The moral economy of Occupy Wall Street.
| Author | Piven, Frances Fox |
| Position | Essay |
Some of us have been waiting for the rise of protest movements in the United States. After all, conditions seemed to demand it. On the one hand, there were the millions of unemployed, still more millions losing their homes and their nest eggs, along with the long-term decline in the earnings of working people and the growing numbers of people who were thrown into desperate poverty, even as programmes that were supposed to protect people when times were hard were being slashed. On the other hand, events were exposing the role of the corporate elite, and especially the financial elite, in causing these developments. After all, had these economic calamities been due to forces beyond anyone's control, people probably would have simply tightened their belts, worried, and maybe prayed. But they wouldn't have risen in anger at the 1 per cent. However, when the financial crisis occurred, the 1 per cent overreached. They demanded huge bailouts with taxpayer monies, insisted on more wage cuts and public budget cuts, and then proudly reported a new spurt of rising profits and huge bonuses, especially in the financial sector.
Meanwhile, the long-term increase in poverty in the United States and the long-term decline of the earnings of middle America continued and grew worse. Then, with their own bottom lines safe, at least for the moment, business leaders and their right-wing allies took a new tack. Their formula for economic recovery was not bailouts but fiscal austerity. Taxes on top earners, they argued, would be bad for the economy--'job killer', they screamed at such proposals. They were adamant in resisting debt relief for millions of homeowners facing foreclosure ('moral hazards' they had the gall to call such relief), or for the students whose debts had soared even while they faced a jobless future. Instead they pushed for more punishment for the mass of Americans in the form of job and pension cuts in the public sector, as well as cuts in what remained of the safety net. As for the double dealing and criminality exposed by the financial crisis, well, there was no point in pestering the past our leaders told us.
This was all simply too much for many people to swallow quietly. In effect, the financial meltdown and the mix of greed and irresponsibility with which our political and economic leaders responded created a crisis of legitimacy.
In particular, attention turned to Wall Street. Financial capitalists have clearly been in the driver's seat in the United States and across the globe. Only consider who it is that European publics confront as they deal with problems of debt, or who Latin American and Asian publics confronted not long ago. In the past, finance has sometimes been seen as the 'mind' of capitalism. But if finance has a mind, it was now a mind that was entirely self-seeking, with no responsibility for the body, with no firm attachment or accountability to the society and the world it was steering. As events made this failure of accountability more and more apparent, and hardships worsened, people began to question the authority of the elites we usually think know best, and who we accept as moral leaders.
So I think lots of us waited and wondered. What was going to happen? Were the...
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