The new strategy: A push for us to empathize with Wall Street

[woo me with science]

"If he were alive today, I believe he would remind us that the unemployed worker can rightly challenge the excesses of Wall Street without demonizing all who work there; that the businessman can enter tough negotiations with his company’s union without vilifying the right to collectively bargain....He would call on us to assume the best in each other rather than the worst, and challenge one another in ways that ultimately heal rather than wound."



Listening to the President's speech, and to many posts on the GD: P, I am struck by the new exhortations to find common ground and empathize with the people who work on Wall Street.

We are told that we have to empathize and try to understand each other. Once again, there are two sides to every story, and the fair route must be somewhere in the middle.

The clever deceit here is the attempt to cast our opponents as the people who work on Wall Street rather than the SYSTEM that is impoverishing people across the globe. Suddenly we are being told it is mean or heartless to want fundamental change to the corporate system. We should not demonize each other. We have a commitment to each other.

But corporations are not people. They have no commitment except to their profit margins. It is precisely because they are not people, and their bottom line is profit, that they are squeezing workers in this country (and others) until they are dried husks, and then discarding them. Corporations do not have consciences. They have quarterly reports.

This has absolutely nothing to do with people on Wall Street. It has to do with the diseased, unregulated or corruptly regulated corporate structure that is in place, in which profit is the bottom line motive, above human beings and their lives. Corporations do not have empathy. They do not function to care about people. They function for the bottom line.

This is their new strategy, to claim that We are people and Wall Street is also people, and we must have empathy for each other. How ironic that the people in the "We are the 53 percent" posts are being revealed as fabricated, two-dimensional photoshop jobs, not actual people at all.

What a perfect symbol of this transparent attempt to make us empathize, and cooperate, with corporations.