If there’s one thing the Occupy Wall Street and Occupy D.C. protestors have achieved, it is shaking up the establishment. House Minority Leader Eric Cantor denounced them as “mobs” that pit Americans against Americans. President Obama’s thoughts were a bit more understanding. He said the protestors are “giving voice to a more broad-based frustration.”
Reactions on Georgetown’s campus are just as varied. I’ve heard from students who planned to head up to New York or Freedom Plaza last weekend to take part, as well as those who derided the protests as irrational and anti-American.
But it is one thing to react and another to understand the motivations of the protestors. This is especially difficult with this movement. The groups involved in each individual march and in each city have distinctive demands and motivations.The labor union marchers in New York are out there for different reasons than the young, unemployed college graduates.
Nevertheless, there are certain similarities within the groups, especially those in the District occupying Freedom Plaza and McPherson Square.
New York activists have been more concerned with the bank bailouts, executive bonuses, and financial sector regulation. Here the protestors are focusing more on how these companies get their way—their powerful and well-financed lobbying and campaign finance efforts.
Participants show up to the rallies with monocles and champagne glasses, asking politicians if they’d attend one of their fundraisers. One picture in the Washington Post showed a man carrying an American flag with each of the stars replaced by a corporate logo.
This sort of good-governance protest is a novel occurrence. Few outside of progressive political elites were talking about this issue before the rallies began.
Issues of taxation and economic opportunity are also obviously central to the protests nationwide. But here in D.C. they take on an enhanced meaning. According to a report from the Brookings Institution released last Wednesday, about one in three young adults with a four-year college degree in the District is unemployed. For those lucky enough to be employed, they have seen their wages and benefits trimmed.
Until the recession hit, real incomes for everyone except the very rich had not risen in almost 20 years, and the downturn had disastrous impacts on this group. A new study from Sentier Research by two former census bureau officials shows that real income during the recession fell an average of 3.2 percent. Between June 2009 and June 2011—after the recession was officially over—it dipped a further 6.7 percent.
These young protestors look at their declining economic situation and do not see a government that puts them high on the priority list. They see tax cut extensions for the rich while they are asked to contribute more to their retirement, cuts in education funding for their children while businesses get tax exemptions, two costly wars still raging despite broad support for ending them, and a Republican party hell-bent on relieving the top earners in this economy of any pain involved in austerity measures.
Add to that the frustration over new records in corporate political fundraising made possible by the Citizens United case and the fact that these young D.C.
professionals know more about the patronage relationships that exist between corporations and government than the average American—is it really surprising that they take this opportunity to protest?
But just who are they trying to reach? Many observers like Van Jones, Obama’s former “green jobs czar” who has become one of the impromptu protest leaders in D.C., claim the demonstrations are a left-leaning version of the Tea Party.
In some sense, they are correct. The Tea Party first arrived on the scene to pressure the politicians on the right side of the spectrum, and the Occupy activists look to do the same on the left.
They’re plenty angry at congressional conservatives, but they are acting in reaction to the Democratic Party, not the Tea Party. These are the politicians who they expect to voice their interests but have repeatedly let the middle class down in debates over the Bush tax cuts, the debt ceiling increase, and needed increases in infrastructure and education spending.
If there’s one thing progressive politicians can be sure of it is that the demands of this group will not go away. Leaders of Occupy D.C. have announced that they plan to stay as long as it takes for their voices to be heard, even though their permit with the National Park Service expired Sunday.
The next step for the protestors, though, is to appeal to a wider audience, specifically the unorganized poor. Right now, many civil rights and social justice leaders are unsure whether a protest made up of mostly young unemployed professionals, career activists, and labor unions has room for the interests of the unaffiliated lower classes.
If organizers of the Occupy movement can turn out the struggling residents of places like Southeast D.C. and avoid being simply another affluent youth movement, they will cease to be a band of protestors. They will be a broad-based political coalition—and this is perhaps the only way they can hope to create change.
Give Gavin something to protest about at gbade@georgetownvoice.com
