Occupy America

I’m not a particularly political animal.  In fact, I actively avoided voting for many years, simply because I didn’t see the sense in participating in a political process that I saw as controlled by special interests and ultimately unresponsive to the needs/desires of its people.  But as much as I’ve divested myself of politics in America, I’ve always paid very close attention to what goes on in the public sphere.  Most of the time I’ve been disgusted by it, even outraged, but in the last few weeks I’ve actually seen things occurring that have led me to think that maybe there is still some hope for this country.

Specifically: the Occupy Wall Street movement.  It’s in its infancy right now, and lots of people are predicting that it will either collapse from lack of direction and passion, or else it will get eaten up by the interests of the contending political parties.  I suspect that the first expectation is mistaken, though the second might not be.  In any case, I think it’s a movement worthy of not only my attention but the attention of everyone in this country.  Actually, everyone in the world should be paying attention to it, because it addresses a problem that ultimately effects the entire world economy, not just the American economy.

The Occupy Wall Street movement started nearly a month ago, and it was originally made up of mostly college kids protesting the fact that their college degrees will be or are useless in helping them to find gainful employment once they graduate, or else the fact that once they do graduate they’ll be starting out their lives in debt to the tune of tens of thousands—sometimes even hundreds of thousands—of dollars in student loans.  They blamed Wall Street for this, and while their target may have been off by a few miles (Washington D.C. and Congress should have been where they started), and while their particular grievance may not have resonated with the majority of America, it has resonated with enough people that they haven’t yet been shouted down or forced to disappear by their real enemy—which is our real enemy, the real enemy of the “99 per cent:” the corporate executives that are stealing all of our money.

But more on that later.  First, I want to address the accusations by many that these kids are “hippies with no jobs and no motivation.”  Granted, the majority of them are still in school, but how can they be blamed for that?  Being a student doesn’t automatically translate into being lazy or unmotivated.  The lazy and unmotivated are the ones who either dropped out of college or never bothered to go in the first place, electing to apply for welfare instead so that they can have an income while they live in their parents’ basement and play video games all day (and who says that even the lazy and unmotivated can’t have a voice in how they’re governed?).  No, these kids are working hard in school so that they can eventually go out into the world and make something of themselves, but they’ve seen that their ambitions will be thwarted by a corporate elite that has already been robbing them through higher and higher tuitions each year and will continue to do so by limiting their success in the future.  I’ve also seen that a lot of people are dismissing them simply because they’re kids, they haven’t been out in the world yet and so they don’t really understand how it works.  This might be true, but these kids are our future; what they’re learning now, and what they’ll learn in the next ten years, will effect what happens to this country thirty and forty years from now.  Instead of dismissing them, we should be paying attention to them, because eventually they’ll be the ones running this place.  Besides, it’s hypocritical to dismiss them simply because they’re young and in college, especially when a lot of the people doing the dismissing were once young and in college themselves, and when they were they believed they had a right to voice their concerns just as ardently as these kids today do.

I’d also like to note that the OWS movement is quickly becoming more than just a youth movement; plenty of older people, in their 30s and 40s and 50s, are getting involved.  I’m one of them.

And here’s why: Because it’s not just about college tuition and the availability of jobs anymore.  The protestors camping out in a park near Wall Street exposed the tip of the iceberg, and more and more people are recognizing that the real thing to protest here is the unrestrained greed of the top corporate executives, the 1% that rakes in billions of dollars every year for themselves while they lay off their workers by the thousands, outsource jobs to sweatshops overseas, use their power and influence obtained through their wealth to lobby Congress to deregulate their industries so that they can rake in even more money, and ask for government bail outs every time they screw up the economy with their bad/deceptive/illegal business practices.  I’ve said it in other places on line and I’ll say it here: I’m not against business, it’s one of the things that makes a capitalist society work, but I am against thievery, and that, ultimately, is what the OWS movement is going to be about.

George Carlin (1937-2008) used to be a comedian, but in the last ten or so years of his life he spent most of his public time trying to educate the American people about what he called “The Ownership Class,” that is, the people who really own America.  They’re the top executives and board members of the six largest corporations in the world, and, as Carlin told us, they own everything.  They own the corporations, of course, but they also own the banks, the media, and every politician they can buy from the President on down to your local city council member, and they use them as their mouthpieces to tell us what they think we should think is good for us.  They lobby Congress to deregulate a certain industry because, according to them, it will help the economy and improve the quality of life for individuals either through advanced technology, better social systems, or new jobs.  But what always happens is that, once these industries are deregulated (meaning: all or most of the rules for ethical conduct have been eliminated) the corporations rake in extra profits while the economy either stagnates or tanks, people lose their homes, their money and their opportunities, no new social systems that benefit people are created (though a few that benefit the corporations might appear), and instead of new jobs being created, people tend to lose their jobs.

Case in point: after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and the subsequent shutting down of the airline industry for three days, the corporate executives calculated that they would need around 15 billion dollars to recover from the financial disaster that was caused as a result of the attacks; they asked the government for a bail out because to not bail them out would have wrecked our economy and put thousands of people out of work; but they didn’t ask for 15 billion dollars, they asked for 150 billion dollars, and they got it; then, when they were through putting the industry back together, they showed their gratitude to the taxpayers who footed the bill by giving themselves and each other billions of dollars in salaries and bonuses and laying off 100,000 workers.

