why i support the occupy movement

 Bigg Jus – This Is Poor People’s Day

“The vast combinations of capital which have marked the development of our industrial system create new conditions and necessitate a change from the old attitude of the State and the nation toward property… More and more it is evident that the State, and if necessary the nation, has got to possess the right of supervision and control as regards the great corporations which are its creatures.” - Theodore Roosevelt, September 1901.

This post is a response to something that a friend of mine shared on Facebook. He posted an anti-Occupy picture that I found offensive. If you’d like to look at the picture, it’s here (I linked instead of embedding because it’s mean-spirited and makes me a bit queasy). Basically, the picture is of a teenager who has never worked a day in her life holding a sign accusing the protesters of being lazy and calling them spoiled. It made me angry, so I made my second donation to the movement this week. Speaking of that… you can donate too!

I told my friend that his post had inspired me to donate more cash, and he asked me to explain why I supported the movement. In response, I typed the following essay. It wouldn’t fit on Facebook, so I decided to post it here. There’s been a lot of love for the movement on this blog, and I actually think that it was through Noah’s Facebook page that I first heard about Occupy Wall Street in the first place!  My reasoning for supporting the movement is my own, though, and I’m neither speaking for FMLY nor the Occupy movement in general. Nonetheless, I thought some of y’all would like to read this.

Please follow the link for the (admittedly quite long) essay…

Firstly, I’d like to address the intellectual dishonestly in the girl’s sign. We should be focusing on ideas, not looking for easy ways to dismiss our “opponents” without considering their points. Condemning the protests because a few protesters have used the bathroom in alleys is as unfair as condemning the Tea Party because a few of its members have spit on Congresspeople and booed gay US soldiers. It’s as unfair as condemning the entire police force because some officers sprayed innocent people with pepper spray. Yes, there are terrible people in every group. Those people don’t represent the whole, or even the majority.

Secondly, it’s important to clarify that I’m not supporting the movement on my own behalf. I’m certainly not in the “1%,” but I’m happily employed and doing pretty well for myself. But so much of that is a result of circumstance. My family is affluent, and staying relatively affluent has been less of an exercise in pulling myself up by my bootstraps and more of an exercise in simply not messing up the gifts with which I’ve been blessed. The problem is that I see the country falling apart around me. In my neighborhood, I’m surrounded by people who work much harder than me for much less. Our nation was founded on the concept of upward mobility, and upward mobility is a narrative that we still hold sacred — yet it’s not reality.

I’m fighting for the Social Contract. I’ll speak about two documents that were important to the founding of our Republic — John Locke’s 2nd Treatise and Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. Locke tells us that government derives its power from the consent of the governed. Government itself is inherently “socialist” — it’s predicated upon the idea that, if we work together, we can all do better than we’d do if we were simply on our own. Wealth of Nations tells us that self interest is good for society. The desire of producers to become rich can enhance the world for everyone. Products succeed in markets because they have positive impacts and people want them. Thus, producers motivated by greed still make products that are useful for the general public. But according to Smith, a company that is bad for the public should go out of business. The so-called “invisible hand” is the Public Good.

Those two concepts seem as if they’re opposed, but it’s the marriage of the two that has enabled our country to get where it is today. Hamilton’s bank, Clay’s American System, Mann’s Common School Movement, Franklin Roosevelt’s TVA, Eisenhower’s Interstate Highway System  – these are all examples of great public undertakings that have enabled the “producer class” to do as well as it has. We worked together  to pool our resources as a nation and create institutions that have enabled the entrepreneurial class to erect the most prosperous nation the world has ever seen. Socialism enables capitalism, because when we work together we can better create an environment within which we can thrive. Capitalism, likewise, enables socialism by creating the abundance that’s needed to provide services like fire departments, schools, and public transportation. America has always worked as a combination of the two.

I believe in progressive taxation, and the argument that Clinton-era levels of taxation were restrictive to business is demonstrably false. People make tons  of money in this nation by building large corporations, and the larger your corporation the more you rely on the things provided by the government. You need the education system to prepare your workers to compete globally. You need the highway system to transport your goods. You need the monetary system to do your business. You need the police to make sure some other jackass doesn’t try to take your wealth. You need environmental regulations to make sure that the cumulative actions of all the corporations don’t pollute the Earth so badly that it diminishes productivity throughout the economy. This is to say nothing about tax loopholes that allow companies to actually get reductions on their taxes for moving jobs overseas or for intentionally keeping high worker turnover rates (for instance, laws that give tax credits for hiring but don’t stipulate anything about how long the workers need to be employed, thereby providing an incentive to not keep people around for long).

These days, corporate America is simply not living up to its end of the bargain. In 2001, Congress reduced taxes for the wealthiest Americans. Two years later, we went to an unprovoked war of choice at the behest of a group of people who were connected to corporations (Halliburton, Lockheed, etc) that stood to benefit greatly from an overseas adventure. I appreciate the hard work and sacrifices of every single troop, and this isn’t a discussion of whether or not the Iraq War was justified. Nonetheless, for the first time in our history we engaged in a war and decided not to pay for it with increased revenues. We paved the way for American corporations to set up shop in a foreign country that was previously hostile to our enterprises, and they’ve done that with aplomb. Hell, we’re actually the ones paying their bills in the forms of defense contracts! Our tax dollars go to work, every day, to make them rich — why shouldn’t we increase their tax rate to pay for the war?

