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By Prof. Joseph Tharamangalam
Global Research, December 13, 2011
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=28201
By highlighting rising inequality and poverty in America and asking why “the one percent” has been so successful in tilting state policy in its favour, the Occupy Wall Street Movement (OSW) is raising old and new questions about the nature and quality of the country’s democracy. It has brought into the spotlight the fact that the vast majority of the country’s citizens are unable to exercise the countervailing power needed to wrest for themselves some basic entitlement that are largely available to citizens of many social democratic countries.
Whether the Occupy Wall Street movement (OWS) can sustain its fight for a more equitable America remains to be seen. But it has succeeded in raising two critical issues. It has highlighted the issue of rising inequality and poverty in America attracting considerable attention from academics and the media. It has also interrogated the quality of American democracy, raising an old question once again. Why has “the 1 percent” been so successful in tilting state policy in its favour in a democracy that is supposed to favour the majority? This article attempts to offer some observations that shed light on these questions. It is organized in three parts. First it briefly examines the evidence showing rising inequality and increasing deprivations of the disadvantaged classes. Second it draws on some scholarly work on comparative politics to argue that the capacity of American democracy to achieve equity-enhancing and redistributive outcomes has continued to be at a very low end in comparison with other western democracies. The decisive factor, it argues, is the absence of a social democratic state and of countervailing movements and parties of the lower classes to counter the power of the corporate elite. For unbridled capitalism, unchecked by democratic pressures from below, in fact results in monopoly capitalism and its political cousin oligarchy. In the final part it offers some comments on the ideology of individualism and anti-statism that supports laissez-faire capitalism in an attempt to shed some light on its persistence and even resurgence in the face of the evidence of the systemic nature of America’s poverty and inequality.
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