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Friday, November 18, 2011

Occupy Wall Street: The 99% Movement

The following select portion is from the 10-28-2011 issue of The Week, a weekly magazine well worth subscribing to:

Occupy Wall Street continues to gather momentum with satellite protests in more than 60 American cities. Yet as the growing protest continues, critics are still asking what it’s all about.

The answer is simple: “income inequality.” The wealthiest 400 people in the U.S. are now worth more than the bottom 150 million Americans. Three years after taxpayers bailed out the Wall Street gamblers whose recklessness plunged the country into the Great Recession, the average pay in the securities industry is $361,000, and the gap between the rich and everyone else is wider than ever. And the rich continue to rig the game, using their wealth to buy off politicians, and lobby for laws and tax policies that help them at the expense of everyone else.

Protesters have legitimate grievances, despite the nonstop demands for “democracy” / though democracy is necessarily an unglamorous, time-consuming process, which you can turn to your advantage only by immersing yourself in rules, laws, institutions, and elections.

Polls show that the “99 percent” movement is resonating with millions of people not present at the protests; the belief that wealthy Americans have grown too rich while the majority have been left behind is “shared by Americans across the political spectrum,” whether rich, poor, Republican, or Democrat. If you tune out the “anti-capitalist claptrap” of the usual “lefty fringe groups,” you’ll hear the “plaintive cry of a middle class in distress.” Who isn’t angry that Washington bailed out the big banks, which immediately went back to awarding their executives obscene bonuses? That “bipartisan dereliction of duty” is what unites the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street.

That’s why all politicians should heed the ongoing cry of distress. On the “99 percent” website, the stories that inspire the movement are a portrayal of the grinding misery of the Great Recession: a construction worker laid off from his job, now doing menial labor for $12 an hour; “hard-pressed single moms” who can’t afford health care; the Harvard graduate who owes $60,000 and can’t find a job. This is a moment that calls for bold political leadership and genuine economic reforms. But Obama’s only “misbegotten contribution” has been a costly, ineffective health-care law, and the Republican candidates don’t even seem to be aware of “the troubles of workers down the income scale.”

It’s about the “downward mobility” of middle-class Americans.

http://theweek.com/article/index/220577/the-lsquo99-percentrsquo-movement-will-it-matter