What is Occupy Wall Street about?

I have a lot of strong political beliefs and chief among them is that money has absolutely no place in politics. We have a perverse political system where we assign constituencies for our congressmen and women to represent in our federal government, but the only way to get elected is to spend exorbitant amounts of money. How do our representatives get this money? From corporations and wealthy donors of course (head to OpenSecrets.org and check out this page and see who is getting their money from where, hint: Wall St. & the insurance companies give to EVERYONE). These wealthy donors do not give money to our representatives out of the goodness of their hearts; like any financial transaction, they expect to receive something in return. Calling this system a democracy is absurd. Hopefully this Occupy Wall Street movement will focus on that as opposed to uniformly denigrating every millionaire in the country.

I watched a livestream of what was supposed to be the biggest day for the OWS movement and after I felt fairly ambiguous about it. There were union leaders who stepped to the podium and delivered powerful speeches with legitimate grievances, but there were many instances of people simply spewing vitriol towards Wall Street and the rich. Yes, Wall Street has a large hand in the current mess but broadly declaring everyone who works in the financial services industry a crook is the same thing as painting everyone in the OWS movement as a pot smoking hippie.

It seems as if this movement was borne out of legitimate grievances; union members lost their pensions in 2008, students cannot find jobs to help pay back their student loans, and many blue collar jobs are disappearing. Blaming the rich is an easy way to find a scapegoat but ultimately is unproductive and it is class warfare from the bottom up. This crisis was the result of too much power being concentrated in a small amount of people's hands. Day traders on Wall Street aren't the issue, the Lloyd Blankfein's of the world are. The last quarter-century has seen an incredible amount of deregulation of the financial sector that can be attributed to the massive campaign contributions that Goldman Sachs and the like have made to our politicians.

The uber-rich are an asset to this country, not a detriment. Businesses cannot grow until they receive loans and the banks are an essential part of that process. The OWS movement cannot be solely about campaigning against the rich. Do they need to pay more in taxes? Absolutely, the current tax rates are morally reprehensible. But just taxing the rich is not the solution to our problems. It is the left wing counterweight to the right wing policy of cutting every government program. Our biggest problems are political; S&P downgraded the United States' AAA credit rating almost entirely due to political malfeasance. We need to utilize our government to help our problems instead of demonizing and destroying it. We need to find a way to make our government work for the people again (the way we do this is with publicly funded elections, I will get to that later, that deserves its own post). I am rooting for the movement and am interested in joining it, but it must declare what it is truly attempting to accomplish before I jump on board. OWS, please create concrete demands. If you do not, then this movement is nothing more than an expression of anger and disenfranchisement and not a vehicle for real change.