Bieber Otis Freestyle

2011-11-09T03:02:00.002-05:00

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2011-11-07T18:11:00.000-05:00

2011-11-02T02:19:00.000-04:00

the following was written as an e-mail in response to someone who encouraged me to watch a YouTube video of this guy named Peter Schiff, a 1-Percenter, who dared brave the confines of Zuccotti Park to talk to the 99-Percenters about their occupation.

my e-mail evolved from a response to the video, which is linked below, into a more thoughtful piece detailing my views on the Occupy Wall Street movement and the general direction of the country at large. i find myself satisfied with what i wrote, and so, i decided to share it here...

"this was the video of Peter Schiff I watched: http://youtu.be/UGL-Ex1CD1c

i didn't necessarily agree with all of the thing things the protesters were talking about, and obviously some of them don't know what they're talking about at all. i think it's good that someone of the 1% was willing to go down there and talk with the people. i do agree with and understand some of the things Schiff was talking about, particularly the problems with Fannie and Freddie, how government-backed student loans lead to higher tuition, and how tax loopholes negate higher rates of taxation rendering them ineffective. but, i don't believe that pure Libertarianism is the "correct" answer for American government, which leads me to a point that was not addressed by anyone in the video: corporate personhood erodes democracy.

my support for the Occupy movement is born out of the idea that corporate power in terms of financing all political candidates, owning all the media outlets, the Citizens United Supreme Court ruling which allows corporations to spend unlimited funds in campaigns, etc. are the biggest threat to the democratic process.

i don't necessarily think it's a problem for people to make billions of dollars, but i do think it's necessary to recognize that not everyone is going to make that amount of money and some people, lazy, hard working but unlucky, or otherwise, need assistance. now, i understand that at a certain point a "welfare state" or whatever you want to call it, becomes counterproductive and that's valid. but, it's unfair to label the unemployed or welfare recipients as simply lazy when the reality of the global economy is that cheap, cheap labor overseas takes opportunity away from American workers who corporations don't want to pay a living wage. that's fair enough, i guess, but people in America shouldn't starve so corporations can feed off the labor of desperately poor people in China rather than lose out on some small percentage of their almighty dollar.

anyway, my problem is not specifically with capitalism and i don't have any interest in abolishing capitalism, whatever that would entail. i understand that capitalism is responsible for the prosperity and success of America. however, it is also responsible for a lot of suffering in this country and around the world. it's impossible to accept only the good things capitalism produces and ignore the bad things. one of the bad things it has produced is a system hijacked by power-hungry corporations viewed in the eyes of the law as human beings and government stooges busy enjoying their cushy lives, selling the democratic process to the highest bidder.

that's my biggest concern. how much money people make and how much they're taxed is a secondary, and ultimately separate argument, from how much control corporations are to have in what is supposedly still a democracy. my logic here is that politicians are owned by corporations who finance their campaigns, Barack Obama included. i get why there hasn't been a single new financial regulation passed since the most recent economic meltdown under the Obama administration: Wall Street owns him too.

now, that being said, i definitely agree that the federal government is at fault in all of this too. i think 95% or more of Congress is owned by corporate money, including probably almost all of the Senate. beyond that, i'm sure there are a million different aspects of the Washington bureaucracy that could be trimmed back or eliminated, including the Military Industrial Complex. however, i disagree with Peter Schiff that we should just get rid of the EPA, the FDA, or the Board of Education. i will admit that these agencies, like most of the government, are susceptible to outside money which is why BP is still allowed to drill in the Gulf Coast without having ever cleaned it up after their most recent blunder there and without new regulation. but, i think we should strive more for efficiency as opposed to elimination.

essentially, i think the point is, i'd be much more comfortable trimming back and scaling down the size of government if it wasn't so apparent that corporations and the moneyed interests in this country, and around the world, had a stranglehold on the legislative bodies charged with protecting our freedoms in a democracy. i think it's shortsighted to say that government is the problem and capitalism and free-markets are the answer when it's pretty clear that the main problem with government is how susceptible it is to influences other than the actual will of the American people. and, to me, it seems like the only way to combat this problem is through protests and demonstrations. voting, particularly for candidates on a federal level, is basically pointless as the people elected on either side are in the pockets of corporations and aren't really representing the people who elected them anyway.

so, in the end, i think the most important aspect of Occupy Wall Street or any other protest movement shouldn't necessarily be about the elimination of capitalism, but rather the revocation of corporate personhood and a check on the ability corporations have to buy politicians and write policy. outside of that, taxes and how much money people make and everything else are different conversations. ideally, corporate money would be removed from government so people can actually have their voices heard in real, democratic elections and then i think once that happens, government could naturally be scaled down."

Mandatory Sampson

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