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The real 99 percent

Scientia Potentia Est

Published: Sunday, November 20, 2011

Updated: Monday, November 28, 2011 16:11

The Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement is particularly fascinating to watch. Similar to many populist movements, it has come out of nowhere, and a mix of economic frustration, media coverage and traction has expanded it more than anyone could have imagined.

The main premise of Occupy Wall Street is that the 99 percent (a group that represents the bottom 99 percent of income earners) protest against the one percent (the top one percent of income earners). What many people do not realize is that this premise comes with an inherent irony: The 99 percent's political beliefs are so extreme that they represent the beliefs of only a small percentage of the population (one percent perhaps?). Those who Occupy Wall Street are generally part of the extreme left, a group that was politically active long before Occupy Wall Street started. The 99 percent is not the first, nor the last, extremist group to claim they represent the American people. For example, the Tea Party, a relatively small group made up of people from the extreme right, also claimed to represent the American people.

The group that really represents the vast majority of Americans is the "Silent Majority." Silent Majority was a term popularized by Richard Nixon to describe the majority of Americans who did not engage in the protests against the Vietnam War amidst the increasing visibility of the protesters in the news.

As Joe Klein pointed out in a recent "Time" magazine article, there is still a Silent Majority in America. The Silent Majority is composed of Americans who hold moderate views, are not active in politics and have low voter turnout rates. The Silent Majority does not fear a government takeover of health care, but it does fear the annual rise in their health care premiums. The Silent Majority does not call for the abolishment of student loan debt, but it wonders what will happen if it works hard and saves but still can't afford to put kids through college. If there was ever a group that could be labeled "the 99 percent," it is the Americans who belong to the Silent Majority.

The reason the Tea Party and OWS seem more representative than they actually are is due to their high turnout in American elections amidst embarrassingly low voter turnout by the Silent Majority, especially in primary elections. The prominence of extremes, left and right, over the past few decades has fueled the rise of a new generation of partisan politicians. It is not hard to see the political effects of this influence, as moderates perpetually lose to extremes in elections, and moderates in both parties move to the extremes to win their party's nomination.

As of right now, the main issue the Tea Party protests against is mounting deficits, and the main issue the 99 percent protests against is large income inequality. However, the main problem with protesting against deficits and income equality are that they are both symptoms of a larger problem: a less competitive America.

Over the past thirty years, technological advancement and globalization has created a more competitive world. This is a world in which America was, and currently is, unprepared to compete. The less competitive America has hollowed the middle class, leading to the economic inequality that the 99 percent protests against, and it has also increased the demand for the expensive social programs that have become the main drivers of the deficits that the Tea Party protests against. Like any good physician would say: You can't cure someone by treating only the symptoms of a disease; you need to treat the causes.

Treating the causes of America's lack of competitiveness means structural reforms to health care, infrastructure, immigration, education, energy and the tax code. I could go into detail about how leaving these unreformed makes for a less competitive America, but that would require much more than an 800-word opinion editorial.

Both the Tea Party and the 99 percent have ideas on how to best reform these components of the economy. But they often don't realize that the only way big reforms happen in America is through bipartisanship because no one political party can ever accomplish the "big things" alone. Civil Rights in 1964 and Social Security reform in 1983 were both big, extremely controversial reforms and only happened because Democrats and Republicans were able to come together. There is no shortage of big reforms that America needs, just a shortage of leaders able to cooperate and get them done.

 

Unfortunately, coming together is impossible if groups that make up one percent of the population like the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street fuel partisan politicians who tear Americans apart. This will only end when the one percent groups are overshadowed by a Silent Majority of Americans determined to take their country back.

 

Adam Newman is a junior finance major. He can be reached at anewman3@nd.edu

The views expressed in this column are those of the author and not necessarily those of The Observer.

