Opinion Occupy the agenda

Just in the last few days,Bloomberg — who in other respects has been an excellent mayor — rescued the movement from one of its biggest conundrums. It was stuck in a squalid encampment in Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park: antagonising local residents,scaring off would-be supporters,and facing months of debilitating snow and rain. Then the mayor helped save the demonstrators by clearing them out,thus solving their real estate problem and re-establishing their narrative of billionaires bullying the disenfranchised. Thanks to the mayor,the protests grew bigger than ever.

I watched in downtown Manhattan last week as the police moved in to drag off protesters — and several credentialed journalists — and the action seemed wildly over the top. Sure,the mayor had legitimate concerns about sanitation and safety,but have you looked around New York City? Many locations aren’t so clean and safe,but there usually aren’t hundreds of officers in riot gear showing up in the middle of the night to address the problem.

Yet in a larger sense,the furore over the eviction of protesters in New York,Oakland,Portland and other cities is a sideshow. Occupy Wall Street isn’t about real estate,and its signal achievement was not assembling shivering sleepers in a park.

The high ground that the protesters seized is not an archipelago of parks in America,but the national agenda. The movement has planted economic inequality on the nation’s consciousness,and it will be difficult for any mayor or police force to dislodge it.

A reporter for Politico found that use of the words “income inequality” quintupled in a news database after the Occupy protests began. That’s a significant achievement,for this is an issue that goes to our country’s values and our opportunities for growth — and yet we in the news business have rarely given it the attention it deserves.

The statistic that takes my breath away is this: The top 1 per cent of Americans possess a greater net worth than the entire bottom 90 per cent,according to an analysis by the Economic Policy Institute.

A new study by Michael I. Norton of Harvard Business School and Dan Ariely of Duke University polled Americans about what wealth distribution would be optimal. People across the board thought that the richest 20 per cent of Americans should control about one-third of the nation’s wealth,and the poorest 20 per cent about one-tenth.

In fact,the richest 20 percent of Americans own more than 80 per cent of the country’s wealth. And the poorest 20 per cent own one-tenth of 1 per cent. It would be easier to accept this gulf between the haves and the have-nots if it could be spanned by intelligence and hard work. Sometimes it can. But over all,such upward mobility in the United States seems more constrained than in the supposed class societies of Europe.

Research by the Economic Mobility Project,which explores accessibility to the American dream,suggests that the US provides less intergenerational mobility than most other industrialised nations do. That’s not only because of tax policy,which is what liberals focus on. Perhaps even more important are educational investments. We can’t solve inequality unless we give poor and working-class kids better educational opportunities.

The Occupy movement is also right that one of the drivers of inequality (among many) is the money game in politics. James M. Stone,former chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission,said in a recent speech that many members of Congress knew that banks needed to be more tightly regulated. “So why was this not done?” he asked. “One obvious piece of the answer is that both political parties rely heavily on campaign contributions from the financial sector.”

The solution to these inequities and injustices is not so much setting up tents at bits of real estate here or there,but a relentless focus on the costs of inequality. So as we move into an election year,I’m hoping that the movement will continue to morph into: Occupy the Agenda.