If you are wondering why protesters have occupied Wall Street for the past few weeks, and why similar protests have been springing up around the country, consider these facts.
Since the end of 2007, the number of working-age Americans has grown by 7 million. Yet the number of those over age 18 who have full-time work has declined by 300,000.
Job growth has come to a standstill, yet many U.S. corporations are enjoying record profits and are collectively sitting on a cash stash of $2 trillion. They say they won't create new jobs until there is enough consumer demand to support them.
Consumer spending makes up 70 percent of the U.S. economy. But consumers aren't spending.
If you have a job, you're worried about keeping it, knowing that you are only a couple of paychecks away from disaster. If you're jobless, you're too busy trying to survive and aren't thinking about buying a new car or a television.
We now have this vicious cycle of decreased consumer demand leading to fewer jobs which leads to still-lower demand. But, unlike past recessions, corporations are still making money because they are producing and selling more products overseas than in America.
In other words, corporations have reached a point where they don't need American consumers to be profitable.
And, unlike past recessions, the federal government is doing almost nothing to stimulate demand because our Congress is being held hostage by conservative berserkers who would rather see an economic collapse than a second term for President Obama.
There are too many politicians in Washington more obsessed with the federal deficit than addressing the needs of 25 million Americans who are either unemployed or underemployed.
These politicians are more concerned about protecting the people they've taken to calling “job creators” than about helping the millions of Americans drowning in mortgage and personal debt.
* * *
All of what we are seeing now is a culmination of three decades of economic policies that benefited the wealthy at the expense of the rest of us.
Since 1979, the median U.S. income, adjusted for inflation, has been virtually flat, even though the economy is twice as large as it was three decades ago. And nearly all the gains have gone to the wealthiest Americans.
The richest 1 percent now accounts for 24 percent of the nation's income and 40 percent of its wealth, and the gap between the richest and poorest Americans is the widest it's been since the 1920s.
That is why Occupy Wall Street became inevitable, and why this protest is gaining more support with each passing day.
Capitalism no longer works for the 99 percent of Americans who aren't super-wealthy. Politicians of both parties are bought and paid for by the wealthy and powerful, and none of the CEOs who looted the federal treasury and brought the global economy the brink of total collapse has faced accountability for their actions.
Far from being the self-indulgent, incoherent, and confused dirty neo-hippies that the chattering class make them out to be, the workers, the students, the unemployed, and the poor who are camped out in Liberty Square form just the first wave on the beachhead, fighting a long-overdue battle against the forces of unbridled avarice and greed.
They are one with their brothers and sisters who did likewise earlier this year in Tunis and Cairo, in Madrid and Athens, in Tripoli and Damascus, and in Madison. They are standing up and fighting back.
They are crying “Enough!”
* * *
It is not an exaggeration to say that our nation's entire economic, social, and political order is being challenged by a movement that is calling for America to live up to its promise of democracy.
Too many people are impoverished, disenfranchised, and cast aside by a system where the elite call all the shots. The cry rises up for something better from people who have been let down one time too many.
The elites didn't take the young people in Cairo seriously until former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak was forced to step down. That's what can happen when the collective courage of a small group of determined people sets into motion a force that ultimately can't be stopped.
This force is what we are seeing in New York.
This force is what democracy looks like.