Letter to the Editor: Occupy Santa Barbara Statement of Solidarity with Working People

By Occupy Santa Barbara | Published on 10.28.2011

We at Occupy Santa Barbara recognize the important work that AFL-CIO, SEIU and the many other unions across our country and the world have done for decades on behalf of fair wages for fair labor. OccupySB recognizes that what is in the interest of the majority of union workers is also in the interest of nonunionized members of our society, especially relating to these facts:

» 1. We (the 99 percent of the population) perform the vast majority of tasks that allow our society to function.

» 2. The practice of suppressing the wages of people whose efforts are essential for a functioning society, for purposes of creating additional dividends to corporate shareholders or additional executive compensation, must be altered to reflect the real human needs of workers, union or non-union, and their families.

Having asserted the above position, OccupySB invites all workers of the world, including those unemployed, fully employed (but still feeling the pain in our community) or the underemployed to join us. We, the 99 percent, will in turn supply voices and numbers through coordinated efforts with the unions of workers in our country to advance efforts for our greater good, in consent through our General Assembly process.

In order to restore fairness to our economic model, we must come together to demand more fair practices in corporate governance and economic policy.

We are the 99 percent, and so are firefighters, teachers, steelworkers, factory workers, sanitation engineers, grocery store clerks and anyone else suffering from the system that has been manipulated to favor the 1 percent.

Occupy Santa Barbara General Assembly

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» AN50 on 10.29.11 @ 10:44 AM

Yet another vulgar demonstration of ignorance by anti-capitalists. Your wages are driven by what value your work has in the market, not what your intellectual narcissism causes you to believe they are. The tasks you perform can be divided into two categories, those that add more intrinsic value to the economy as a whole and those that actually consume more value than they add.

First go through the ego deflating exercise of determining truthfully and honestly which category your so called tasks fall into. I’ll give you a hint, most or consumptive, not productive. Second, even in the productive category if you demand more value for your output than it delivers in value to the economy you drop back to the consumptive slot. This exercise can be performed by every single person in a sovereign economy such as ours, from the President to your infant child. No one escapes.

To further help you realize what you are let me help you identify some common consumptive activities. Doctors, lawyers, bankers, accountants, teachers, cops, government, sales, advertizing, infrastructure related construction, real estate, protesters, lobbyists, speculators, investors, analysts, military, entertainers, sports, pundits, news outlets, prisons, etc, etc, etc…… get the picture. Most of these we recognize as valuable services, like cops, firefighter, the military and teachers, but they are all net consumers of wealth which means we need a steady growth in wealth to offset the consumption. That is done by the producers, and no, Warren Buffet is not a producer. His liberal brother Bill Gates is though as was Steven Jobs. The much hated by the left Koch brothers are producers as is Rosie the Riveter down at the local non-union factory. Non-union factory workers are those who are building intrinsic wealth that the rest of the over paid over valued government workers are sucking off of.

Of the so called 1% you socialists love to demonize, how many earned their wealth building far more into our economy and how many just accumulated that wealth by being world class gamblers and vultures? Do you know? Is it even a conceivable distinction in your hopelessly muddled mind? Did you know that the lion’s share of funding for your movement comes from parasites like George Soros who became stinking filthy rich doing exactly what you idiots are protesting? Did you ever stop to consider why someone of this evil wretched character might want to destroy capitalist free markets even though his empire was built exploiting those free markets?

Get a clue. Really, just standing around angry that you are not a sticking filthy rich parasite like the guy funding your organization is not going to change a damned thing and only serves to make you look like stupid overtly manipulated minions of the gambler class you love to demonize. Unions are no longer serving to protect workers, they exist to protect themselves often at the expense of their workers and I can’t believe you numb nuts can’t see that! I agree we should shame the gamblers, vultures and parasites, for accumulating wealth they did not earn at the expense to us all, but since most of us (the failed to mention 70%) fall into that category it would seem a trite hypocritical. I mean really how can you stand around and demonize a greedy banker when what you do is no damned different?

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