The Occupy Movement and the First Amendment: A Quandary

One of the most interesting political developments of the past decade has been the emergence of the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement. OWS is a movement against the concentration of power and wealth in American society. Its chief target is the “One-Percenters,” a group of wealthy individuals and banking organizations depicted as having created a financial crisis and then profiting from the economic downturn through government bailouts. In addition, “One Percenters” are viewed by Occupiers as being instrumental in outsourcing jobs abroad thus hurting people “who work hard and play by the rules,” especially those who hold blue-collar jobs. Among the latter were people who retired from a company or were on disability but who lost their company-funded pensions when the company filed for bankruptcy. Ofer views OWS as a movement “bringing a much-needed voice to the victims of a decades-long march toward policies that benefit the rich over everyone else.” Like Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) during the 1960s, OWS has no concrete demands and no leaders. Their concern is with the growing inequality that they believe harms 99 percent of the American public. As with SDS, what seems to unite the OWS movement is an anti-elitist, anti-establishment attitude, and its bottom-up approach to creating a new society. Said Occupier activist Ashley Hanisko, “We are fighting this idea that you are expendable if you are not wealthy. And if you are not wealthy, it’s through some fault of your own.” The belief that Wall Street has been too influential and is harming the national interest is one of the underlying tenets of the OWS movement. As former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich observed, the core message of the Occupiers is “that the increasing concentration of wealth in society poses a great danger to our democracy.” Even President Obama praised the concerns raised by the OWS movement: “The protesters are giving voice to a more broad-based frustration with how our finance sector works . . . The American people understand that not everybody’s been following the rules.”