"hard times" a documentary film you should see, then make your own

Have you seen or heard of Hard Times: Lost on Long Island? The film won the Audience
Award/Best Documentary at the Hamptons International Film Festival in
October. The documentary follows a group of unemployed men and women,
ranging in age from their late thirties into their sixties, who are
looking for work while living in certain middle class suburbs on Long
Island. This is the true meaning of the Occupy Wall Street movement. SEE
"HOW TO MAKE A DOCUMENTARY" http://www.masterjules.net/docu.htm

Hard Times is a disturbing film that puts a face to the unemployment
crisis in America in a rather effective way. At times, talk radio
broadcasts play over footage of the principals as they trundle off to
another day of staring down their own obsolescence. Over the airwaves,
voices of people like Rush Limbaugh can be heard exhorting his listeners
about the evil of unemployment benefits and how such programs only
encourage procrastination and sloth.

In America today, we are told that unemployment now hovers at around
nine percent, while other sources insist that those statistics are
underreported and are closer to 12.5 percent. At nine percent, we are
confronted with a situation where one in eleven working Americans is
without an income. At 12.5 percent, we are talking about one in eight.

The rest of us try to go about our business. We wish those who are
suffering our very best. We hope that they succeed in finding work. We
are grateful, on a daily if not twice daily basis, to have jobs and to
be able to pay our bills and to support our families. Then we put our
heads down and try not to think about what it would be like to be one of
those unemployed people. Especially the long term unemployed.

It is somewhat easier to sidestep the raw helplessness of one in eleven
or even one in eight. It's similar to the way we sidestep the homeless
or indigent on the street, believing that they got there like a leaf
falls from a tree; as if they belonged there through some law of nature,
and that we are not responsible in any way. Nor are any of our
decisions. But what happens if unemployment reaches twenty percent? What
would it be like for one in five Americans to be in serious, bordering
on irreversible, financial trouble? How do you overlook one in five
people in contemporary society?

We have learned many lessons in the past three years. One important
lesson, I believe, is that bailouts of major corporations in any and all
industries is counterproductive to long term economic health. And not
simply direct infusions of cash as loans, tossed like gargantuan life
preservers, in moments of greatest perceived dread. I'm talking about
the bailouts the US government gives major corporations every day. The
excessive fees forced on customers by certain banks, not to mention the
predatory lending practices of the mortgage industry (coupled with the
remarkably stupid borrowing of certain homeowners).

Another example is that we have no high speed rail in this country.
Typically, you fly or you drive. So airlines are free to tack on fees to
remain profitable the way that oil companies are free to manipulate oil
production, and thus the price of gasoline. You bailed out the airlines
every time you did not demand more effective, intermediate range travel,
i.e. high speed rail. You bailed out the oil companies every time you
watched (were you watching?) as American troops went to Iraq to fight a
war for oil. You bail out American business, and help them maintain an
often false veneer of profitability, every time you send nearly every
member of the current Congress back to Washington. Maintaining US
corporate profitability is the single goal of this Congress. Because
that is what the corporations who own the Congress paid for when they
bought the Congress.

Every thing I have put forth here, I have heard articulated from the
Occupy Wall Street movement. Some of it was not news to me. I have grown
up in the latter half of the 20th Century. When the Greatest Generation
was replaced by the greediest generation and what was known as the
Protestant Work Ethic became a quaint chestnut. The definition of
success became getting the most for doing the least. It became about
getting away with what you can and the only issue was getting caught.
Which pretty much defines the Wall Street culture of today. Never have
the world's greatest financial markets been controlled by such
dangerously short-sighted people as they are today. And never has this
country been cursed by a more incompetent and derelict Securities and
Exchange Commission as we are today. In the wake of 9/11, America
attacked a perceived terrorist community with all it had. In the wake of
some of the worst financial scandals in US history, the SEC took a dive,
throwing the fight in the first round.

Occupy Wall Street people understand that not only are more difficult
times possibly around the corner, they know that the current government
will likely do as it has historically done, which is to protect the rich
and powerful at the expense of the long term interests of the middle
class. Some of the most financially successful people in America
continually remind us all that capitalism is a contest. There are
winners and losers. And the winners want to enjoy their success and they
want the losers to keep it down. The noise of the vanquished is spoiling
the victors' fun.

OWS talks a lot, too much in fact, about One Percent versus Ninety Nine
Percent. As if success itself were a crime. That's a mistake. But what
OWS has helped to remind me is that One in Five is a far more unsettling
ratio. Twenty percent unemployment. In the 21st Century United States.

There won't be enough cops any where in this country to rip down all the
tents that are going to pop up in places you never imagined if we hit
that figure. That's what OWS has taught me.

In my next post, let's talk about how Ray Kelly is running for Mayor of
New York and how he'll never get there without paddy wagons full of Wall
Street money, which is why he had the boys hose down Zuccotti Park.

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