John Petro

I was among the thousands of people cramming into Foley Square Wednesday evening, observing those who had come down to show their support for the Occupy Wall Street movement. I arrived at 4:30, and for the next hour roamed around the park. It had the energy of a festival, a celebration. The air was permeated by the sound of drums. Placards waved about in the air, many of them hastily written with marker on brown corrugated cardboard. And though the rally was organized by labor unions, those with union t-shirts were vastly outnumbered by those with no obvious union affiliation.

I could find no central focal point. If amplified speeches were going on, I could not hear them. Nearer to the drummers people were dancing. Standing on top of the fountain, I found it impossible to get a true sense of the size of the crowd. It was difficult to get it all within view.

This was symbolic, perhaps. The most frequent criticism of the Occupy Wall Street movement is that there is no central organized message. However, looking out over the amorphous crowd that evening, it was very simple to identify what the movement was all about. That is, thousands were gathering here to speak out about economic injustice—injustices dealt to them, their families, and to the entire nation. There was a palpable sense that our democracy is in danger, that the voices of the many are being drowned out by the few: those with vast fortunes and a certain political agenda.

“We are the 99 percent,” the protesters chanted. In contrast, those that make the decisions that affect our lives are the other one percent. They’re the ones telling us that we’re better off if we allow corporations to pollute our air, to ship our jobs overseas, to cut corporate taxes and those on the wealthy. They tell us that we’re better off if we cut health benefits for workers, if we get rid of pensions, if we do away with the social safety net. We’re better off without high-speed rail or universal health care. These things are unattainable, we’re told, because government is out of money. If we raise taxes on the wealthiest to help pay for these things then the whole economy will fail, we’re told.

The crowd at Foley Square wasn’t falling for it.

Student loan debt was a common cause for many. After all, we were all told that we must go to college to get a good job. For some this is no problem; their parents can simply write a check. For others, loans are the only practical solution. Now many are out of college and are tens of thousands of dollars in debt. There are few jobs to be had and those who haven’t found one are wondering just how they’re supposed to pay all this debt off.

“The banks got bailed out, we got sold out,” the crowd chanted.

These are big, institutional problems that don’t lend themselves to easy answers. The seductive power of the Tea Party is that it offers simple, easy answers. Cut government and cut taxes. Get government out of your life and maybe someday you will be rich. The real answers aren’t going to be that easy.

Earlier that morning a Republican presidential candidate told the protesters that they ought not to blame Wall Street for the fact that they’re not rich. But no one at Foley Square said anything about wanting to become rich. For the former CEO of a fast-food pizza chain this may be a difficult idea to understand. It’s also difficult for New York City’s billionaire mayor to understand. He called the protesters “ridiculous.” This is the same mayor who expresses no concern over the growing gap between the rich and poor in his city.

The crowd at Foley Square wasn’t concerned about amassing riches. They wanted economic security and a say in their political process. They wanted to end the injustice that they see all about them, to eliminate want in the face of greed.

An hour later, looking south on Centre Street, the setting sun reflected off of the silver façade of a new luxury apartment building. A two-bedroom apartment in this building rents for $72,000 a year, a sum greater than many of the attendees’ salaries. And then the crowd began to move forward for the march down to Zuccotti Park. I walked with the chanting crowd in silence. When the march met with those encamped at Zuccotti Park there were cheers. There was dancing. Later a small group tried to storm some barricades. A white shirt officer swung his nightstick at the group. Thousands of cameras captured the moment.

Amy Traub

Cutting public pensions won’t improve the lives of ordinary New Yorkers. Giving tax breaks to the state’s highest income residents won’t benefit most of us either. But at least one reform promoted by Governor Andrew Cuomo has the potential to truly transform New York’s politics, putting people, rather than corporate interests, in control of the political process. Publicly-funded, voter-owned elections represent our best chance to genuinely clean up Albany and assert democratic values in the face of special interests. And while shifting the balance of power is always an uphill fight, the governor’s support combined with strong voter approval for public financing of elections make this the year that New York may finally take back its political system.

That’s why, on the one-year anniversary of the Citizens United Supreme Court decision that allowed corporate interests to spend unlimited amounts of money to influence our elections, a coalition spearheaded by the grassroots group Citizen Action joined members of the State Assembly in calling for publicly-financed elections in New York.

At first glance, campaign finance reform looks like a good government issue remote from the day-to-day concerns of New Yorkers facing tough times. But at a time when the top 1 percent of New Yorkers rake in 35 percent of the income and Wall Street bankers making bigger bonuses insist they’re still “not satisfied” with their payouts, reasserting ordinary citizens’ control over politicians and the policy they make is more important than ever. Whether it’s rent that’s too damn high, drilling that threatens our drinking water, or transit riders forced to pay more for less service, we need the voices of voters, not big money, calling the shots.

