Occupy Wall Street

Two weeks ago, I attended a meeting and listened to representatives of the occupy Carbondale contingent of the Occupy Wall Street movement.  I wanted to meet these people personally and hear what their goals are directly. The first thing I noted was that the usual main stream media characterization was way off. These folks are not lazy, smelly Hippies. There was a small-business owner, two Ph.D. students, one undergrad student, a woman who is being crushed under $250,000 of medical debt, and a business manager.

I kept thinking that it’s hard to argue with lofty ideals but implementing them is a lot more difficult. I came away with the impression that the OWS movement is not clear about what it wants. I was ready to intellectually dismiss it as a passing fad.

Then I read the following excerpt about the OWS group from  an article by Naomi Wolf of the English newspaper, The Guardian, “The No 1 agenda item: get the money out of politics. Most often cited was legislation to blunt the effect of the Citizens United ruling, which lets boundless sums enter the campaign process. No 2: reform the banking system to prevent fraud and manipulation, with the most frequent item being to restore the Glass-Steagall Act – the Depression-era law, done away with by President Clinton, that separates investment banks from commercial banks. This law would correct the conditions for the recent crisis, as investment banks could not take risks for profit that create kale derivatives out of thin air, and wipe out the commercial and savings banks.

No 3 was the most clarifying: draft laws against the little-known loophole that currently allows members of Congress to pass legislation affecting Delaware-based corporations in which they themselves are investors.”

Well now I have a newly stimulated interest in this movement. On point No 1, Justice Louis Brandeis said, "You can have an increasing amount of wealth,-controlled by fewer and fewer people,-or you can have democracy. You cannot have both!". And with the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling the last vestiges of a real democracy have disappeared. This from writer, Joshua Holland, on Alternet.org, “At a 2010 conference, former Rep. Alan Grayson, D-Florida, put the potential impact of Citizens United in stark terms. ‘We’re now in a situation,’ he told the crowd, ‘where a lobbyist can walk into my office…and say, ‘I’ve got five million dollars to spend, and I can spend it for you or against you. Which do you prefer?’”

On point No 2, this from my column in February of this year,  “a financial product called a derivative was designed that allowed the big institutions to package sub-prime loans and sell them to the market as an investment instrument called a CDO (Collateralized Debt Obligation).  The rating agencies were paid to give them excellent investment grade ratings.  The investment companies recommended them to investors at the same time that they were selling them short.  (Short-selling is a process of contracting to sell an investment that you think will go down in value.)  Yes, that’s right. They were promoting investments that they thought would fail and made money on both ends when they did fail.” This was the domino that started the economic chain reaction when AIG couldn’t pay the insurance claims that backed the derivatives.

Point No 3 is a new one for me. It’s even more troubling than the recently revealed   insider-trading that some members of Congress do. In case you didn’t know it,  “Delaware is well known as a corporate haven. Over 50% of U.S. publicly-traded corporations and 60% of the Fortune 500 companies are incorporated in that state.”

Well, you can fall for the smear campaign currently underway against OWS or you can consider the above facts before you decide who to support. But one thing is for sure, money is corrupting our political system. Wait, change that to money has corrupted it.

Robert DeFilippis