Campaigning Against the 1%

What will it take for putative progressive politicians to realize what a gift the Occupy Wall Street movement has offered them? While campaigning against "the one-percent," the OWS has begun to awaken the slumbering giant that is the American public.

I wonder, however, if elected leaders will get the message. I have a friend, Joel Tyner, who holds a position in the local legislature. He now sees his chance: he's campaigning for Congress; his opponent, the incumbent, is a Tea Party Republican elected in the 2010 wave.

I'm not sure my friend will have what it takes, which is a ton of money and good organization, even to be heard, even to be part of the electoral debate. It's no secret that the Republican will not only have sufficient campaign funds, he will also be supported, if necessary, with piles of corporate money. My friend will probably reject special interest funding, and doesn't know many likely wealthy contributors. He'll do things like hold demonstrations outside the Congressman's office; he's known for his publicized hikes to highlight political grievances, yet not even the local newspaper covers him most of the time.

The American political system, as presently constituted, favors the wealthy, and rewards those who side with them. Charles Beard, an American revisionist historian, made the case that the American Constitution was a counter-revolution by the propertied, looking out for their special interests. Their interests included "worthless" war bonds and deeds to western lands issued to Revolutionary War veterans in lieu of pay. George Washington and others bought them up for tiny fractions of their face value. The Constitution insured that the new government would protect their new lands and honor the war bonds, making the speculators--many in the Constitutional Congress--extremely wealthy.

Today we have a continuation of that tradition in Congress's immunity from insider trading laws, which is probably one of the reasons why most Congress-persons and Senators are much wealthier than their constituents.

Any reform, let alone revolution, has to overcome this. Further, it will have to overwhelm party establishments that are set up to protect special interests, rather than represent popular concerns. Only sustained popular mobilization, like the civil rights movement and the suffrage movement, has overcome the entrenched status quo. Effective leaders can help promote change, but our complicated structure tends to keep things the way they were.

If far-reaching reform doesn't happen, the American system ultimately may be overthrown by an enraged 99%; it's what happened in France, Russia, China, etc. Alternatively, the US political and economic system could continue to become increasingly dysfunctional, until it collapses of its own weight, like the Roman Empire. Rome went bankrupt because its Senators refused to raise taxes on themselves: they had extracted all the available wealth from everyone else, but had no sense of obligation to the Empire or society as a whole. Sounds like Wall Street, doesn't it?