At Country Club, a Rally to "Save the 1 Percent"

Pete Woiwode figures that if the 1 percent is going to take a stand against the 99 percent, it might as well be at a country club.

"I mean, we have a right to golf," the 29-year-old community organizer proclaimed on Saturday. He was wearing a khaki suit and standing under the palms of Pleasanton, California's Castlewood Country Club, where a dozen or so protesters had gathered near the 14th hole, next to a tent on which someone had written, "Save the 1%!" The group had come together to support Castlewood's two-year lockout of its unionized cooks, dishwashers, and janitors—people who "are asking for so much," Woiwode told me as another demonstrator sipped Perrier. "They are asking for health care and asking for their good jobs back. Why don't they go out there and find other jobs?"

Pleasanton, a town of 70,000 southeast of Oakland, is fertile territory for a 1 percenter movement; the Census Bureau ranks it as the nation's wealthiest mid-sized city. Located a short drive from the cute Main Street, the grounds of the Castlewood Country Club once surrounded a 53-room mansion inhabited by Phoebe Apperson Hearst, the mother of the Gilded Age newspaper magnate. Porsches typically clog the club's parking lot and weekend warriors zip past its fairway on carbon-fiber Kestrels. On this day, one of them slowed down just enough to shout a single word at the Save-the-1-Percenters: "Idiots!"

Whether the biker thought the protesters ridiculous or just not rich enough was hard to say. Instead of the club's de rigueur golf shirts and yoga pants, members of the group sported a faded top hat, wrinkled knickers, and a full-length evening gown of questionable vintage. Woiwode's suit seemed ill-tailored and his Dockers the knockoff kind, but he didn't let that curb his enthusiasm. "The real idiots are the people who are talking about trying to spread the wealth around," said Woiwode (who works for anti-poverty groups in Oakland when he's not advocating for the rich). He clutched a handmade placard that read: "Can I pay you to hold this sign? (It's heavy)".

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http://motherjones.com/politics/2012/02/occupy-1-percent-country-club