Luther "Luke" Campbell, the man whose booty-shaking madness made the U.S. Supreme Court stand up for free speech, gets as nasty as he wants to be for Miami New Times. This week, Luke assesses the Occupy movement sweeping New York, Miami, and other American cities.
The tens of thousands of protesters occupying streets in lower Manhattan and around the country are allowing the corporate media — from MSNBC to Fox News — to paint them as a bunch of out-of-control, radical hipsters and dirty, old hippies clashing with a-hole cops. "Brawl Street" was the headline in the New York Post. But the mainstream press is distorting what the movement is about. The executives don't want the rest of the American public to sign on.
Occupy Wall Street is really about helping folks who have lost their homes to foreclosure. Some want the government to forgive student loans. Then there are the very few anarchists who just don't believe in any kind of law and order. People are starting to wake up. They are realizing this country has gone to hell and that they have been manipulated for too long. They are rightfully pissed off.
Now it's time for the protesters to get organized.
If I were leading this movement, I would focus on the most important problem facing America today: the lack of jobs. Right now the government is offering only slave work, like building roads.
President Obama's job plan is just a Band-Aid on our economic problems.
The long-term solution is to prepare Americans for new industries to replace thousands of jobs we've lost to kiosks and highly educated foreign workers. Today you can find an Indian or Russian computer programmer via the Internet who will build you a website or software program for pennies on the dollar.
Don't believe all the hype about Apple and Microsoft developing innovative technology in California and Washington state. The computer giants get much of their technology from the Far East. I've been to Japan a few times, and their technology is five to ten years ahead of ours.
We get the hand-me-downs sold by American companies that bought the products on the cheap. When the products arrive in the States, corporations jack up the price on the consumer. The only ones making any money today are eBay, Amazon, FedEx, UPS, and the megabillionaires who run Apple and Microsoft. They include Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, until his recent death.
These protesters have the idea right. But time is running out for them to be heard. They need to fight for reasonable work for reasonable Americans. And newspapers and TV stations must catch on before it's too late.
If we don't do something soon about the morass of an economy we live in, we'll end up living in a simulated reality like the one in the Matrix movies.
