“Are the workhouses full?”
“I see poor people”.
“Let’s throw the waiter off the the balcony and feed him to the poors”.
They could have at least taken off their ugly capitalist pig masks!
“Marie Antoinette maintained a stoic pose as an open tumbrel cart carried the condemned woman through the streets, from the rue Sainte-Honoré to what is now the Place de la Concorde. When the guillotine sliced off her head at 12:15 p.m., thousands of spectators erupted in cheers. Her body was placed in a coffin and tossed into a common grave in a cemetery behind the Church of the Madeleine”.
Jump. Just fucking jump.
(So, guys, I take it you’re not all standing on your perch high above Wall Street, above it all, looking down on the poors, in a huge metaphor clusterfuck come to life?)
Occupy Wall Street began September 17th, with the American hippies descending on Lower Manhattan’s financial district, holding a people’s assembly and setting up an encampment in Zuccotti Park on Liberty Street, a stone’s throw from the Federal Reserve. When the be-sandaleds headed down Wall Street, they came to a halt right underneath the balcony of the National City Bank Building at number 55, coming face to face with a bunch of grotesque, champagne-guzzling oligarchs, ogling the Wall Street indignados from a perch high above.
What is this place, 55 Wall Street? The sprawling Beaux-Arts landmark framed by monolithic, Corinthian columns houses Ciprion Club Residences, a private club and full service luxury residence for Wall Street’s élite, providing “everything essential to living the good life” and “a natural expression of your business and social life” (like a restaurant with the dubious distinction of being home to a $32 hamburger). And there the swells stood – like the Roman elite as the Visigoths sacked their city – on the balconies of their rich house, the men in their $6,000 William Fioravanti and Milan’s Caraceni suits, or tuxedoes, the women in power suits or evening gowns, or periwinkle gold trim dashikis. There they stood, the fatcats, toasting the dirty hippies mockingly with flutes of 1990 Methuselah, smiling and snapping pictures, giggling like girls or outwardly guffawing over the fight of the 99 percent. But then this is hardly anything new – aristocrats on balconies have been amused by peasants in the streets since time immemorial (or at least since 1789).
These parasitic speculators, con men, parodic “tycoons” of false real estate deals, nepotism, bailouts, inflated bonuses, stolen pension funds, junk bond manipulation, playing their shell games with the wealth created by others, cheating honest people, all to get to that Shangrila-di-da, that holy grail: the balcony of the Ciprion Club Residences. Yes, these are our best and brightest”, who believed that they could create financial instruments so complex that they’d fool even their Wall Street brethren, and get away with it forever. Look at them, the Architects of the 2008 Collapse….just look at them. And God forbid if we made these terrible people pay for all of the bailouts of Wall Street, or raised their taxes, why then these titans of industry would not be able to “create jobs” on a yacht on the Côte d’Azur, or on the slopes of St. Moritz or the tobacco plantations of Cuba.
Billionaire Michael “Bloomberg, the midget autocrat who bought his way into the mayor’s office, finds himself confronted with his worst nightmare: media-savvy hippieswho refuse to play by his rules of engagement. On the periphery of Liberty Plaza is a parallel cyber activism buttressing the on-the-ground movement, the virtual collective/Scientology annoyers known as “Anonymous”. Despite having predicted the whole thing, Bloomberg seems a fool, blundering around, making dismissive comments, as if he’s 5 minutes away from sending the cops into Zuccotti Park with billy clubs, to rid his city of the whole mess. His hippie antagonizers use Macs, so they’re “hypocrites” for having tools created by “corporations”, yet they don’t have a “focus”/corporate sponsor/powerpoint presentation, so how can we take them seriously? They’re also somehow magic, because although there are only a couple hundred of them, somehow there can be 700 arrests and yet still have people left in the streets.
Mayor McMillions criticized the protesters for a lack of nuance in their arguments, and accused them of targeting the wrong people. Said the man whose recent dramatic increase in wealth moved him from the 142nd wealthiest person in the country to the 17th:
“The protesters are protesting against people who make $40,000, $50,000 year and are struggling to make ends meet….Those are the people that work on Wall Street in the finance sector…If the banks don’t go out and make loans, we will not come out of our economic problems. We will not have jobs.”
Umm….to the contrary. I believe they’re protesting the handful like yourself whose wealth has ballooned obscenely while people who make “forty, fifty thousand dollars a year are struggling to make ends’ meet”. In case you haven’t noticed, the conditions under which YOU thrived no longer exist. The housing market/stock market/hiring market are all kaput, banksaren’t lending money, and corporations are sitting on their cash rather than investing/expanding. Any implied argument that the 50 million people in this country currently unemployed lack either the brains or desire to work is completely bogus. The tools to succeed are almost completely inaccessible to most people today. They don’t have your bootstraps. You had a net worth of about $6 billion when you ran for mayor and today you’re worth triple that. So of course you’re standing up for corporate agendas and for the rich, not for the middle and working classes who define that city you lord over, doubling their property taxes and shoving them out of their own neighborhoods, neighborhoods they occupied for generations. You have made NYC a city for the rich only, and all other are expendable, displaced, And by the way, wasn’t it the shitty “loans” that made these economic problems in the first place??
See, this is what I think of when I hear of “class warfare” – uber rich politicians manipulating the lower/working/middle/upper middle/upper economic classes against each other, leaving the real target (the oligarchy) beyond scrutiny and reproach, mocking the proletariat from the balcony of their $3.5 million apartments.
Can we just raise the top bracket to whatever rate it is that gets these fucktards to decide to stop “working”? I’m willing to go to a super exclusive 110 percent marginal rate on this.
I hate the rich.
for: @AndeeD