Protest may be first sign of history repeating itself
A young woman holds up a hand lettered sign that reads: If they enforced bank regulation like they do park rules we wouldn’t be in this mess in the first place! #OWS
The sign, and tens of thousands like it spread by social media and the internet, have become a vast digital billboard spreading the message for the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement. Those messages have been as varied as the OWSers themselves.
The OWS movement has been criticized, and to some extent dismissed, for not having a single voice and clear demands. Neither absence should come as a surprise.
The movement began spontaneously in New York’s Zuccotti Park on September 17 and is not yet (as of this writing) three months old.
Anyone willing to look beyond the lack of a formal manifesto and list of demands will see that OWS itself is the message. OWS instantly became a lightning rod for hundreds of thousands of people: homeless, working poor, chronically unemployed and underemployed, debt-ridden, students, foreclosed on, fed-up, angry and united by the deep-down certainty that something was dramatically amiss.
The movement quickly spread to other locations revealing a surprising scope of disenchantment. The OWS message began to appear on crudely lettered signs. The signs became the message. (The medium is the message.)
The power of the message stemmed from the fact that the signs were not slick pre-printed propaganda; they were personal accounts of social and economic failure.
OWS has become the antithesis of the American Tea Party. The conservative Tea Party has been gaining steam for the past couple of years based on the premise that big government is the root cause of America’s economic and social ills. The discontent that condensed into OWS in Zuccotti Park is rooted in economic inequity and global corporatism.
In the U.S. (and Canada), the wealthiest one per cent of the population own 30 per cent of the wealth. Freed by deregulation, financial institutions embarked on a binge of greed and fraud that nearly collapsed the global economy in 2008.
Just when it looked like the whole Wall Street Ponzi scheme was going to come crashing down, the heavily lobbied U.S. Congress shoveled out trillions of dollars to keep the guilty parties afloat and inadvertently created no-fault capitalism.
Wall Street celebrated by patting itself on the back and stuffing its pockets with bonuses for being so clever. This bit of nastiness has yet to run its course. The economies of several European nations are unravelling and the European Union itself is in danger of falling apart. Economies in the U.S. and Canada are “fragile,” unemployment rates are climbing and the middle class is on a slippery slope and losing ground.
The scope of the anger and discontent that is fuelling OWS seemed to catch politicians off guard. Initially, the media treated it as a flash-in-the-pan and devoted scant attention to it but, as they say on the web, it went viral and soon had everyone’s attention.
There were hints of the possibility in Wisconsin last spring when 100,000 people protested the state’s Budget Repair Bill, at one point occupying the state legislature.
One person who recognized the widespread anger and frustration decided to light a match. On July 13, 2011, KalleLasn, the editor and co-founder of the Vancouver based anti-consumerism magazine Adbusters created the twitter hash tag #OCCUPYWALLSTREET and a poster that showed a ballerina dancing on the back of the famous bull sculpture in Manhattan. The poster asked a single question: WHAT IS OUR ONE DEMAND? At the bottom was the twitter hash tag and simple instructions: #OCCUPYWALLSTREET SEPTEMBER 17TH BRING TENT.
OWS has yet to answer the question and make its one demand. Hardly surprising when you consider how many cars are off the rails. Whole platoons of politicians and bureaucrats have been attempting to put things back on track for the past three years with little success.
No solutions seem likely to emerge from the miasma of corporate intransigence and political constipation swirling around the bowl in Europe and the U.S.
It’s not as if there haven’t been proposals. Thomas L. Friedman, writing in the October 29 edition of the New York Times, suggests four immediate courses of action:
1. if a bank is too big to fail, it needs to be broken up.
2. If your bank’s deposits are federally insured by U.S. taxpayers, you can’t do any proprietary trading with those deposits. Period.
3. Derivatives have to be traded on transparent exchanges.
4. (My favorite!) U.S. congressmen will have to dress like Nascar drivers and wear the logos of all the banks, investment banks, insurance companies and real estate firms that they’re taking money from.
Most of the news coverage about OWSers lately has been devoted to their eviction from various civic properties but I doubt they will simply fade away. One group in California is occupying the house of a woman with cerebral palsy who is facing eviction.
They have found a voice and strength in numbers. I doubt that injunctions forbidding them from camping in parks will satisfy them.
The last time the wealthiest one per cent of the population had its mitts on 30 per cent of the wealth was in 1929. Everyone knows how that turned out. It’s hard to bear the hangover when you weren’t even asked to the party.
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