To the Editor:

Your editorial “Protesting the Right Cause” (5 October 2011) made several misleading claims about the nature, scope, and purpose of the #OccupyWallStreet movement.

In the first place, the idea that the protesters have overreacted to the police is beyond absurd.

If anyone is guilty of overreacting, it is the NYPD.

From the indiscriminate use of pepper spray against peaceful demonstrators to the unlawful kettling of 700 marchers on Brooklyn Bridge, the police have repeatedly employed brutal and heavy-handed tactics without justification.

The protesters have every right to be outraged.

In the second place, it simply isn’t true that the movement lacks a coherent set of demands, as you yourself intimate at the beginning of the editorial.

At the highest level of generality, #OccupyWallStreet is opposed to the corrupt, immoral, rapacious corporatocracy which has raped, robbed, and pillaged 99% of Americans for the benefit of the top 1%.

It demands an end to widespread unemployment and gross inequalities in income and wealth; it demands that our tax dollars be spent on public goods–education, environmental protection, and affordable health care for all–rather than on pointless and illegal wars, corporate welfare, and bank bailouts.

It demands systematic campaign finance reform to wrest our political system from corporate control.

Most importantly, #OccupyWallStreet is about demonstrating to the country and the world that power belongs to the 99%–the ordinary people, the teachers and laborers and nurses against whom the wealthiest 1% have been waging class warfare for the past 30 years.

The point is to show what real democracy looks like, to make our voices heard, to “be the change we want to see in the world,” rather than waiting around for the ruling class and its political lapdogs in the Democrat and Republican parties to fix our problems for us.

Nathan Jun

Assistant Professor of Philosophy