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Tuesday, November 29, 2011

OCCUPY FACEBOOK: Hypocrisy in Numbers

Why does Facebook get off easy?

Mark Zuckerberg. Apparently with 24 BILLION DOLLARS you have as much net worth as 27 million of the poorest American Families put together. You could buy 27 million families or you could own Facebook.

The Wall Street Journal blogger D.E. Wittkower Read it here OWS is seemingly anti Wall Street but not anti Silicon Valley.

Is there a sense that Wall Street with its numbers and ether world trading figures is a bunch of rich guys just playing with Monopoly money?  (literally and figuratively) The billionaires that make our gadgets and all our fun stuff - they are creators, workers, inventors.. and therefore okay. But bankers are bad because they don't work? Is that what's going on with this contradiction? 

There is a war on work in this country and Ive noticed I play along with it too sometimes. People are soooo ready to criticize others about not working hard enough. The conservatives say the hippies aren't working; the liberals say the bankers are corporate greedy bums. People defensive about how hard they work; that the economy doesn't support just hard work. Luck is important too. But that bootstraps mythology tells you otherwise.

I hear it on all sides. Anti-OWS think a bunch of dirty hippies are laying around asking for handouts and not working (it bothers me too that people are camping out rather than working to make change). Similarly, OWS seems to be critiquing rich people for not really working. I don't think either stereotype is true or fair. And I think it keeps us all fighting and ignoring the main thing that's obvious and right in front of our face. But I'll get to what THAT is next time..

For now, let me ask you this OWS..

You're anti-wealth, anti-corporation, anti- 1%ers. So what are you doing on Facebook?

You're for raising awareness and growing your group and spreading the message. What better way to do that than one of the most incredible social media sites of all time?

So who's your daddy?

You want to boycott banks and physically occupy wall street... why not silicon valley? I look forward to hearing the justifications...

Here are some of Wittkower's excellent questions:

• Is Zuckerberg a “creator” and therefore deserving of wealth? Does an investment banker create and, if so, is that creation similarly deserving?

• Should we allow a company to reap such profits if, in the views of some, consumers have no meaningful alternatives, or does this kind of market require more regulation?

• What goals and virtues does inequality of wealth create and support? Are those goals appropriately served by a society in which one man owns perhaps as much as a quarter of his society combined? What other goals and virtues are we sacrificing–and what are the ways, if any, that society is profiting?

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