Protest rooted in real democratic principles
17th October 2011 · 0 Comments
By Tonyaa Weathersbee
Guest Columnist
It’s hard not to appreciate the irony here.
In the weeks before the dedication of the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial, nonviolent protest, the thing that King perfected and the thing that forced America to begin to live up to its ideals about all men being created equal, has come back in a big way.
I’m talking about Occupy Wall Street.
It’s a movement that began in mid-September in New York City’s Zuccotti Park, but has now spread to 150 cities and Europe. Its central message is about ending economic inequality and poverty — which is exactly what King was fighting to end before he was killed in 1968.
It’s the kind of structural inequality in which Wall Street profits grew by 720 percent between 2007 and 2009, while unemployment grew by 102 percent.
It’s the kind that excuses greed and irresponsibility on the part of Wall Street honchos, but excoriates poor people for gaming the social welfare system to survive in an economic environment made even more treacherous by Wall Street’s excesses.
But perhaps more insidious than all of the above is the fact that this kind of inequality now dominates the one vehicle that can be used to change it all — that vehicle being the democratic process.
The same people — many of who had a hand in wrecking the financial system — are the same people who pump money into the political system to see to it that things stay the same — or that the needle doesn’t move very far.
So what it all means is that even if struggling people — particularly struggling Black people — make their voices heard at the ballot box, chances are their voices will be drowned out by monied interests.
Case in point: Grover Norquist, a high-powered lobbyist and an anti-tax zealot, has gotten virtually every congressional Republican to sign a pledge to not raise taxes.
They’ve signed it in spite of the fact that economists from a number of non-partisan research organizations say that the ailing economy that now has people spilling out in the streets to protest will only recover if taxes are raised on the wealthiest Americans.
According to the Economic Policy Institute, the top 400 households with an average income of more than $350 million saw their taxes drop to less than 17 percent in 2007, compared to 26 percent in 1992.
Yet the Republicans who signed the Norquist’s pledge are only swayed by rich people’s interests and their own re-election prospects – not by math or poor or middle-class people’s pain.
But Democrats also are beholden to lobbyists. That makes many people, particularly poor people and Black people, less convinced that their vote matters. It breeds apathy, not action.
From the looks of things lately, though, that may be changing.
That’s why I believe that Occupy Wall Street is starting in the right place with one of its goals: To reclaim the democratic system from corporations and lobbyists. They should keep up that fight.
They should keep it up because unlike the Tea Party movement, which was formed when a bunch of white people decided they hated government after a Black man was elected to lead it.
Occupy Wall Street is based on real pain, not racial paranoia.
You won’t find these protesters screaming about how much they hate the government as they motor around in Medicaid-funded scooters. These protesters – many of whom are unemployed, foreclosed on, and at the end of their savings – aren’t angry at government for barging into their lives, but for failing to bolster economic fairness.
If nothing else, the Occupy Wall Street protests, like the movement that King led, reveals to the rest of the world that once again, the United States isn’t living up to its ideals. It isn’t living up to its ideals for many white people, and it certainly isn’t living up to its ideals for the 16 percent of Black people who are unemployed.
And you can’t have a country that promises freedom and equality if the democratic system that is supposed to guarantee it is bought and paid for by people who have a stake in keeping the scales unbalanced.
This article was originally published in the October 17, 2011 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper
