I’m Tim Hogan. I am a husband, a father of two, a small businessman and I am one of the 99%.
The day will come when our Republic will become an impossibility because wealth will be concentrated in the hands of a few. When that day comes, we must rely upon the wisdom of the best elements in the country to readjust the laws of the nation.
- James Madison
Our Republic is at such an impossible time because the fewest have the wealth of our nation. The gap between the richest and poorest in America is at its greatest ever. The income of the top 1% of Americans has increased by nearly 300% since 1979 while wages and salaries of average Americans have barely, if at all, kept up with inflation over the same period. Americans suffer poverty at the highest rate ever. 46.3 million Americans have household incomes below the federal poverty line, with one in six children in America living in poverty, right now.
The percentage of wages as a percentage of our nation’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is at its lowest since 1947 when the government began keeping such statistics while corporate profits are at an all time high. Corporations have more than $2 trillion in cash reserves while unemployment is endemic and worker productivity is at all time highs.
The financial crisis of 2008 spawned efforts to stop the excesses of the banking and investment communities but, those valiant efforts have been to no avail as the laws and regulations which would prevent a re-occurrence of the financial crisis have been stymied and blocked by the financial industry’s stranglehold on the US House and Senate and threats of lawsuits.
Meanwhile the four largest financial institutions which took over $100 billion in bailout money from US tax payers have doubled and redoubled down on the risky derivatives which caused the financial collapse. Bank of America, Citicorp, JP Morgan Chase and Goldman Sachs as insured commercial banks now hold some 95% of risky derivatives as investments after they collectively received over $135 billion in federal bailout monies. Yes, the bailout monies were repaid with interest but, right now banks continue the very same risky activities which caused the 2008 financial meltdown in the first place. And see here and here.
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I occasionally listen to Rush Limbaugh's radio show because I consider it important to understand how it is that my views differ from those of people who oppose my views. Two days ago, I listened to Limbaugh bloviating about the people who are participating in the Occupy Protests springing up all over the United States. By some reports, there are more than 1,000 such protests ongoing, and they are actually occurring all over the world. Limbaugh announced, without hesitation, that these protesters are mostly unemployed, lazy, dirty, amoral, socially irresponsible and ignorant young people. Those who rely on Rush Limbaugh for their facts might thus be highly likely to object to these protests (including Occupy Wall Street) based on Limbaugh's description of the protesters. But is the description he gave to his many (though dwindling number of) listeners accurate? I had an opportunity to check this yesterday at the Occupy St. Louis protest in my hometown of St. Louis, Missouri.
Over the past few days, I've been quite occupied at my day job, and it was only while walking back to my law office from the federal courthouse at 4 pm yesterday that I spotted an organized march coming down Market Street in downtown St. Louis. I would estimate that there were almost 1,000 people marching. I didn't have my video camera with me, but I did have my Canon S95 pocket camera, so I got to work taking hand-held video and still shots of the protesters. Here's the finished product, which will allow you to actually meet the types of people who are participating in the Saint Louis Occupy protest. You can now be your own judge of what these protesters are like:
As you can see from the parade route pans and the interviews, none of these people fit the description given by Rush Limbaugh. Off camera, I asked most of the protesters about their "day jobs," and all of them indicated that they were gainfully employed, and in a wide variety of challenging fields. These "young" protesters of Occupy St. Louis ranged in age from 20's to their 80's. The on-camera statements of the people I interviewed show that they are well-informed, thoughtful, highly articulate and good-hearted. Many of the people I spoke with indicated that they are not going away. They have been waiting for a good time and place to express their deep concerns about the way our government works, and they have finally found what they've been looking for.
In case anyone is concerned that I intentionally skewed my sampling regarding who I interviewed, this was my method: I simply walked up to someone nearby and asked whether he or she would be willing to give a short statement about why they were attending the protest. I approached 12 people. One woman sympathetic to the protest apologized and said she couldn't talk on camera because she was a member of the news media. One man said that he supported the protest, but he'd rather not go on camera. Another man said he had never been part of a protest before, but he read about this protest recently and then said to himself, "Yeah, these people are right on these issues." The other nine people I approached agreed to give statements on camera. I'd like to thank each of these folks for taking the time to talk (I've listed their names in the order in which they appear in my video):
Al Vitale
Fred Raines (a retired economics professor, who said that he compiled the statistics displayed on one of the signs appearing on the video)
Apollonia Childs
Chrissy Kirchhoefer
Curtis Roberts
Michel Kiepe
Jeff Schaefer
Matt Ankney, and
Frances Madeson
Based on the above video, there is no lack of intellectual moorings for this protest. The focus is that our government, including politicians of both major parties, has been substantially bought by big business, and many destructive things are flowing from the consequent misuse of government power.
About a dozen protesters have have formed a camp in Kiener Plaza, a public gathering spot across the street from the towering downtown headquarters of Bank of America. I was told by several protesters that some of the camping protesters had been evicted from the camp over the past week, but that the intent is nonetheless maintain a presence in Kiener Plaza indefinitely. The Bank of America building has been the geographical focus of other recent protests, including this one in August, 2011. (A payday loan protest by a group called GRO occurred at this same bank last year--here's video). I should note that most of the people who work in the huge Bank of America building work for companies other than the Bank of America, yet the building remains a symbol of what has gone so very wrong with the political process.
I'd also like to mention that the St. Louis Police, who were out in the hundreds, were courteous and professional. The protesters were there merely to protest-to get their message out. There were no untoward incidents that would distract from the central message of the protests.
For more on yesterday's protest, see this description by St. Louis blogger Gloria Bilchik at Occasional Planet. See also, this post by another St. Louis blogger, Adam Shriver at St. Louis Activist Hub.
What do all of those people in the Wall Street towers actually do? You won't find them doing much of what most people think about when they hear the term "banking." The following description of the business of Wall Street is from Christopher Ketcham's "The Reign of One Percenters" at Orion Magazine:
At one time, the financial sector could be relied upon to allocate capital for the building of things that society needed—projects that also invariably created jobs. But productivity is no longer its purview. . . . Structured investment vehicles, credit default swaps, futures exchanges, hedge funds, complex securitization and derivative pools, the tranching of mortgages—these were shown to have “little or no long-term value,” according to [John Cassidy, a staff writer for The New Yorker]. The purpose was to “merely shift money around” without designing, building, or selling “a single tangible thing.” The One Percenter seeks only exchange value, as opposed to real value. Thus foreign exchange currency gambling has skyrocketed to seventy-three times the actual goods and services of the planet, up from eleven times in 1980. Thus the “value” of oil futures has risen from 20 percent of actual physical production in 1980 to 1,000 percent today. Thus interest rate derivatives have gone from nil in 1980 to $390 trillion in 2009. The trading schemes float disembodied above the real economy, related to it only because without the real economy there would be nothing to exploit.
Behold, then, the One Percenter in his Wall Street tower. He creates “value” by tapping on keyboards and punching in algorithms. He makes money playing with money, manipulating abstractions. He manufactures and chases after financial bubbles and then pricks them. . . . A study from the New Economics Foundation in England found that for every pound made in financial services in the city of London, roughly seven pounds of social wealth is lost—meaning the wealth of those in society who do productive work.
Chris Hedges asserts that Americans are seeing through the plutocratic mendacity that currently governs them, and that's why they are taking to the streets. The Occupy protests we are seeing are not at all like the Tea Party, which is "bankrolled by the most retrograde elements in American society." What we are now seeing on the streets is genuine, and we need it, given the "continuity" that is apparent from the Administrations of George W. Bush to that of Barack Obama. The commonality of interests against the corporate state is a "unifying force" and we will now see whether we can stand together to take back our country.
At Huffpo, Lawrence Lessig has eloquently encouraged all of us to reach out to all others who seek to return control of the government to the People rather than the 1%. We should especially do this regarding people with whom we disagree on many other issues:
[W]hen Ron Paul criticizes the "Wall Street bailouts," and attacks government support for "special businesses" with special access, we should say, "that's right, Congressman Paul." Bailouts for the rich is not the American way.
And when Rick Santelli launches a Tea Party movement, by attacking the government's subsidies "to the losers," we should ask in reply, what about the subsidies "to the winners" -- to the banks who engineered the dumbest form of socialism ever invented by man: socialized risk with privatized benefits. What, we should ask Mr. Santelli, about that subsidy?
Or when Republican Senator Richard Shelby tells NBC's Meet the Press that the message in bank reform "should be, unambiguously, that nothing's too big to fail," we should say that's right, Senator, and it's about time our Congress recognized it.
Or when Sarah Palin calls GE the "poster child of crony capitalism," we should say "Amen, Mamma Grisly": For whether or not we are all believers in "capitalism," we should all be opponents of "crony capitalism," the form of capitalism that is increasingly dominating Washington, and that was partly responsible for the catastrophe on Wall Street in 2008, and hence the catastrophes throughout America since.
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