For John Galt's sake

In recent days, I’ve been tuning into NPR with the sole purpose of hearing any news of the Occupy Wall Street protests.  As my main sources of news lean to the left: the BBC, NPR and, the New York Times I feel they have given a pretty good detailing of recent events.  Yet, reading Paul Krugman’s Op-ed entitled “Panic of the Plutocrats” it would seem had I used a different source of news, I might get a very different story.  Krugman, the Ford International Professor of Economics and the 2008 winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, reports that much of the Republican Party is denouncing these protests, accusing the protesters of being “Anti-American” and “pitting Americans against Americans”.  Yet, as Krugman points out to his mainly liberal fan base, he has seen this sort of thing before.  He uses the attacks against Elizabeth Warren (Massachusetts Senator candidate) by the G.O.P who likened her to a parasite when she made a speech about raising taxes on the wealthy as an example.  Krugman sees that anytime anyone or any group swings a spot light on to the way private institutions are treated in America, they are heckled and labeled “Anti-American”.  Even our own President is not safe from the wrath these conservative groups bestow.  Krugman likens this as a sort of defense mechanism that these institutions use as a ploy to keep people from closely examining the unfair favoritism the government places on private institutions over it’s own citizens. 

Krugman also points out that it is these very critics who likened themselves to Ayn Rand’s ideological character, John Galt from “Atlas Shrugged”.  Yet, John Galt would have never trumped over the poor using devious schemes to get rich nor would he go looking for every tax loophole the government had to offer in order to pay less than most middle class families do.    As I remember, John Galt was one of the lowliest workers of the railroad; he was blue collar to the core and believed above all else that hard work would prevail.  He despised the top dogs in their comfortable chairs in meeting rooms who thought only of ways to get their pocket books thicker.  John Galt was part of the 99% the Wall Street protesters are fighting for. 

At the end of the book, Galt leaves his work knowing that without him and the others, the constructs of society will crumble with his only hope being that once it does, they can go back and start anew.  Yet, we are not living in a book, we can’t afford to wait for society to fail, the protesters know this and are starting to speak up.  I hope many more of us do and I hope even more take a note from Paul Krugman and understand the fear these people are trying to bestow on us is just a trick that has all too often succeeded in suppressing us.   Hopefully this time, things will be different.