The Right to Occupy: Interview of ONeil - Assignment Example

The Right to Occupy It comes to me as no surprise in a world where no one gives a helpful hand to children, they are dying of starvation in Africa and, on the other hand, there are politicians, players, industrialists, celebrities and musicians who make billions of dollars in no time. On one hand, there are those 99% who are trying to earn to survive, while, on the other hand, there is 1% squandering and controlling the world. So, where everyone is trying to compete and excel in life, there remain those intrigued with a question: how fast will the world go before we are no longer able to keep the pace? How much will we accumulate before we feel satisfied? So, was Saint Francis’s chastity and self denial the answer to these existential musings? Or was Helen Keller right in observing that “true happiness...is not attained through self-gratification, but through fidelity to a worthy purpose”? Some people have found a worthy purpose to be faithful to. They have found the hope that they were constantly yearning for to end the bizarre income gaps in the world and by inferences mitigate the gap in resource availability. They aim to end the monopoly that a handful is exercising over the assets that belong to the whole world. They have found an image of satisfaction in Shepard Fairy’s Wall Street Hope poster. These demonstrators at Wall Street have gone viral. Their purposefulness is striking the world over with people around the globe taking it to streets with similar demands to put an end to the monopoly over global money and animalistic competition of survival of the fittest in human world. The video that I am doing my research on is and interview of O’Neil who had been teaching Mathematics formerly before joining Occupy Wall Street and Occupy the SEC, where she hopes to devise an alternative banking system. The interview starts with her explaining her choice of the subject of Mathematics. She explains that she liked the way things could be neatly categorized as right or wrong within this subject. The question was pertinent for the viewer to get to the background of the speakers and contextualize her analysis with her interest there by making it easier to get to their own conclusions. While we can understand her interest in knowing the right thing we also are given a slight insight into her inability to see the possibility of gray areas in matters. There is a possibility of gray areas on Wall Street lashing of Business techniques. Some Banks have spoken out that they have been unfairly drawn into criticism for something that they have never done. There are also people inside the financial institutions who claim that they are not aware of who drives and mainly benefits from the money minting. Then there are also writers, like Arundhati, who have made accusations under which it’s 99% who do not know about these financial Big Fishes. O’Neil famously critiqued in her speech “Come September” the world which is being run by three of “the most secretive institutions in the world: the IMF, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization” and concluded enthusiastically that “a world run by a handful of greedy bankers and CEOs whom nobody elected can’t possibly last.” Then O’Neil further talks about her work at D. E. Show, as well as her choices and works. She talks about being rich as typical American goal from which the satire can be extracted that if the world continues to thrive at the amount of expenses that an individual in America utilizes, the resources would soon run out so it automatically makes everyone want to beat the other in competition and accumulation race. So it is not only the one percent that is playing the dirty game, they have evolved out of the 99% and their dreams. O’Neil in pertinence to this sites the need for insurance as the reason for accumulation. People do not want to end up having a bad life or to have their children become financially unstable so they go on to hoard as much as possible. Historically the probability that the wealth would last down another generation is not encouraging. Further O’Neil presents this strong argument that the greed is not a result of the fear of going bankrupt. In fact it is the greed that instigates the victims to find a reason and they invent such fears to rationalize the unnecessary hoarding and tension. Then fairly enough O’Neil argues that tools, such as smartness, should not be used to crush the dumb. In fact they should be used as an equipment to make the world a better place. She is almost poetical in her condemnation of such exploitation which is being done with the Occupy Wall Street protestors and being fearlessly truthful about it. O’Neil then brings in certain moral aspects and prophetically connects the in-house recession in her company with the uncertainty of morality of their work. Being instinctive and at the same time empathetic with fellows is the characteristic quality of human beings and Wall Street protests uphold this one value of empathy that makes us differ from animals. So, O’Neil decides that money she was making was at the expense of poor pensioners and she is not comfortable with this fact. She then talks of the wastefulness of money at Wall Street and the insensitivity of paying large amount of bonuses by the banks. She takes the tale of her life and the tale of Wall Street in a parallel fashion. And with the progression of her argument its strength increases and the viewer agrees more with her side of the contention, no matter how much in defiance with the norms of business approach to life they may be. While the institutions are wasteful and insensitive, they ignore risk reports and pay big bonuses, they are well backed by the government and are, therefore, also negligent of the dire consequences. The government, apparently, has a Wall Street backed lobby in the house and, therefore, the entire story is a vicious circle that would hardly bring an investigator to a conclusion. However, it would reiterate the fact that the protestors are more rational, more fair and more purposefully worthy than those in the offices at Wall Street. The protestors are more cautious and beaten for their demand of something which is their basic right than those squandering the money of poor investors and to whom they do not even feel answerable. Thus, O’Neil talks about her transition from a “disgusted risk researcher” to Wall Street to fix the unfair, insensitive, inhumane and careless system. It is laudable how the lady has put the amount of individual efforts into the purpose of pointing out the contradictions in the system in an attempt to fix the culture that is not going to readily change itself. It is also commendable that the protestors acknowledge the fact that they may not be able to pin point the lapses in the system that frequently result in catastrophic injustices but they can say with strong confidence that the result of the system is what it is, as I wrote before, - catastrophic injustices. Such a world won’t survive, to restate Arundhati’s analysis in endorsement to O’Neil. The individual blog writer musters it up to work in groups. Now she systematically works with the protest groups, trying to pin-point the lapses in system, planning out the strategy to go about bringing forth the implementation, improve and reform, and be a worthy adversary to something that should have been protested against before matters snowballed out of proportion. The most commendable thing about these protestors is their will and conviction. They believe the change will come. They look at history and feel triumphant over the reforms in Banks after the Great Depression and hope to bring about a change of significant magnitude. They hope to break down the monopoly of big banks, lessen income gaps and, consequently, save the world from tyrannical power of paranoia, while constantly and humanely imparting awareness to the world of their rights, limitations and sharable happiness. Works Cited “The Financial Crisis.” n.d. Web. Arundhati, Roy. An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire. n.d. Print. O’Neil, Cathy. “Come September.” The Financial Crisis: The Frontline Interviews. n.d. Print. Read More