Occupy Wall Street

A lot of us have been wondering how long Americans would remain unconcerned and unquestioning about the economy and issues of social justice in this country. But now a movement has actually started. The only question is where will it (can it) go from here. 

It is unfortunate that the movement took the name "Occupy Wall Street" since there is nothing inherently evil about Wall Street and, in fact, Wall Street serves an important role in the functioning of our economy. If they literally took down Wall Street, they would cause enormous damage to the economy and to themselves; and I don't know what they would put in its place. The real issue here is how the Great Recession of 2007, from which we still suffer, was caused by individual and corporate greed miss-using not only Wall Street but also the entire banking and lending system. On top of that, and running over a much longer period of time, is the way in which the political system has been miss-used in order to favor the production of extreme wealth for a very small number of people at the expense of most people. It is this very chasm of wealth that cripples the nation now since the residual buying power of the 99% is so small that it cannot possibly stimulate investment and job creation. 

I hope that the Occupy movement will begin to take a position of political power. So long as Congress (as well as state houses across the country)  is owned by the 1%, there will be no basic changes in the situation. They will refuse to tax wealth and they will do nothing to promote job creation. They will, instead, waste their time on legislation aimed at taking abortion rights away from women and jeopardizing women's health. The Republicans, at this point, do not want to do anything constructive toward solving our economic problems since they hope that voters will blame everything on Obama in November 2012. That means Americans will be held hostage by the Republicans for more than one more year! But we can't say that they didn't tell us so. Remember in 2010 when they swept into power how they all declared that their primary goal was making Obama a one-term president? Wouldn't it be nice, though, if the Republicans could see service to the people as part of their political obligations?