This kind of thing is standard practice for corporate owners—the ones who really own America.  They do it all the time, and they’ve been doing it for thirty years.  Does anyone remember the government bail out of the Chrysler Corporation in the 1980s (and how many millions or billions of dollars Lee Iacocca walked away with)?  The bail out of the savings and loan companies in the 1990s?  Enron?  Fanny Mae?  Freddy Mac?  Goldman Sachs?  The further ruination of our economy by the banks and their subprime loans?  The corporations have set up a system in which they can keep launching these get richer quick schemes, fleece their customers and their stockholders of all of their money, and then walk away with billions for themselves and nothing at all for the people they robbed.  And they’re going to keep doing it until we stop them.

A lot of people don’t seem to think it’s all that bad.  A lot of people will tell you that this backlash against rampant corporate greed is just spoiled middle class liberals who want everything handed to them without having to earn it.  They claim that people who protest against corporate thievery like the kinds mentioned above are just biting the hand that feeds them, and that the repercussions will be that corporations will take their business overseas, leaving everyone here without jobs.  Well, they’ve been taking their jobs overseas for more than 30 years now, and they’ll continue to do so as long as it’s profitable for them, but they won’t take all the jobs overseas because that wouldn’t be in their best interests; they need to keep Americans working, or at least keep the system functioning, in order to maximize their profits.  But the real point here—and the most ominous one, in my estimation—is that the very people most effected by corporate dominance of society are the ones using the “don’t bite the hand that feeds you” argument to defend corporate malfeasance.  And this is exactly what the corporations want: they want a docile, obedient work force that does their bidding, makes them more and more money, and doesn’t complain or resist in any way.  They’ll plug us into our television sets and our iPods and our computers and tell us what to think, what to feel, and what to believe, subdue us through the news and entertainment that they provide while they pick our pockets and our bank accounts behind our backs.  They might allow some people to succeed, but only to a certain extent; the billionaires aren’t allowing any new members into their club.  And eventually, if they get their way, the middle class will disappear and all that will be left is the poor and the top 1% that will be wealthier than ever.

And the government knows this.  The government, i.e., Congress, has been in collusion with the corporate elite for the last forty years.  They’re the ones that are deregulating the industries, filling the tax codes with loopholes for the corporations to slip through, and sharing in some of the wealth those things generate.  It’s no coincidence that so many politicians are wealthy before they come to Congress, or that they get even wealthier while they’re there.  They take corporate money and vote in session according to the corporate agenda, which is spelled out for them by the corporations’ lobbyists, who swarm over the capitol like an infestation of cockroaches.  But it’s not just Congress; as I mentioned before, this applies to the lower houses of power as well, the governorships, the legislatures, and the county and city councils.  Granted, there are a lot of people who have no ties to corporations who run for office every year, but the vast majority of the people who get elected are backed by business, and as a result, those people are expected to defer to corporate interests whenever they can.  As Mr. Carlin once told us, “Forget the politicians. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice.  You don’t.”

Forget the unions too.  Sure, they were once a great idea, they created the middle class, and they did a lot to advance the standard of living for the average person, but in the last forty years the unions have not only lost nearly all of their power in this country (something the corporate leaders wanted and brought about), but the modern union isn’t anymore interested in the welfare of their members than the corporations are.  This is evidenced by the gigantic salaries, the huge bonuses, and the extravagant lifestyles of most union leaders.  Union leaders, these days, act just like corporate leaders; their profit margin and getting the largest piece of the pie possible is the only thing that matters to them.  Unions have become corporations themselves, and so can’t be trusted or expected to serve the needs of their individual members any better than the corporations do.

So, if you oppose the corporate elite and you oppose the unions as well, where does that place the OWS movement on the political spectrum?  I’ve seen comments on the internet accusing it of being a pawn for both the liberals and the conservatives, the Democratic Party and the Tea Party.  But, in my view at least, it doesn’t belong in either of those camps.  To my mind, the OWS movement isn’t about liberal or conservative politics, and not just because the corporations have bought most of our politicians, Democrat, Republican or otherwise.  It’s because this movement is about class warfare.  The top 1%—the ownership class—against the rest of us.  The multi-billionaires who own America against all those who don’t.  Because the corporate leaders don’t want to control just the economy and the politicians and the media and the judges, they want to control the culture itself.  They want us all to adopt a corporate mindset, to believe that corporations have the same kind of rights that individuals do (they’ve actually won court cases granting them protection of the right to free speech under the First Amendment), so that we’ll no longer judge ourselves or our communities by individual merit but by how much we contribute to the corporation, either through work or purchasing their products.  And those people who are too poor to afford to participate, or who have proven their inadequacy by getting laid off (by the corporations) will have no power and no voice in the community.

There are some things we can do to stop them: We can pressure Congress to reinstate a lot of the regulations on business and business practices that they’ve eliminated in the last thirty years; demand the end to lobbyists and special interest groups in Washington; demand the reversal of all court decisions that have ruled that corporations have the same rights as citizens; demand that corporations, when they get themselves into a financial bind, be allowed to fail rather than get bailed out with taxpayer money; and demand that the government exercise its right to dissolve corporations guilty of breaking the law and/or endangering lives.  We  can also do things ourselves, like refusing to do business with whatever corporations we can afford to stop doing business with.  We can cut up our credit cards, take our money out of the banks and put them into credit unions (a lot of people are doing this after Bank of America announced they were slapping a five dollar monthly user fee onto their customer’s debit cards), and find other ways to deny the corporations the opportunity to exploit us for their own gain.  Despite what the corporations and the politicians and the unions want us to think, we are not powerless without them. In fact, the exact opposite is true: without us, their workers and their customers, the corporations can’t exist.  We can stop the corporate takeover of America.  We can take our country, our economy, our politics, and our culture back from the robber barons.  Or we can let them continue to own us.  This is what Occupy Wall Street is all about.