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发帖数: 29846 | 1 占领运动抱怨错了对象：参加占领多伦多运动的28岁社会学研究生担心毕业后找不到工
作，“但我不禁想到，究竟是贪婪的华尔街还是她自己造成了她现在的困境”
Occupiers are blaming the wrong people
MARGARET WENTE | Columnist profile | E-mail
From Saturday's Globe and Mail (includes clarifications)
Published Saturday, Nov. 05, 2011 2:00AM EDT
Last updated Monday, Nov. 07, 2011 8:12PM EST
Laurel O’Gorman is one of the faces of Occupy Toronto. She believes the
capitalist system has robbed her of her future. At 28, she’s studying for a
master’s degree in sociology at Laurentian University in Sudbury. She’s
also the single mother of two children. “I’m here because I don’t know
what kind of job I could possibly find that would allow me to pay rent, take
care of these two children and pay back $600 each month in loans,” she
said.
Members of the New York City chapter of Iraq Veterans Against the War and
dozens of other uniformed veterans known as 'Veterans of the 99%' pause in
front of the New York Stock Exchange while marching from Vietnam Veterans
Plaza to Zucotti Park where the Occupy Wall Street movement is centered on
November 2, 2011 in New York City.
Video
War veterans support Occupy Wall Street
Photos
I'm a squirrel!
Ms. O’Gorman is in a fix. But I can’t help wondering whether she, and not
the greedy Wall Street bankers, is the author of her own misfortune. Just
what kind of jobs did she imagine are on offer for freshly minted sociology
graduates? Did she bother to ask? Did it occur to her that it might be a
good idea to figure out how to support her children before she had them?
She’s typical in her bitter disappointment. Here’s Boston resident
Sarvenaz Asasy, 33, who has a master’s degree in international human rights
, along with $60,000 in student loans. She dreamed of doing work to help the
poor get food and education. But now she can’t find a job in her field.
She blames the government. “They’re cutting all the grants, and they’re
bailing out the banks. I don’t get it.”
Then there’s John, who’s pursuing a degree in environmental law. He wants
to work at a non-profit. After he graduated from university, he struggled to
find work. “I had to go a full year between college and law school without
a job. I lived at home with my parents to make ends meet.” He thinks a law
degree will help, but these days, I’m not so sure.
These people make up the Occupier generation. They aspire to join the
virtueocracy – the class of people who expect to find self-fulfillment (and
a comfortable living) in non-profit or government work, by saving the
planet, rescuing the poor and regulating the rest of us. They are what the
social critic Christopher Lasch called the “new class” of "therapeutic
cops in the new bureaucracy."
The trouble is, this social model no longer works. As blogger Kenneth
Anderson writes, “The machine by which universities train young people to
become minor regulators and then delivered them into white-collar positions
on the basis of credentials in history, political science, literature,
ethnic and women’s studies – with or without the benefit of law school –
has broken down. The supply is uninterrupted, but the demand has dried up.”
It’s not the greedy Wall Street bankers who destroyed these people’s hopes
. It’s the virtueocracy itself. It’s the people who constructed a benefit-
heavy entitlement system whose costs can no longer be sustained. It’s the
politicians and union leaders who made reckless pension promises that are
now bankrupting cities and states. It’s the socially progressive policy-
makers in the U.S. who declared that everyone, even those with no visible
means of support, should be able to own a home with no money down, courtesy
of their government. In Canada, it’s the social progressives who assure us
we can keep on consuming all the health care we want, even as the costs
squeeze out other public goods.
The Occupiers are right when they say our system of wealth redistribution is
broken. But they’re wrong about what broke it. The richest 1 per cent are
not exactly starving out the working poor. (In the U.S., half all income
sent to Washington is redistributed to the elderly, sick and disabled, or to
those who serve them, and nearly half the country lives in a household that
’s getting some sort of government benefit.) The problem is, our system
redistributes the wealth from young to old, and from middle-class workers in
the private sector to inefficient and expensive unions in the public sector.
Among the biggest beneficiaries of this redistribution is the higher-
education industry. In Canada, we subsidize it directly. In the U.S., it’s
subsidized by a vast system of student loans, which have allowed colleges to
jack up tuition to sky-high levels. U.S. student debt has hit the trillion-
dollar mark. Both systems crank out too many sociologists and too few
mechanical engineers. These days, even law-school graduates are having
trouble finding work. That’s because the supply has increased far faster
than the demand.
The voices of Occupy Wall Street, argues Mr. Anderson and others, are the
voices of the downwardly mobile who are acutely aware of their threatened
social status and need someone to blame. These are people who weren’t
interested in just any white-collar work. They wanted to do transformational
, world-saving work – which would presumably be underwritten by taxing the
rich. They now face the worst job market in a generation. But their
predicament is at least in part of their own making. And none of the
solutions they propose will address their problem.
Ms. O’Gorman, the graduate student in sociology, didn’t bring her kids to
the Occupy demonstration in Toronto because she was worried about security.
Still, she hoped they would absorb the message. “I’m trying to teach them
equity and critical thinking from a young age,” she said. If she’d only
applied a bit more critical thinking to herself, she might be able to pay
the rent.
Editor's note: Clarifications: John, who’s pursuing a degree in
environmental law, is not part of the Occupy movement.
The following sentence is a paraphrase, not a direct quote: They are what
the social critic Christopher Lasch called the “new class” of “
therapeutic cops in the new bureaucracy.” |
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