Friday, October 7, 2011

One Demand

One of the biggest questions about the Occupy Wall Street is; "What is their one demand?" It seems a lot of people *coughrepublicanscough* just can't understand why all these people are pissed off enough to get out and protest, much less protest without having a specific reason in mind. But it seems to be difficult for them to understand that you can protest injustice, even if you don't know exactly what that injustice is. Only, these protestors do know what injustice they're facing; greed.

We are living in an era where the vast majority of wealth in the USA is controlled by an insultingly small number of people. Over 95% of Americans are struggling to make ends meet, many aren't. People are going to college, coming out with crushing debt and finding out that if they're lucky enough to find a job it won't likely be much better than minimum wage. And gods help them if they have to use a credit card to buy anything. In many cases people are only able to pay the minimum, but often the monthly minimum is less than the fees and interest rates so even though they're paying, they're finding their owed balance growing. But while people are being bled dry of everything they own, the banks aren't exactly crying in their beer knowing that some poor (literally) sap out there will be paying them off for the rest of their lives.

How bad does it have to get when you have lawyers telling you to just stop paying credit card companies?

The way the fees are now imposed, "people would be better off if they stopped paying" once they get in over their heads, said T. Bentley Leonard, a North Carolina bankruptcy attorney . Once you stop paying, creditors write off the debt and sell it to a debt collector. "They may harass you, but your balance doesn't keep rising. That's the irony."


Now we have an influx of people getting out of college and can only buy food on credit and they're quickly finding out they're likely worse off than if they're just stuck with a high school education; by and large the only jobs out there are low-level minimum wage jobs which they can't get hired for because they're "overqualified" and it's hard to find work in their field because they don't have enough experience. They're caught in an endless cycle of You're-Fucked.

Now add insult to injury; the wealthiest people in the country are sitting on trillions of dollars and a rich republican congressmen is whining that he only has $400K ($400,000) a year left to live on after taxes and expenses. Cry me a motherfucking river, he's got it so hard, doesn't he?

Contrast that with 13 year old Allison who's parents can't afford for her to see a doctor after showing signs of Schizophrenia and whom has been hiding her need for sleeping pills and going without enough food because she knows just how poor her family is. No kid should ever have to face that kind of reality, much less before they've finished middle school.

This is supposed to be the greatest, richest country on earth so how can we allow our kids to go hungry and without medical care?

So what is the One Demand from Occupy Wall Street? They'll release lists of their demands, but whatever it is, it will be variations on the same thing; we want economic security.

I never believed in the American Dream, but it is still shocking to see that people are perusing it overseas. In a first world nation like America, nobody should ever have to work two jobs and still have to resort to prostitution to make ends meet. No one should ever have to work 80 and 90 hours a week just to pay for their own chemotherapy.

That is the One Demand; we want this injustice to stop. How can any government leader or millionaire look at themselves in the mirror and not be horrified by what they see when things are allowed to become this bad?

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