US Elections

• Average American CEO pay is 185 times the average worker pay.
• Average income for 90 per cent of Americans was $31k; for the top 10 per cent it was $165k; and for the top 1 per cent it was over $27 million in 2008.
• The effective tax rate for millionaires has fallen 15 per cent in the last 25 years.
• The distance between Joe Average on the median income and the American super rich hit a peak just prior to the financial crisis.

President Obama’s administration is attempting to address some of the issues underpinning wealth inequality. The Occupy Wall Street protests began one week after President Obama submitted his American Jobs Act to Congress with repeated public demands for them to "pass this bill" to help boost the economy and get some of the nearly 10 per cent unemployed back to work. And one day after the protests began, Obama announced proposals for five principles of tax reform, including the "Buffett Rule," named after Warren Buffett, one of the world’s richest men, who champions a belief he should not pay less federal taxes than his secretary.

The Occupy Wall Street protest gained momentum when police arrested 80 protesters (Day 8), and video footage of female protestors being maced by NYPD officers ws uploaded to the Internet. Large orange nets were used to corral the crowds. Celebrity activists Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore (Day 10), and actress Susan Sarandon (Day 11) have lent their fame, and trade unions, including the powerful transport workers (Day 13) and teachers unions, have pledged support (Day 15). The protest has since turned into a large march from Manhattan over the Brooklyn Bridge, resulting in the bridge's closure and the arrest of up to 700 protesters for blocking traffic lanes.

With an organising committee called the NYC General Assembly, public donations, hacker supported live streaming video, social media updates and even their own broadsheet newspaper called The Occupied Wall Street Journal, the movement has started to spread to other American cities, including Boston and Chicago.

Could it be that the Occupy Wall Street protests are the beginning of a more liberal, secular, and progressive version of the Tea Party? Both the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street movements are unhappy with the status quo and believe that America is going in the wrong direction, albeit for different reasons. At this stage the Occupy Wall Streeters are still at the "We know that we’re angry" stage, and have yet to articulate any solutions or tangible demands beyond a fervent desire for change. However, the movement is a valid expression of public dissatisfaction that America is no longer the land of social mobility, equality or opportunity it was once thought to be.

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My friend, who is a libertarian at heart, is dismayed by what he sees as the lack of practicality of the current breed of Republicans — particularly the Tea Partiers — and believes “most American voters do not identify with (or even understand) what is fast becoming seen as their extreme and inflexible position.”

As novice politicians they seem determined to stick solidly to political ideology and ignore political practicalities and eroding public support. This will be their undoing. As they stick to their guns they will lose support of their conservative American base, who are undoubtedly wearying of the drama and embarrassed by tactics that are childish and irresponsible. Further, they will provide real ammunition for Barack Obama’s re-election campaign in 2012 because they can so easily be blamed for this manufactured crisis.

In this weekend’s Washington Post, Dan Balz writes:

In the normal course of politics, a party on the wrong side of public opinion begins to correct its course. In this case, House Republicans are paying attention less to the public at large and more to the views of the tea party activists who helped propel them to power in the fall. They could pay a steep price for that if the public concludes they were responsible for putting the government in default or further damaging the economy.

And Kathleen Parker too writes of the Tea Party’s self-destructive tactics:

The Tea Partyers who wanted to oust Barack Obama have greatly enhanced his chances for reelection by undermining their own leader and damaging the country in the process. The debt ceiling may have been raised and the crisis averted by the time this column appears, but that event should not erase the memory of what transpired. The Tea Party was a movement that changed the conversation in Washington, but it has steeped too long and has become toxic.

The political drama is undoubtedly colourful and engaging to witness but it will be a relief when the Tea Partiers are removed from the main game. The ramifications of American political instability around the world are very real and we’ve had enough drama and financial instability of late. Their political naivety is leading them to turn their victory into potential defeat and ultimate demise.

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