“I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!” This quote, made famous in many films, but none better than in the award-winning “Network,” must have been in the minds of thousands of protesters who joined the Occupy Wall Street rallies in New York and other cities around the United States to protest corporate greed, social inequality, Washington incompetence, and other ills that afflict American society and economy.
The protest, which started in New York City on September 17, has spread across the US and even Canada with similar names, such as OccupyBoston, OccupyLA, OccupyChicago, and OccupyToronto.
From a small rally with less than 50 young protesters on Wall Street, home of corporate greed in America, it has ballooned to hundreds of both young and old Americans who have grown tired of the general decline of American society and economy. The reasons for the protest have grown from corporate greed to Washington’s incompetence in dealing with the problems, lack of jobs, foreclosures, drugs, and every conceivable ill that afflict the United States and the world.
In the satirical film “Network,” TV news anchor Howard Beale, played by Peter Finch, breaks into an impassioned diatribe during his supposed last broadcast and galvanizes the nation with his rant: “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!” and calls on all his viewers to shout out of their windows. Millions did exactly what he asked, and his ratings zoomed through the roof, forcing network owners to extend the news program. Beale was, however, assassinated at the end of the film after his ratings plummeted again.
The government will try to silence the Wall Street protesters as the networks quieted Beale down, but with the general pessimism that pervades American society over the continuous decline of the US, we can expect the protests to grow even bigger despite the passive coverage being made by media of the protests.
More than 700 protesters were arrested by policemen on Saturday on Brooklyn Bridge as they were marching on the bridge’s roadway, with mach organizers claiming that the police lured them onto the roadway to have an excuse to arrest them. But police intimidation has not discouraged the protesters who continue to camp out at Zucotti Park in New York’s Financial District.
Stressing that it is time that their voices be heard, the protesters said on its website: “We are unions, students, teachers, veterans, first responders, families, the unemployed and underemployed. We are all races, sexes and creeds. We are the majority. We are the 99 percent. And we will no longer be silent.”
The unions vowed to join the protests, saying that they agree with what the protesters are up against.
“Well, actually, the protesters, it’s pretty courageous what they’re doing,” a TWU spokesman said, “and it’s brought a new public focus in a different way to what we’ve been saying all along. While Wall Street and the banks and the corporations are the ones that caused the mess that’s flowed down into the states and cities, it seems there’s no shared sacrifice. It’s the workers having to sacrifice while the wealthy get away scot-free. It’s kind of a natural alliance with the young people and the students — they’re voicing our message, why not join them? On many levels, our workers feel an affinity with the kids. They just seem to be hanging out there getting the crap beaten out of them, and maybe union support will help them out a little bit.”
It is a gripe many have voiced all along. The US economy dove into recession on the greed of Wall Street companies, particularly due to the numerous financing frauds that triggered the mortgage crisis that, in turn, resulted in hundreds of thousands of foreclosures and massive layoffs. When Washington came to their rescue, they made it difficult for homeowners to recover or keep their homes by tightening credit, and obviously spent the stimulus money somewhere else.
Many Wall Street firms reported hefty profits in the years following the mortgage crisis, but the people of Main Street remained unemployed, continued losing homes, and joining the poverty line.
Corporate greed has also manifested itself in the big companies’ continued reliance on outsourcing jobs by the thousands, resulting in many Americans losing their jobs and those still unemployed, contenting themselves with lower wages. While outsourcing jobs have increased the already huge profits of these companies, it has left millions of Americans either unemployed or underemployed. It also severely weakened the manufacturing sector, the backbone of old America.
The country barely crawled out of the recession despite Wall Street’s greed, but American politicians showed its own selfish interests when another crisis hit the US, this time the real possibility of default on the country’s huge debts. With their eyes focused on next year’s presidential elections, the politicians clung to their highly divisive brand of politics, and refused to agree on a long-term compromise to end the debt crisis and budget deficit problem.
President Obama recently submitted to Congress a job and tax package that would pour in billions for job-generation programs and tax corporations and the wealthy, but again the feuding politicians are preparing to go to war, instead of trying to work out a compromise.
The Republicans, who have majority control of the House, are threatening to vote down the proposal in the House while their Senate counterparts are vowing to block its passage by filibustering. Do the Republicans really represent Wall Street and the wealthy that they would not even consider the Obama proposal? Or do they have only eyes for next year’s elections? Or both? When will they begin to fight for the people of America?
Apparently, there is a general feeling of frustration among the American populace. And no one can blame the people. Statistics back up their frustration.
Last year, 2.6 million more Americans slipped into poverty, according to the Census Bureau, increasing the number of Americans living below the official poverty line to 46.2 million people, the highest number in 52 years.
The Census Bureau also reported that median household incomes fell in 2010 to levels last seen in 1997. Lawrence Katz, an economic professor at Harvard, said it was the first time since the Great Depression that median household income, adjusted for inflation, had not risen over such a long period. This can only mean a diminishing middle class, a phenomenon seen mostly in Third World countries.
“This is truly a lost decade,” Katz said. “We think of America as a place where every generation is doing better, but we’re looking at a period when the median family is in worse shape than it was in the late 1990s.”
There is reason for these young people to be alarmed and to take action. America is on the decline and they do not want to be the ones to fall in the precipice. They do not want to take out student loans and not be able to pay them because they can’t find jobs when they graduate. They do not want to grow old and not find the opportunities that their parents and grandparents had, or the benefits that their elders enjoyed.
The rising protest movement should awaken our politicians to the reality that the America that they are steering is no longer the same America that their predecessors steered to greatness. The protests should soon make them realize that they should stop serving their selfish interests and those of their wealthy constituents, and start working for the greater majority of Americans.
Washington politicians and those wealthy capitalists should start rethinking their agendas before millions of Americans join those young protesters on the streets and revive Beale’s famous rant: “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!”