My return from a brief visit to OWS last week prompted a great deal of discussion with, and a fair amount of teasing from, my friends and colleagues. All of them were curious, several were sympathetic, and a few - as you might expect - were skeptical. Surprisingly, though, no one was openly hostile. Both the merely curious and the skeptics all wanted to know: "What do they want?" In response, I pointed out that my visit was brief and casual, so I couldn't really presume to answer the question, and that the protestors themselves did not yet seem to share many specific goals beyond drawing attention to the failures of the existing economic system. I was thinking specifically of two of the people I met there, one a self-described Marxist, the other an energetic libertarian, who together represented the polar extremes of political thought and who presumably wouldn't agree about much of anything beyond their shared outrage at the inequities of the status quo. The more I considered this, though, the more I realized that was actually the answer my friends were looking for. What is OWS about? It is about demanding attention to the common problems that the vast majority of Americans face today, problems of debt, decline and economic insecurity, problems that are likely to only grow worse in the future, problems which the media and politicians have all but ignored, problems which everyone from a Marxist to a libertarian can agree need to be addressed, even if they may not agree on the ultimate solutions. And that, I argued, is an invaluable function, because before you can even begin to develop a cure, you have to make sure you have diagnosed the right disease, and at least the symptoms of our current societal ills seem beyond dispute. Here are the ones I think we all ought to be able to recognize, whatever our political persuasion, and each of them lie at the heart of OWS.
First, and perhaps most important, that the dramatically increasing levels of inequality in our country are bad for both the economy and democracy. As the Congressional Budget Office recently detailed, this has been a growing problem for nearly thirty years, reaching a historic peak in 2007, shortly before the Great Recession began. Yet until OWS, there was little public discussion of the problem. Now it is front page news and even Republicans have been forced to acknowledge it though, as usual, they blame the government despite all evidence to the contrary. By the way, that CBO report actually understates the scope of income inequality for two reasons. First, because it is based on household incomes rather than individual wages. That is significant because at least some portion of the paltry increases in household income at the bottom of the wage scale can be attributed simply to the dramatic increase in the number of working women since 1979. Second, it uses Adjusted Gross Income as a baseline, and thus fails to account for the substantial value of corporate perks received by people with higher incomes, which are deductible expenses and thus not counted as "income." I actually have no problem with those deductions as a matter of tax law, but from the perspective of economic disparity, that bottle of Mouton Rothschild tastes just as lovely when you drink it for business as it does when you drink it at home. Either way, it isn't an experience that the 99% will share very often. Anyone interested in more data about inequality should look here for an excellent summary: http://www.businessinsider.com/... . The CBO report itself can be found here: http://www.cbo.gov/...
Second, that the financial industry plays too large a role in our current economy, and this disproportionate influence is inherently destabilizing. During the same time period that average incomes stagnated, and higher incomes soared, the financial industry doubled its share of our GDP, as reflected in this chart: http://sternfinance.blogspot.com/... . That is not a mere coincidence, but rather reflects a self-perpetuating cycle of an increasing concentration of wealth, which in turn fed a speculative frenzy of trading in exotic financial instruments in an effort to generate ever higher returns on that wealth.
Third, that the people responsible for the financial crisis should be held accountable for their actions by, at the very least, using the proceeds of their bailouts in a way that is beneficial to the public. This has been one of my biggest disappointments with the Obama Administration, and one of the greatest sources of frustration for ordinary citizens. Indeed, it is a primary complaint for both OWS protestors and the Tea Party. I understand that it may not have been prudent to pursue investigations, or impose strict requirements, in 2009 when the markets were still fragile, but there is no excuse for not doing so in 2010, when Wall Street bonuses began to soar once again to stratospheric levels while the banks themselves did literally nothing to help the economy, nothing to provide loans to small businesses, nothing to modify the millions of mortgages that could still be saved from default and foreclosure. Only now, with the advent of OWS, have the banks begun to recognize that they cannot continue to treat the public with open contempt. That is only a small step forward, but it is a start.
Fourth, that the increasingly aggressive actions of police and security officials across the country threaten the spirit, if not the reality, of a free society. The random violence of the NYPD is what drew the attention of much of the public to OWS to begin with, and the same pattern has been replayed in cities throughout the country. This is not merely a question of police brutality, which is a problem that has always existed, but of police control, of the expectation of submission to the arbitrary assertion of authority. Nor is this a problem limited to the protest movement. I am reminded of it each time I pass through security at the airport and watch thousands of travelers, myself included, sheepishly comply with the small, pointless humiliations of the TSA. Nor is this a complaint limited to liberals. While scanning through the radio a few weeks ago I listened (briefly) to a conservative talk show host complaining - rightly, I believe - about a warrantless search of his family's RV during a recent vacation trip. This is a topic far broader than I can address here, but suffice it to say that in the wake of 9/11 we have slowly drifted closer and closer to a police state. That may not have been one of the original points of OWS, but it is a critical issue which the courage and perseverance of the protestors serves to highlight.
There are, of course, countless other problems in our country such as a failing education system, crushing student loan debts, crumbling infrastructure, a health care system that somehow manages to be both far too expensive and far too ineffective, and a political system openly corrupted by campaign donations. But those are issues on which it is harder to form agreement, unfortunately. As for solutions - well, those are trickier still. Some of these problems have no easy or obvious solution, let alone one on which both a Marxist and a libertarian could agree. Even more, as The Onion recently pointed out in its usual comically prescient manner, once OWS develops a list of specific demands, the rest of the country can begin to systematically disregard them. http://www.theonion.com/... For now, I hope that OWS continues to focus on identifying problems, and building consensus. The actual cure will be harder, and can wait on a correct diagnosis.