More On Occupy Wall Street

If anybody has ever been in sales, then you'll know who Grant Cardone is because either somebody reference his training or forced you to watch it. In the car business, I was only referenced to it. His high-energy, positive motivational work has made him pretty much the prominent speaker for the sales profession, and his entrepreneurial work has been covered by the mass media. In fact, he has his own show, Turnaround King, on National Geographic.

If you're looking for a post for me bashing his contributions for the Church of Scientology, you won't find it in this post. Scientology is a joke and not really worth my time shitting on.

What this post is about, however, is his comments made on a Phoenix television station that he uploaded on this account on YouTube describing the Occupy Wall Street movement as a distraction. Many people continue to dismiss that Occupy Wall Street is nothing more than a movement of lazy, anti-capitalist Americans that want a handout. He also noted that he has never seen anything that looks like the mighty 1% of Americans oppressing the other 99%.

Hmm...

Before I get into that, allow me to digress for a moment.  The "American Dream" has been always romanced into a quasi-rags-to-riches story, as hard work, persistence, and dedication will pay off into comfortable living. That's a reasonable statement, and why not? People, such as Grant Cardone can tell that story. It's his story of making his wealth from dirt by taking a sales job and his reinforcement of the entrepreneurial spirit is what sold him so many damn books in the first place. It's a good story.

Same thing can be said about the late Steve Jobs -- his love of technology, his demand for perfection, and his savvy marketing skills brought him great wealth and reverence as the greatest technology executive ever. He too has a rags-to-riches story, from founding Apple in his parents garage to taking Apple to vanguard status in computing and telecommunications.

However, let's not confine ourselves to idealism. You can give your effort to anything and then still come out with nothing. That happens. Especially in sales. There are more people who don't experience what they deem to be success than those that would consider themselves successful and the unsuccessful/successful discrepancy is massive. Capitalism is a crapshoot, but I didn't tell you that.

I recognize that capitalism is a crapshoot. I've been in sales. I'm still in sales, by way of transitioning into the insurance industry. However, I'm also attempting to get a degree in business so I can head to the energy sector. I'm just like a good chunk of the people down in Wall Street -- broke, balancing school and work, and hoping for a payoff with my degree. I also realize that I have a real chance to fall flat on my face, and there is also a chance that if I do fall on my face, it can be as much my fault as it isn't my fault.

I wrote before that there are winners and losers in capitalism. Someone argued with me that this was a result of a mathematical outcome. I'm inclined to agree with him; its just the result of that said mathematical outcome is what brought thousands of people to Wall Street and as such, it moves past being just a mathematical outcome.

I also came up with the concept of "corporate arielism". Some of you would consider it a far fetched idea -- that corporations and the extremely wealthy want the other 99% or so to accept the fact that they have the income, they run the show, and they're in the driver's seat.
 
What I mean by the driver's seat is that they have the financial means necessary to solve many issues that the vast amount of Americans can't. Those issues can be anything; the financial means could be exercised in anyway -- whether its just throwing money at liabilities, throwing money in to invest, or throwing money to lobby politicians.

What I mean by how they run the show is that for better or for worse, they get called on to spur the economy. That's either through increased consumption, increased investment, or paying more in taxes. The monetarists and the Keynesians and the well off and the dirt poor turn to the 1% for all three reasons (give or take what category you fall into, you either are calling on all three, two of, or one of those things listed above). It's the Gospel of Wealth versus Social Darwinism.

What I mean by having the income is self explanatory. Then again, it is not self explanatory. There's a wide range of topics from commerce to capital gains. I don't count on your attention span to be that wide. It's not me being unable to make a point here; its me basically saying that they have an ability to generate income through the means that they have that most people don't have.

In short, the top 1% represent the "winners" in the economic game of capitalism. That's where Grant Cardone is. Good for him. Makes for a hell of a story to tell. However, his story won't get repeated 310 million times over.

I will have to dispute his notion that government has never fixed an economy. The United States government has fixed an economy before. It's called entering into World War II.

I will dispute his assertion that the Occupy Wall Street movement is a distraction; it's a necessary movement to address the issue that is going to dominate this century -- the income disparity with a corollary addressing financial greed and the corporate state. That's the gripes. In their eyes, its financial greed that wrecked the market place, the corporate state that allowed for it, and now greater income disparity as a result of it. They're pretty much right -- a free market will never truly behave itself, no matter how many times libertarians and conservatives will argue otherwise; Washington will hear big business loudest; and the income disparity, no matter how much people will argue that it is just a mathematical outcome as a result of capitalism, will continue at an increasingly unsustainable pace.

