redneckgaijin

For those who keep repeating the Fox news ~~talking point~~ blatant lie that Occupy Wall Street et al. don't know why they're protesting, here is the answer.

We were raised to believe that we lived in a country with a unique system of government and economics, where any person could do or become anything that person wished by working hard enough and being honest, and where all citizens were equal under the law regardless of wealth, race, gender, or birth.

We have seen this promise of America made a lie. We have seen hard work rewarded not by advancement or achievement but by layoffs, offshoring, and exploitation. We have seen people commit the gravest of crimes, the grossest of robberies, without shame or remorse, and evade even the threat of prosecution. We have seen America turned into a country of the rich, by the rich, and for ONLY the rich- with nothing left over for anyone else.

Here are some examples of how the American system has been rigged to benefit the rich at the direct expense and disenfranchisement of those who are not rich:

* Over the past forty years the tax code of the United States has been systematically and deliberately changed. The progressive tax system which helped bring about the great expansion of wealth for all Americans from 1946 to 1970, in which the wealthy paid the vast majority of all taxes, has been replaced by a regressive system in which wealthy investors actually pay a lower percentage of their income as taxes than a poor laborer.

* During the same period, the social safety net, established after a long struggle, has been steadily weakened and crippled. Today, while millions of poor people lose benefits that often mean the difference between home and homelessness, massive corporations receive tax breaks, incentives, and government payments funded by the taxes paid by the poor.

* During the past thirty years the overall wealth of the United States has more than tripled, but over eighty percent of the citizens of the United States have seen little or no actual gain to their own wealth. All the gains in productivity, value, and property over that period have been concentrated in the top twenty percent of Americans- and virtually all of those gains are held by fewer than one percent of all Americans.

* Today, while poverty is at an all-time high since statistics have been measured, corporate profits also are at all-time highs- yet both parties are discussing cutting taxes still further on the wealthy and on corporations while reducing or eliminating aid programs to the poor.

* Not satisfied with this state of affairs, the super-wealthy have used their wealth to take control of our entire system of government. By lobbying, funding candidates for office, and even occasionally outright bribery, they have worked to remove regulatory safeguards put in place after disasters- banking regulations enacted in response to the Great Depression, environmental regulations enacted in response to the various ecological disasters of the twentieth century.

* In the most egregious example of this behavior, a handful of financial firms took advantage of this deregulation to offer mortgages on fraudulent terms to people they knew could not pay them off, then shuffle and repackage the mortgages for resale to investors, and then take out credit default swaps as insurance on these toxic securities- thus ensuring that they would profit massively even when the whole bubble collapsed.

* When the credit default swaps triggered a collapse of the entire global banking system, the people who engineered the collapse ensured that the government would step in and bail them out at taxpayer expense, without any demand of sacrifice, loss, or accountability on their own part.

* These same people who brought about the collapse of the global banking system also made sure that the laws regulating their behavior were so weak, and those charged with enforcing those laws so indebted to the giant banks, that despite blatant and overwhelming evidence of deliberate fraud and wrongdoing not a single culprit could ever be charged, much less convicted, of any crime whatever.

Efforts by the working classes to seek redress through politics have failed, for the following reasons:

* The majority of elected officials of both major political parties in the United States have become wholly dependent upon the wealth of the top 1% of American individuals and corporations both for their continued term in office and for their post-political careers.

* By failure of political will, and by rulings of Constitutional law that equate money to free speech and grant corporations all the unlimited rights of born human beings, the ability of the richest 1% to influence and determine the outcome of elections in this country is effectively unlimited.

* Furthermore, the members of both political parties have, by mutual agreement and cooperation, engineered a system in which most incumbents are guaranteed re-election without significant opposition from the other party, while independent candidates and new political parties are shut out of the process by burdensome ballot access laws and lack of funds.

* Furthermore, even in cases where there is a chance of a competitive race, the unlimited ability of the rich to funnel funds into elections ensures in most cases that the nominees of both political parties will be those candidates of each party most favorable to the agenda of the richest and least favorable to protecting the poor or working classes.

* Thus, in a majority of partisan races, the incumbent runs unopposed; in a majority of the remaining races, the incumbent faces an opponent without the funds to run on an equal basis; and in the tiny minority of races which are truly competitive, both candidates are usually of or under the control of the richest 1%, leaving the rest of America effectively without a voice in government.

The people who participate in Occupy Wall Street and the other protests across the United States believe that this corrupt system, in which wealth is political power and in which the rich are above the law, is not compatible with the concept of a nation of liberty and justice for all. Their tolerance of the system has reached its end. Through their protests they are reaching out to the rest of America, asking them to join in challenging this corrupt system. The protests also warn the office-holders of both parties that, unless they change their ways, they can no longer rely on their support.

THAT is what they are protesting for, and they all know it. Quit saying they don't.

(I don't consider myself part of OWS for two reasons. One, I'm not actually in a park somewhere being part of the protest- I'm too poor, too far out in the country, and have responsibilities that won't let me. Two, unlike most of OWS supporters who have despaired of any direct political solution, I believe that ONLY by using what remains of our system of democracy- through either a tea-party-like political faction inside the Democratic Party or an outright third party- can we bring any pressure on government that the government cannot ignore. But I definitely sympathize with OWS, despite coming up with this.)