Let us go then you and I, to that famed metropolis of New York City, where hundreds have taken to the streets to protest corporate greed, economic disparity, and blatant special interest lobbying. There is little love in their song: "APATHY IS FOR ASSHOLES", "EAT THE RICH", "TAX WALL STREET LEECHES", and the even less subtle "FUCK GOOGLE" were only a few of the signs recorded by journalist John Cassidy in his post for the New Yorker about the Occupy Wall Street protests. How is competition reflected in this relatively peaceful (but not confrontation free) gathering?
Fundamentally, the protest illustrates an important component of conflict theory sociology: competition for limited resources among groups. From a straightforward viewpoint, the groups in play right now are simply separated by socioeconomic status. Participants hail from a variety of religious, political, and financial backgrounds, but you'd be hard pressed to find a Fortune 500 company CEO among them. Putting this situation into a simple model, we see the protesters constitute one group and their perceived rivals constitute the other - Wall Street bankers, corporate executives, and to a certain degree, rich people in general. The limited resource being contested is of course money, and along similar lines, job benefits and employment. "Why am I struggling to put my kids through college while Mr. MBA over there is struggling to put his Ferrari back in the garage?"
Is that all? People want more money because they've been pummeled in the race for wealth? I think not. Exacerbating the conflict is the narrative that many protesters have perceived. That is, the view that the rich caused this and the rich haven't been held accountable. Even worse, the rich use their money to influence the government so they can get richer. This is the simplest form of the story they see and admittedly, it is infuriating. The U.S. has a family income disparity rating of 45 on the widely used Gini index (the higher the number the more uneven the income distribution), coming in as the 39th highest in the world. For the #1 economy in the world, that's not something to be proud of. The effectiveness of corporate lobbying on the democratic political process is also rather shameful. A recent and decent example would be Rick Perry's support of HPV vaccination - initially, it seemed the governor had valiantly gone against his party on a matter he felt strongly about. But soon the familiar and ugly truth emerged as it was revealed that Perry had received extensive funding from drug giant Merck, manufacturer of the Gardasil vaccine. Do American politicians represent the people or the Mercks of the U.S.?
These are just a few of the realities which have prompted the Occupy Wall Street movement to Occupy Wall Street. Some of the other reasons are far too complex for a person of my limited knowledge to even approach, like the collapse of the housing bubble and the global recession as a whole . But the important thing to realize about the recent manifestations is this: the people aren't just protesting the outcome. They're protesting the system. To give a simple analogy, they are opposed not just to the rich winning the game of money-making by so much, but also to the rich breaking the rules to do so. Economic competition in the modern system is governed by rules which guide the competitors. Though businesses do their best to sidestep them constantly, the guidelines are still there. What Occupy Wall Street is saying, nay, yelling, is that their competitors are cheating - and thus winning unfairly.
Photo Credit: Paul Stein, September 26, 2011. Hosted link.
Reading your post, it seems to me that a lot of the Occupy Wall Street protesters are simply there to raise some hell and feel like a part of this movement. I bet there are hundreds out there who aren't informed about the underlying reasons for the unhappiness; they might not know why they're there, other than that people in the group in which they associate themselves are also there and they feel united when they show up and picket with everyone else (bandwagon fallacy!).
ReplyDeleteI bet some of them were influenced by the Arab Spring. They see all these young people across the oceans rising up and violently grabbing what they feel they deserve. And there's no denying that those revolutions have been splashed all over the news. Could this be part of a bigger global competition between American and Arab youth, with the Americans trying to "top" the Arab Spring, seeing who can make the most headlines?