The past three years have been, to put it mildly, a little depressing for Americans. We’ve seen an economic collapse unmatched in generations shred our finances and job opportunities. We’ve watched as unemployment ticked slowly higher and our wages stagnated. We looked to Washington for some sort of solution, and they responded by bickering like children, starting fights about things that don’t create jobs, and some of them were even bald-facedly making a shit ton of money off our misery.
And then for a brief moment in Zuccotti Park, it seemed like Americans were finally fed up with the bum deal they’d been getting from big businesses and Washington, and decided to do something about it. The Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protests spread across the country, and then across the world, as people filled the streets to protest the unholy marriage of big business and government; a system that gave billions in bailouts, then ground to a halt when someone proposed something as preposterous as better benefits for the average American. The protests have persisted for months, even through repeated clashes with police. It seems now that OWS isn’t just a flash in the populism pan, but may actually be a genuine movement out to represent the interests of the common man, after all, how can you stop the will of 99% of the country? With ease and a lot of money, is the unfortunate answer.
One of the biggest and most salient points coming out of the somewhat muddled ideology of the OWS protestors is that big business has far too great an influence on government. This leads to policies that benefit the biggest campaign contributors, since its their money, not their constituents votes, that ultimately guarantees re-election. It’s a difficult argument to refute, especially after you see the massive amounts of money companies put into their lobbying activities, and the subsequent benefits they see in legislation. OWS protestors have