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9 comments

Corporations are not people
Tue Nov 22 2011 08:16
"Over the past thirty years, technological advancement and globalization has created a more competitive world. This is a world in which America was, and currently is, unprepared to compete"

Actually, Reaganomics is a major reason for the high disparity in income levels (highest since 1928) and for the economic crisis we face today. According to a report issue by the CBO recently, Reaganomics over the past 30 years rose the income of the top 1% by 275%, while the incomes for the middle and lower class (the 99%) rose 65% and 18% respectively. The cost of living has increased substantially while many average working American's incomes have remained stagnant. Along with bailing out the big banking companies who used illegal financial tactics to horde obscene amounts of wealth and letting most of them off the hook without so much as an investigation; the so-called "job creator" class has received generous tax cuts, outsourced or laid off millions of jobs, and call for social services to be cut so that they can obtain more revenue. The main reason for the OWS movement was summarized last month when an activist was interviewed by a Fox News producer in New York: "After 30 years of having our living standards decrease while the wealthiest 1% have had it better than ever, I think it's time for some participation in our democracy". These are not extreme positions, they are facts which should make one reconsider social justice concerns in our country.

Michael L Norris
Mon Nov 21 2011 22:56
"Anonymous,"

Honestly, I'd like to hear the sound of disingenuity. Is it more or less shivery than the clinks of silver spoon against teeth in a mouth that gargles historical white-wash?

Look, here's the deal (again and for the last time). Person X claimed:

"The main premise of Occupy Wall Street is that the 99 percent (a group that represents the bottom 99 percent of income earners) protest against the one percent (the top one percent of income earners). What many people do not realize is that this premise comes with an inherent irony: The 99 percent's political beliefs are so extreme that they represent the beliefs of only a small percentage of the population (one percent perhaps?). Those who Occupy Wall Street are generally part of the extreme left, a group that was politically active long before Occupy Wall Street started."

From the start, I took premise to mean "a piece of given information we're all familiar with already." That I had to take it this way and not, say, as "an assertion which forms the basis for a work or theory" is clear from the incoherence resulting from an assumption that protestors would assert protest as a basis for work when their protesting is itself the work, is itself the assertion. So, the first sentence quoted above must be seen as spelling out uncontroversial, descriptive information about OWS: "the 99 percent (a group that represents the bottom 99 percent of income earners) protest against the one percent (the top one percent of income earners)." Again, this statement must be taken so because the next sentence provides, qualified in terms of revelation ("What many people do not realize is that this premise comes with an inherent irony"), a claim arguing for recalculation: "The 99 percent's political beliefs are so extreme that they represent the beliefs of only a small percentage of the population (one percent perhaps?)." One problem for this reformulation--we've got two items at odds.

Item 1: The "99 percent" of Occupy Wall Street is "a group that represents the bottom 99 percent of income earners."

Item 2: "The 99 percent's political beliefs are so extreme that they represent the beliefs of only a small percentage of the population."

The obvious question arising from this characterization is how can a group represent both "the bottom 99 percent of income earners" and at the same time represent "the beliefs of only a small percentage of the population"? Even the fuzziest of maths won't let us equate representation of the bottom 99 percent of income earners with representation of only a small percentage of the population. So, I responded with the obvious observation: given the premise, we can conclude the protestors cannot be drawn ("generally" or otherwise) just from the "extreme left." (Unless, I guess, you want to claim that the bottom 99 of income earners are of "the extreme left." But that would flip the valence of "extreme" from "radical" to "statistically dominant"; presumably, most people who invoke or affirm the phrase "extreme left" have no wish to do this.)

To my conclusion Person Y then objected: "[I]f you think that OWS is people coming together from points all over the ideological spectrum, you haven't been reading **their** signs or listening to **their** interviews[.]"

My suggestion in response pointed to those signs and doubted they could be held representative of a movement made up of (to continue following from the premise) "the bottom 99 percent of income earners." I mean, you'd need to eyeball a lot of signs to convince somebody that the Left is even "moderately represented," much less operating as the exclusive ideological engine behind this movement, right? Sure, "it's possible that one or two self-professed" liberals "have joined the thousands of protestors, but that's hardly enough" to prove the absence of "people from points all over the ideological spectrum."

