For the past few weeks, signs featuring “We are the 99” dominated Wall Street and Main Streets across America. This is in response to a double-dip recession, federal bailouts of big banks and record highs for corporate profits in the past several years.
According to the Federal Reserve, the top 1 percent of the population hold 34.3 percent of the nation’s net value. If this fact alone does not cause you to cringe, chances are you’re either a Randist Libertarian ideologue with no sense of equality or one of the top 1 percent.
Many of the other 99 percent are rallying around the country and the world to show their solidarity with one another and to demand change. These “Occupy Wall Street” protests should not be linked to the Tea Party or its repulsive candidates like Sarah Palin. The Occupy movement has a profoundly different sort of flavor than an assemblage of frustrated libertarians resenting the idea of having to pay for public education. This legitimately grassroots and leaderless movement is the product of a middle class that has been hit the hardest by all of the financial turmoil and has an innate sense of distributive justice that the raw statistics indicate is being violated.
The public media debate is being straw manned by right wing commentators insisting that the protesters are Communists, or “anti-capitalism.” Instead of writing the protesters off, it is time people began questioning ideas they hold with a religious fervor, such as the notion that laissez-faire capitalism is a good thing.
Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and the very notion of insurance are themselves very socialistic ideas, yet they are programs that most Americans want and need. The free market has done great things for wealth creation in the U.S. and around the world, but every economic system has its drawbacks, and those of unfettered capitalism are beginning to reveal themselves. The capitalist system on the whole is here to stay, and this is a good thing, but the question of regulation and social fairness is what is on trial here.
The Occupy Wall Street protest goes beyond the mere problem of disproportionate distribution of wealth. Former Wisconsin Sen. Russ Feingold pointed out another issue: “We have to get corporations away from dominating our political process … We have to overturn the Citizens United decision that has created the most destructive situation at least in 100 years, if not in the whole history of the country.”
He is referring to the U.S. Supreme Court case that ruled in favor of allowing corporations to donate as much money as they wanted to any political candidate and to do it in secrecy. This sort of corporate influence is bound to be a corrupting process, and it has already hit us in our home state, where Gov. Scott Walker decided to pass the Telecom Deregulation Bill, or as it should be called, the AT&T Deregulation Bill.
Regardless of what any fool of a presidential candidate (Mitt Romney) says, corporations are not people; people work at corporations. Citizens United is a violation of the First Amendment right to free speech, because profits that workers create for corporations are being used to support political candidates and positions they may not support. If John Doe, who works at AT&T, is a staunch liberal Democrat and he produces wealth for the corporation of AT&T (they wouldn’t hire him if he didn’t), it is a violation of his rights to take some of that money and put it towards a political campaign he does not support. He is indirectly being used to support something he does not wish to. It is not enough to say, “It’s his choice to work at that company,” especially in light of the fact that corporations can make contributions to political campaigns in secret.
When the government bails out large businesses and banks that go on to make record profits while the unemployment rate hovers at 9 percent, you know something is wrong with the political and economic system of this country. Does it really make sense that a CEO makes 100 times what the average worker does, especially considering that statistically speaking he is not much happier than those in the upper middle class who make $75,000 instead of millions? The Occupiers are not asking for, nor do they want, a communist system, but they do want the ability to find a job that pays a living wage.
Matt Jeffers ([email protected]) is a senior majoring in philosophy and economics.
