Occupy Wall Street expanding to Main Street

The American Spring

What at first seemed like a small and isolated fringe movement in New York City is now popping up across our nation, even in the conservative heartland of Kansas City.

Meghan Whalen, a 30-year-old single mother, said she got involved with Occupy KC because of inequality. “We’re not going to come out of here tonight and say, ‘Okay, guys, we figured it out. This is the one thing why we’re here.’ Because there isn’t one reason. That’s just the truth. People who can’t swallow that and handle that, I’m sorry. There isn’t one reason. There just isn’t.”

She is right. Many overlapping reasons seem so convoluted and twisted together that making sense almost seems impossible. But as Whalen stated so well, it isn’t necessary to figure it all out to realize that something is very wrong, not only in Kansas City but across the globe. What began with the Arab Spring is now metastasizing to everyone’s spring and what is common to all of these is greed, anger, and an unwillingness to just grin and bear it any longer.

The “jobs, jobs, jobs” mantra has become a clarion call for survival falling on deaf ears of politicians and captains of industry who are immune to the suffering of those impacted by their own bad decisions. The world’s wealth is progressively more and more concentrated into the hands of fewer and fewer; simultaneously, the chronically poor ranks are expanding. These two trends are not unrelated. The sucking machine of greed is depleting the lifeblood required for meaningful solutions.

The pathway to economic contraction is creating a worldwide imbalance with fewer and fewer able to meet nations’ financial needs and more and more in need. The gap between the haves and the have-nots has never been greater in the modern era than today. The middle class has been the tax revenue backbone of contemporary societies, which has enabled stability and economic expansion and is rapidly becoming an artifact of the past. The chronic poor’s ranks are expanding, and wealth is increasingly concentrated at the top of the socio/economic pyramid.

No economic system can continue for very long with such imbalance. This disparity is clearly illustrated by looking at the distribution of assets in the United States. Four years ago, 62% of business equity and 61% of financial securities were held by the top 1% of the population. In the same timeframe, 73% of the debt was owed by the bottom 90% of the population, leaving just 5% of the top 1% debt.

This imbalance has resulted in close to 85% of total wealth in our country concentrated in the top 20%’ hands and so little owned by the bottom 20% that it is nearly impossible to measure (.1%). When the gap between compensation for heads of industry is compared to compensation for the people they employ, it is understandable how much concentration is happening. This is not unexpected when you consider the following—In 1950, the average executive’s paycheck ratio compared to the average worker’s paycheck stood at 30 to 1. Since 2000 that ratio has exploded to 300-500 to 1. The rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer, and the Middle Class is gradually sinking into the abyss.

These conditions of imbalance and injustice have profound effects across the economic and political landscape. It is blatantly obvious that some groups must meet the financial needs of our country. The tax base is disappearing, needs are expanding rapidly due to financing continuing war, growing costs associated with the justice system, costs of entitlement programs (e.g., Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, VA benefits, etc.) are about to leap into the stratosphere as the baby boomers reach the age of qualification, natural disasters are coming one after another in rapid succession, unemployment compensation, and other contributing factors too many to identify. In the meantime, vast amounts of money are needed to finance new technologies which would ensure our competitive edge in the world market place, pay for the education and training of our population to compete in that market place and slow down (and hopefully stop) global climate devastation which is making this entire scenario worse.

Washington’s political climate has become so divisive that any clear-headed reconciliation seems beyond the pale of possibility. The population segment who can meet these burgeoning financial needs refuses to do so, and the traditional source (the middle class) can no longer. To counter this rising tide, the wealthy, in ever-growing numbers, are moving their assets off-shore and playing other financial shell games to avoid paying more taxes. To avert financial meltdown by defaulting on our federal obligations, our elected officials have chosen, as they always have, to delay, procrastinate and push the dirty decision making down the road onto someone else’s plate. In the meantime, the opposing forces have both pledged to not cooperate but instead play Russian Roulette with our heads as the target.

Taken as a whole, these intertwined conditions have metastasized to the point that no person, however intelligent or clever, can ever hope to unwind them. This complex perspective is what Meghan Whalen and millions of others sense, but can’t define. And unless we find the source leading to this entangled Gordian Knot, there is little reason for hope. What is that source, and how can we find it? Without being evasive or coy, I am now in the final phases of publishing my next book, which lays out the case. It will be available for sale sometime in the next couple of months. The title is “The Non-identity Crisis: The crisis that endangers our world.”