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10/3/11

The 99% Is 75%

The other twenty-five percent recognize reality of the New Era...

Sheep who want shepherds rather than personal responsibility.

Personally I have little in common with the Occupy Wall Street movement, a consortium of "unions, students, teachers, veterans, first responders, families, the unemployed and underemployed." These are not my people and I doubt they represent all of the groups they list as "...the majority" and "...are the 99 percent" who will "...no longer be silent." I would venture that a large segment of "99ers" whose unemployment is running out is among them. What I think is they belong in the seventy-five percent majority of Americans, that number my purely anecdotal guess, which doesn't yet fully understand the 21st Century has arrived but not in its fullness. They are still looking backwards to institutions, government, public education, banks, politicians and private employers for overhaul and reform when by the nature of this disruptive period these entities are on the verge of collapse.

Your right to protest is honored, your protest may not be honorable.

What I do support is their Constitutional and common law right to assemble and protest by exercising their free speech peacefully. It seems to me that has been breached by the New York Police Department but there is a disconnect that bothers me. The place of umbrage is while I support their rights they totally miss the point of those of us who pursue the cause of liberty and free speech. To them we are out on some right wing limb and they do not see the correlation to their dependence on Statism. What the NYPD has done to break up their protests is the very thing that many of us warned about post 9-11 when the federal government subsidized police departments all across the country in obtaining equipment and training in the name of anti-terrorism. It has created a militarized de facto national police force that was never intended for our country.


Mainstream America is still listening to the Mainstream Media and watching reality TV shows. Their gut instinct tells them something is terribly wrong but they cannot articulate what. It is a result of years of dumbing down the population by the very public schools and institutions they are now beholden to. My calculation is the majority of my rough estimate of this three-quarters of the population will not go quietly into a new era and adjust their expectations about how they obtain consumer goods. They feel entitled to a "middle class lifestyle" and that is their "right." Since the mid-nineties anyone who knows me has had to listen to my saying that our biggest concern should be what happens when the mass population figures out they actually have to work for something when the bubble bursts. Then I was referring to the tech/telecom bubble. The majority like bubbles since they easily provide them consumer goods even though they become fuel for the "one percent," really the institutions they're rallying against now, to ensnare them into debt and a contemporary version of servitude. This escapes those demonstrating on Wall Street.

Being one of 99 percent will be the loneliest thing they ever do.

What they also misunderstand is globally we are in the midst of a 500 year crash of civilizations event that breaks up empires and reshapes the world. They just want their SUV. It is fair to make comparisons to the Great Depression and use the history of it and previous Panics as a guide for what will happen next on the economic markets front. What is happening though is bigger than a Panic or Depression and much larger than the social changes of the sixties and seventies. Loosely about twenty-five percent of us understand that and recognize we are not only in an economic crisis but a disruption of high magnitude that may take more than a decade to play out. It is economic, political and social; permeating all areas of our culture and lives and will create the New Economy but won't be one the "99 percent" envision. You will have the right to be entrepreneurial, creative thinking, a free agent to live and earn a way of life of your choice. You will not have the right to be entitled to a desultory lifestyle based on what was considered "middle class."

"He who is not busy being born is busy dying."

Those of us who understand that we must go on with our lives know that in disruption there are opportunities if you choose to seek them. A chance to reinvent your life depending on how hard you work and what you want to surrender to rise above current conditions. We channel our energy towards that rather than banging a drum asking to be dependent on a reformed government and institutions to make us happy. These are difficult times but not insurmountable if you are willing to take a long term realistic view of what you want to do with your life and are willing to get on with it despite obstacles. This is a forward looking view recognizing that we may have to endure another bubble (the education bubble comes to mind) before we get to the other side. Post WWII institutions and method of governing must fail in order to restore what America was originally and is meant to be. It is a new reconstruction, a tough one just as Reconstruction was after the first Civil War. This war will not be fought geographically but between those with internal motivation versus those who expect external awards. It will be a new structure based on an old one although a more advanced version that is resurrected as the false storefront of the twentieth century collapses.