According to an Occupy Wall Street website, the movement “aims to expose how the richest 1 percent of people are writing the rules of an unfair global economy that is foreclosing on our future.”
But who are the 1 percent, especially here at IU?
“You wanna know what the 1 percent looks like?” an occupier said Thursday night after a general assembly meeting in Peoples Park. “I don’t know anybody like that, but I know what their kids drive to school. They drive Porsches. They drive Lexuses.”
Lauren, another occupier, chose not to give her last name, but said the lifestyle of the 1 percent is marked by “taking more than you need and the concept that the suffering of others could ever be equated to a good time.”
The actual threshold for the 1 percent the Occupy movement decries is $343,927 annual, individual income, according to the latest available tax statistics from the Internal Revenue Service.
At IU, eight administrators and athletic coaches fall into that category, including basketball Coach Tom Crean and President Michael McRobbie, earning annual incomes of $600,000 and $533,120, respectively.
While there are no faculty members at the Bloomington campus who qualify as part of the 1 percent on the basis of individual income, nearly 300 IU faculty members fall in the top 5 percent of earners in the United States, earning more than $154,643 annually.
The list of faculty within that top 1 percent increases when dual-income households are considered. Although the IRS threshold for the 1 percent accounts for individual income, economics instructor Peter Olson points out this distinction.
“If you think about this $300,000 level as two people who are earning $150,000, those are good incomes, but those are people working full-time jobs, and it’s not like they’re the idle rich,” Olson said. “They’re highly skilled people who, because they share the same household, the combined income is very high.”
However, senior Justinian Dispenza, a member of the Occupy IU movement, said occupiers sometimes faced criticism from students passing Peoples Park due to their misunderstanding of the 1 percent.
“People would be hostile because they think we’re protesting against their parents who make $400,000 a year,” he said.
Assistant Professor of Germanic Studies Benjamin Robinson, who has been involved with both Occupy Bloomington and Occupy IU, said the movement is not about “tearing down the 1 percent or blaming the 1 percent as individuals.”
“Here in Bloomington, there are many examples of the 1 percent,” Robinson said, citing Duke Energy, Verizon Wireless and Baxter pharmaceuticals as members of
that group.
A November 2011 study by Citizens for Tax Justice, he said, showed that these companies paid negative effective income tax, which is less than the maximum federal corporate income tax of 35 percent, because of government subsidies.
That, Robinson said, is what the movement takes issue with.
“There’s been a lot of mocking in the media that a lot of these protesters use Apple products or they use GE products or whatnot,” Robinson said. “It’s not calling for the immediate abolition of these firms. It’s calling for them to pay what they owe society for making their profits.”
Robinson referenced Bloomington’s high poverty rate. A September 2011 New York Times article revealed that among U.S. cities its size, Bloomington has the third-highest poverty rate.
“Given the poverty rate in Bloomington and given the national poverty rate of 16 percent or 49.1 million people, that there are salaries in the multiple hundreds of thousands should at least give us pause,” he said.
Ultimately, though, Robinson said the movement isn’t really about the individuals earning more than the $343,927 threshold.
“Part of its energy comes from affirming the 99 percent,” he said. “If there’s a symbol of the movement, it’s the 99 percent, not the 1.”
For more IU salaries, visit: https://fdrs.fms.indiana.edu/
8 IU employees earn high salaries opposed by Occupy movement
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