Preparation for Essay 3 - Occupy - Critique of a Column

Dillon Waugh

Hayes

English 100 – 9:10

3/18/13

Word Count:

Critique: Occupy Movement

Charles Kenny of the online journal Foreign Policy writes in an article entitled “We’re All the 1%” that while the protestors of the growing American Occupy Movement are absolutely right in asserting that the wealthiest have no right to hold all that they do without acting out of an obligation to share it with, in Marxist terms, the “have-nots”, it is nigh hypocritical of an average American citizen to cry outrage at economic inequality when even most of the proverbial 99% of Americans are within the world’s top 1% - and I agree. Most anyone can imagine that the typical urban to suburban Westerner hardly looks needy next a technological or investing multibillionaire as opposed to a mid-to-north African shanty-dweller. However, at the end of the article, Kenny whacks the strength out of his argument with a single blow that leaves his point ambiguous at best and self-contradictory at worst.

Kenny makes his point well statistically – while he doesn’t dispute that American’s middle and lower classes have it rather shamefully in comparison to its wealthiest, Census data claims that while the average American household is able to spend approximately  $55.00 per day per person to the top 1%’s $1,500, the world average is closer to $11.00. According to the IRS, meanwhile, cries for increased taxes on the middle-class representatives of the Occupy movement is almost suspect, as middle-class Americans more often than not benefit more highly than anyone from taxes as it is.

He does fail to reference the problem of inflation or how that average $55.00 daily allowance in America would compare to the give-or-take $11.00 elsewhere, as he fails to cite a few points of his data – his statement that “an estimated 900 million people . . . live on less than $1.50” a day would have an even greater impact with affirmation or direction to someplace to confirm that that is a highly educated guess.

But what is most bothersome is that although he writes himself that the Occupiers “have a point”, he ends on the note of telling them to “stop whining.” Shut up with that point of yours. In that case, what is he really saying – that Occupy is all middle-class, and have no right to complain about undoubtedly present economic inequality in America and beyond? That nothing should be done at all and so they had better stop asking for it – even if it’s a problem, if not just on the scale of America? Shouldn’t it start somewhere?