I would like to offer some reasons for why I support the Occupy Albuquerque and Occupy Wall Street protesters across the country, and why I would like to see everyone in this community support them financially and thank them.
I hope the movement grows and strengthens.
Wall Street and corporate America, as has been reported many times, are rolling in money. Politicians call them “job creators,” but they are not creating jobs. In fact, they are supporting widespread reductions of state, local and federal government jobs. Big money and big business are refusing to create jobs until they get their way on a number of issues.
Corporations demand fewer or no regulations on their activities.
Most regulations are enacted to protect workers, protect the public financially, protect the public from dangerous products, protect the environment from destruction, etc. Because government created regulation is unpopular now, this is an opening to get rid of regulations labeled as government excess that hinders higher incomes for the high-income folks.
Big money and big business are also refusing to create jobs until unions are destroyed. Private unions are almost gone and public unions are threatened. A lone employee bargaining with a corporation or any employer is powerless.
After unions go, the laws that unions have been instrumental in creating, such as the 40-hour work week, decent wages, overtime pay, holidays, and safe workplaces may go as well, under the guise of the need to compete in the global economy.
True, there are not as many low-skilled unionized jobs now, but other jobs, even for college graduates, may sink to the level of non-union unskilled worker pay with few benefits in the name of global competition.
Another target of union opponents is the National Labor Relations Board. According to its website, the NLRB enforces “the National Labor Relations Act, the primary law governing relations between employers and employees in the private sector” and “has worked to guarantee the rights of employees to bargain collectively, if they choose to do so.”
Big money and big business are defining “free enterprise” and the “free market” as no restrictions, no taxes and apparently no morals on whatever enterprise and the market do. How did the free market work out for the United States in the 19th century? How is the free market working out in Russia now?
The same way it is headed today. The rich are becoming more and more fabulously wealthy, the middle class is shrinking, and poverty is becoming more and more widespread across the country.
This is evident in New Mexico, especially for minorities and children.
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Conservatives quote a particularly well-known Heritage Foundation report (“Expanding the Failed War on Poverty: Obama’s 2011 Budget Increased Welfare Spending to Historic Levels”), and say the poor in America are not really poor because they are often overweight, get government handouts and have consumer goods like color televisions. Do they not know that the cheapest food is the most fattening and the electronics they mention are essentially garbage these days?
The study doesn’t mention health care. One of the study’s authors concludes, “Among families with children, the collapse of marriage and erosion of the work ethic are the principal long-term causes of poverty.”
The author also supports government-sponsored abstinence education. In other words, it’s mainly the social failings of the poor, rather than economics that cause poverty. These are the conservatives who are saying that we should curb government “handouts” and “entitlements.”
After all, Americans are not entitled to anything but moral lectures, I guess, except the right to die on the streets if that’s what one “chooses.” True, working hard and choosing the “right” path in life may improve one’s status in life, but luck plays a very big part from the moment one is born.
This class warfare is too often a war of the lucky (successful and wealthy) against the unlucky (the rest of us). Many of the poor, unemployed, underemployed, homeless, sick, mentally and/or physically disabled Americans may just be unlucky.
So the corporations, Wall Street bullies, strict conservatives and Tea Party fundamentalists really are on the attack, as seen in recent actions by Congress and the moneyed classes — politicians trying to destroy government by defunding it, corporations refusing to create jobs, banks refusing to give loans to small businesses and refusing to give concessions to foreclosure-threatened homeowners.
Yes, it is “class warfare,” but they fired the first shots. And no, Cain and Gingrich, this fight is not anti-American, anti-capitalist, or about jealousy. It is pro-American, for all the American people.
We all know we theoretically have the right to become wealthy, but that doesn’t mean we all are able to do it, or even want to.
I would prefer that all Americans are prosperous and happy with meaningful jobs and lives. We also have the right to settle for enough in this country and to care that other Americans have enough, too.
