Time magazine had it partially right when it named “the protester” its person of the year. The image of an Arab woman on the issue’s cover suggested an emphasis on the Arab spring movements that have toppled several autocratic regimes and threaten several others.
But closer to home, indeed, at home, the protesters of note were, and are, the Occupiers of the Occupy Wall Street movement. The Arab spring movement will change the face of the Middle East, hopefully for the better (much on that score remains to be seen). But the Occupy Wall Street movement might save America from the march toward plutocracy that it has been on for the last thirty years.
Properly understood, the Occupy movement is aimed at reining in the excesses of rampant greed in a corporate-dominated capitalist system that has lost its bearings.
That sentence is a mouthful, but it is an accurate statement of the purpose of the Occupy movement, and with a little historical perspective, it will make sense.
As everyone knows, the United States emerged as a nation after rebelling against British colonial rule. In forming their new union, the founders drew heavily on the writing and thinking of the Age of Enlightenment that had swept Europe in the preceding century. That movement was based on the pursuit of intellectualism and was embodied by the goal of egalitarianism.
In drafting the Declaration of Independence and the country’s Constitution, the founders sought to effectuate what many European countries were struggling (against reigning monarchies) to achieve: a democratic form of government in which the citizens were in control and decided the rules by which their society would be governed.
The new American society was to be bound by a basic concept, encapsulated in the Bill of Rights’ Due Process Clause, which was best expressed as “fundamental fairness.”
But when the founders put the finishing touches to the Constitution, the fledgling country was an agrarian society. Commerce was largely limited to bartering for goods and services. Money was of less value than property and property was primarily of value for what it could produce.
In fact, the Industrial Revolution did not reach America’s shores until the nineteenth century was well underway. It had its beginnings with the War of 1812, but didn’t really start to change the economic landscape of the country until later in the century. And even then, the basic economy of the country was still a mix of agriculture (principally in the south and midwest) and the commercial (in the northeast).
Seen in this historical light, capitalism must be understood to have been little more than an irrelevancy in the founders’ minds as they constructed the form their new country would take. And corporations, if they were thought of at all, were hardly intended to be recognized and protected in the founding documents of the new country.
But the country did ultimately move from an agrarian economy to an industrial one, and with that change came the proliferation of corporations. The principal purpose of the corporate structure was to allow businesses to exist in which the owners were shielded from personal liability. This protection allowed for innovation.
Innovation in an industrial society is good, because it promotes progress. And progress is good, because it allows the citizens of the society to live better, fuller, richer lives. But without the corporate shield from liability, many businesses would avoid the risks of innovation, thereby thwarting, rather than promoting, progress.
And so, as the nation became more focused on its industrial economy, capitalism became the economic model it adopted. Simply stated, capitalism is the best way to recognize the value and benefits of corporations. It rewards innovation by allowing the owners of the businesses to keep their profits. It allows the most successful of the innovators to expand and thereby increase the amount of progress they create.
But unchecked capitalism also has its downside. Corporations exist for the sole purpose of producing profits. They promote, in that sense, the unfettered greed that in individuals is usually mitigated by the other side of humanity’s nature (its “soul,” if you will). Corporations are soulless. They only want to maximize their profitability, and without controls on the way businesses conduct themselves, the drive for profits can be all consuming.
The Occupy Wall Street movement seeks to curtail the ravenous lust for profits that have produced the gross income disparity that exists in the country today. In essence, the equilibrium that a well-functioning capitalist system requires has been lost, as evidenced by the growth of mega-corporations that award multi-million dollar bonuses to their top executives while paying their workers no more in inflation-adjusted dollars than those same workers would have made decades ago.
The United States has become a nation of haves and have-nots, which is the very antithesis of what the founders envisioned. The middle class, which used to be the country’s great strength, is shrinking. A recent government report indicated that as many as sixty percent of America’s population barely gets by or lives in poverty. That kind of report isn’t too different from what might be found in some third world countries.
And so, to speak of the ninety-nine percent and the one percent is not far-fetched. The ninety-nine percent are struggling to maintain the lifestyle they have, while the one percent are getting ever wealthier.
It’s simple math when you get right down to it — simple math built on simple history. The Occupy Wall Street movement wants equity. It wants a system that honors hard work and gives everyone a chance to succeed. It wants what the one percent refuses to let them have: the ability to live a better life than their parents lived and to provide for their children a better life than they have, which, simplistic though it may be, is the embodiment of the American dream.
That dream has been increasingly difficult to realize for the last thirty years, and America’s current brand of capitalism is largely to blame.
Unfettered capitalism is not guaranteed by the Constitution. Fundamental fairness is.
When the Supreme Court declared corporations to be people they essentially created the living version of Mary Shelly’s nightmarish vision, a huge powerful being with something resembling intelligence but no soul. At least Frankenstein’s monster had the virtues of being reasonably easy to destroy and not being big enough to take the whole world down with it.
I started to worry about corporations back in the 80’s when the surge of hostile takeovers began. It was a means for a company to acquire products and processes that enhance their consumer offerings and their bottom line – the two should be inseparable. Innovation was obviously coming from the smaller start-ups, not bureaucratic monsters who at least paid well for many of their acquisitions.
