Last month we reported on what we were fairly certain was a parody, and no one’s disproven our hypothesis so far. But the line between parody and reality is almost nonexistent in 2011 America. Case in point, the idle hundreds who have decided to do their part for humanity by making Occupy Wall Street their full-time volunteer occupation over the last few weeks.
An axiom that any middle schooler should know:
-Humans create wealth by toil and exchange. That doesn’t mean that working and trading will guarantee you riches, but rather that you have to do one and/or the other to build anything of lasting value. They’re necessary conditions, not sufficient ones. Wealth doesn’t fall from the sky, nor from the hands of elected officials.
We found a website where Occupy Wall Street protestors have chosen to write their laments. There are hundreds of them, but once you’ve read a few you can create the rest from a template. Which would read something like “I willingly took on tens of thousands of dollars in debt without calculating the estimated payoff. This is rich people’s fault, for some reason. And I probably have a child. Feel sorry for me.”
Our sampling of the more erudite protesters begins with Roger “Buzz” Osborne, founder of proto-grunge legends the Melvins, who apparently ran out of money halfway through the gender reassignment surgery:
She’s apparently serious, or at least earnest enough not to pick up the irony in the opening sentence of her diatribe.
You were dumb enough to enter an “academic field” that even the dippiest Kardashian sister could have told you wasn’t going to lead to a job. No one forced you to rely on food stamps, nor WIC (that’s the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children, for those of you too busy working to feed your kids to have kept tabs on which taxpayer-funded teats are out there for you to suck at.)
If these are literally the 99% – if only one out of every 100 Americans isn’t borrowing money she can’t pay back from people who had no choice in the matter for degrees with no utility – then it’s already over. Maybe we can start again in Antarctica.
Oh, you fatuous whore. You have the only fixed-rate adjustable-rate mortgage in history. Which is it? Fixed, or adjustable? You put “fixed rate” in quotes, which presumably means we’re supposed to take the term figuratively, but then why did you refer to it as such? Were you hoodwinked by a mortgage lender’s assistant whom you were too dumb to question? Did you make a six-digit financial decision armed only with your guile, too stupid to even bring along a representative who might know a little more about these transactions than you do?
Well, can’t your husband help take care of his 1-year-old and the baby growing inside you? What’s that you say? You’re not married? Never were? Two different fathers? Well, that’s not right. You shouldn’t be held responsible for your decisions.
“I can’t get a job, because I have no work history. I have no work history, because no one will hire me.” Taken to its logical conclusion, that would mean that no human has ever held, or could ever hold, a job. What is this “entry level” of which you speak?
Hey sister: I understand. My father drank and it made me an idiot. I mean, my being an idiot made my father drink. One or the other.
Or this one:
If borrowing thousands of dollars to go to school while spreading one’s legs and getting inseminated (by someone who didn’t stick around to help raise the kid) isn’t a sure path to self-sufficiency, we don’t know what is.
Or this one:
Her initial complaint is that in her chosen line of work, customers are mean to her. Yes, welcome to the adult world, but the logical inconsistencies here are all over the place. She “can’t” find a job in her field, yet “refuses” (as if ultimately it’s her decision) to work in “their evil industry”.
She doesn’t specify what the evil industry is, but she inadvertently brings up a point.
You know how not all protesters are lazy hippies, and not all Jews are cheap, and not all homosexuals are child molesters*, and not all Mexicans are illegals? Well, that kind of blanket stereotyping works just fine when you’re discussing “Wall Street CEOs”, who seem to be the casus belli of every single protestor.
Our dour young miss isn’t complaining about every company that’s headquartered literally on Wall Street. That would include the American University of Antigua’s college of medicine; architects Skidmore, Owings and Merrill; and any number of newsstand operators and hot dog vendors.
So what exactly is a “Wall Street CEO”, anyway? “Wall Street” is what they call a metonym. Wall Street is where the New York Stock Exchange is located, and thus the latter is often identified with the former. By its narrowest definition, then, “Wall Street CEO” should mean any CEO of a company listed on the Dow. Who exactly are those people? Here they are, with what they studied in college:
Microsoft – Steve Ballmer (mathematics)
Alcoa – Klaus Kleinfeld (economics)
Kraft – Irene Rosenfeld (Ph.D in statistics)
3M – Sir George Buckley (Ph.D in engineering)
AT&T – Randall Stephenson (accounting)
Boeing – Jim McNerney (MBA)
Not only has Boeing not received bailout money, the Obama administration is attempting to prevent it from building a plant in South Carolina and hiring thousands of skilled workers.
Caterpillar – Doug Oberhelman (finance)
Chevron – John Watson (economics)
Cisco – John Chambers (business)
Coca-Cola – Muhtar Kent (economics)
DuPont – Ellen Kullman (mechanical engineering)
Exxon Mobil – Rex Tillerson (civil engineering)
Hewlett-Packard – Meg Whitman (economics)
Home Depot – Frank Blake (unspecified bachelor’s)
Intel – Paul Otellini (economics)
IBM – Ginni Rometty (computer science/electrical engineering)
Johnson & Johnson – Bill Weldon (biology)
Travelers – Jay Fishman (accounting)
Pfizer – Ian Read (chemical engineering)
Procter & Gamble – Bob McDonald (engineering, West Point. Also a captain in the 82nd Airborne)
Verizon – Lowell McAdam (engineering)
Disney – Bob Iger (television/radio)
United Technologies – Louis R. Chênevert (commerce, production management)
Walmart – Mike Duke (engineering)
McDonald’s – Jim Skinner
This one’s awesome. He never graduated college, and we can’t even determine which one he attended, if any. He spent a decade in the Navy, got out at 27 and became a restaurant manager trainee. That’s right, his ambition was to manage a McDonald’s. (Not “manage McDonald’s”. Manage a McDonald’s.)
