News / International
'Arab spring' hits Wall Street
07 Oct 2011 at 04:42hrs | Views
THE police clampdown on peaceful protesters who have occupied the US financial centre, Wall Street, in what has come to be known as ''The Occupy Wall Street protest'', exposes the double standards of the western world. If this was happening in any target country, we would have ranting from the Hillary Clintons of this world; pontificating from the Susan Rices and paper-shuffling at the United Nations. It so happens that this time, no one dares bell the cat.
The protest, now in its third week, has struck a powerful chord throughout the developing world, with similar occupations developing in Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles and other cities and towns across the country,
Americans can at least get to feel what billions of people feel about Uncle Sam's exploitative economic policies.
As Bill Van Auken writes for World Socialist Website, the demonstrators and their demand for social equality have given expression to the growing hostility of millions towards capitalism, the banks and the corporations, and the burning need for jobs, decent living standards and a guarantee of health care, education and other basic social necessities.
This was captured on Tuesday in an article by New York Times financial columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin, who quoted a Wall Street CEO worried about his "personal safety" and warned that the protest constituted "a warning shot about the kind of civil unrest that may emerge-as we've seen in some European countries-if our economy continues to struggle."
It is not the bankers who have to fear for their personal safety, but the demonstrators, who have been subjected repeatedly to police brutality and mass arrests for exercising their free speech rights.
Nonetheless, Sorkin's warning about civil unrest is entirely justified. These are among the first prominent social protests in the United States in more than 30 years. Most of those involved in the occupations have never seen significant struggles for social change in their lifetimes. Coming on the heels of the mass demonstrations in Wisconsin last February, they signal the re-emergence of open class struggle in the United States, the centre of world capitalism.
Such struggles do not arise by accident.
They are driven by the powerful contradictions of a world capitalist system which, three years after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, has produced catastrophic unemployment levels and deepening poverty for millions, while those at the top continue to pile up obscene levels of wealth.
What has kept such struggles bottled up for so long in the US? Since the late 1970s, there has been an ongoing and ever accelerating transfer of social wealth from the masses of working people to a financial oligarchy, the top 1 percent.
Working class resistance to this process, from the 1981 PATCO strike on, was systematically betrayed by the unions, which have integrated themselves ever more closely into the corporations, the government and the Democratic Party.
The results are plain to see, nowhere more starkly than in New York City. There, 50 percent of total income goes to the top 1 percent, some 34 500 households with an average annual income of $3.7 million. This gilded layer rakes in more in a single day than the poorest million people in the city earn in an entire year.
The struggle against social inequality and the capitalist system in which it is rooted is above all a political struggle.
How could it be otherwise when the issues at stake are the distribution of wealth and power in society? Those in the Occupy Wall Street protest who want to carry it forward face sharp political challenges and decisions.
As this movement develops, it faces the danger, as so often happens with every form of protest in America, of being channelled into the grip of the Democratic Party. Such was the case with the antiwar demonstrations that began under the Bush administration, became regulated according to the electoral calendar and were finally wound up once Obama entered the White House, where he has continued and expanded Bush's wars.
In its news coverage of the anti-Wall Street protests, the New York Times quotes Georgetown University professor Michael Kazin, who states, "Rants based on discontents are the first stage of any movement."
The article goes on to quote Kazin as saying that the requirement for the protest to turn into a "lasting movement" is for "newly unleashed passions to be channelled into institutions and shaped into political goals."
There is no doubt that the "institutions" he has in mind are those affiliated to the Democratic Party and the political establishment.
To that same end, there has been a pilgrimage to the Wall Street protest by an increasingly unlikely group of supporters, including former World Bank Vice President Joseph Stiglitz, who assured protesters that the problem wasn't capitalism but a "distorted economy."
The protest, now in its third week, has struck a powerful chord throughout the developing world, with similar occupations developing in Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles and other cities and towns across the country,
Americans can at least get to feel what billions of people feel about Uncle Sam's exploitative economic policies.
As Bill Van Auken writes for World Socialist Website, the demonstrators and their demand for social equality have given expression to the growing hostility of millions towards capitalism, the banks and the corporations, and the burning need for jobs, decent living standards and a guarantee of health care, education and other basic social necessities.
This was captured on Tuesday in an article by New York Times financial columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin, who quoted a Wall Street CEO worried about his "personal safety" and warned that the protest constituted "a warning shot about the kind of civil unrest that may emerge-as we've seen in some European countries-if our economy continues to struggle."
It is not the bankers who have to fear for their personal safety, but the demonstrators, who have been subjected repeatedly to police brutality and mass arrests for exercising their free speech rights.
Nonetheless, Sorkin's warning about civil unrest is entirely justified. These are among the first prominent social protests in the United States in more than 30 years. Most of those involved in the occupations have never seen significant struggles for social change in their lifetimes. Coming on the heels of the mass demonstrations in Wisconsin last February, they signal the re-emergence of open class struggle in the United States, the centre of world capitalism.
Such struggles do not arise by accident.
They are driven by the powerful contradictions of a world capitalist system which, three years after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, has produced catastrophic unemployment levels and deepening poverty for millions, while those at the top continue to pile up obscene levels of wealth.
What has kept such struggles bottled up for so long in the US? Since the late 1970s, there has been an ongoing and ever accelerating transfer of social wealth from the masses of working people to a financial oligarchy, the top 1 percent.
Working class resistance to this process, from the 1981 PATCO strike on, was systematically betrayed by the unions, which have integrated themselves ever more closely into the corporations, the government and the Democratic Party.
The results are plain to see, nowhere more starkly than in New York City. There, 50 percent of total income goes to the top 1 percent, some 34 500 households with an average annual income of $3.7 million. This gilded layer rakes in more in a single day than the poorest million people in the city earn in an entire year.
The struggle against social inequality and the capitalist system in which it is rooted is above all a political struggle.
How could it be otherwise when the issues at stake are the distribution of wealth and power in society? Those in the Occupy Wall Street protest who want to carry it forward face sharp political challenges and decisions.
As this movement develops, it faces the danger, as so often happens with every form of protest in America, of being channelled into the grip of the Democratic Party. Such was the case with the antiwar demonstrations that began under the Bush administration, became regulated according to the electoral calendar and were finally wound up once Obama entered the White House, where he has continued and expanded Bush's wars.
In its news coverage of the anti-Wall Street protests, the New York Times quotes Georgetown University professor Michael Kazin, who states, "Rants based on discontents are the first stage of any movement."
The article goes on to quote Kazin as saying that the requirement for the protest to turn into a "lasting movement" is for "newly unleashed passions to be channelled into institutions and shaped into political goals."
There is no doubt that the "institutions" he has in mind are those affiliated to the Democratic Party and the political establishment.
To that same end, there has been a pilgrimage to the Wall Street protest by an increasingly unlikely group of supporters, including former World Bank Vice President Joseph Stiglitz, who assured protesters that the problem wasn't capitalism but a "distorted economy."
Source - -
