Published 14 Oct, 2011
It all started with an email.
Back in July, the staff of AdBusters, a small Vancouver-based magazine, proposed an idea: A demonstration on Wall Street to show disgust with economic inequality, lack of action on jobs and growing corporate control over the levers of our democracy.
Talk about an idea whose time has come! Thousands answered the call to Occupy Wall Street, and the movement has now spread to more than 1,000 cities across the country.
Members of Transport Workers Union Local 100, representing New York transit workers, were early supporters. On October 5th, the International Executive Council of TWU voted to endorse the protests, calling on local union members beyond New York to join the effort.
Union members are right at home in this grass-roots effort. Every day, we sit across the table from employers, fighting for decent jobs, good wages, and secure health care and pensions for ordinary working people.
Our work has gotten harder in recent years. Wealthy corporations believe they can ignore our nation’s labor laws, restrict our rights in the workplace and pay little or no penalty. The same is true when it comes to environmental laws, consumer safety or tax regulations. It’s obvious the system is broken when successful companies like General Electric, Bank of America, and Chevron can earn billions and pay not a penny in taxes. Other companies like American Airlines award their executives outrageous bonuses while freezing worker wages.
It’s refreshing to see a growing citizen’s movement, which – unlike the Tea Party and its radical anti-government rhetoric – is focused on the real problem: The financial elites whose shady and corrupt trading and business practices nearly wrecked the global economy.
Wall Street firms got government bailouts in 2008 and 2009 to prevent an overall collapse of credit and lending, but they’ve given us precious little in return. The same executives who approved subprime loans and other questionable financial instruments that caused the mess in the first place got to keep their jobs and their obscene bonuses. The rest of us got the shaft: Foreclosure on our homes, a catastrophic drop in our savings and retirement accounts, and cutbacks in public services like transportation and education that are the life blood of the middle class.
You don’t have to be in the middle class, however, to realize it’s time for our country to change direction.
• Billionaire investor Warren Buffett has called for higher taxes on the wealthy to help balance our budget and pay for essential services.
• Google CEO Eric Schmidt told ABC News that it’s time for public investment “in income and growth producing things like highways and bridges and schools, new opportunities for the private sector to go then build businesses.”
• Consumer advocate Elizabeth Warren, running for the Senate in Massachusetts, became in Internet sensation when she told supporters “nobody gets rich on their own,” pointing out the role that public infrastructure, public education and other public services play in creating and protecting private sector wealth.
Some Republicans in Congress, sadly, have not gotten the message. In a truly disgraceful move, they recently used a filibuster to prevent President Obama’s American Jobs Act from coming to the floor for a vote.
It’s an odd spectacle: An unlikely army of street demonstrators in cities across the country are talking about the issues that really matter — while the U.S. Senate refuses to debate a jobs bill in the middle of a recession.