Class Warfare and Occupy Wall Street

Blogger won't let me post any images to this post, so please look through the images on this website.

I’m sure by now that most people have heard about the Occupy Wall Street protests going on all over the country. The message behind these occupations is that Wall Street encourages inequity of wealth by making the rich wealthier. Prominent people in Wall Street use the stock market to turn their vast amounts of money into even more money. These photos show the class warfare that has ensued on behalf of equality.

The first thing I pondered when I looked at the series of photos on this website was, “what are these photos trying to argue?” At first, I had to think about it for a while to figure it out. It seems to me that these photos are trying to portray the violence and unfair nature of the police on this occasion who arrested 700 protesters at this particular Occupation on the Brooklyn Bridge. However, I think that the impression a person gets from these photos may be entirely dependent on which side of the social scale that person fits. I imagine Warren Buffet or Bill Gates might look at these dirty protesters and think “Yuck, these people are pigs and they should stop their whining.” Whereas a hipster in Minneapolis might say something along the lines of, “Fight the power! This is a conspiracy against the lower classes!” This is a dramatization of course, but nonetheless, I feel that a person’s bodily response to this picture depends primarily on their social and political standing. People with power will look at these “powerless” people who are trying to make a point and might feel pity.

My own personal body response to this picture was confusion. In these photos, it seems that the police have taken the side of the upper class by arresting the 700 protesters. I thought that the police were here to protect and serve the people! Just because these people aren’t rich doesn’t mean they’re not American citizens! This feels like an impingement of our first amendment rights! It doesn’t really make sense to me that the police, who are supposed to represent safety and security, made me feel uneasy in these pictures. Policemen aren’t particularly wealthy, either. Why do they seem to represent the oppressive power of the elite in these pictures? Considering that this was my response, this probably means that I’m on the lower class side of this debate.

Nonetheless, it seems that the police have taken the role of representing the elite in these photos. They talk down to the protesters and look at them with disgust. Meanwhile, the protesters are holding up a “We the People” sign. This is a clear sign that this photo is trying to argue on behalf of the protesters. We the people deserve equality and happiness. We the people deserve to work hard and become financially secure. This is an argument against the argument presented by Mankiw in his economics textbook. Maniw specifically argues that “when the government tries to cut the economic pie into more equal slices, the pie gets smaller” because when the government helps out lower class people, it reduces the reward for working hard. When I read that section of the Mankiw textbook, I literally laughed out loud. What a piece of work! The Occupy Wall Street protesters argue that the way the economic system is set up right now, it’s rigged by the rich to keep the rich getting richer. Try saying that five times fast. I tend to agree with that. Some of the things we’ve looked at in class, such as the “Nickled and Dimed” musical video and the Jon Stewart “World of Class Warfare,” present arguments about why the poor stays poor. The policy makers in this country are controlled by wealthy donors to their campaigns and special interests, which gives the rich special tax loopholes. However, in Jon Stewart’s clip, Fox News argues that the “productive class” carries the burden of helping the “moocher class” because the “moocher class” doesn’t pay taxes. The “moocher class” also controls only 2.5% of the world’s wealth, but that’s apparently not important.

The important thing to take away from these images is the politics behind each photograph. These images seem to be taken by a photographer who favors the side of the protesters. The photographer chose to frame the shots in a way that made the police officers (which represent the rich in these photos) look brutal and harsh. They chose to show the protesters looking heroic with signs saying "We the people." The message that is being conveyed in this series of photos is that the members of the Occupy Wall Street are being heroic and that the oppressors are being unjust.