Obama: MLK Jr. would have supported Occupy Wall Street

I do not think that Rev. King would have supported students using easy credit to pay for obscure degrees, then blaming “the system” when they cannot find gainful employment nor are able to pay off their debt.

Check out Legal Insurrection’s post today: Another Occupy Wall Street poster child who is not (Update: He responds)

Here is the explanation from a PhD-Level Critical Dance major participating in OWS because he racked up $150,000 in debt while attending a UC School:

Actually I am an associate member of the Stage Directors and Choreographers union. (The average annual salary for working Directors in the union, by the way, is $35-40,000). I appreciate the press for JUNK, it has been difficult to raise money for a show that is critical of corporate abuses of power, celebrity obsessed culture, and social/economic/environmental inequality. I was proud to be at the Occupation Party in Times Square last night, demonstrating in front of the very theatres I hope to work in one day. The point of chanting “We are the 99%” is to show the solidarity between folks who come from a wide range of backgrounds with a broad list of grievances. I’m also proud to be an artist with an academic background, and I don’t regret staying in school the extra years to get a PHD (which was only partially funded by teaching assistantships for 3 out of 6 years… you’d consider that if you paid attention to the rampant budget cuts and tuition fee hikes in the University of California and colleges and universities elsewhere). Now, let’s get to the real issue I have with your blog post, which is the greater sociocultural problem of art, especially immaterial art like dance and theatre, not valued as labor, thus discounting the WORK of ARTISTS as LABORERS. Yes, I have an extensive resume, I have performed in galleries, theatres, schools and streets. I get paid next to nothing for my work, but I do it because it is my calling and my passion. Most of the time I get no pay aside from travel, lodging, and per-diem. This is subsistence artistry, I’m not making enough money to live independently, I have no health insurance, I can’t support a family. Show me a society that functions without artists, show me a revolution or social movement that succeeded without a performative element. I worked all the way through school, and yes, I used some of my loan money to develop my craft as a director and performance artist. I also used credit cards. I was 18 and they were giving them away at the college book store with a free gift! So I spent all of grad school paying them off, only to and accrue more! As for my production company, in the six years that I’ve worked on JUNK I think I’ve paid myself $3,000. If you read the mission statement for Epic Megalopolis, you will see that I believe in supporting artists with a living wage. The last workshop of JUNK we paid our actors, young professionals like myself, something like $400 for 6 weeks of rehearsal and then $18 a show for 6 weekends. This is WELL ABOVE the rates usually offered to non-union actors on a 99-seat theatre show… and still, tell me who could survive on that? It takes a lot of people to build a theatrical production, those people all deserve to be paid fairly. $100,000 is peanuts compared to the budget of a Broadway show, and let me tell you NOBODY working on Broadway is in the 1%. Occupy Wall Street is about targeting the obscenely wealthy, it’s about getting corporate investment out of politics, it’s about making quality health care and higher education a right not a privilege. The movement to forgive student loan debt is an alternative to bailing out the banks and CEOs who profited from our losses, and instead offer people a chance, students, consumers, working and unemployed, to move forward on a clean slate. I think it’s a brilliant idea, a sort of amnesty for folks who are crippled by their educational debt, regardless of the life circumstances and decisions that got them there. I talked to several other people at the protest who agreed with me, and countless others who just flashed me a “thumbs up” or a nod of recognition because of my little hand-scrawled sign.

I find it difficult to believe King would be down for this particular struggle.

Mutnodjmet on October 16, 2011 at 5:05 PM