Thoreau and the Occupy Wall Street Movement

By Hasan Zillur Rahim

What would Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) make of the “Occupy Wall Street” (OWS) movement now sweeping America?

Based on how he lived and what he wrote, it is evident that the author of Civil Disobedience (1849) would have passionately supported it.

Thoreau was the iconoclast who boldly spoke out for John Brown when the abolitionist seized a federal armory in 1859 to arm slaves to rise against the South. He was the rebel who built his own cabin by Walden Pond in Massachusetts and wrote (Walden, 1854) of the residents of Concord who borrowed money from banks to buy houses that “when the farmer has got his house, he may not be the richer but the poorer for it, and it be the house that has got him.” He was the reformer Russia’s Leo Tolstoy, India’s Mahatma Gandhi and his country’s Martin Luther King looked up to when they worked to bring about fundamental changes in their respective societies.

Thoreau was driven by self-reliance and a sense of justice. If he were to review the “State of the Union” in the 21st century, these are some of the grim statistics he would encounter:

The richest 1 percent (the One Percenters) take home almost 25% of the national income, which represents a more unequal wealth distribution than most of the world’s banana republics.

From 1980 to 2005, more than 80% of the total increase in incomes went to the One Percenters. They now have more net worth (34%) than the bottom 90 percent (29%), according to figures compiled by the Economic Policy Institute in Washington.

The CEOs of the largest American companies earn an average of more than 500 times as much as the average worker.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, over 14 million Americans (9.1%) are unemployed as of September 2011. (This does not include Americans who have given up looking for jobs, particularly those above 50). About as many Americans are working only part-time because they are unable to find full-time work. 46.2 million Americans are living in poverty, the most in more than 50 years. Foreclosures and bankruptcies are at an all-time high.

In New York, the epicenter of the OWS protest, the wealth of the One Percenters derives almost entirely from the sector known as “financial innovation” (formerly known as financial services) that led to the devastating financial crisis of 2008 and the Great Recession, with no end in sight. These “Masters of the Universe” work in Wall Street, commercial and investment banks, hedge funds, credit card companies and insurance companies. They produce nothing, no tangible products or service that benefits you and me. Instead, they claim to create “value” by speculating with our money, be it in mortgages, car loans, credit card debt, gas and food prices, always hedging the bets so that they end up with a staggering pile of cash whether society wins (rarely) or loses (almost always).

In other words, Thoreau would have found that in the America of today, the One Percenters control the rest of the population, the Ninetynine Percenters, through economic and political hegemony. He would have found that our government has become a government of the One Percenters, by the One Percenters, and for the One Percenters.

But as that timeless exhortation goes, one that would resonate mightily with Thoreau, “Enough is enough.”

What began as a small gathering of peaceful protests by a handful of New Yorkers on September 17 (http://occupywallst.org/) in front of the Wall Street towers has now spread from coast to coast. Protesters are citing the Arab Spring (Tunis, Cairo, Damascus, Tripoli) as their inspiration. There are no leaders, no heroes, no ideologues, only ordinary citizens bound by a fierce desire to right the glaring inequity that threatens that most fundamental of rights, our freedom.

The Bard of Walden would be deeply disappointed with President. Barack Obama promised to clean up the economic disaster he inherited from George Bush. He vowed to be an agent of change, a beacon of hope. Instead, he coddled those responsible for the meltdown - banksters, hedge fund operators, reckless speculators and other assorted wealthy sociopaths - and bailed them out with billions of taxpayers’ money, going so far as to hail the CEO of Goldman Sachs, the most insidiously corrupt company of them all, as a “savvy businessman!”

Thoreau would remind the president that oratory was not a substitute for action. He would vigorously argue for increasing taxes on the wealthy. He would work to put an end to corporate thievery through sound legal procedures. He would propose a rigorous system of checks and balances that rewarded those who created actual values for society, as opposed to those who used financial abstractions and algorithms to enrich themselves beyond all proportions. He would have had a field day skewering the right wingers who have denounced the OWS grassroots movement as “un-American” and populated by “mobs.” He would throw himself into reducing the vast economic distances between the One Percenters and the Ninetynine Percenters.

The only line that Thoreau would retract from Walden, circa 2011, is his biting observation that “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” OWS is drawing “the mass of men” into its ever-widening circle of passion and activism. Yes, the movement grew from the desperation of intolerable injustice but now it has acquired a momentum that transcends desperation, charging the national discourse with timeless ideas of equity and fairness.

“We are the 99” is a banner that Henry David Thoreau would have been proud to unfurl on Main Street, America, for the world to behold.

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