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The Occupy Wall Street Movement Essay

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Occupy Wall Street has been called many things including: unfocused, ungrounded, and silly. Others coin it as “America’s first internet-era movement” (Rushkoff). In quintessence, Occupy Wall Street is a series of protests and demonstrations that oppose the influence that corporate greed has on American Democracy. The protestors manipulate marches and nonviolent demonstrations to express their dissatisfaction with the state of American Politics and economy. This relates to the political science concepts of power, performance democracy, and protective democracy.
The Occupy Wall Street movement is a succession of protests that have no formal leader and no formal demands. The concept behind this form of movement is that each person …show more content…

The 99 percent consists of average Americans whose homes are being foreclosed upon, who have accrued colossal student loan debt and are most affected by economic setbacks. A definition of power is the “ownership, control, and distribution of resources”. In this way, the 99 percent is powerless in America because they lack the ability to exist independently of the one percent who has the power over the nation’s resources. The one percent has an advantage in its ability to influence the government and public policy. The protestors point to many societal problems as evidence of this inequality. Some of these examples are unequal access to healthcare, poverty, exorbitant student loan debt, unemployment, and unfair practices in the housing market. These are all indicators of the unequal distribution of resources and subsequently power that Occupy Wall Street denounces.
Performance democracy is characterized by “governmental outputs in the form of laws and policies that are a reflection of a self-governing people’s desire for well-being” (Grigsby). The protestors of Occupy Wall Street contend that American laws and policies do not reflect the interests of the majority of the population. The current laws and policies, according to members of the movement, only benefit the wealthy one percent of the population. The protestors stand against the elitist nature of capitalism that inhibits adequate performance in the form of laws and

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