Occupy Tulsa issued on its website today a condemnation of Ron Paul and other Republican presidential candidates, calling them “puppets for the One Percent.” Group organizer Daniel Lee writes, “The Republican Party has worked for years against the working class of this country, promoting crony capitalism and unregulated corporate corruption, handing tax breaks and corporate welfare to the rich, while slashing public support programs for the poor and encouraging the exploitation of the people. Ron Paul is no exception.”

[Lee] continued, “His blatant racism and fanatical support of rampant unregulated corporate greed under the guise of ‘free markets’ poses as great a threat to the freedom and equality of the people of this country as bloated, openly bigoted Republican bureaucrats like Newt Gingrich or the trust-fund club elitists like Mitt Romney.”

Occupy Tulsa, now as ever, does not promote or endorse political parties or candidates. However, it is committed to exposing corruption and cronyism wherever it is found, and it bears a strong responsibility to the people to warn of candidates seeking to adopt a populist stance while promoting the interests of the One Percent, such as Ron Paul. Paul’s strong defense of Mitt Romney’s record as a venture capitalist shows clearly he is on the side of the very institutions which have exploited the American people and ruined our economy. Despite his stance on the war and other popular libertarian issues, Paul’s public social and economic policy would bring this country to a complete state of ruin, and dismantle what little safety net is left for minorities, the poor, and the working class.

As such, his positions are incompatible with the ideals and goals of the Occupy movement, and concerted attempts by Ron Paul groups to co-opt the movement should be taken as a serious threat to the cohesion and unity of the revolution. As always, all individuals are welcome to join Occupy Tulsa as part of the 99%, but it is imperative that the movement remain true to its founding ideals of direct democracy and complete social and economic equality.

I’m delighted to see a condemnation like this for one significant reason - in recent debates and interviews, Ron Paul has begun stating he sympathizes with the plight of the 99%. Notice he also essentially states he empathizes with the one percent as well, using the same language as Romney about punishing success, then typically moves into claims it was too much government regulation which caused the financial crisis. 

If over-regulation were the case, the decrease of government oversight, coupled with the increase in severity of crises and complexity of risky financial instruments, makes for an awfully interesting correlation.

Using the language of populism does not make one a champion of the working class.

Brass ones. And not in a good way:

For many years, insurance behemoth AIG was so poorly managed that the American taxpayer eventually had to invest nearly $70 billion in the incompetently run company to prevent its collapse from taking the entire U.S. economy along with it. Former AIG CEO Maurice Greenberg, however, thinks that the American people haven’t done enough to protect his massive fortune, so his company filed a lawsuit demanding even more taxpayer money.

For reals. He’s suing on the basis that when the government seizes or takes over property (aside from property used in illegal activity, i.e. RICO seizures) the government must provide ‘just compensation’ - typically, fair market value. ThinkProgress points out that when we bailed out AIG, the fair market value was nearly nil.

See?

Now, let’s say AIG’s assets were involved in illegal activity. Just kidding! Quite a bit of what companies like AIG did was legal - or borderline legal. Deregulation doesn’t make tanking the market illegal - it makes it a near certainty.

It remains to be seen whether the Occupy Wall Street protests will change America’s direction. Yet the protests have already elicited a remarkably hysterical reaction from Wall Street, the super-rich in general, and politicians and pundits who reliably serve the interests of the wealthiest hundredth of a percent.

This is so perfect. The plutocrats should be worried.

“Both Congress and the Ohio General Assembly still have this bizarre notion that if we just channel enough money to rich folks they’re going to come down here to Athens, or Meigs or Vinton County, and invest money in jobs down here in Appalachia,” says Frech. “It’s been proven untrue year after year after year—and yet both parties keep selling it to us anyway.”

As a result, Frech’s department has been forced to cut services at precisely the time when the need is greatest. For example, a dental program that helped 150 clients per month was eliminated; a program helping 690 clients study and work at community college was cut to 500, and slots continue to decline…money to help people with fuel and automobile repairs so they could fulfill their TANF work requirement was also eliminated.

“If you’re living on $300 to $400 per month, you don’t have money to get your car fixed or pay for gasoline,” says Frech. “So these are people who literally have to take food out of their kids’ mouths in order to sweep the county garage and meet their work requirement. And that situation is going to get worse with the next round of budget cuts.” Frech says he listens in disbelief as politician after politician—from state legislators to President Obama—claim to be “protecting the most vulnerable people, especially children” but support budgets that make the lives of poor people and kids harder.

“Things are just so much harsher now, the way we treat poor people,” says Frech. “It makes you wonder—who is going to champion their cause? When you keep your eyes open to how much people are hurting out there, there’s a lot of nights I don’t sleep.”

I shudder at what’s happened to my home state. This is Ohio, but this could be anywhere.

Economists long ago tried to justify the vast inequalities that seemed so troubling in the mid-19th century—inequalities that are but a pale shadow of what we are seeing in America today. The justification they came up with was called “marginal-productivity theory.” In a nutshell, this theory associated higher incomes with higher productivity and a greater contribution to society. It is a theory that has always been cherished by the rich. Evidence for its validity, however, remains thin. The corporate executives who helped bring on the recession of the past three years—whose contribution to our society, and to their own companies, has been massively negative—went on to receive large bonuses. In some cases, companies were so embarrassed about calling such rewards “performance bonuses” that they felt compelled to change the name to “retention bonuses” (even if the only thing being retained was bad performance). Those who have contributed great positive innovations to our society, from the pioneers of genetic understanding to the pioneers of the Information Age, have received a pittance compared with those responsible for the financial innovations that brought our global economy to the brink of ruin.

A sobering look at inequality in the United States that raises a serious question: Where do we go from here?