coeus:

disobey:

lepus:

wearethe99percent:

I am 25 years old.

Very lucky to have a college degree and no debt.

But my career is in progressive politics — working for labor unions, campaigns and nonprofits — and I can’t afford to make ends meet in a Big City, on the $30,000 average salaries these jobs pay. Now I’m 1000s in credit card debt.

How can young people like me change the world, stand up for what we believe in, and still get ahead?

I am the 99%.  #occupywallstreet

 Look at your life.  Look at your choices.

This is fascinating. No debt, and having trouble making ends meet on 30,000 a year? Does this young girl have children or outrageous medical bills she forgot to mention? I only make 30K a year and I live pretty comfortably…. What is she squandering her money on that is causing this failure to “make ends meet”?

True story: there was a time when my family of 4 lived on about 13,000 US. Honey, please. 

“How can I change the world and get ahead in life?!” 

I think this is what is called #whitepeopleproblems and ‘I should have taken a class in finance or at least learned how to balance a checkbook while I was in college getting my totally useless degree’.

So let’s ignore the fact that this girl obviously doesn’t realize that non-profit means, um, ‘not for profit’, nor are labour union, campaign, and nonprofit jobs really consistent in goals or necessarily positively affecting the world, and look at that $30,000/yr salary.

First off, ‘these jobs’ is so insanely vague I cannot even begin to understand how she came up with an across-the-board figure.I used to work for a non-profit in high school, earning $8/hr (that’s above minimum wage in Texas; holla’ for skilled labour!) and in recent years looking into for-profit charity, I’ve read that a reasonable salary for CEOs of nonprofits is $100,000-200,000 (not that I think this is reasonable if you want to attract talent, but that goes back to the many reasons I’m for for-profit charity). So that’s a relatively large spectrum.

Working for campaigns. Well. The salaries for this range from $0 (volunteer) to hundreds of thousands, probably even millions for ones running high-profile, well-funded campaigns. That is a huge spectrum.

I don’t know much about the inner-workings of labour unions, because it makes me nauseated, but unions are insanely wealthy and are virtually hemorrhaging money which they extort from unwilling workers in non-right-to-work states (ahem Massachusetts).

If you know anything about mean (average) salary, you probably know that it can be extremely skewed in some cases, and that median salary might be a better reflection of earning potential (not that this girl clarifies whether this is average overall or average starting salary—the latter is pretty much always deceptively low, in most industries, because, uh, you have no experience and are therefore pretty useless). You should also know that there are far more people at the bottom than the top. Obviously, you can’t be the manager of half of a person. That means that the lower salaries drag down the mean, because they ‘count’ more than the higher salaries. This relates to what is called a ‘spread’ blah blah statistics blah blah percentile blah blah di-blah. So yeah, this girl is vague to the point of irrelevance.

I mean, if you want a $50,000/yr starting salary, get a degree in finance, engineering, computer programming, or some related field. But that’s a want, not a need—my dad used to give me that lecture all the time when I was younger, but maybe it takes a MA in Finance to prepare your kids for the real world. When I was considering selling my soul to work on Wall Street for a six figure starting salary, it was because I was planning on being $80,000+ in debt, not because that level of income is at all necessary for financial well-being—I would know, I’m an Economics major (a.k.a. a glorified Finance major with a slightly higher mean starting salary and more Indians/fewer white people).

To put this in perspective, my mother’s income is $12,000/yr, all from the  rental income of one apartment (because my mother cannot afford to support me, I have become financially independent at 19). My mother needs several surgeries, including a knee replacement, correction of a herniated disk in her lower back, and a brain tumor. Her insurance costs alone take up about half of her income. I am a full-time student earning $0/yr and pay all of my own bills, including insurance ($1,200/yr), which I cannot go without because my ADHD (and its comorbid OCD and depression) is too severe for me to forgo my otherwise $2,000/yr Adderall and my chronic (daily) migraines are too debilitating and frequent for me to forgo my otherwise $1,600/yr migraine medication. My rent is $525/mo +electricity. I am living relatively comfortably on the money I’ve saved since high school and while I worry sometimes, I am not complaining. People like the girl in this picture exemplify what is wrong with America; she probably wouldn’t know austerity or actual financial hardship if it hit her in the face.

One last thing: SHE NEVER MENTIONS THE FIELD IN WHICH SHE RECEIVED HER DEGREE. IF IT IS ZOOLOGY, MEDIEVAL WEAPONRY, OR GEOLOGY, SHE PROBABLY SHOULDN’T BE EARNING VERY MUCH IN POLITICS. Not all degrees are created equal. You are not entitled to not being laughed out of an employer’s office. 

(Source: http://wearethe99percent.tumblr.com/post/11593261584/i-am-25-years-old-very-lucky-to-have-a-college)

wearethe99percent:

I live in a part of my country where:

• Children graduate high school with a third grade reading level
• The school gets only $5000 per student for the year
• People were getting laid off from the two main employers in town. (the school and the hotel)
• People live in tents or houses built out of scrap materials
• We have one of the highest costs of living in the NATION

I LIVE IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.

we are the 99%

occupywallst.org

Only $5,000 per year. My public high school got less than $4,000 and it’s ranked #21 in the country. Many private schools get similar results; if education were completely privatized, I imagine competition would drive prices down quite a bit lower, across the board.

I imagine that the bullet more indicative of her concern about this lack of funding is the one that indicates that the school is one of the main employers in town. I understand that things are tough. I really do. I don’t have a job, am a full-time student, am pretty much completely financially independent because my family’s yearly income is around $12,000 (yup, I pay for my own insurance, (pretty expensive) medication, housing, vet bills for my crippled puppy, college, food, you name it). And I want less government, not more (so I can afford my puppy’s and my own healthcare, at the very least). And I understand that if one is unemployed, and has the time to construct houses out of scrap material (um, hello, become a mason? That’s impressive), they have the option to start a business. Given that this woman lives in an area that spends towards the lower end on public education, this woman probably lives in a southern state, which would indicate less business regulation. So starting a business is a very viable option. If anything, the monopoly that the school seems to have on employment could indicate a crowding out effect, which is a much more significant point this woman could be making about business corruption/corporatism.

Also, this woman is in a house. With reading level probably exceeding most Americans’, at least based on her grammar and spelling. She also never comments on her personal situation. Just a couple observations.

I do not want to trivialize the fact that so many people are speaking out against corporatism, but the government, being the facilitator, cannot be the solution. If Occupy Wall Street wants people to take them more seriously, they should a. research their proposed solutions more thoroughly and stop asking for more of the same as a solution, b. stop claiming to represent others (I consider this infringement of free speech, which is a huge problem I have with unions, as well), and c. make an effort in constructing your self-portrait; your disheveled appearance doesn’t speak to my empathy, but rather, makes me feel that you could not be bothered to compose yourself, as if this was of little consequence to you (as I assume it is, provided the underlying assumption of the movement is that these people are starved for liberation and justice).

And this is from someone sympathetic to the movement. Obviously, if these things are off-putting to me, one can imagine how alienating they could be to someone less willing to give the movement the benefit of the doubt.