Sometimes movement conservative actors perform deeds that are so dark and disgusting that it makes me ashamed. Ashamed of their cruelty towards their fellow human beings. I won't trace the roots of the movement conservatives players here or repeat the stories of their bowing to the shrine of Ayn Rand narcissistic greed and arrogance, but we know the major players. Just think of Jack Abramoff, Paul Ryan, Alan Greenspan, Ralph Reed and Grover Norquist. For all his many transgressions against American families, Grover's K Street Project ranks up there with the worst of the worst.
At this moment in time, the U.S. has an incredibly bad economy, punctuated by high unemployment and staggering wealth inequality throughout the country. Students, recent and older college graduates, working class families and just about every one under the sun has been affected by the global financial collapse. As the Occupy Wall Street protests began to expand around the country, the conservatives tried to downplay the protests by saying the protesters were just too lazy to work. As a response to this unparalleled financial inequality that now pervades our nation, a small minded conservative pundit tries to counter the protests with his own idiocy. You know him because CNN hired him: Erick Erickson.
His response to the "We are the 99 percent" website, in which regular people document all the hardships they've had to endure as the top one percent sits fat and happy is to create his own site, named "The 53%ers," or something ludicrous like that.
Gawker has a nice rundown on it.
Did you know that if you are uninsured or jobless, you should just suck it up? That if you're overworked or underemployed, you should be thankful? Learn all that—and more!—at "We Are the 53%," the right wing's incredibly depressing response to Occupy Wall Street!
"We Are the 53%" was created thought up by CNN's chief goat-fucking correspondent Erick Erickson as a response to "We Are the 99 Percent," an Occupy Wall Street-affiliated blog that collects the stories of the underemployed, overworked, debt-ridden and uninsured victims of the recession. The blog, run by conservative filmmaker Mike Wilson, gets its name from the popular (and wildly simplistic!) Republican talking point that only 53 percent of households pay federal income taxes, and Erickson himself sets the tone:
The poor dear has to work three jobs. Notice he doesn't say what they are. My father had to work twelve hours a day down in Manhattan's Flower Market from 5am, then drive a cab for about eight hours a night part time and then he took every carpentry job he could find on the side, but hey, going on CNN is really a heavy burden to behold. I haven't seen anything this moronic in a long line. Clearly, Frank Luntz's hands were nowhere to be found on this one.
We'll be honest: when your three jobs include "appearing on CNN" and "starting Tumblrs," our sympathy is... somewhat limited. Also, if your house can't sell, you probably should blame Wall Street, because the subprime mortgage crisis and housing market crash really is Wall Street's fault. And the thing about "complaining" is that it's kind of how politics works!
But what makes "We Are the 53%" so heartbreaking isn't that its contributors are enormous jerks—it's that so many of them could just as easily be writing in to We Are the 99 Percent. Like the guy on the left, who can "barely afford" his rent. Or the "former marine" in the center who hasn't had "4 consecutive days off in 4 years." The phrase "I don't have health insurance" pops up frequently on "We Are the 53%," but not as a cry for help or an indictment of a broken system. Here, it's a badge of pride...
Really, this is what you're going with, Erick? Alex Pareene has a nice take down of EE's lamebrain exercise in gibberish-conservative thinking. The tragic, hilarious “We Are the 53 percent” movement
The project was kicked off by Erick Erickson, who announced that he works “three jobs,” by which he means being a professional television pundit, radio pundit and Internet pundit. There is a stunning amount of cognitive dissonance, misplaced resentment and class revulsion going on, even for a conservative Web project.
The site can’t even manage to correctly represent that 53 percent, with multiple contributors very clearly belonging to the 47 percent of people who make up the supposed parasite class. There is a blog dedicated to this confused minority. The best example is obviously this dog.
Let’s get this out of the way early: Pretty much every adult American pays taxes. Workers who are too poor to pay federal income taxes still pay payroll taxes, and property taxes if they own their home. Even the unemployed pay sales taxes. The poorest Americans — people who make an average of $12,500 a year — pay, on average, 16 percent of their paltry income in taxes. That is less than every other demographic, but the point of a progressive tax system is that 16 percent of a poor person’s income is a hell of a lot more meaningful to that person than 30 percent of a millionaire’s. It’s a simple concept, and one that most Americans agree with. And that simplicity and popularity is why the conservative movement has spent 100 years attempting to muddy the debate with misinformation. (They are quite dedicated, actually, to class warfare, in that they seek to align the shrinking middle with the elites in a war against the downtrodden.) So a good number of people who pay no federal income taxes are simply lucky enough to be impoverished. The rest are beneficiaries of tax breaks and loopholes championed most vocally by Republicans. A member of “the 1 percent” (or, more accurately, the tenth-of-1 percent) likely considers these harried taxpayers
Talk radio, Fox News and other transmitters of movement conservatism have fostered in a generation of hatred directed squarely at the left. It's not just that they have to disagree with progressive policies, it's that they train millions to reject the notion that the Democratic Party should exist. And they wish to delete us out of existence in the same way Glenn Beck eloquently wished that I would be wiped off the face of the map in a mudslide. Government programs like The New Deal were designed and implemented because the country witnessed the decades of destruction inflicted upon the American people who were not fortunate to be part of the upper class and they couldn't bear it anymore. Most of these lunatic 53%ers probably have prospered from at least one government program already in their lives.
Shame on Erick Erickson, Shame, shame, shame.
