In The Time Of The Reign Of Terror Of The One Percent-And Their Hangers-On

In The Time Of The Reign Of Terror Of The One Percent (1%)-And Their Hangers-On

By Sarah Le Moyne

I was in college, senior year, when the great if short-lived social explosion which went under the name Occupy hit Wall Street and its environs in the fall of 2011. At the time I thought the idea of camping out, making a political issue out of camping out in the city parks (and later other cities’ parks) was kind of goofy, beside the point whatever merit the protesters had in their message. Then a student at NYU I actually went down to the park at Wall Street a couple of weeks after they established their beachhead and found that I was not really mistaken that what should have been a few day symbolic encampment had turned in what essentially was an old hobo “jungle” complete with winos, misfits and junkies. (Jenny, my partner who was a student in Boston at the time said the same was true of the Occupy encampment at the Rose Kennedy Greenway except the people in charge, if you can use such a word in a world where nobody was supposed to be in charge, were enablers of these weird behaviors like this was the model for the “newer world” they were talking endlessly about.)

What I did not find wrong despite the chaos of the camps was the whole idea that especially in the post-Great Recession period there were serious class inequalities in this country which had not been addressed by governments or the people themselves in their righteous anger. That idea has since almost by accident entered the mainstream political language as the one percent, 1% which looks better on the page, from journalists to political candidates. Some candidates have given approximate numbers like one multi-billionaire, the guy who owns Amazon perhaps, has more personal wealth than the bottom fifty percent, 50 %, of the population. That all these folk or their corporations pay zilch for taxes. More dramatically, the one that brings this whole issue home something like fifty percent, 50 %, of the population was living so close to the edge that they could not come up with $500 cash money in an emergency. Astounding.         

Today, almost a decade later and the gap widening if anything, people should be up in arms, although they do not appear to be in any great numbers hoping I guess for some political miracle or finding some money on the ground. And if they did, and now I hope they do and I will think about joining them then they had better be prepared to face more than the one percent, 1%. If it were merely a matter of that of rounding up a few billionaires and their household servants we could have toppled their regime long ago. But the simple facts are, and the hidden part of Donald Trump’s base, that something like thirty-five percent, 35%, of the population is organically linked to that 1 %. That is no mean task especially when we know from painful experience that the political parties, courts, the cops, the military, most institutions in fact are run by then, or maybe better for them. Still as the cartoon below graphically points out in indirection the day of the tumbrels may not be far off.