ABSTRACT
I have not participated in Occupy Wall Street (OWS). I view it from the outside as reflected or refracted through the media. Friends and family who have gone down to Zuccotti Park speak of the experience with enthusiasm. Anyone who believes that there is a gross disparity of wealth between the super-haves and the have-nots must be grateful to the movement for having changed the political narrative from an obsession with debt and deficit to one of gross economic inequality. OWS is a reaction against both the unprincipled behavior of those who have power in our political system and the system itself. It attacks Wall Street greed and the support that it receives from government. Americans of all persuasions know that we have an unacceptably high unemployment rate, but what many do not know or did not know until recently is how great the disparity in wealth is between the 1 percent and the 99 percent. In random interviews of pedestrians on the streets of New York conducted before OWS came into existence, an NPR reporter, Paul Solmon, elicited responses that reflected a generally held, mistaken view that economic inequality in this country resembled that of the Scandinavian countries. 62OWS has delivered a message that inequality more closely resembles the disparities in developing nations. Whether or not Obama was inspired or pressured by the presence of OWS, he has become more forceful and aggressive in making the case for economic fairness since the movement appeared on the scene.
