Some 99% are more 99% than others

Here's something Jonathan Schwarz wrote about the 2008 campaign which is also relevant to understanding what these "Occupy" marches really are.

What's happening now is the technocracy is organizing itself to fight back. MoveOn, the Obama campaign, blogland—that's the technocracy in action. But the only way they'll win is by allying themselves to the 80% of Americans who have essentially no power. And technocrats can almost never bring themselves to identify downward. (I didn't get a PhD in mechanical engineering so I'd have to join no union!) Meanwhile, the 80% can smell the fact the technocrats do have contempt for them and have no intention of sharing real power—making the 80% vulnerable to rhetorical attacks on the technocratic elite.

Yesterday in a widely circulated blog post Ezra Klein highlighted what, to him, makes the protests "worth covering." Unlike a lot of these elite presspersons I personally have always thought the sit-ins were "coverage-worthy" even if I don't particularly care for the participants, but I digress. Here's Klein.

It was a Tumblr called, “We Are The 99 Percent,” and all it’s doing is posting grainy pictures of people holding handwritten signs telling their stories, one after the other.

“I am 20K in debt and am paying out of pocket for my current tuition while I start paying back loans with two part time jobs.”

These are not rants against the system. They’re not anarchist manifestos. They’re not calls for a revolution. They’re small stories of people who played by the rules, did what they were told, and now have nothing to show for it. Or, worse, they have tens of thousands in debt to show for it.

Yeah yeah "small stories of people who played by the rules" sounds appealing to a certain aesthetic like Klein's. But what that really refers to is Schwarz's "technocratic elite" in this case at least appearing to "identify downward" for once. Except not really. Mostly what we're seeing is a lot of Yuppies suddenly disappointed that their decision to buy into a corrupt system hasn't affirmed their claim to superior personhood through material reward. Particularly telling is that so many of the messages include citations of advanced degrees. We're hearing from people who think they're entitled to something they've "earned."

These are people who did what they were supposed to do. They signed up to pay the right banks for the appropriately expensive educations and mortgages. They read the right books, watched the right TV, bought the right gadgets. They voted for consensus elite governments and assented to policies that redistributed wealth upward while leaving the rest of us, those of us who hadn't fixated so intensely on proving ourselves worthy by their standards, behind. And now they're shocked to learn that they're as expendable and unnecessary as the next human? I thought these were smart people. They certainly like to proclaim themselves so anyway.

One would have at least hoped the local chapter would have applied for a city permit to march tomorrow given the hyper-serious attitude of our current administration and police force to such matters.

But alas,

As of Tuesday afternoon, the NOPD said that Occupy NOLA has not applied for a permit to march. If the march does happen, the NOPD says officers will be on the scene.

The OccupyNOLA position on this is that their "legal team" advises them a permit is not actually necessary for a political protest even though marching without one in New Orleans is technically illegal. I'm not sure I would take my chances given NOPD's behavioral tendencies but good luck anyway.