Anonymous
Mon Nov 21 2011 16:38
Michael, if you say that OWS has "people from points all over the ideological spectrum", one expects that this includes conservatives, Republicans, etc. Do you have evidence that those are even moderately represented in the OWS movement? It's possible that one or two self-professed conservatives have joined the thousands of other protesters, but that is not enough to prevent your claim from sounding disingenuous. I would like to know how you have drawn your conclusion that OWS has people from points all over the ideological spectrum.
Anonymous
Mon Nov 21 2011 15:51
Poor columnist. He's only a finance major. He doesn't understand money or politics.

Get a real degree man.

Michael L Norris
Mon Nov 21 2011 14:37
Anonymous,

1.) Do you understand "succeeded because" and "only happened because" to mean the same thing? I do not and so objected. I defer again to the mid-century's charnel house of murdered non-white citizen-activists.

2.) "If [. . .], you haven't been reading their signs or listening to their interviews (or, for that matter, tracing the funding and support for the movement)." How would reading of a few signs or listening to a few interviews contradict my claim of wide ideological participation? Even though selections from a data pool may be proffered to an audience as representative of the data pool, it doesn't follow that the presentation will have been projected honestly or accurately. Your quick lapse into the empty rhetoric of partisan politics illustrates that your conception of "ideological spectrum" stems from a perception of only two frequencies. Red and blue are the political colors of a radio spectrum the airwaves of which are no longer publicly accessible, sold to the corporations to be resold to you and me. Red shift, blue shift; end up in the same place.

The movement is achromatic to partisan politics and monochromatic to the "green" culture of unchecked corporo-governmental greed. "Trace the funding" is in fact what a lot of different people are starting to do.

Anonymous
Mon Nov 21 2011 13:27
Michael, if you think that OWS is people coming together from points all over the ideological spectrum, you haven't been reading their signs or listening to their interviews (or, for that matter, tracing the funding and support for the movement). As far as civil rights go, Republicans spent the better part of a century trying to enact the sort of legislation that finally passed in the '60s. Why did it take so long? Because the legislation had previously been blocked by Democrats in congress or vetoed by Democratic presidents until that point. The civil rights movement succeeded because it finally won enough Democratic support to supplement the Republican support it always had.
Anonymous
Mon Nov 21 2011 12:26
You make a good point brother
Michael L Norris
Mon Nov 21 2011 02:20
"What many people do not realize is that this premise comes with an inherent irony: The 99 percent's political beliefs are so extreme that they represent the beliefs of only a small percentage of the population (one percent perhaps?). Those who Occupy Wall Street are generally part of the extreme left, a group that was politically active long before Occupy Wall Street started."

What has Occupy Wall Street to do with partisan politics? This movement, to anyone paying attention (and being intellectually honest in discussing it), is a swell of citizen activism in the face of a government beholden to corporate oligarchs, immunized against accountability under the law for the harms it daily visits upon human beings foreign and domestic, and increasingly fascistic in its exercise of power. The idea that this movement is populated "generally" by some small (yet paradoxically incredibly powerful) "so extreme" left-wing fringe is exactly the kind of absurd, evidence-free establishment media "talking point" that one would regurgitate from, not surprisingly, a hack like Joke Line. (Seriously, take a moment to read any of the double-digit hits returned from searching the terms "Joe Klein" and "wrong": Iraq, FISA surveillance/NSA wiretapping, the economic collapse--take your pick!)

Ironically, what you fail to perceive is that "coming together" is precisely what people from points all over the ideological spectrum are doing rightnowthisverysecond in Occupy protesting.

Also, please let the corpse of Medgar Evers know that the "reform" of civil rights in 1964 "only happened because Democrats and Republicans were able to come together."

Anonymous
Mon Nov 21 2011 00:08
Silent Majority is just another name for Sheep. They deal with the cards that are dealt to them instead of actively trying to shape their destiny. If America remains a nation of sheep, then our decline is sealed.






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