The New American Revolution: Occupy Wall Street

“In a society based on exploitation and servitude human nature is degraded.”

-Peter Kropotkin

Finding truth in media is like finding honesty in politics – it is there in small doses, but it’s hard to define and filter out from the subjective white noise droning through the airwaves and cluttering up popular publications. Searching for information on Occupy Wall Street, what it is and what it stands for, brings in results as varied as the protesters themselves. TIME magazine says one thing, radio pundits another, T.V. coverage finds a different angle (depending on the channel, and the channel’s corporate owner) and the internet is like a myopic game of bobbing for apples.

The information can be confusing and conflicting. Our poll-manic media has already released a number of surveys to establish how popular the movement is with Americans: the TIME/Abt SRBI poll claims 54% of Americans have a favorable view of the protesters, supposedly from a ‘random’ group of 1,001 people. Another survey found 59% are favorable, while the Wall Street Journal’s survey has only a 37% approval rate (no surprise there). Obviously each organization has its own opinion and the so-called ‘random’ groups being surveyed are probably randomly selected from subscribers of the publication, so a liberal leaning magazine like TIME will have more favorable results and the more conservative Wall Street Journal less so. Such polls are essentially pointless, as are most claims and ‘facts’ perpetuated by corporate media, no matter where their sympathies lie.

Trying to pin down an amorphous movement like Occupy Wall Street and present it in a specific light will serve only to make the matter more confusing. The protests are not about any single objective or idea, the best way to describe it is as the anger of the people at the vast inequality of this county come to a head.

The protestors have resisted forming a list of demands or any specific idea as a primary objective; they want it to remain open. It is a noble practice, preventing any small group involved in the protests from taking charge and speaking their opinions in the guise of the entire crowd’s opinions. It is a waiting game to see what impact, if any, will eventually come from the protests. That is one of the problems of the lack of specific demands, because the movement is more emotional than cognitive, what will the government do in response? Increase taxation on the wealthy? It seems unlikely that congress will pass any legislation to this effect. Another commonly heard protest associated with O.W.S. is that corporations, and the wealthy, have too much power is Washington. If that is true, appealing to Washington to end this practice is futile.

Anarchists were among the first to show up on Wall Street on 17 September. There are a few members of O.W.S. that say the President has become irrelevant, it is likely that the anarchists are the preachers of this doctrine. The depth and complexity of the bureaucracy that truly controls the U.S. government does appear to limit presidential power; the people, and not any branch or member of government, are the only ones with any true power to change the establishment. The only sure victory is if O.W.S. continues indefinitely and continues to grow.

The universal goal of anarchism is complete individual liberty. With corporate power growing (Mitt Romney is now referring to corporations as “people”), what limited liberty we currently enjoy, thanks to the founding fathers forethought in drafting a Bill of Rights, is under threat. The movement still growing on the streets could be the first step towards breaking the chains that government and an unrestrained free market forge to keep the populous in check. One of the definable objectives that all the occupiers share is that the wrong groups have too much power over this country, and that these groups have taken control of the American government with their bottomless well of money.

Occupy Wall Street has proven that the people are well aware of what is happening to this country, and that powerful minorities are halting the natural growth of society to their own advantage. The people are not as ignorant as these minorities like to fool themselves into believing. The people are not blind to these facts, and they are becoming very tired of it, and very angry.

While the government is bogged down in disputes and partisan bickering, and the President views O.W.S. as little more than a way to gain support and win another election, the people involved, walking the streets, not only in New York City, but in Oakland, Detroit, Bloomington, Hong Kong, Tokyo and other cities in the U.S. and around the world, are the ones working for change.

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Why the Constitution is Irrelevant, and the Bill of Rights is Indispensable

“It has been said that all of us are naturally anarchists at heart, - which is only to say that we all desire the largest possible personal freedom and the least possible external restraint.”

-Roger N. Baldwin

Much is often made of our “Constitutional rights” in political debates; it is a phrase evoked in the context of explaining the legal rights of Americans or to attack something that is considered contrary to these rights. The mistake in the usage of the phrase is in the content of the Constitution, which hardly mentions individual freedoms and instead establishes our government’s structure, term lengths, which branch has what powers, financial issues, etc. (transcript of the Constitution). The document that should actually be evoked is the Bill of Rights.

Technically, of course, the Bill of Rights (transcript of the Bill of Rights) is a series of amendments to the Constitution and therefore a part of it. But in our minds it is often seen and treated as a separate document, which in many ways it really is, or should be.

The Constitution without the Bill of Rights has little impact on individual liberties, nor is it the perfect document we are led to believe in grade school. The original document devised in 1787 actually had a section that limited personal freedom and supported the right to own slaves.

Article IV

Section 2

No person held to Service or Labour in one State, under the Laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in Consequence of any Law or Regulation therein, be discharged from such Service or Labour, but shall be delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due.

Most of us are familiar with the Dred Scott v. Sandford case of 1857. We can criticize the Supreme Court’s decision that Scott had no rights as “a person of African descent,” but according to the Constitution, which the Supreme Court is supposed to view as the “law of the land,” they did exactly as they should have done, legally speaking. So the Constitution actually supported an extreme case of injustice by law. For 78 years this was an acceptable segment of the United States highest laws, until the passing of the 13^th Amendment of the Bill of Rights in 1865 which superseded that section of Article IV.

The entire purpose of the Bill of Rights was to prevent just such travesties from occurring; it is the true great achievement of America’s founding fathers that still resonates in the modern world. Before the Bill of Rights was drafted, some at the Constitutional Convention feared the central government would use the “laws of the land” to “open the way to tyranny.” Their fears were obviously justified.

The Constitution is irrelevant because its only purpose is to establish a form of government, and all governments, even republics, will suppress and trample the inherent rights of its citizens at some point. The United States government has even used its power to use the Bill of Rights, a document that’s purpose, by its very name, is to protect and uphold freedom, to take away certain rights they deem inappropriate or to use it to further the government’s own needs at the people’s expense.

Until the last 100 years the Bill of Rights was exactly as its name implied, but since 1913 the government has added new amendments that negatively affect people’s liberty. The 16^th Amendment was used to increase the central government’s power to levy taxes (no amendment that increases the government’s power is to the people’s benefit) and in 1919, the most famous amendment to take away freedom, congress ratified the 18^th Amendment which took away the right to sell and imbibe alcohol. This amendment is one of the main reasons we have large networks of organized crime flourishing in the U.S. to this day.

Recently there has been talk about another proposed amendment, this one used to legally establish a definition for marriage: one man and one woman. This amendment is obviously an attempt at conservatives to make gay marriage illegal in all states permanently. Definitions are the work of dictionaries, not laws. It seems the Bill of Rights, in the hands of a government, has lost its original intention to protect the people under that government’s authority and now is predominantly used to suspend certain freedoms that some elected officials believe should not be granted. They believe this as if they had the power to grant or take away freedom. That is a dangerous and slippery slope.

When taking into account the Bill of Rights, the Constitution seems like a superfluous document. The idea, during the time of the American and French Revolutions, that there should be a universal Declaration of the Rights of Man, is the lasting achievement of the enlightenment era. The evolution from monarchy to republicanism served a great purpose 230 years ago, but the evolutionary process is not complete and seems to have stalled because of the vested interests of a tiny minority of the population obsessed with greed and power. With anarchism the Bill of Rights still has a place in society; a universally accepted document that prevents one person, or group of persons, from suppressing others. That should be the “law of the land,” that there is no law besides universal freedom.