Explaining Occupy Wall Street

Two weeks ago, a quite sheltered friend of mine asked me, "What's up with occupy Albany? What do they want?"

Someone on my friends list had already posted an awesome response to this, but I was unable to find it. (Edit: Here it is.) So I wrote this back:

Good question. The protests are aimed at drawing attention to income inequality, corporate greed, government corruption, and the ill effects that these are having on the country and the economy.

These are broad topics, with thousands of specific examples. The foremost, of course, is the deregulation of Wall Street, which allowed the reckless speculating that led to the economic collapse (the regulations were put in place after the Great Depression to keep it from happening again, a Republican bill took them away (and Clinton signed it), and, surprise, it happened again) and the subsequent gigantic corporate bailouts (which led to tremendous bonuses for the CEOs who engineered them). Those bailouts came from tax money gathered almost entirely from the lower and middle classes, to line the pockets of ultra-rich executives. Meanwhile, the people who paid for it are being catapulted into poverty as a result of the actions of those executives.

Shady bank practices regarding foreclosures and credit cards are also in the spotlight, hence the movement to switch to credit unions.

This set of issues presents problems when someone is asked for a concrete list of demands. Because while the many issues boil down to corruption and corporate greed at the expense of human lives and livelihoods, you can't use "End corruption!" as a concrete demand and expect to be taken seriously. Hell, you can't even ask lawmakers to pass a law restricting lobbying, because the lobbyists are such a great source of income for the lawmakers; it would be like cutting off their own hands.

So there's a lot of rage and frustration directed at a huge problem with so many specific instances that not one of them can be chosen as a demand. Protesters could, for example, demand that corporations cease offshoring jobs to places where they don't have to pay a living wage, but even in the unlikely event that this happened, their job wouldn't be done. They could demand that corporations no longer be given the same rights as people, but even then, their job still wouldn't be done. They could demand regulation of Wall Street and fines for banks behaving illegally, and even if they got it, their job wouldn't be close to done.

We live in an *extremely* corrupt corporatocracy, and I suspect that the first goal on the way to doing something about it is to make people aware of it. Just like an alcoholic, this country cannot begin to fix its problem until it acknowledges that it has a problem. I think Occupy Wall Street (with its offshoots like Occupy Albany) is the push to get the country to stop willfully ignoring the problem, stop blaming poor people for poverty, start taking a good, hard look at the real causes of economic collapse, and start taking responsibility for changing course while there's still a chance.

Not that I speak for them, of course. You could see what they have to say:

http://occupyalbany.org/
http://occupywallst.org/

Meanwhile, Send back credit card junk mail SASEs. (Thanks, Kim!)
I've been doing this lately. My handwritten notes have been along these lines:

To the executive: Please give the mail clerk who handles this a raise.
And google "Capital One" Shady Practices to know why I sent back an empty application.