"Occupy Wall Street"

I live right at the Brooklyn end of the Brooklyn Bridge. This past Saturday, October 1, at about 5:30 in the afternoon, I was starting out on a simple errand in the neighborhood. I got to the corner to cross the approach to the Bridge and found lots of police and considerable consternation. A police department communications van was parked in the bike lane, and city buses were backing into the Brooklyn-bound lanes and then across the Bridge itself. Traffic at the busy intersection was stopped in all directions and horns were honking.

It was reaction to the "Occupy Wall Street" protesters, who were at the other end of the Bridge in Manhattan trying to swarm across the Bridge in the car lanes. Some of the protesters report that police on the Manhattan side at first seemed to be willing to have the hundreds of people do that, but then changed their minds and tried to stop them. I don't know anything about the police policy here, only that these marchers had no permit and had made no advance plan; traffic was snarled all over lower Manhattan as a consequence. You have probably read that as many as 700 protesters were then arrested. The city buses I had seen were loaded up and then traveled to police stations in Brooklyn and Manhattan.

This defiant action stood in sharp contrast to two other events that took place on the Bridge during the weekend. United Way New York sponsored a march on Saturday morning to call attention to the high poverty rate newly reported for New York City. Those people moved in a tightly knit group over the Bridge's pedestrian walkway and on up to a nearby park where there were refreshments and rest facilities. They made their point in an orderly manner. The next morning, a more casual bunch of people came together across the pedestrian part of the Bridge and made their way to another local park with a similar rest arrangement along with a mariachi band. Those people were supporting diabetes research, some of them told me.

At first, I wasn't going to write here about the Occupy Wall Street people; even some news organizations have pointedly ignored them. But the publicity is growing and the "movement" is spreading. Perhaps this is a liberal response to the Tea Party. Their complaints are garnering support on a number of fronts. They are concerned about corporate greed, Wall Street greed, dishonesty and corruption, the growing gap between rich and poor and other perceived maladies of society.

One of the missions of Ways of the World is to answer, explain or give background about some of these issues. Perhaps the simple picture the Occupiers describe is incomplete. Two current examples. First, it is said that the rich don't pay a fair share of taxes. We've touched on this before, but it bears repeating. As of 2008, the latest published IRS tabulation, the top 5% of taxpayers paid 59% of total income taxes*. A more comprehensive view compiled by the Congressional Budget Office shows that in 2007, the top 20% of individual taxpayers covered almost 70% of all federal taxes. So "the rich" provide a lot of support to the government. Perhaps more is desired, but it's hardly that they get off cheaply.

Second, the Wall Street demonstrators are mad because banks got bailed out during the crisis in 2008 and 2009. Long-time readers of Ways of the World were with us during that time. You might recall that while we didn't really favor those rescue operations, we didn't even want to consider the alternative, which would have been an even more massive breakdown of the financial system. Now, we can check into U.S. Treasury press releases and reports to see how these bailouts have turned out. The public monies invested by the Treasury in these banks through the "TARP" program are being returned, and back in March, the program turned a profit: more has been returned than was originally doled out. Through July, that profit had run to $10 billion and the Treasury estimates that the government will get back about $20 billion more than was invested by the time the program is concluded.

Surely society is plagued by various ills and certainly those inequities and problems should be brought to our attention. That very questioning prompts us to look for answers in any number of ways, two of which we have just illustrated. We'd still rather have the demonstrators conduct themselves in the respectful manner that they are arguing they want private and public officials to practice with them. We aren't ignoring the other, more civil demonstrators: we will indeed address here the question about poverty which they raised. Meantime, we find it ironic that the Occupy Wall Street project, now midway through its third week, is being supported by funders whose funds were originally generated through the very capitalist system the demonstrators are quarrelling against.

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*This figure is corrected from 43% in the original version of this article. I read the wrong line off the IRS table where these figures are presented.