“We Are the 99%”

SHOCKWAVES FROM WALL STREET COME TO MAIN STREET VENTURA

By Grant Marcus

Top photo–widely shared image on Facebook; middle photo is an East coast friend’s poster; bottom photo from New Republic Printing–their #occupy stickers were featured in yesterday’s post for $2.

Occupy Wall Street has gone global, with its shock waves felt in all major cities across the United States, as well as other countries such as Italy, Spain, Greece, Germany, Great Britain, and Japan.

And as many as 1000 came out throughout the day to support the encampment at Mission Park, with some participating in marches down Main Street, Ventura. Organizers here have named the action, “Occupy Ventura.”

As the economic crisis continues to be felt throughout the nation, and as unemployment remains high, with little being accomplished by Congress, its effects are reverberating in over 40cities, large and small in California.

But unlike the Tea Party, which is supported by the Koch Brothers (big oil) Freedom Works (Dick Armey and insurance companies) and FoxNews (the corporate media) the “99 percenters” are not getting the same media coverage. And although there have been daily protests for the last four weeks that has lead to a global response and a “world’s day of protest against corporate greed,” the corporate media has onl recently covered the story, and sparsely at best, often staging interviews to mock the seriousness or popularity of the movement. Perhaps it is because the message of the 99% doesn’t cater to the Fortune 500, i.e., those who sponsor and pay for the major news media.

When a protester was asked by FoxNews how “hippies and commies” could be taken seriously, one youth said, “You know, my mom is American and she had an American son. You don’t have to be a hippie to be against trillions of dollars wasted on war, and you don’t have to be a commie to oppose corporate greed and bailouts, while the rest of America is hurting. What I want to know is, who pays your salary?” The young activist’s comment was apparently excluded at air time.

Major media sources have targeted youth, pinholing them as “neo-hippies, Maoists, idiots, and the like. But when you sit down and talk with unemployed lawyers, struggling business owners, food safety instructors, laid off teachers and counselors, and graduate students who can’t find work right here in Ventura County, one begins to realize just how deeply entrenched the economic crisis is.

Engaged in politics myself, I didn’t want to interview the usual sources. I wanted to meet new faces that had come out in large numbers to support “Occupy Ventura.”

The first fresh face I met was a young Asian woman who was a college graduate, and who had successfully passed the Bar, but was unable to find work for two years, after obtaining her license. She is $250,000 in debt, a debt she hopes “to pay back before the end of my lifetime,” but she is obviously discouraged. At this point, unknowingly, my recorder goes dead (new batteries from China) and so I cannot complete her sad tale. I apologize to her now. It reaffirms in me why we need paper trails, at the voting booth and in interviews.

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Scott Brown’s interview is successful. Scott is a 53 year old aeronautics engineer who lives in east Ventura. I asked him why he was here at the protest.

“I’ve witnessed for many years the middle class being squeezed, and how all the wealth and power is being concentrated at the top. The middle class used to be able to turn to the political process, but that’s awash in money, money unaccounted for in so many ways, which has been bought and sold by both sides of the aisle, I hate to say.”

I ask Scott about the effects of all that.

“A strong country needs a strong middle class. We are losing that. We may have freedom of expression, but it has no power right now. It’s just corporations and pure greed. Corporations take all the money, then they complain of paying taxes when they hardly pay any. Personal income tax for the wealthy has been at its lowest in 50 years, and still we have politicians that go out on the stump to propose even lower taxes under the preposterous notion that it will somehow fix unemployment, it will somehow fix the deficit. Somehow, by giving more money to the rich and taking more money from the public trough, it will make all our problems go away. It’s a preposterous notion, and I am gratified to see people rising up.”

Not hearing a voice like Scott’s on the news, I asked him if he felt his point of view was being represented in the media. Read more…