Forum Post: Consumer Confidence

First and foremost, I’ve got to say, I love what you all are doing. I haven’t been able to be on the streets myself, but I have been occupying the IRC chat on occasion.

I don’t want to get political, but I feel like this idea of calling the wealthy among us “job creators” has gotten completely out of hand. If it is their job to ‘create’ jobs, why exactly aren’t they? Their taxes are too low, or the government is in the way, it always seems to be something. There’s always SOME reason why they should make more and we should make less. Even the “middle class” has been jumping on board lately, calling themselves the ‘Tea Party’ and making the poor out to be scapegoats. They need to work harder, they need to pay their taxes, they need to stop living on welfare, and so on, and so on. I don’t want to fight you people, I get the impression you’re fucking terrified, just like I am, that the economy is in the crapper and there’s no signs of improvement on the horizon. To me, though, the answer isn’t to board up your windows and sit there in a panic while stroking your gun, with nightmares of big bad government boogeymen around the corner.

I agree with some of the left’s message, but I really hate this idea of “fairness.” Why should anyone give a fuck if your boss makes more than you? Granted, when we’re talking about your boss making 300x more than you, we have an issue. But who really cares if it’s “fair” or not? What is the end result? Can I say something that might blow your fucking mind? American labor, is the American consumer. ZOMGWTFBBQ. The people that are making 300 times less than their CEO, are the people who need to buy houses, plasma TV’s, and whatever else you can think of to get us out of this recession/depression. Let’s combine the two works and just call it a repression.

I respect Henry Ford. He was kind of a douche in certain regards, but he figured out that paying a lot of money in at the bottom made it so people could afford the shit they were making, and the economy goes around and around. Whether you are a “job creator” or not, if you don’t have customers, you don’t have a job, no matter how much money you piss away. There’s no really good reason to mass produce if people can’t mass consume. So, now we have millions of people out of work, drowning in debt, and some economists are telling us we have a “demand” problem. Of course we have a fucking “demand” problem. You can’t bleed the labor market down to peasant wages, drive them to live on overextended credit, and still expect to sell them something.

So, why protest Wall Street? To me, it’s all about priorities. The next time you invest in a company outsourcing jobs to China, India, or so on… The next time you justify cutting labor costs, busting unions, or wonder why “consumer confidence” is down… remember who those consumers are.