Still Occupied
Nov 18th, 2011 | 4 responses
NEW YORK — Occupy Wall Street may not occupy Zuccotti Park anymore, but it refuses to surrender its place in the national discourse. Up close, you get the sense that the movement may have only just begun.
Demonstrators staged a “day of action” Thursday, following the eviction of their two-month-old encampment earlier this week. The idea was, well, to occupy Wall Street in a literal sense — to shut down the financial district, at least during the morning rush hour.
For the most part, it didn’t work. Entrances to some subway stations were blocked for a while and traffic was more of a mess than usual. But police turned out in force, erecting barricades that kept protesters from getting anywhere near their main target, the New York Stock Exchange. Captains of commerce may have been hassled and inconvenienced, but they weren’t thwarted.
There was some pushing and shoving, resulting in a few dozen arrests. Coordinated “day of action” protests were also held in other cities. They did not change the world.
A big failure? No, quite the opposite.
Lower Manhattan was swarming not just with demonstrators and police but with journalists from around the world — and with tourists who wanted to see what all the fuss was about. A small, nonviolent protest had been amplified into something much bigger and more compelling, not by the strength of its numbers but by the power of its central idea.
There (BEG ITAL)is(END ITAL) a central idea, by the way: that our financial system has been warped to serve the interests of a privileged few at the expense of everyone else.
Is this true? I believe the evidence suggests that it is. Others might disagree. The important thing is that because of the activism of the Occupy Wall Street protests — however naive, however all-over-the-map — issues of unfairness and inequality are being discussed.
This is a conversation we haven’t been having for the past 30 years. For politicians — and those who pay lavishly to fund their campaigns — the discussion is destabilizing because it does not respect traditional alignments. For example, white working-class voters are supposed to be riled up against Democrats for policies such as affirmative action and gun control. They’re not supposed to get angry with Republicans for voting to bail out the banks and then flatly ruling out the idea of relief for underwater borrowers.
How people feel about fairness — the 1 percent at the top versus the other 99 percent — has nothing to do with how they feel about limiting abortion or banning assault weapons. It has nothing to do with whether people think racism is a thing of the past or a continuing scourge. Fairness can’t be dismissed as some sort of first step toward socialism, unless we’re willing to concede that capitalism and fairness are fundamentally incompatible. I don’t believe this is the case. Maybe some of the Occupy protests’ most vocal opponents would like to disagree.
In Midtown, many blocks from Zuccotti Park, famously jaded New Yorkers were eager to talk about Occupy Wall Street. Buttonholing people at random, I found a lot of support for Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s decision to clear the park of tents, sleeping bags and other appurtenances of a permanent settlement. But I also found a lot of agreement with the protesters — even if not everyone had the same idea about just what the protesters were saying.
“Yeah, they were talking a lot of crazy stuff, some of them,” said Ramon Henriquez, owner of a limousine company, who was idling on Central Park South behind the wheel of one of his cars. “Some of them, when they’d do that crazy human microphone thing, they would talk about socialism. I didn’t like that at all. But I liked what they said about the banks.”
He remembered one Occupy speaker asking what would happen if every homeowner decided to skip a month on the mortgage, instead putting the money in escrow — just to get the banks’ attention. “You saw what happened with the debit-card fee,” he said, referring to Bank of America’s abandoned attempt to squeeze new revenue out of account holders. “They listened because they had to listen.”
The erstwhile occupiers of Zuccotti Park swear that they aren’t going anywhere — that they’ll get back into the park one way or another. But they’ve done something more important: They’ve gotten into people’s heads.
Eugene Robinson’s email address is eugenerobinson(at)washpost.com. (c) 2011, Washington Post Writers Group. This column is licensed to run on TMV in full.
Photo via lev radin / Shutterstock.com
4 Responses to “Still Occupied”
So many things going on in our country to make you sad…mad…and disgusted.
and then the picture of a young lady with a protest sign pops up on your pc monitor and you think to yourself…
now that is the America I love.
Good for the occupiers! I applaud their courage. Nothing apathetic about these folks.
The ‘trickle up’ economics started around Reagan’s time. http://deanbaker.net/images/stories/documents/End-of-Loser-Liberalism.pdf documents it. The treatise is written by an economist.
For those who don’t have the time (or inclination) to read it, let me give some quick ideas of what he is saying.
1.) Tighter money policy by the Fed led to rising unemployment (by design). The Fed does have a mandate to try to keep inflation low but also has a mandate for full employment. According to one of the Fed chairman the first mandate is almost sacrosanct, the second one is not often much of a consideration.
2.) Weakening of unions. Reagan fired the air traffic controllers (when usually politicians took a more conciliatory approach to union demands). This was followed by numerous other union-bashing actions by various businesses. In addition, laws were passed to prevent secondary strikes (a secondary strike would be, for instance, if teamsters refused to deliver to a company that the workers were striking. If the Teamsters’ Union did this, their officers would be jailed and their assets seized.) In addition to all this, Reagan appointed pro-management hacks to the NLRB and pulled most of its funding. Thus, any person who wanted to bring a suit against a company would have to wait two years to get a hearing (for instance if he/she was fired for trying to form a union).
Currently there are more than 20 states with laws on the books requiring that non-union employees get the same pay as union employees. Furthermore, if such an employee were fired, the union MUST REPRESENT that employee, even though the employee never paid for such representation.
More to come
3.) The value of the dollar against other currencies is a function of both the Fed and the Treasury. A high-dollar policy makes goods manufactured in the US more expensive than those manufactured in other countries. For instance, if the dollar is over-valued by 5% then foreign goods get a 5% subsidy to sell here while our goods have a 5% tariff penalty in trying to sell overseas. Free Trade agreements (such as NAFTA) are not really free trade. Goods can move from one country to the next with few restrictions (thus lowering the cost of labor due to cheaper labor in Mexico). However, the same is not true concerning upper-income labor. Doctors and lawyers (along with many other professionals) are protected from competition with their lower-wage counterparts in other countries.
4.) Patent and copyright protection (note: I am not necessarily against these, I am just pointing out how they skew prices). The government gives patent protection to all sorts of inventions. This includes the prescription drug industry. The country will spend about $300 billion in drugs this year. Without patent protection, the same drugs would cost about $30 billion. The savings dwarf the Bush-era tax cuts per year and would save trillions over ten years. The author suggests that the US could have a policy of buying the patents and doing the expensive clinical trials themselves. Then allowing anyone to make the drugs. Similar expenses are incurred for music, movies, et. al. due to copyright. Maybe the government should offer art-credits to people, allowing them to apply these to any art they want.
5.) Corporate liability limitations. Corporation, noun: A vehicle for obtaining individual profit without incurring individual responsibility. (From Civilization IV) Corporations have been declared, by the Supreme Court, to be people. When was a corporation last jailed for its misconduct? Corporate officers are exempt (predominantly) from the misbehavior of their companies. Their assets can not be taken in liability lawsuits.
6.) Corporate governance: CEO’s in most corporations decide who gets to be on the board of directors (mostly by de facto making the board members the only ones who are offered up for nomination). Those board members are often paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to attend 4-8 meetings per year. Those boards also determine the salaries of the CEO’s.
6.) Too big to fail banks: currently the banks that were ‘too big to fail’ were either absorbed into even bigger banks or have absorbed others (or remained the same size, that is, too big to fail). These banks now get to borrow at a cheaper cost than their smaller competitors because the lenders know that the government will not let such systemically important institutions fail. This is grotesquely unfair. It is also a serious cost to the country. Those banks give huge pay-outs to their top officers at the expense of the country (since they are receiving an insurance that they do not pay for).
Just some things to think about.