"Why Protest?"

[OneAngryDemocrat]

The Occupy Wall Street protests - and the protests now taking place throughout the country (including Rockford) - are all about wealth redistribution.

But isn't the wealth redistribution that radical right-wing commentators are constantly talking about on the AM radio dial, so put your preconceptions into a box, and set the box aside.

The Constitution clearly grants Congress the authority to regulate commerce between the 50 states and foreign nations. It also grants Congress the authority to ratify the trade treaties the Presdient drafts into law.

Elected officials, acting on behalf of their corporate financiers (the top 1% income earners in America), have repeatedly bestowed upon their buddies in Big Business the ability to legally blackmail their American employees (the other 99%) into accepting lower wages and fewer benefits under the threat of outsourcing their U.S. jobs to despotic regimes overseas, and of course, actually moving their business overseas when their employees couldn't give up anything more, all the while pocketing the profits made by those blackmailed workers.

Like all forms of extortion, and theft, that's an example of clear-cut wealth re-distribution.

Unlike extortion or theft, what big business has been doing is 100% legal - but only because they are paying off the people who write the laws with legalized bribes called campaign contributions.

Add to this assault upon America's working folk all of the low tariffs Congress has placed on foreign imports that strongarm American businesses who want to do the right thing and pay their employees a decent wage with decent benefits, but can't, because unfair overseas competition force them into seeking the lowest labor costs they can find just to stay in operation.

Big Business has "gamed" the system to their advantage by influencing Congress into ratifying these trade treaties and low tariffs, and now denounces any attempt to end this extortion as a communist or socialist plot.

Congress is 'supposed' to represent we, the people, and not merely the interests of those who can afford to close down domestic operations and open up factories in Red China.

We have a Constitutional RIGHT to demand our Representatives protect the economic interests of the 99% of Americans who don't own a factory, too, and not just look after those profiting from the labor taking placein those factories.

We accomplish that goal by coercing our Representatives to do something they haven't done in a long time: represent us.

That's not socialism, nor is it communism - that's DEMOCRACY.

Del Wasso,
The Rockford Sons of Liberty