The Tea Party of Michele Bachmann and Sarah Palin is a loosely organized group of conservatives, many of them seniors, that is angry with big government and government spending. Now there is a new Tea Party in town – Occupy Wall Street – a group of lefties, mostly young college students and unemployed recent college grads that is railing against the financial sector and ‘greedy’ corporations for feeding off of those less fortunate than the rich.
Occupy Wall Street started out three weeks ago in New York but has now spread all over the country. If it ever gets well organized, it could be a potent political force, one that would favor the reelection of President Obama.
On Thursday, as I was on the way to do my volunteer thing at the nature center, I listened on my truck’s radio to one Houston protester being interviewed by a reporter. When the reporter asked what the protest was all about, he started a tirade against corporate greed. He said the corporations got rich on the backs of the poor. When asked what he meant by that, the protester replied that the poor were the ones who purchased the products sold by the corporations.
Bingo! Now we can surmise how that Houston protester must have come to the conclusion that corporations are getting rich off of the poor. He was obviously taught by Marxist or Marxist-leaning college professors that the capitalist system oppresses the masses and exploits the workers. As David Smith, an avowed Marxist who teaches political science at College of the Mainland puts it:
__“We are committed to the abolition of capitalism because this economic and social order is inherently based on exploitation and oppression. Although capitalism is different than slavery or feudal societies in some important ways, it is grounded in the exploitation of workers labor power through the process of wage labor. In this process, workers are paid wages representing only a fraction of the wealth they produce. The bulk of this wealth is surplus value appropriated by the capitalists; this is the basis of profits and capital accumulation. Thus the dominant capitalist class becomes rich not through their own labor but through the appropriation of wealth produced by laborers. In this sense, capitalism is similar to slavery and feudalism.”
The Occupy Wall Street protesters need a reality check. The capitalist system is largely responsible for the fact that even the poor in this country are far better off than the poor in non-capitalist societies. The greedy corporations they scream about are owned by investors and not all of them are rich. Many investors are workers with 401Ks or people like me, with their retirement savings in mutual funds. Whether the investors are rich or not, they want their investments to turn a profit. Corporations, whether they are oil conglomerates or financial institutions, exist to serve their shareholders, not society at large.
The protesters are also in an uproar about the greedy corporations shipping jobs overseas. The need to show a profit for their shareholders is the engine that drives the outsourcing of jobs. When the cost of manufacturing goods is significantly less in foreign countries than in America - either because of union wages and benefits or because of government regulations - businesses are going to go where they can employ the least costly workers. Now even Japanese and Korean corporations are having many of their products produced by cheaper labor in China and Malaysia.
The bailouts of investment banks and car companies are another issue angering the Occupy Wall Street crowd. “Capitalism for us, socialism for the capitalists.”
The left-wing Tea Party of protesters may be a flash in the pan. However, it may yet evolve into an organized movement and, if that happens, it will become a political force to be reckoned with, just like Bachmann and Palin’s conservative Tea Party. Then Occupy Wall Street will help Obama continue to occupy the White House because the Republicans are identified with the financial sector and big business.
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