Wall Street Protestors Sparking Conservatives’ Ire, Fueling Overdue Discussion of Economic Inequality

by Jeremy Leaming

As Occupy Wall Street continues to spread from city to city and garner backers from Union leaders to the head of Washington’s largest progressive nonprofit, an important and long overdue focus is shifting to the efforts of the nation’s super wealthy to keep things just the way they are.

In a piece for The Huffington Post, Dean Baker, of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, laments the stranglehold the status quo has on Washington, where austerity measures are all of sudden the obsession of many conservative politicians, and incessant talk of cutting Social Security and Medicare rules the day.

While conservative talking heads bemoan the growing gap between the nation’s top one percent and everyone else as class warfare, Baker notes that the only redistribution of wealth occurring in this country is that which helps those within the top one percent.

Baker concludes:

In short, we have an economic system that, even when it is working, has been rigged to redistribute income to the rich. And we have a political system that at a time of immense economic distress is more focused on undercutting the means of support for working families than fixing the economy. It is hard to understand why everyone is not occupying Wall Street.

As noted on this blog numerous times, Columbia Business School Professor Joseph E. Stiglitz wrote earlier in the year about the power of the country’s top 1 percent and its efforts to hold the status quo. He argued that the top one percent is seriously out of touch with the rest of the country, and it appreciates a government that can only push policy that furthers its interests.

But such action has created the current economic morass, one that doesn’t bother many conservative pundits or is not understood by them.

Stiglitz wrote that “a modern economy requires ‘collective action’ – it needs government to invest in infrastructure, education, and technology. The United States and the world have benefited greatly from government-sponsored research that led to the Internet, to advances in public health, and so on. But America has long suffered from an under-investment in infrastructure (look at the condition of our highways and bridges, our railroads and airports), in basic research, and in education at all levels. Further cutbacks lie ahead.”

And yesterday, The New York Times columnist Paul Krugman noted the overwrought reaction from many of the nation’s apologists for the status quo over Occupy Wall Street. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor has blasted the “mobs,” Republican presidential candidates have joined in the attack, many employing the tired class warfare refrain, and pundits like George Will and Rush Limbaugh have slammed Elizabeth Warren, who is a candidate for the U.S. Senate, for providing a robust and accessible critique of economic policy that protects the super wealthy.

The “sliming” of Warren and of the Occupy Wall Street protestors is more of the same from the nation’s super wealthy. As Krugman concludes the “real extremists here are America’s oligarchs, who want to suppress any criticism of the sources of their wealth.”