Merck – Ken Frazier (political science) (And Clay Matthews III was a college walk-on who became a Pro Bowler. It happens.)
JP Morgan Chase – Jamie Dimon (economics)
General Electric – Jeff Immelt (applied math)
Oh, and this is what we’ve building toward:
Bank of America – Brian Moynihan (history)
The one Wall Street CEO whose company might deserve the protesters’ wrath just happens to be one of only 2 with a confirmed liberal arts degree.
These people’s workplaces are easy to find, if not their homes. Yet the protestors choose to rally elsewhere.
Aside from Bank of America, which of these companies are keeping the 99% down? Is it Johnson & Johnson, exploiting our hopeless addiction to cotton in swab form by charging us an exorbitant 1¢ apiece for Q-Tips?
Or Hewlett-Packard and their insistence on undercutting and running every mom-and-pop neighborhood laser printer manufacturer out of business? Maybe it’s Pfizer, makers of Zithromax, which has saved many a hippie from a chlamydia or syphilis outbreak.
Whichever, the cops recently kicked all the protestors out of Zucotti Park, supplanting 9/11 as the NYPD’s greatest moment.
*All Catholic priests are, however.**
**Before you bombard us with hate mail, that was sarcasm. We’re exposing journalists’ habit of mentioning Catholic priests every time a pedophilia scandal arises, e.g. the completely secular Jerry Sandusky affair.
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Financial Retard of the Month, By Request
Our relationship was fleeting, but intense
We swear to God, we don’t go looking for this stuff.
Let’s just give Trent Hamm of The Simple Dollar the lifetime achievement award, Retard of Eternity, and be done with it. But even Trent Hamm at his cheapest doesn’t complain about the hand life dealt him. Far from it, in fact. He sees possibility in everything, even a gently used Ziploc bag or a toothpaste tube with a milligram of Crest left inside.
No, for complaining about the world and the curveballs it throws we have to go to the profane, portly woman at So Over Debt, the most self-defeating honoree we’ve had so far. Her site’s very subtitle illustrates the problem:
What do we have there?
Self-categorization. Is it relevant that she had a child, and doesn’t have a husband? She thinks it is.
Pessisism writ large. “not to financial freedom, because that’s out of reach”. Why? One of the Control Your Cash principals was a single mom at one point – and a college dropout, unlike the highly educated Ms. So Over Debt – and financial freedom wasn’t out of reach for her.
(This is why we started the RotM series. Most of our winners so far have been people who live their lives not even realizing that they are living, breathing bad examples. People who can’t get ahead financially and can’t understand why, even though the answer is staring them in the face [if they happen to be looking in the mirror.] Buy assets, sell liabilities isn’t just a mindless mantra to be recited, it’s a never-fail method for building wealth. And something this month’s winner would never bother applying to her life, not when she can make excuses and blame the world.)
Ms. So Over Debt’s 2-part bio illustrates the problem in even greater detail. She explains why she’s poor, or at least incapable of financial freedom. She had a kid at 15, spent tons of money on a college degree that enables her to now take home somewhere in the neighborhood of $600 per pay period in her chosen field, got divorced, and smokes. We’re not sure about you, but that sounds to us like the kind of person who should be writing about personal finance. But still, every part of her misfortune is someone else’s fault:
From “under (you)”? Because you have a say in the transfer of someone else’s house? It doesn’t matter if you paid the rent on time, or never did. The house is the landlord’s to sell as he wishes. That doesn’t mean he can kick you out before your lease is up, assuming you’re honoring its terms, but his decision to sell an asset has nothing to do with your promptness or delinquency. Although it’s adorable that you think it might.
And if being told the house you live in is being sold (or more to the point, that your lease isn’t being renewed) results in crying, how do you handle legitimate crises?
Multiple-choice quiz time. Will she use the death of a grandparent as an excuse for some other misfortune?
The answer is c), Of course.
Lady, grandparents die. It’s what they do. Most of us grieve briefly, remember the good times if any and move on. But we have to admit, your method sounds way more exciting.
This woman is exemplary for showcasing how to never, ever build wealth:
And then, seconds later:
Which links to a post titled “I’ve Really, Really Screwed Up”, which contains the following piece of inspiration:
Then, the dizzying crescendo:
We’re sure the old boss would be delighted to know how highly you think of the old job. Hell, who wouldn’t want to hire someone like that? Grab her now while she’s still on the market!
The larger point is that living at the mercy of bosses (whom you might have to go back and grovel to) is no way to live. No wait, there’s a still larger point. Which is that effort is no substitute for results:
It’s awesome when a slow learner proves our points for us.
First off, you didn’t make good choices. You made mind-boggingly awful choices, such as starting a new job without even knowing the pay scale.
And let’s requote her quote, seeing how poignant it is:
See above. Having a spouse to pick up the slack, or at the very least not eliminating a spouse from your life, is a great way to not be poor.
We were going to present her with the Retard of the Month prize (a carton of Marlboros, a trial membership to Match.com, an illustrated brochure that explains how to safely use a treadmill, and a voucher for one free class at the trade school of her choice, so she can learn at least one marketable skill), but fate intervened. Not only did she prevent us from commenting on her site, she took her ball and went home.
It takes an especially sensitive little girl to a) forbid non-spammers from posting on her site, and b) deny them access to her server. No wonder she cries when her landlord makes a transaction she doesn’t like. Ms. So Over Debt, this one’s for you. Try not to cry (again).