Recovering Wall Street Employee Speaks Out about the "1%"

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31. I didn't start this thread.

The acknowledgement that the .01% are the problem came out early on in the occupy movement; if that is the 'new DU bugaboo' of which you speak, I am merely agreeing with it. It did not originate with me. Someone also posted a video (again, not me) a few days ago demonstrating just how disproportionate a share the .01% have. If you mean something else by the phrase 'the new DU bugaboo; I don't know what you mean.

I acknowledge some people have more choices than others. I disagree that there is a 'gatekeeper' class of 1%ers than deserve our scorn.

There are a lot of people who had the choice to go to school during the Clinton administration, and chose not to. I went despite being in my mid-30's and having 4 kids. I earned an engineering degree and because I was making decent money; my wife was able to go to law school and graduated in 2006 with a JD.

We aren't among the 1%, but I can see how young people who graduated when I did ('99) could have been sucked into the game and could easily lose it all, by simply living life and getting by.

There isn't a conspiracy. There are a lot of conspiracies. It wasn't a single person who deregulated the banking industry. It wasn't one individual that weakened monopoly laws that prevented:
The telecommunications giants,
The pharmaceutical giants
The energy giants
and the various other empires that prevent young professionals from successfully competing as a small business in the marketplace. It wasn't a single individual who changed the tax codes to favor the wealthy. Since it wasn't a single individual; it was a conspiracy.

It isn't some kind of secret conspiracy that the 30,000 or so people that are in the top .01% are involved in; it's different agendas that the various interests gather in the corridors of power to work out. This 'gatekeeper class' that you have defined comes nowhere near these corridors of power.

Sure, there are despicable parasites and yeah, some people don't have as many choices as others, but the biggest part of the catastrophe that we are in now happened because a lot of people were invested in the housing market (a lot of them without even knowing they were) and trillions of dollars of perceived real estate value disappeared literally overnight.

The fact that some people are suffering less because they were fortunate enough to have choices and then made good choices; is not enough to earn my scorn. A lot of people are given more choices because they are more attractive than others; some are given more choices because they are taller, thinner or speak more eloquently; some people just get an easy ride because they look intelligent; the reasons that people have more choices can be simply the luck of the draw.

A lot of people are more fortunate than I am; that doesn't make me angry at them and it doesn't make me suspect them of being involved in some evil plot to make me unhappy. Sure there's class warfare, but I don't agree with your assessment of the enemy.