Special interest campaign contributors exercise outsize influence in a number of ways. Deep-pocketed donors lavishly finance candidates friendly to their positions, influencing policy by impacting who gets elected and becomes a policymaker. Meanwhile, elected officials must take substantial time away from their public responsibilities to focus on fundraising. In some cases campaign contributors corrupt the policy process altogether, leading lawmakers to weigh the interests of large donors more heavily than the well-being of ordinary constituents.

New York’s loose campaign finance laws are ultimately costly to taxpayers, as the public ends up paying for special favors, uncompetitive contracts, and other policies tailored to benefit campaign donors rather than the public. Even in cases where outright corruption is absent, the majority of citizens who lack the means to make large campaign contributions are shut out of a critical part of the political process.

A voluntary system of publicly financed elections shuts off the big money spigot by allowing candidates to run for office by collecting many small donations and receiving public funds to run their campaign. It’s working in states from Connecticut to New Mexico. And shifting the balance away from powerful donors and back toward ordinary New Yorkers is one reform that could really change New York for the better.

Amy Traub

“There is a clear link between the integrity of public officials and campaign finance law. Any time elected officials or candidates solicit or receive funds from private sources, the public perceives that there is the potential for corruption to contaminate the political process.”

So reads the newly released report (pdf) of New York City’s Campaign Finance Board. With a clarion call for engaging and educating ordinary citizens, holding candidates accountable, promoting competitive elections and – most importantly – enhancing the integrity of policy making, the report describes the largely positive record of New York City’s campaign finance system in 2009. The voluntary system of matching small campaign contributions for participating candidates (currently at a 6-1 ratio) while imposing strict limits on contribution size and disclosures was first enacted in 1988 and has been updated in recent years.

The New York Times’ Michael Barbaro reads the report as a refutation of the conventional wisdom about 2009 as a city election year characterized exclusively by Mayor Bloomberg’s outsize campaign spending:

changes enacted before the race encouraged 34,000 New Yorkers to make campaign donations for the first time; drastically curtailed the role of businesses, political committees and lobbyists in campaigns; and caused a major drop in donations from those doing business with the city.

Perhaps most intriguingly, the new data suggests that, in a year when voter turnout was historically low and pundits treated the mayoral election as a foregone conclusion, many New Yorkers of more modest means felt compelled to participate in the election process.

“While the program cannot guarantee a participating candidate will always overcome a high-spending non-participant,” the report itself notes, “the 2009 election shows that public funds can provide resources to communicate a message effectively.” New York City’s system promoted more competitive elections, helping to make challengers more competitive against incumbent officeholders and giving them the ability to make their voices heard. While New York City’s is not a full Fair Elections campaign system like the Arizona model highlighted by the Drum Major Institute in the past, it is a testament to the power of removing even a portion of the big money influence from the political process. New York’s successful city level policy should be an inspiration for other cities and for the federal and state campaign reform we urgently need.

Emi Wang

Since 2001, opponents of at least 18 proposed mosques throughout the nation have justified their hostile resistance by repeatedly claiming that no, they are not bigots, yes, they believe in freedom of speech—and that regardless, something has to be done to prevent the “Islamification” of the United States. In states and towns across country, from Staten Island to Tennessee, opponents assert that they just cannot trust that Muslims (a population of 2.5 million people in the United States according to the Pew Research Center, and much larger, according to other estimates) are not terrorists.

Taking up the airwaves as of late, the proposed mosque near Ground Zero has only stirred up an ever more heated and incoherent uproar. Last week, CBS and NBC rejected an ad from a conservative political action committee titled “The Audacity of Jihad” that displayed images of terrorists and the 9/11 attacks, as a narrator inveighed again and again against the “they” who perpetrated such violence.

Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Times reported yesterday that as the public hearing for a proposed mosque in Temecula approaches, many have turned increasingly sour and vocal. While places of worship are common in the city—indeed, the mosque would be set on a plot of land immediately adjoining two churches—residents are having none of it. As the pastor of Calvary Baptist Church stated, “There is a concern with all the rumors you hear about sleeper cells and all that. Are we supposed to be complacent just because these people say it’s a religion of peace?” Well, of course if you speak in deliberately vague terms of rumors, “all that” and “these people,” then just about anything could be true.

Those who support the mosques all cite the opportunity to engage with the wider community as one reason for their development. Now if only the majority of Americans were listening.