I’ve been fielding a lot of emotionally-charged questions in recent days from folks trying to get a handle on what, exactly, Occupy hopes to accomplish. I honestly don’t know the answer to the question, or if there will ever be an answer that suitably satisfies everyone. But I am convinced that the Occupy Movement needs to exist, and that the spontaneous energy that produced it is rooted in a very real, very immediate sense of urgency about the stability and fairness of our democracy. If nothing else, Occupy is a safe venue for citizens to air their grievances. Things have gotten a little fishy in this country in the last few years, and typically apolitical folks are suddenly starting to seriously doubt the efficacy of a system that seems unable or unwilling to pay them anything but lip service.
Based on what I’ve seen, this is the closest I can come to speaking the truth:
The Occupy Movement currently serves as a mutable vessel for the manifold complaints of a large, diverse, and disheartened segment of American society, one that feels that certain fundamental tenets of our Constitutional Republic have been systematically neglected, abandoned, or outright undermined. Of particular concern is the outsized influence of money with respect to elections, legislation, and policy priorities. From this perspective, I consider the Tea Party and Occupy to be responding to the same clarion call. The Tea Party generally focuses on government, while Occupy has focused largely on corporations. In fact, government and corporations are increasingly difficult to distinguish from one another, and this is the biggest issue at the heart of the national discontent.
Elections – Whatever Happened to Campaign Finance Reform?
In the case of the financing of elections, fundraising numbers are typically highly correlated with election outcomes. From a certain perspective, this might seem both self-evident and benign. As the theory goes, the candidate with the superior platform can reasonably expect to achieve monetary support reflective of the backing he or she earns in the marketplace of ideas. In other words, more money suggests more popular support. In practice, however, that relationship is considerably muddier. The ratio between popular support and financial contributions is not, nor has it ever been, a clean 1:1. In a capitalist system, money is never distributed equitably. Some of us have more money than others (exponentially more, in some cases), creating a scenario in which a single individual could, if he wanted to, provide a financial boost to his candidate equal to or exceeding the combined financial contributions of a much larger group of his fellow citizens.
To illustrate, let’s imagine a totally outlandish scenario in which the wealthiest 1% of Americans, in synchronous fits of dementia, decide to throw the entirety of their vast fortunes (some $22.76 trillion) behind a single candidate. Let’s also imagine that the single candidate they’ve chosen is widely reviled by the rest of the American voting public, Paris Hilton maybe, or OJ Simpson or Snooki — whatever. And just for kicks, let’s further assume that the 89 million votes cast in the 2008 election will remain constant in the 2012 election. Now, if the top 1% are the only voters in America bankrolling Paris/OJ/Snooki, the 88,110,000 Americans on the other side of the argument need to pony up 258,313 dollars apiece to keep pace. If those 88,110,000 are evenly divided between two major party candidates, that number jumps to 516,626 bones each.
Historically, legislative efforts have been made to maintain a reasonable, if imperfect, balance between popular support and financial support, specifically capping the dollar amount a single individual can contribute to a campaign each calendar year. The most recent legislation caps that number at $30,800 (an unreachable figure for the majority of us to be sure, but hardly astronomical).
2010’s Citizens United decision, however, affirmed that: a) money is a form of speech; b) corporations are persons with the right to free speech; and c) limiting the amount of money a person/corporation/union can spend on political advertising is an unconstitutional restriction of that speech (a.k.a. censorship). In other words, anyone with the means can easily sidestep the $30,800 yearly contribution threshold by funneling their money into a SuperPAC and airing hundreds of thousands of dollars of political advertisements (even in places they don’t actually live). Or a corporation with a vested interest in defying overwhelming public opinion against a project can throw unlimited funds behind a business friendly politician. Suddenly, our hypothetical scenario, in which a select few individuals pit themselves against the wishes of the majority of society, seems not so outlandish at all. In fact, it seems to be the current state of things; our new reality.
Legislation – Money Fuels Lobbyists, Lobbyists Write Laws
There is nothing fundamentally immoral about lobbying. The very same 1st Amendment right to petition that protects the residents of Occupy Philly also provides lobbyists with their legal basis. In fact, the action in which Occupy Philly is currently engaged is itself form of lobbying (although its aims are harder to define, and the population whose interests it seeks to protect is broader). A more dramatic difference between us and them, however, is that we have nothing to offer the people we’re lobbying other than reason and an abiding sense of fairness. Professional lobbyists are armed with years of professional relationships, an intimate knowledge of the legislative process, the ability to organize all expense paid “fact-finding” trips, and the promise of large campaign contributions.
An unfortunate consequence of the massive amount of money that pours into elections is that holding elected office has become a form of glorified fundraising. Campaigning is, for all intents and purposes, a full-time affair, overshadowing even legislative responsibilities. It’s as if there’s no longer downtime between an initial election victory and a reelection campaign, leaving officeholders a negligible amount of time to actually do the job they were elected to do, namely governing. A nefarious result of this redistribution of human energy is that laws aren’t just being influenced by lobbyists, but are being written by them outright. Add that to the fact that representatives oftentimes vote on dense legislation that they’ve not taken the time to read, and you’ve got a recipe for highly undemocratic decision-making.
