The Weekly Screed (#560)

How to end “Occupy Wall Street” happily, for everyone
by David Benjamin

BROOKLYN — To Democrats, the restive masses involved in Occupy Wall
Street must seem like an unending film loop of “Dog Day Afternoon.”
The ragtag protesters are like Sonny and Sal, the movie’s hapless bank
robbers, who find themselves the darlings of the media but can’t quite
explain what they want. Like the cops in the movie, sympathetic
politicians in Washington keep asking the protesters, “Please, define
your program. List your demands. Tell us what you want! For God’s
sake, people, focus!”

Meanwhile, Republicans —defenders of the Wall Street status quo — are
trying to figure out how to stop this revolt before it hits critical
mass. The GOP’s latest presidential front-runner, Herman Cain,
helpfully told the protesters: “Get a job.” Newt Gingrich blames it
all on “bad education.” Fox News evangelist Sarah Palin sees Occupy
Wall Street as the dark, Satanic side of her godly movement, the Tea
Party. A lot of the right-wing feel vindicated in their fear of a vast
Communist plot, ‘cause here it is.

Clearly, the Establishment types aren’t getting it. The motto of the
protest from Day One, has been “We are the 99%.” If you have not —
like Democrats and Republicans — been listening, the protesters are
referring to the fact that, in the last 30 years, the bottom 99
percent of Americans have been paying higher taxes and earning less
money while the top one percent has devoured all the rewards derived
from what is still the richest economy in the world. Ninety-nine
percent of us are getting steadily, measurably, palpably poorer while
the rich are laughing all the way to the next bank bailout.

We’re looking at the wrong movie here. It ain’t “Dog Day Afternoon.”
It’s “Jerry Maguire.” And all those fist-shaking, sign-carrying,
unruly, unkempt and outspoken denizens of Zuccotti Park are Rod
Tidwell.

“Show me the money!” That’s what they’re saying, man. “Show me the MONEY!”

The Occupy folks, on Wall Street, in Chicago, Houston, San Francisco,
Hawaii, everywhere, are talking economics. They’re up in arms and on
the streets because almost none of us are getting a fair share of the
vast bounty of the land of the free.

Show ‘em the money! I mean really. Literally. That will break up the protests.

I mean, why occupy Wall Street if you’re not going after the money?
For example, according to the State of New York, total earnings last
year for people in the Wall Street financial industry — banks,
brokerages, mutual funds, insurance companies, hedge funds,
commodities, etc. — was $144 billion. We’re talking about an area of
two or three blocks in lower Manhattan with a gross domestic product
bigger than that of 130 entire nations. Compared to Wall Street,
Versailles at the peak of its splendor was a tarpaper shack; the Taj
Mahal is a double-wide on the wrong side of the tracks.

Show you the money? Let’s go to Wall Street.

In 2010, Wall Street paid its salespeople (which is what they are, and
all they are) $20.8 billion in bonuses — just bonuses. That’s an
average of $128,530, which is almost exactly three times the wages
earned by the average American worker (teachers, firefighters,
welders, construction workers, nurses, clerks, plumbers, social
workers, house painters, actors, truck drivers, cops, waitresses,
salespeople).

Now, we all definitely know that the rich want to hold on to every
penny they’ve grubbed together over the years. We know this because
the Republican Party tells us so, every minute of every day. Any
effort at restoring balance to the economy, through a change in the
tax code, elimination of certain deductions or — God forbid — a surtax
on incomes over $1 million, guarantees shrieks from the GOP of “class
warfare,” “redistribution of wealth” and, for old times’ sake,
“socialism.”

The idea of “economic justice,” recirculating — as a nation — some of
the money absconded by Wall Street and tucked away in Switzerland for
a rainy day, is politically DOA. However, we’re not really talking
“America” here. The key to ending Occupy Wall Street comes down to —
at most — some 10,000 activists cycling through Zuccotti Park. If you
could buy off those cockeyed idealists, you’d kill the whole movement,
everywhere, long before it caught fire in Peoria and affected the 2012
elections.

How much would we have to invest in this act of naked (but legal) corruption?

By my calculations, if you were to take 25 percent of just one year’s
Wall Street bonus money (or 3.5 percent of Wall Street’s annual GDP),
you could pay10,000 protesters a half-million bucks each, to go just
go away. Take the money and run.

But really, does it have to cost that much? With winter coming on,
most of the currently outraged would roll up their sleeping bags and
fold their tents for a tenth as much — $50,000 in hard cash (only 2.5
percent, or $3,213 each, of the annual bonus orgy). Even if you
couldn’t co-opt all the protesters for a mere fifty grand, the rest
would be so dismayed by the greed — or neediness — of their erstwhile
comrades that they’d eventually shuffle off in despair and go back to
living in their parents’ basement.

Still, is it fair to the tireless white-collar leather-lungs of Wall
Street to have to pay anything to get the Occupy bums out of their
hair. What if, instead of imposing an onerous outlay of $3,213 on
every croupier on Wall Street, we just appeal to the ten wealthiest
hedge fund players in the casino. Together, John Paulson ($3.3b),
George Soros ($2.4b), Philip Falcone ($1.7b), Kenneth Griffin ($1.5b),
James Simons ($1.3b), T. Boone Pickens ($1.2b), Steven Cohen ($1b),
David Shaw ($770m), John Arnold ($700m) and Raymond Dalio ($580m),
took in $11.15 billion last year. If we hit these guys up for enough
money to go around Zuccotti Park buying off the downtrodden,
“lobbying” them to end their little un-American, anti-capitalist
insurrection and hit the road, it would only cost our ten uber-Geckos
a little over four percent of one year’s pay.

We’re talking about throwing a teaspoon off the Titanic here.

We’re also talking about happy endings, which only money can buy.
“Jerry Maguire,” you remember, ends up with everybody hugging
everybody else.

In “Dog Day Afternoon,” on the other hand, Sal gets his brains blown
out and Sonny gets sent up the river to Sing Sing.