Time for Left & Right to Unite Against Corporate & Government Corruption

It’s time for Americans across the entire political spectrum – left and right – to turn off the talk radio, ignore all the “talking points”, and embrace the core ideals of the Occupiers.

After talking with some Occupy LA protesters one afternoon and reading about the movement online, I began to realize that when you look past the fringe elements, a few common demands begin to take shape: for a return to accountability in government, for corporations to serve their communities as well as their shareholders, and for an end to corruption in our public and private institutions.

These are not the radical demands of hippie freeloaders; this is a common-sense rallying cry for all Americans, liberal and conservative. Our government is broken. Corporations are increasingly focusing on their bottom line at the expense of their customers and the society that supports them. This is not a fight to destroy capitalism – it is a fight to save it.

A recent survey reported that most Occupy sympathizers blame corporations for our current mess, while most of those who do not identify with the movement blame the government. There really is no difference in these points of view. They are flip sides of the same coin, with a common root cause between them. This is why it is so important to ignore media voices that try to drive a wedge between the left and right for the sake of ratings. They are trying to distract us, and despite what they would have us believe, we all want the same thing: a government that is responsive to its citizens. We are Americans, first and foremost, and our country was founded of the people, by the people, and for the people. It is our duty to stand up for our country and demand something better of our institutions.

I am not advocating that everyone should throw away their political beliefs. Each side has different ideas about how to address the problems facing our country, and this healthy exchange of ideas is exactly what makes our democracy so vibrant. But right now we can unite behind a common cause, which is to end the paralysis in our politics, and demand accountability from politicians and corporations to the people they serve.

The Occupy movement embodies a classic conservative principle of individualism: the responsibility each of us has to create a better life for ourselves and our community. I have come to see that the movement is not about demanding handouts. It is about ending handouts to our country’s least-deserving, the so-called 1%. Do not confuse this with a redistribution of wealth. This is about leveling the playing field so our free market system can begin to work again.

Americans, left- or right-wing, need to ask themselves if they are happy with the status quo. If they are unhappy with the free pass our financial institutions have gotten after bringing the global economy to the brink of destruction, if they are unhappy with the record levels of unemployment, and most of all, if they are unhappy with how our politicians have become incapable of doing anything substantial to fix this mess, then they need to support what the Occupy movement is fighting for. They are giving a voice to all our grievances.

Perhaps the greatest gift these occupations have given us is the sense that individuals can still effect change. Ultimately, you may not agree with everything they are saying, but there is no denying that they truly are fighting for all of us and for our country. And through their sheer force of will and dedication, they have become a powerful symbol of what individuals can accomplish together.

Supporting Occupy does not mean giving up bathing and joining a drum circle. It means becoming involved in the political process. It means forcing our politicians (Republican and Democrat) to stop listening to their donors and start listening to mainstream Americans again. It means demanding that CEOs stop seeing their customers as nothing more than dollar signs. Simply put, this movement is about putting citizens back into the driver’s seat.

And if we can make our system start to function again and get our government to listen to people instead of dollars, we can then begin to have a proper, adult debate between liberals and conservatives about the areas in which we disagree, and move forward and prosper again.

Was the mortgage crisis Clinton’s fault?

There is a constant push in the media to simplify the Occupy movement into a single catchphrase, then to either jump on board or vilify it based on an equally simple notion. Enter Michael Bloomberg:

“It was not the banks that created the mortgage crisis. It was, plain and simple, Congress who forced everybody to go and give mortgages to people who were on the cusp. Now, I’m not saying I’m sure that was terrible policy, because a lot of those people who got homes still have them and they wouldn’t have gotten them without that.”

This is one of the points the right likes to jump on from time-to-time, the “Blame Clinton” thread, which pins our entire mess at his feet in the 1990s. Investors Business Daily recently dived into this, with an article breathlessly titled Smoking-Gun Document Ties Policy To Housing Crisis (echoing some of Michael Bloomberg’s comments). It just came out yesterday, and I can bet it will be all the rage on right-wing radio and blogs.

I won’t even argue that what it describes wasn’t a contributing factor (I’ll leave that to this excellent piece), BUT it does conveniently ignore the fact that while the housing boom was on, NOBODY on the left or the right was complaining. I personally remember very vividly that one of George W. Bush’s re-election themes was how a record number of people were homeowners during his term.

And while lending standards were being relaxed, how did the industry react? I suppose the banks were all dragged kicking and screaming into this because the government forced it upon them? That they were forced to give out all these loans, then forced to package them and resell them at a profit to other institutions? To extend extra credit to people based on the inflated value of their home they knew they couldn’t afford? All the while raking in greater and greater profits while becoming increasingly leveraged out to the precipice?

I would argue that the mortage crisis is the culmination of 30 years of government policy. The deregulation started under Reagan removed the safety valves from our economy, leading to the middle class stalling out while the 1% did better and better. With the middle class stuck, the only way to increase purchasing power (even against inflation) was to use credit. This was ultimately unsustainable as we all found out.

So should the Occupy movement really be about protesting government policy?

In part — this movement is about fighting the collusion between large corporations and government against the best interests of the general population. Government policy has been geared to benefit a small sliver of the American public for too long, under the guise that the benefits they reap will somehow spread to the rest of us. It has resulted in a corrupted, skewed system where the voices of the vast majority of people are no longer being heard.

For our part, we were complicit in our silence. That has changed, and people are waking up now and realizing that the only way to change the system is to stand up to it.