BonaLibro

Who Is Occupy Wall Street? – NYTimes.com.

Those who view Occupy Wall Street dimly have plenty of venues available to them to make their dim views known. So the real question, as Joe Hill sang, is “Whose side are you on?” As long as you’re able to sell papers and distribute commercial messages, your advertisers aren’t going to care, but most of your readers will care which side you are on, and from what I read of the comments on here and how many people like what, it’s pretty clear how your readers feel.

It’s also clear that our plutocrats, with their neo-liberal ideology, have driven us over the cliff. That is what the protestors are protesting. They see their once bright futures going up in a puff of smoke, like the icons on my iMac, when I remove them from the dock. The corporations that run this country have all become unmoored, taking their plants and the offices elsewhere, leaving their stakeholders to starve. “We don’t need you anymore” has become a refrain we hear far too often. 

It isn’t for nothing that Germany has the healthiest, and most productive, economy in Europe. The reason for it is quite clear. It’s reflected in the GINI co-efficient, the measure of income distribution. Productivity improvement is equitably shared with German workers. In America, it used to be, but not since Reagan came to power and introduced Radical Capitalism, or whatever you want to call it. 

All of that productivity increase that came from computer technology accrued to capital rather than labor, and the income tax structure encouraged it, by allowing the big boys to keep more of their gains. The only way people could keep up was to overextend with leverage. The results are what we are living with now.

So who has the greater wisdom? The plutocrats or the OWSers? And whose side are you on? That is what makes all the difference here.