However, its not a political movement. It's a movement to bring awareness and to push for action, for there are those that work hard and still struggle. For there are those that seek to better themselves with education and degrees that are supposed to provide for a better pay day and a better life and still struggle. For there are those that can't afford to take care of themselves or see what issues with their health they may have. For there are those that can't find full time work, not because they don't want to, but because they can't. For there are those that are upset that as they struggle to make ends meet in the wake of the financial system's collapse, those in the driver seats of the financial sector have never been held accountable for the damage done -- in their eyes an injustice.

There are others, like Grant Cardone -- mainly conservative pundits and bloggers who believe in the "American Dream" of work hard brings rewards -- that only want to open their mouths to discredit the whole movement. However, what these pundits and bloggers fail to realize, that every tried and true system has an end game to it. Yet, the end game doesn't have to be doom and gloom, if we just use our heads.

Occupy Wall Street

Protestors at Occupy Wall Street in New York City on 17 September 2011. (David Shankbone, Wikipedia)

To satisfy my humanities requirement for my degree, I'm taking American Cultures this semester here at the University of Houston. I'm not necessarily going to publicly criticize or make a gratifying statement about the course. It's just a class, I take it online, and I just took the midterm earlier here on campus.

I have to credit this class to introducing me to something that most people are not even anywhere familiar with. Hell, I never even heard of arielism until I read about it a few weeks ago. However, the American interpretation of José Enrique Rodó's 1900 seminal work is rooted in elitism as, Frederick Pike wrote, the American elitist clique believed that the lower class needed to be "liberated" from materialism, which was fed to them by Corporate America. Indeed, Rodó's Ariel does criticize materialism, but also calls on the need for Latin American youth to aspire to not fall into the shadow of the United States. Keep in mind, this was written two years after the Spanish-American War which established the United States as a world power and the cemented the States as the national power of the Western Hemisphere. Whether American arielists misinterpreted that part of Ariel or deliberately ignored it, who knows.

I bring this up because the American elitist gripe of the early 20th century is has similarities with the Occupy Wall Street / We Are the 99 Percent social movement that has sprung up in the past three weeks.

Pike wrote that the American arielists aimed to expose the lower class to higher cultural tastes for they believed that culture should set the tone of society and not economic achievement. He further wrote that these arielists sought to reaffirm what they believed to be their place in the American social hierarchy (of course them being at the top) and basically leave the "lower class" to be happy with their lot in life and accepting of their subordinate position to the cultural elite. Needless to say that something of this sort happened, but not in the way the arielists would hope for it to happen.

A brief history lesson here: as the modern "corporate America" took shape in the late 1880s it gained a fairly shitty reputation, as evidenced by strike after strike by laborers that felt victimized by Corporate America and a federal government that felt that Corporate America represented an obstruction on the American economy. Presidents William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt based their presidencies around "trust-busting", which was basically the federal government's fight against cartels (or at the time widely known as "trusts"). However, Corporate America had the same aim as the American arielists albeit in a different way: people of the "lower class" in this class the actual economic lower class and middle class, should be happy with their lot and accept the fact that Corporate America runs the show in the United States. In addition, Corporate America believed (and advertised) that materialism should be where Americans find value.

It brings us to today.

A friend of mine wrote to me on Facebook in response to my post on what should be the size and role of government in the United States that the wealth and income disparity statistics is mainly a product of a mathematical outcome. I did concur that it was a mathematical outcome, however, when considering all points, it comes out to being more than just a mathematical outcome. It's a by product of what I call corporate arielism: that Americans should be accepting of the fact that corporate America provides the hands from which the United States feeds from, whether it is in the form of politics, society, or simple daily life. The value of life, at least in the eyes of Corporate America, should come in the form of how much you are able to participate in materialistic consumerism. It will be Corporate America that allows for opportunities to exist. It will be Corporate America that decides whether or not the opportunity that you think is yours is really yours. Corporate America will be responsible for what it wants to be responsible for. And I could go on and on.

Take that into consideration, and it is obvious to see what the Occupy Wall Street movement is actually about. Those that support movement believe that Corporate America arielism is screwing Americans in many forms from not hiring, to laying off, to not providing enough jobs, to health care, to hijacking the political process, and to securing their financial position at the expense of the American that wants to pursue their dream of living a comfortable, decent life. Whether the logic is flawed is in the eye of the beholder; however, their message shouldn't be ignored.

Like I said before, there are winners and losers in capitalism in the sense that someone gains wealth at the expense of someone else. Is that the reality of the free market? Sure. I'd be absolutely stupid to deny that. However, capitalism, corporate arielism, and Corporate America as we know it now have a bigger question on their hands as middle and lower class discontent begins to grow and spread: sustainability. So few people can control so few of the wealth for so long. Personally, I believe this: if the Occupy Wall Street gains the momentum that their inspiration, the Arab Spring, did, then just maybe we will see a new form of arielism to develop over the course of this century that the majority of Americans will be willing to accept -- the arielism of the middle class, where the middle class runs the show and the upper class will have to be the ones living with it, and the middle class would be free from having to abide by and depend on Corporate America.