The Corporate Age

Many people would point to any one individual participating in the Occupy movement and use it to decry the entire thing, which makes about as much sense as basing your entire view of America's political system on your first impression of a single citizen. Since the Occupy movement began, it's become a bandwagon for all manner of political figures attempting to promote their own agendas. Every movement has its crazies; this is nothing new. Corporations and capitalism aren't going away, and socialism and communism (hopefully) aren't taking their place.

Cronyism

Many people would also shun the idea that corporations have any fault in this situation and instead argue that the government is the entire cause of the problem. This belief is inherently flawed: without corporations, there would be nothing to diminish the people's influence on their government, and without the government, corporations would have nothing over which to exert their influence.

This a symbiotic relationship commonly known as cronyism: corporations provide the funding that helps representatives get elected, representatives pass legislation in the interest of those corporations. Rinse, repeat. This is one reason why there's little substantial difference in the quality of elected representatives between administrations: the same corporations are influencing their policy-making.

The front-runners for the 2012 presidential election are incumbent Democrat Barack Obama and former Massachusetts governor GOP Mitt Romney. One of the top campaign contributors for both candidates is Goldman Sachs, a Wall Street investment bank that profited on the subprime mortgage crisis. This isn't their first political conflict of interest, either.

While there may be others solutions, those that come to mind involve either capping or preventing corporate campaign donations and potentially applying similar restrictions on individual donations to keep the influence of the upper class comparable to that of the middle and lower classes.

The Bailout Fallout

The 2008 bailout was intended to prevent the financial failure of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, companies that were claimed to be "too large to fail" because the alleged impact on the American economy would be too devastating.

The federal money to fund this bailout came from American taxpayers and added to the federal deficit. Part of the rationale for the bailout was that the economy would worsen if avenues of funding provided to small businesses by these types of organizations was curtailed.

The problem is that banks aren't keeping up their end of the bargain: we bailed them out, but they're lending substantially less anyway. To add insult to injury, despite having to be bailed out, these institutions still found plenty to give out in corporate bonuses.

Less lending, fewer businesses, fewer jobs. This is likely a large contributing factor to the present 9% unemployment rate. Wages as a percentage of the economy have dropped roughly 7% in the last 50 years, leaving individuals lucky enough to have a job to pay taxes while some corporations are paying none or are even receiving tax benefits.

The current tax code that caters to corporate interests needs to be reformed. By the same token, business regulations also need to be reexamined to increase incentive for corporations to hire domestically rather than sending jobs overseas.

Conclusion

Corporations aren't inherently evil and they can do good things. This blog post is published on Blogger, a service owned and offered for free by Google that enables its users to easily publish their works and opinions. This is just one example of the beneficial effects that corporations can have on America.

However, as this post also establishes, Americans have several reasons to dislike corporations and the relationship they have with the government at the moment.

The Occupy Movement

So, the movement that began with Occupy Wall Street has gone global. Rather difficult not to take notice of it when the point of the movement, at least when it first started, was to raise awareness. While many people have shown their support for this movement, there are a few things preventing it from advancing.

The Groupthinkers and The Crazies

Yes, this movement has some level of groupthink behind it. Yes, groupthink is in general a dangerous thing. On sheer principle, anyone participating in the protests should have a full understanding of what's being protested and why. Sadly, this isn't the case. It's not that all protesters don't know what's going on, but yes, some of them don't.

Yes, there are people with extremist views trying to jump on the bandwagon to promote their own agenda. This is human nature. People are pushing for everything from open revolution to returning to a gold standard and dissolving the Federal Reserve. People are complaining about the general notion of corporate greed in a capitalist society when they probably couldn't define capitalism if you asked them to.

The Baptists have Westboro, the Republicans have the Tea Party, and the Occupy movement is going to have its own subset of extremists. If you let that form your entire impression of the movement, you're not paying enough attention.

The Authority and The Media

Politicians are taking advantage of the presence of a few crazies to belittle the movement. They're throwing out words that have been dirty in America for generations like socialism, communism, and Nazism simply to assert their position. They're demanding a single solution to a multifaceted problem from protesting citizens. They don't want the movement to succeed because the people behind it recognize that problems exist within our society and that our government is a major contributor to them. In some cases, even the police that we trust to protect us are contributing to our oppression. Thankfully, some of us have enough courage and honor that we're calling them out on it.

Mainstream media is merely a pawn parroting the politicians' statements. Like this country, the media was bought and paid for a long time ago. True news doesn't exist anymore. The only information we get is twisted, biased, and filtered to be what corporate businesses want it to be.

We as a country have learned to stop thinking for ourselves and readily accept the shit shoveled in our general direction. Before anything else can change, that needs to change.

The Idealists

Don't get me wrong: overall, Occupy is a good idea. There are problems with our society, that much is a given. However, the thoughts of the movement's protesters can't end there if they hope to ever actually accomplish anything other than being noteworthy news because they managed to attract enough attention. We need to identify the real problems that got us to where we are. We need to civilly discuss them with each other and figure out how to solve them. We need to try to keep an open mind and allow our positions to be subject to change.

Our governmental representatives have proven that they aren't even capable of reading a bill for their life-long salaries, much less making a decision that's in our best interest. Yes, we can elect new officials in the coming elections, but they're just as susceptible to the flaws of our current system as their predecessors. The system itself needs to be fixed, and that requires people more interested in that cause than in their own individual power or wealth.

Corporations are and will always be fueled by the incentive for profit in a capitalist society, not by whatever beneficial societal effects may or may not arise as a result. They can't be trusted to make decisions in the interest of society when their own interests conflict.

It's up to us, the people, to fix the world that we live in. That requires more than an idea or the acknowledgement or validation of a problem or a symptom.