At the outset of the Occupy Wall Street movement, big media outlets ignored the colourful scene in New Yorks financial district. The first tremors of interest came more than a week into the protests, after a New York Police Department officer pepper-sprayed young women who were peacefully demonstrating. If it bleeds it leads, as they say.
As the crowds at Occupy Wall Street grew into the thousands, media outlets were struck by a mass outbreak of confusion. What do these people want? What are they protesting? Know one seems to know. On both sides of the border, pundits repeated this special needs refrain, while accusing the OWS demonstrators of being unfocused.
Heres a clue. These peopleyoung and old, male and female, black and white, blue collar and white collarare occupying Wall Street. They are protesting the fact that there has not been a single indictment or conviction for the criminal activity responsible for the 2007 banking collapse, which wiped out 20 per cent of the U.S. national net worth and set off millions of home foreclosures, job losses and business failures. They are protesting the domination of the White House by a ruthless financial sector, which has engineered the largest upward transfer of wealth in U.S. history through finely-tuned disaster capitalism. Thats why demonstrators are camped out near Wall Street, and not on Pennsylvania Avenue.
Heres another factor that old media commentators dont seem to understand, a half century after Marshall McLuhan. The medium is the message: the occupation of the ground zero of high finance is the entire point. It is the citizens visible, non-virtual rejection of political and financial corruption, in solidarity with others.
OWS is not a paid group aimed at re-electing Obama. Neither is it a disorganized mob with a fuzzy grievance against the Man, although it is laterally organized without an easily decapitated leadership. In fact, the demonstrators are following time-tested organizational principles, drawing from French situationists, Spanish indignados, and Tahrir Square activists. Online videos from Zucotti Park indicate how far they have come since the first General Assembly. There is a food preparation area, a medic station, a media camp, and a peoples library. Sympathetic supporters are bringing in food and other supplies. Visitors in passing tour buses cheer out encouragement to the OWS crowd.
Although Zucotti Parks power is more about future promise than present effect, it could be said it is supplying a very rough sketch for an alternative civil societysomething that might come in handy in a post-collapse economy. The trick now is for the movement to resist being co-opted by establishment organizations, political operatives, and moneyed benefactors, while rejecting possible incitements to violence from agent provocateurs.
Only a month ago, it would have seemed impossible that this movement would spark solidarity protests across the U.S., spread to 1,000 cities around the world in a global Oct. 15 day of action, and boomerang back to Vancouver, its original point of inspiration. But why protest here, of all places? Werent our banks more solvent, more responsible, that those in the U.S.? Thats true, if you ignore our own adventures in irresponsible home mortgages. In any case, our nation is hardly exempt from policy directives from Washington and Wall Street. With the harmonization of the U.S. and Canada, we find ourselves starting to resemble our neighbour politically, economically and culturally. The gap between rich and poor in Canada is rising faster than in the U.S, according to a report this week from the Conference Board of Canada
Foreigners have a better handle on this sort of thing than us. For decades, the IMF and World Bank have presided over the restructuring of indebted nations through the so-called Washington Consensus, a euphemism for high-level loan sharking (ask the Greeks). The big banking debt game, and the struggle against it, is now global.
In democratic nations of the industrialized west, politicians are shackled by big money lobbying, campaigning-as-governance, and personality cult journalism. Corrupt political systems reward the few at the expense of the many. When the options for democratic involvement are foreclosed, the people take to the streets, as they have in Athens, Madrid, Cairo and London; just as they are in cities across the U.S.
Starting tomorrow, many more will join in across the world, including Vancouver.
www.geoffolson.com
