Can we challenge capitalism and prevail, considering that the top one percent control 50% of the available capital and the top five percent some 70% of the nation’s private funds?  Richard Wolff is a closely followed Truthout contributor on economics.  Currently, you can obtain his just-released “Occupy the Economy: Challenging Capitalism” directly from Truthout.  If you want to know about alternatives to the current destructive course of our economy and how we, as a nation, got to this point, get your copy of “Occupy the Economy” by clicking here.

The following is an interview with Richard Wolff by Truthout staff member Matt Renner.

Matt Renner: In your introduction to the book, you discuss New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s “cleanliness” excuse for clearing the original Occupy Wall Street encampment at Liberty Square. Why do you think so many public officials and right-wing pundits describe the occupiers as “unclean”?

Richard D. Wolff: Their problem has been, and continues to be, that they have no response to Occupy’s basic attack on the inequity and antidemocratic social conditions summarized in the confrontation of, “1 percent against 99 percent.” They know that the vast majority of Americans feel the truth of Occupy’s social criticism, experience it in their lives, and sympathize with protest against and efforts to change a system with such unjust outcomes. So, they can refute little and need instead to distract public opinion from what Occupy focuses on.

One way to do that is to assert the existence of and then condemn some other quality or dimension of Occupy. In Bloomberg’s pathetic example, the best he and his advisers could come up with was a reference to Zuccotti Park as being “unclean” so as to then position the mayor and the police as militant janitors. Everyone who knows even a little about New York City knows that the mayor and the police preside over many filthy subway tunnels, highways, streets, empty lots and abandoned buildings without doing anything to clean them. So, suddenly asserting the importance of cleanliness simply exposed them to the ridicule such a position deserved. I suspect something similar is underway when others, perhaps taking their cue from Bloomberg in New York, decided to follow the cleanliness ploy.

Continue reading . . .