Now let’s talk about banks. As I said, the so-called “invisible hand” is the Public Good. I think it would be hard to argue that banks have been acting in the interests of the public recently. Yes, everyone who took out a subprime loan is responsible for their own foolishness — but the banks were hardly acting in good faith when they lent to these people. Many of the same banks who were issuing the loans were also betting against them in the markets, and they were packaging the junk loans deceptively and selling them to foreigners who didn’t know better. They were making loads and loads of money, but they weren’t doing anything for the public good.

Here is where we have the perversion of the capitalist/socialist balance. If you don’t serve the public good, then your product ought to fail. That happened in 2008 — yet we used socialism to rescue the banks from the consequences of their actions. We said they were “too big to fail.” We bankrolled their mistakes, and we did so because we were told that our economy would collapse if we didn’t.

Yet — have they changed their ways? We paid for them to be bailed out, and instead of putting our money back into the economy they used it to fight regulations in Congress. When Congress was able to push through a tiny bit of regulation, Bank of America’s response was to pass the cost onto consumers in the form of $5 a month debit card fees. Can you believe the audacity?

We’re in a critical stage in the history of our nation. The fabric of our society is fraying, the wealth gap is increasing, and pockets of America are beginning more and more to look like Third World countries. We need to work together. Otherwise, our “noble experiment” will not last much longer.

Those who are determining our policies are not acting in a way that encourages sustainability. Yes, we need to audit government expenditures and get rid of waste. There are certainly social programs that are in need of serious overhaul. I’m tempted to agree, for example, with the argument that public employee unions are too powerful in many places. The new Michael Lewis book, Boomerang, has a good chapter explaining how pensions have strangled the budget of Vallejo, California and driven it to bankruptcy. But the leaders of the Tea Party movement and their Congressional compatriots aren’t merely trying to reform our programs. They want to utterly destroy them. They want to use our budget crisis as a front for further deregulation and even more tax breaks. The justification for that is that we need to clear the way for “job creators,” but from my perspective the way seems pretty clear. They’re just not creating jobs.

We’re now living in a republic “by the corporations, for the corporations.” Yet the goals being pursued by these corporations are shortsighted at best. They’ll even have negative consequences for the corporations, eventually. If our education system crumbles, then our workforce will continue to lose value. If we don’t invest in new energy technology, then the cost of doing business will eventually skyrocket because we’ve sucked all of the oil out of the ground. If we can’t reign in the costs of healthcare, then the costs of healthcare will eventually eat up all of our resources. All of these reforms, however, require the wealthiest and most powerful Americans to “take one for the team” — to pay a bit more now so that we will be sustainable later.

When it came time for the public to bail out the banks, we weren’t given a vote. When we were told that we’d be bailing them out, we heard the reasoning that it was an essential sacrifice for the future of our nation. Yet our corporate establishment refuses to sacrifice anything. That’s the whole point of the Tea Party  (an astroturf movement that, unlike Occupy Wall Street, is bankrolled by corporations) — to move away from cooperation and towards an “every man for himself” mentality. However much the Sarah Palins and Glenn Becks of the county romanticize that mentality, it’s not American. The reason why Horatio Alger’s stories were so popular is because, thanks to an enabling infrastructure, the potential for upward mobility actually seemed real. As we dismantle this infrastructure, those who already have power are magnifying it. Those who don’t have power are losing the ability to gain it.

I believe that everyone who works hard should be able to make ends meet for themselves and raise a modest family. While the ingenuity of the “job creators” is essential, it requires the sweat of everybody else for that ingenuity to take us anywhere. The masses are increasingly working harder and harder, yet the companies that exploit labor are holding onto their gains or reinvesting them elsewhere. Trickle-down economics is a fraud, and the increased wealth gap over the past few decades proves it. There already is class warfare going on in America, but it’s the wealthy who are engaging in it — not with their rhetoric, as the president has been accused of doing, but with their actions. I do believe that there should be a redistribution of wealth, because I believe that the current distribution is unfair. It violates the Social Contract. It invalidates the Invisible Hand.

That’s why I’m supporting the Occupy movement. The 99% needs awakening — they’re being bamboozled. Occupy Wall Street is the beginning of that awakening. Does it have a clear agenda? Yes, it does. The agenda is to let the people in power know that we’re paying attention. We’re not happy with what is happening. We want our government to deal with the current fiscal crisis in a manner that is consistent with the spirits of cooperation and progression that have characterized America for two and a half centuries and made us the greatest country in the world. Capitalism and socialism are the yin and the yang that have enabled the United States. For the past little bit, however, the masses haven’t been paying attention while the pendulum has swung so far to the capitalism side that we’ve become a corporatocracy. This is the sound of us trying to get the pendulum back to where it belongs. To use a particularly eloquent quote from the wikipedia entry on yin-yang, “you can’t have the back of the hand without the front.”

Should the Occupy Wall Street guys be in charge of America? No, probably not. But do we need them pushing back against the other guys? If we want to survive, then we do.