The Anti-Inequality Demonstration: Public Indignation for a Just Society

It is worth paying attention to the public indignation of Americans who dislike unfairness and demand a society with justice and equality. The demonstration against the income-gap society, which started on Sept. 17 on Wall Street, has entered its fourth week.

The demonstration sharply criticizes the wealthy class and major corporations, or “the richest 1 percent,” while maintaining “We are the 99 percent.” The movement has spread across the United States by drawing on Americans’ shared anger.

The demonstration’s method — young people without jobs utilizing social networks like Facebook — is reminiscent of the Arab Spring, the democratizing movement that ended authoritarian regimes. However, the situations in the Arab world cannot be compared relatively with the inequality in democratic America. The civil uprising in American cities should be neither under nor overestimated.

President Obama asserts that the demonstration “expresses the frustrations the American people feel” toward big corporations that acted “irresponsibly” and brought about the financial crisis, yet oppose financial regulation reform. Is this really the only reason? If public opinion is sincerely heard, it may be more natural to conclude that the failed economic policies of the past few years are also strongly in question.

Governments in their natural state are to suppress inequality and poverty by wealth redistribution through taxation, social security and public projects. In this sense, the fact that anti-inequality demonstrations have occurred represents a dysfunction at the United States’ core. It also accounts for the failure of America’s finance and economic stimulus strategies — the wheels of the vehicle. How, then, should inequality and poverty be alleviated?

After Lehman’s fall in 2008, 6.5 million jobs have reportedly disappeared. The number of people in poverty reached a historic high of 46.18 million last year. The Obama administration, which has been unable to carry out effective employment measures or poverty alleviation, is accountable.

On the other hand, since the proportion of the population under the poverty threshold ($22,000 per year for a family of 4) increased from 11.3 percent 10 years ago to 15.1 percent in 2010, Bush’s Republican administration cannot escape liability.

Such widespread inequality in the United States has been driven by factors like the burst of the IT bubble and off-shoring accompanying globalization. Therefore, it is logical for problems of the market-fundamentalist economic philosophy that generated these outcomes to first be identified and then tackled.

The anti-inequality demonstration is not irrelevant for countries like Japan that are under a globalized economy. Thus, it is expected all the more that the American people, both the Democratic and Republican parties, establish a well-constructed discourse on the elimination of inequality and poverty.