Policy Priorities – Defending the Few at the Expense of the Many
When the proverbial shit hit the fan in 2008 and 2009, the mainstream media dove headlong into doomsday prophesying, scaring the masses into believing that, unless taxpayer money was poured into bailing out financial institutions that placed a decade’s worth of bad bets, the entire US economy would collapse. The larger conversation might have been about the dangerous illogic of tying an entire economy to the luck of professional gamblers placing bets with borrowed money, or of the legislative changes that allowed mortgages to be repackaged and sold by institutions that didn’t issue them to begin with, but since taking the long view is anathema to the modern 24-hour news cycle, the short view prevailed and Congress voted — against the wishes of the majority of the US population — to bail out the big banks.
Regardless of your opinion on that decision, the process itself made clear that representatives are increasingly willing to ignore input from the majority of America. The bailout program, officially known as the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), was one of the Tea Party’s early targets. In fact, unsuccessful Tea Party candidate Christine O’Donnel (probably best known for a campaign ad in which she declared “I am not a witch”), became a candidate by beating incumbent Mike Castle in Delaware’s Republican primary by making his “yes” vote on TARP a major problem for him. In other words, collusion between Wall Street and Washington had been a rallying cry for the Tea Party from the get-go. Directing anger at Wall Street only became a form of “socialism” when Occupy Wall Street took the baton at full sprint.
In addition to being largely ignored by their representatives, the majority of America has been consistently expected to shoulder the burden of poor decisions about which they’ve been allowed little to no input. If you or I fail to honor our debts, we run the very real risk of bankruptcy and litigation. In fact, the inevitable consequence of the bursting of the artificially inflated housing bubble was an immediate foreclosure crisis, in which folks who’d been encouraged to become homeowners by taking out subprime loans, and who’d then been encouraged to borrow against the arbitrarily increasing value of their new homes, were suddenly left holding the short straw.
But for the folks who knowingly took stupid risks, and for the folks who bet against mortgage holders because they knew they’d be able to make a buck off of people who’d been misled into taking out loans they couldn’t possibly repay, there were no consequences to their actions. They blew a hole in their own boat, and instead of letting them sink with the ship, we were asked to patch up the hole with planks from our own decrepit little raft.
Locally, Lincoln Financial Group (which owns stadium name rights to the Philadelphia Eagles), took advantage of the taxpayer bonanza. Lincoln Financial was technically ineligible to receive TARP funds because they were an investment firm, and the money was intended for savings and loan institutions. In order to get a piece of the pie, they acquired a small thrift/savings bank for $10 million. Had that bank applied for TARP funds on its own, it would have gotten about $350K in taxpayer support. But since the math for determining the amount of TARP money to allocate was based on the parent company’s assets, that number leaped to $950 million. And since the parent company was not obligated to spend any of the money in connection with its subsidiary’s activities, not a single cent ever trickled down the thrift/savings that made it possible to begin with. Meanwhile, Philly taxpayers who already financed the damn building and are still on the hook for stadium maintenance fees, spend their nights wondering if they’ll have enough money to pay the bills this month, or if they’ll even have a job next month.
That America’s financial institutions engaged in behavior that would cause harm to the general public while padding their own bottom lines is hardly a surprise. Greed is their modus operandi. The true crime was that the folks that had every reason to see the disaster happening and had the power to prevent it, actually made it easier for Wall Street to fleece the rest of us. With the exception of Sheila Bair at the FDIC, in particular her efforts to curb subprime mortgage abuses as well as her opposition to US adoption of Basel II Accords (which would have lowered the amount of capital banks needed to hold in order to take risks) no government banking regulators made so much as a peep.
So Now What?
We’ve reached a point of critical mass, in which the vast majority of Americans are finally stepping up to the mic and making their voices heard. The Tea Party was the first grassroots response, and it was immediately treated with mistrust and naysaying by the mainstream media (a response that the Occupy Movement has also received). Its leaderless structure and the broad swath of policy positions with which it initially took umbrage meant that, on the one hand, it had wide popular appeal (among Republicans, libertarians, free-thinking independents, and even some fiscally conservative Democrats), and on the other that it couldn’t capture the attention of the loudest voices in media. It wasn’t until it got hijacked by the Koch brothers, Michelle Bachmann, Glenn Beck, and others that its focus narrowed and its profile raised. The move was great strategically, but it pushed to the margins those that agreed with it in principle, but didn’t (and would never) identify with the evangelical wing of the Republican Party, for which the Tea Party has become a placeholder.
Gone were the Ron Paul Republicans, gone were the Blue Dog Democrats, gone were the independents desperate for an honest conversation. Into the void stepped the Occupy Movement, but thanks to coverage that is often dismissive and myopic, there is an impression that those who have complaints can only show up if they’re white, criminals, marxists, or unambitious welfare vampires.
The truth of the matter, and a truth that ought to be shouted from the hilltops, is that the Occupy Movement is about bringing government back to the people, all people, even those who might disagree on solutions to common problems. There are people in suits here as well as junkies wearing last year’s socks. There are senior citizens here, as well as those about to vote in their first election. There is an ethnic representation here that cannot be found at any Tea Party rally that I’ve ever seen. These are Occupy’s strengths, though they’ll be called weaknesses by those most afraid of a loud and motivated populace.
More can be said, but my brain is melting a bit, so I’ll save it. If you’ve made it to the bottom, I thank you for taking the time, and I hope you have a great day. Please consider getting out to your local Occupy and contributing whatever skills you’ve got. We need commitment, we need patience, and we need all the help we can get.
tentcityhall 