The Occupation

I'll admit I haven't paid much attention to the whole "Occupy Wall Street" thing.  From what I gather, it's a small group of protestors taking Wall Street to task for screwing us out of billions of dollars (maybe trillions by now) and crashing the economy.  It seems like a good idea to me, but a quixotic one.  But apparently enough people have taken notice that labor unions, politicians, celebrities, etc. are glomming onto the idea now and it's spun off to all sorts of cities.

In the end I don't think the movement will accomplish anything.  How could it?  Every politician is in the pocket of Wall Street and Corporate America.  You really expect them to do something?  At best Washington might make some half-hearted attempt to crack down on corporate greed, though with the Tea Party running things there, that seems really unlikely.  And you certainly can't expect companies to stop being greedy.  The whole point of the corporate system is to make more money for the shareholders and you don't do that by being generous and ethical.  Again, maybe a few will make some token gesture, though that seems unlikely as well.

For any real change to happen one of the first things you need are some real campaign finance laws.  You need to make it so General Electric or BP or Bank of America or Goldman Sachs can't just buy politicians.  But since the Supreme Court decided corporations are people and any campaign finance laws would have to be written by the very people who benefit from the current system, don't hold your breath on that happening any time soon.

So at least for the time being, I doubt much will happen from this.  But I think it would behoove the government and corporate America to mend their ways, at least a little bit.  If you look at history, you see all sorts of examples of what happens when the peasants get fed up with the aristocracy.  America in the 1770s, France in the 1780s, Russia in the 1910s, and so on.  It usually hasn't gone well for the aristocracy once the "little people" realize, "Hey, there's a lot more of us than there are of them!"  I think that point would be a long time coming--if it ever happens--but if you're one of the 1%, it's something to consider.

Anyway, this is why I don't like talking about politics because it's such a downer.  Especially in a two-party system because all you can do is vote for one party or the other.  Except just because I'm not entirely happy with Obama, does that mean I want Mitt Romney in charge?  No.  Which makes my options very limited.  I can vote for someone I'm not happy with, someone I hate, or do nothing and watch the guy I hate probably get elected.  So it sucks big time.  Yet there seems to be little we can do about it.

So maybe I should just talk about Netflix instead?  Actually I don't care about Netflix much.  The whole "Qwikster" thing didn't matter because I'd already dumped their DVD service.  The reason is they sent me a broken DVD twice in a row.  In my mind I'm convinced they got the first broken one back, broke it some more, and then sent back to me as some kind of message.  The message for me was, "Netflix DVDs blow."  Not that Blockbuster is much better.  It's nice to get new movies a month or so before Netflix, but the problem is Blockbuster is slower in sending and processing them.  With only one DVD at a time the whole cycle is basically a week between movies.  I could always take the movie back to a Blockbuster store and get a new one.  Just one problem:  the nearest Blockbuster store anymore is like 7 miles away!  So much like politics it's a shitty system no matter what you do.  Though unlike politics I suppose I could go without DVDs by mail.  I'll probably have to at some point.