I believe where corporations went off the rail was not in their products and profits, but the financial manipulations and takeovers that tore the heart out of the company.
A recent local example is Bolthouse Farms of Bakersfield – one of the pioneers in creating the #1 snack food – baby carrots. Before “baby carrots”, the bulk of the carrot crop wasn’t pretty as fresh produce and not enough demand for canned and frozen carrots. The culls were sold for cattle feed at $17/ton. Baby carrots are made from those culls by grinding them into shape and bagging them for snacks. The grindings are used for carotene, food supplements, coloring, etc.
Bill Bolthouse had a happy crew of a few thousand employees, locally built harvesting and processing equipment, donated generously to local causes including an Education foundation and even virtually built a new Christian high school from the ground up.
In his 80’s, he sold out to a group of Wall Street speculators who have run the company and employee morale into the ground. My point is that financial manipulators often covered by bad law (or successful lobbying) are what tear the heart out of corporations.
Here are a few lines from my new book, “Weeds, Wheat and Wisdom:”
“Capitalism has little trouble getting a bad name. The ignorant victims of modern education have not been taught the true values of capital properly applied. Rioters in the streets are screaming for anarchy of any kind to replace “the evils of capitalism.” Capital is only evil when its purpose is perverted – when it is loved above things of substance and meaning.
The true definition of Capitalism is in High-Finance’s role as the servant of vision, courage, ideas, savings, philanthropy, investment and commerce! The love of money for its own sake is still the root of all evil.
OWS’ers and Tea Partiers might have noticed the same problems, but one group creates filth and chaos, the other tries to make apple sauce, including leaving the kitchen cleaner than when they started peeling the apples.
Time for all of us to “Occupy our Minds.” Thanks Ed, for your many challenges. Happy New Year!
Ed, given Time Magazine and your pick of the Occupiers, Tea Party Nation has also noted the Occupiers – theirs is “Jerks of the Year.” Here, without comment or editing is their post:
As we wind down to the last few hours of the year, it is only fitting that before the year ends, we take a look back and award our Obnoxious Jerk of the Year.
Who is our winner?
Well, our obvious runner up is Ron Paul supporters, who Mark Levin accurately described in a famous blog this year.
However, our winner is the Occupy mob.
What a bunch of self centered, over inflated, egotistical obnoxious jerks.
While the Occupy mob was a creation of Adbusters and funded by George Soros sponsored groups, they have on their own reached a new level of, well being jerks.
If these clowns were not so problematic, they could be funny. After all, how can you not laugh at many of these so-called protestors who are being funded by Mommy and Daddy, screaming about how terrible capitalism is, while using their Iphones, Ipads and Macbooks. They scream about how much they hate the 1%, which many of them come from, while wearing designer clothes, carrying their North Face backpacks and make regular runs to REI for more camping gear.
While their laughable behavior is bad enough, what makes them our Obnoxious Jerks of the Year is the way they treat other people.
They took over property, some private, some public, without regard for the rights of others. In many cases the property was damaged or destroyed. They invaded businesses and in some cases shut them down. They do not care that they cost real Americans their jobs; Americans who were working to support themselves and their families. Nope, as long as they could raise hell, they did not care.
However, the Occupy mob’s true moments of first class, cranial-rectalitis comes with their infamous “mic-checks.” The members of the Occupy mob believe in their right to speak and no one else’s. They have shouted down people ranging from Scott Walker, to Michele Bachmann to Newt Gingrich. Even yesterday, they invaded a coffee shop in advance of a Newt Gingrich appearance. They were quite happy to try and deny him the right to speak and offer his ideas to the voters of Iowa and the were equally happy to disrupt the operations of a small business.
2011 brought us the Occupy Movement. They are our Obnoxious Jerks of the Year.
We can only hope 2012 will bring us relief from these fools.
Ed –
I guess I’m confused about the whole OWS. I thought that the main rallying cries were centered around highly compensated individuals and executive bonuses / stock options, which I don’t disagree with their disgust for. Recently the CEOs of HP (the guy who replaced Mark Hurd) and Best Buy received very lucrative comp packages despite driving the stock price of the company into the ground, which is essentially the net worth of a corporation. I have no problem with Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Warren Buffett, etc. making millions each year because they unlock value not only in terms of their innovative ideas, the products they produce, jobs they create etc., but I do have a problem with the way some of the golden parachute payments are structured, particularly for CEOs that get paid millions to leave a company that is worse off than when they first took it over. The Michael Eisner compensation package is something every law student who takes business associations reads about whereby he received something to the tune of $50MM to leave the company before his term expired, which was more than if he would have earned if he had remained fully employed.
From that perspective I agree with the OWS protests, but you make it sound like they despise corporations for the sake of wanting turn a profit. Ultimately, profits and what you call “greed” is what drives innovation and allows this country to be one of the leaders of many ideas. You don’t see too many ideas being generated out of Russia, Sweden, Finland, Venezuela, Cuba, etc. Ultimately, the almighty dollar is what drives people to work hard and create something that people value and reap the rewards of their hard work + forward thinking. To the extent OWS protestors have a problem with it, I suggest they’re just jealous and would be on the other side of the fence if they had created something like the ipad.