Invest, Don't Protest

The Occupy Wall Street movement is as historical as the movements that led to the fall of the Berlin Wall or the protests at Tiananmen Square, because instead of taking their protests to the United States Capitol, citizens are taking their complaints to the place where decisions about money are made.  They know that our government is unable to help them.  They acknowledge that our elected representatives are puppets of Wall Street.

I ask the people occupying Wall Street to look deeper.  Wall Street is a puppet, too.  Wall Street is merely one component in the Military Industrial Complex that President Eisenhower warned us about.  President Kennedy also warned us about a monolithic conspiracy.  Taylor Caldwell wrote a novel about an international cabal that controls our lives.  I am now starting to wonder if this vast complex devised a powerful system to control trading and banking that is now out of control. 

If Occupy Wall Street wants to correct the abuses of our financial system, I suggest that they use their organizational skills to get people to pool their money to invest.  Wall Street will not listen to protests in the park.  They will listen to how shareholders vote for board members.  If we want our media to give us real news instead of celebrity gossip, we need to elect enough directors to the boards of media corporations to make that happen.   If we want to make sure that pharmaceutical companies are not sitting on patents for lifesaving drugs, we need to organize with each other to put enough money together to buy enough shares of pharmaceutical companies to elect directors to the board.  If we don’t want a manufacturer to ship jobs overseas, we need to own enough of that company to make them keep the jobs here.

If corporations are our government, getting involved in public life means owning a piece of Corporate America and getting our neighbors to do the same.  We also need to organize boycotts of privately-traded firms if they do harm to the social good.  The boycott of one bus company helped end racial segregation on public transportation throughout the United States.  We can influence policy with how we decide to use the few dollars we have.  Getting more directly involved in the financial world may be the only effective way to uncover and correct the shadowy forces that control our government and our financial system.