An opinion piece by a Nevada academic attempting to marginalize the Occupy Movement that was published a few weeks ago in a Milwaukee newspaper proved to be an exception.
The grabber in the Nevada professor's piece for my acquaintance was the assertion that, "What really motivates the Occupy movement is not resentment against the 1% but a sense of futility in grappling with a weak economy. With unemployment hovering around 9%, and with all the recurrent plant closings, foreclosures and cutbacks in public services, there is a lot of anger to vent. But class warfare isn't the solution."
The newspaper, for whatever reason, chose not to publish my acquaintance's rebutting letter.
So here it is, unedited. I share it because I think it knocks the proverbial ball clean out of the park so far as illuminating the faulty reasoning of the Nevada professor is concerned:
"Bradley Schiller’s ('The 1%', December 11) misrepresentation of the Occupy Movement as a disaffected group taking the anger of their circumstances out on rich folks demonstrates the kind of disconnect that makes people wary of Ivory Tower academics. Schiller, in an apparent attempt to solidify the myths of the self-made man and fluid social mobility, would have us believe that America’s millionaires and billionaires are just like the rest of us and the Occupy Movement is, at hear, merely railing against the American Dream. Though I cannot speak for all who identify with the Occupy Movement, my understanding of it is that it has arisen from anger at a system in which people who have acquired wealth and power attempt to manipulate the political and economic structures to close the door to opportunity behind them, anger at those who use their wealth and power to create a dual justice system in which manufactured threats are used as a basis for curtailing the rights of many, while the real crimes perpetrated by some of the rich and powerful against wide swaths of the populace are ignored, if not condoned, anger at the scarcity mentality that makes some people willing to do apparently anything to jealously guard what this country has afforded them with complete disregard for their debt to it and the opportunities, infrastructure and resources it has provided them. Schiller’s attempt to belittle the Occupy Movement as a naïve, “us or them” class warfare, in the end, says more about Schiller’s lack of intellectual depth and/or honesty, than it does about people’s serious grievances about systematic complexities that promote and perpetuate injustice."
Schiller's entire column is at: http://www.jsonline.com/news/opinion/the-1-833b5br-135692753.html
I'm far too conservative to buy Bradley's kind of "envy" argument that is so liberally bandied about by shills of the rich and privileged, who, oddly, are shouldering their tax burden and whose taxes further enrich them via subsidies and other publicly funded largess.
