One thing that really has been grinding my gears about the coverage of Occupy Wall Street is how media sources are doing their hardest to marginalize the protestors. Some state the movement has no legs because Occupy is just a bunch of jobless hippies. “Go get a job!” they cry. It’s like the financial version of the ever-popular “stop hitting yourself” game.
My (least) favorite thing they’ve been saying is “these protestors are just out there to have something to do.” “They don’t even know what they stand for.” “They don’t have a clear set of goals.”
There’s a lot to digest in the above comic. Sure, there are a lot of things that Occupy participants (and many less-involved Americans) are griping about. But it’s a complex issue with complicated causes and even more confounding effects and solutions. It boils down to this: corporations (some more than others) are guilty of carrying out trades, making sales they knew were doomed for failure, betting against clients being able to pay off debts, and many other actions that led to a massive recession, as well as compounding more “natural” causes (economies aren’t terribly unlike pendulums, after all). And they’re mad that nobody has really had to answer for it. We’re having to suffer the ill-effects (thanks to the miracle of “trickle-down economics”), our tax dollars went to massive, unprecedented bailouts, and you know what the result was? Huge bonuses.
Yes, there’s a lot to gripe about, but griping about a lot doesn’t mean that we’re griping about nothing.