? At the same time, the people who are successful because of birth, did
they earn that right because they won the lucky sperm lottery? Now, the idea
that we should sacrifice all of these things that could help that child born
into poverty succeed because the kid with the silver spoon in his mouth, his
spoon is not big enough, that’s insanity to me.
When you really look at how the
entire economy works, we keep giving advantages to people who don’t require it in
order to take an advantage away from people who actually need that help. It
says that that’s the society that we want. We want a war based society. We want
an economic transaction based economy. We don’t need to manufacture things here. We don’t need sustainable jobs or disposable income for
people who really drive the economy. As long as the plutonomy, that wealthiest
5%, as long as they have their own ongoing cycle of feasting, then the rest of
us will survive on the scraps. That comes to the heart of trickle down. We have
done this for thirty years now. It clearly has not worked, yet the politicians
who are bought by the corporations consistently tell us that this is the only
way to fix things, that deficits are a bigger problem than anything else, that
problems that they don’t want to address because it conflicts with their
corporate pay masters, just don’t exist. The idea that we can just pretend that
there is no such thing as environmental impact of pollution is absurd.
We
cannot get anything done as a society because our institution to democracy is
under attack. It’s gotten to the point where people are so disenfranchised that
they literally have to create their own mini congress. What does that earn us?
Beatings, police surveillance. Why? We’re not supposed to be pointing at the eight
hundred pound elephant in the room, that massive income inequality gap, the
fact that our politicians are bought and sold like stock down at friggin NASDAQ. We’re not supposed to point
that out.
My great frustration with the system is that I expect republicans to
screw me and am often not surprised when democrats do. They are both paid for by
the same guy. No matter who wins the election right now, there’s a governing
majority of corporatists in both parties who are going to make sure that one
set of agendas go through and the others don’t. The one that doesn't is the clear and
obvious fixes to these things. Until we march in the
street and articulate our frustrations, that doesn’t’ get addressed. Even if we
do, they might ignore it. It kind of breaks the matrix, and it says to people, "If you are able to find this information, it’s not what they say it is."
My
thing is trying to reach through to those people who are inundated with
propaganda. I don’t care what network you listen
to. If you watch corporate news, they all have their own design, and that is to maintain the status quo,
whether it’s, “Let’s vote for democrats. Let’s vote for republicans.” None of
that really helps until we get to who they are working for, and that’s not us.
If it were, the Bush tax cuts would have been gotten rid of overnight. It’s
clearly not benefiting the 99% of us. What do I need tax cuts for if I don’t
have bridges that don’t fall apart when I drive over them? My point really in
essence is that the system is tremendously broken, and we can’t expect
institutional reform to come from the institution that requires reform. We need
to force it from the outside. That also means that eventually we need to put
people into those institutions that are going to enact that reform, but that
never happens without boots on the ground.
I hope for a world with more democracy. I think that we have
a paucity of democracy, a lack of democracy in this country. There are so many
different bottlenecks in the power system that don’t let popular will carry
through. For me, I want to see a world where war isn’t a profit center, where
health care isn’t a profit center. I think there are certain things that should
be for profit and other things that are not. Health care should not be for
profit. Prison should not be a profit center. It says a lot about our society
that we’re not investing in education, but we are investing in prisons. I want
to see a country that educates people, informs people, somewhere where everybody
can prosper, not because you were born with every opportunity but because you
have every opportunity available to you. That’s simply not the truth of people
who live in poverty. Let’s be honest, in this country, half of us are like a
paycheck or two away from the poor house. That means that we have an entire
country that’s financially broken. People are easier to exploit when they have
nothing, when they don’t have the information. If this is the information age,
then not having information means you have no ammunition to protect yourself.
To me, I want to see a country that works for people, not just for the rich.
It’s been obvious for the last thirty years that it hasn’t worked for anyone
but the wealthiest 1%, the wealthiest 5%, the plutonomy or oligarchy, however
you want to term it. We need a country
where if you work as an honest person, you can have something to pass off
to your children. In the last generation, we’ve gone backwards. We really have.
We cannot continue that slide backwards because it’s cutting into our civil
liberties. It’s cutting into the heart of democracy because as the poor get
poorer and the rich get richer, the richer can buy more of the democracy. The
poor can’t. At a certain point, we need to tip the scales, and I’d like to see
a world where the scales are tipped more in the favor of the average person
instead of the economic royalty.
Interview by Stacy Lanyon
http://buildingcompassionthroughaction.blogspot.com/
https://www.facebook.com/stacylanyon
https://instagram.com/stacylanyon/
https://twitter.com/StacyLanyon
http://stacylanyon.com/
Interview by Stacy Lanyon
http://buildingcompassionthroughaction.blogspot.com/
https://www.facebook.com/stacylanyon
https://instagram.com/stacylanyon/
https://twitter.com/StacyLanyon
http://stacylanyon.com/