But, who is this resistance? (UPDATE, Nov. 16: And,
what will happen to it now that Zuccotti Park has been raided by the NYPD? UPDATE 2, Nov. 16: OWS semi-officially
believes in communism.)
The Occupy Wall Street website
has breakout information on a web-based poll it commissioned early in October. The fully-crunched numbers/data from the poll are
here, in PDF.
Here's a few samplings from the webpage:
64.2% of respondents were younger than 34 years of age.
While the sample is relatively young, one in three respondents is older than 35 and one in five respondents is 45 and older.
7.9% of respondents have a high school degree or less.
92.1% of the sample has some college, a college degree, or a graduate degree.
27.4% have some college (but no degree), 35% have a college degree, 8.2% have some graduate school (but no degree), and close to 21.5% have a graduate school degree. 6.4% in the sample agree somewhat or strongly that they regularly use Facebook and 28.9 percent use Twitter regularly.
And one from the PDF:
Table 6 asks respondents to identify their race and ethnic origin. The data suggest that 81.3% of respondents considered themselves White, 1.3% Black\African American, 3.2% Asian, .4% Native American Indian, 2.9% Mixed, 7.7% Hispanic, and 3.2% considered themselves some other group.
Gee, how did that one not make the website? Probably because that, even more than the fat tail on the education response, would make clear that this isn't the 99 percent. Rather, it's the 2-80 percent, or something like that.
UPDATE, Nov. 26: Other reports confirm that black Americans
simply aren't connecting to OWS.
“Occupy Wall Street was started by whites and is about their concern with their plight,” Nathalie Thandiwe,
a radio host and producer for WBAI in New York, said in an interview.
“Now that capitalism isn’t working for ‘everybody,’ some are
protesting.”
This gets back to comments I've made before. Black Americans, by and large, have seen capitalism work less well for them for longer, including being the prime targets of subprime mortgages.
Beyond a lack of leaders to inspire them to join the Occupy fold, blacks
are not seeing anything new for themselves in the movement. Why should
they ally with whites who are just now experiencing the hardships that
blacks have known for generations?
The story also notes that black churches were key to the civil rights movement, but aren't part of any clarion call right now, as far as the lack of leadership. It adds that A-list black civil rights groups are co-opted, if you will, by the amount of money they've received in the recent past from Big Tobacco and other hypercapitalists.
So, young, white grad students and graduate degree holders. How many have MBAs and can't get financial employment because Wall Street screwed up? How many sought MBAs to try to work at Wall Street pre-2008? Ditto on how many have JDs and can't practice corporate finance law?
Oh, and almost 5 percent are, if not 1 percenters, 5 percenters. 5.4 percent make more than $100K a year, and $120K is the cutoff to be in the top 5 percent of U.S. incomes.
The remainder 13% of the sample earn over $75,000 with close to 2% earning over $150,000 per year.
And, what were/are the income levels of their parents?
Or, to put it yet another way. At least some of the more stereotypical members of OWS are Millennial-generation youth who probably had helicopter moms and whose overstimulation in the self-esteem movement says they should be making $100K a year now.
Those issues might be a partial explainer for why OWS doesn't have an "agenda."
(Update, March 27, 2012: New research indicates that at college or early post-college ages, Millennials are indeed
much more the "me generation" than Boomers or even Gen-Xers at similar ages. That, in turn, would add fuel to my contention that many an OWSer wouldn't be protesting had he, or perhaps she, gotten that Wall Street job in 2008 for which they got their grad degrees._
A certain percentage of its members, three years ago, might have been trying to get jobs with the very Wall Street firms they now vilify. Or, they may actually have been employed there. So, other than narrow self-interest, and assuming I'm on the right track here as to what grad degrees are held by the top-educated OWSers, what led you all to become protesters? Speaking of that,
some people are now questioning whether Occupy students at Harvard, other Ivy League schools and similar elite institutions might not be getting a bit hypocritical, while others wonder the same about the moral integrity of the universities that churn out so many 1 percenters. (Some elite schools are doing a bit to increase class-based, not just race-based, affirmative action, but progress is slow at best.)
Stay tuned. The OWS website
is doing a repeat/follow-up. Let's see if, five weeks or so later, polling information changes. The blog post announcing it is already getting fun comments. Like this:
Depends on what the results are and the reason for the survey. It may never see the light of day. Besides there are so many trolls on this board, I'd call the results questionable. I told them I don't vote so I am sure they care very little about my answers.
And this:
What difference does that make, it's a "click the dot" plurality system, which perpetuates the two-party system.
And this:
I started this survey, but it looks to me like a move on/dem thing, so I am not going to finish it. Anyone else feel the same way?
Beyond that random sampling, other commenters say that a "principal interpreter" means secondary interpreters, etc. Sounds like a certain amount of paranoia floating out there.
And .... the survey's already closed! WTF? And, given the shutdown, when will we learn its results?
Meanwhile, per the New York Review of Books, here's
yet more reason to be skeptical, even cynical, about at least a certain swath of the "movement":
Adbusters, in a word, a magazine I found pretentious when I first looked at it 15 years ago. From the story author's "welcome to Adbusters" email:
Thank you for joining our network. You are now part of a 90,000+ strong global network of activists, cultural creative’s [sic] and meme insurgents—a revolutionary force that, with your active involvement, just might reshape how power and meaning flow in the 21st century. Together lets live a little more on the wild side, launch a few telling cultural interventions and pull off some surprising pranks, jams and other essential mental resuscitations.
And, even without receiving such a "welcome" email, the "antic, Dadaist tone" is exactly what I saw 15 years ago, too. So, yes, I'm hard on OWS. To riff on Rahm Emanuel, protest as street art is wasting a good crisis, as are the degree of pampered Millennials who may be in iGeneration mode. Union members who have shown up at Zucotti Park should take over, especially left-liberalish ones like longshoremen. More on that below the fold
