These are not the French student protests of the sixties nor Tiananmen Square nor the Arab Spring. Occupy Wall Street if far too inchoate to make a lasting impact. I visited their website to see if they have an agenda that could capture the imagination of the public. I was disappointed. Another rant against capitalism is unlikely to make much of an impression. Or even talk of growing inequalities in the US and elsewhere. Martin Wolf, writing in the FT, says the protests have a message, that something is wrong with today's capitalist system, but fails to articulate any alternatives or solutions.
Occupy Wall Street needs a focus. It must focus on what it professes to be about, which is the problems posed by today's banks and the enormous influence they wield on public policy. The whole movement could gather momentum and amount to something if it focused on one item: the break-up of large banks in the US.
More in my ET column, Occupy Wall Street lacks focus.
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6 comments:
If they really are the 99%, then all political parties would be making a beeline to woo them. But that's not happening. What would that imply?
@Ankur: Because in the U.S., corporations have massive influence on both the legislative and executive branch and the political class in general, among both parties, mostly through lobbying; increase in transperacy of corporate functioning and curbing of corporate-politician nexus is against the interests of almost all mainstream political entities. Since there are only two significant parties it is basically a 'political duopoly' where politicians on both sides benefit by imitating each other; they can both try to control corporate corruption or they can both continue to take bribes and face no electoral loss because on voting day all those who come to vote won't be able to differentiate between these two parties on the basis of this issue.
Also, this article sheds light on some important aspects of this issue: http://politics.salon.com/2011/09/28/protests_21/singleton/
@PKBang, what you are saying suggests an even deeper problem exists in the US than merely the misdeeds of Wall Street: the US democracy is scammed and rigged. But then if it is so, and it has been so for a long time, then why haven't there been any serious protests against this? In fact the ground reality seems quite the opposite. The US and its people are always pontificating about the greatness of their democracy.
While I agree that without a coherent agenda, there is no real change possible - the fact remains that there is some real dissatisfaction that exists, and which needs to be addressed
Furthermore, what is pertinent is the scale of the operation that was mounted. This is not a development that can be, or should be, ignored. That would be myopic approach. It does not take time for a directionless protest to metamorphose into something entirely different in character.
While I agree that without a coherent agenda, there is no real change possible - the fact remains that there is some real dissatisfaction that exists, and which needs to be addressed
Furthermore, what is pertinent is the scale of the operation that was mounted. This is not a development that can be, or should be, ignored. That would be a myopic approach. It does not take time for a directionless protest to metamorphose into something entirely different in character.
@Ankur Kulkarni: The celebration of the greatness of U.S. democracy is usually done by politicians themselves, deciding whether or not this sentiment was prevalent among the general people is extremely difficult, because there are few windows that present an unbiased view((it is common knowledge that the mainstream media, in any country, hardly cared about seriously questioning the foundation of the status quo)) and even if it was I don't think it is an inidcator of the real quality of their democracy as uncritical adherence to tradition can easily prevail among common people.
Instead we should look at the functioning of their democracy directly ((rather than at opinons about it)): http://www.opensecrets.org/pres08/contrib.php?cid=N00009638
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1108/15283.html
http://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/
These are mere examples, however it should be obvious that when politicians are free to take bribes((and they do so too, almost every Senator and Congressmen recieves "donations" during election campaign and "consulting fees" from lobbyist who want him/her to take a particular stand on some issue once he is in office)) and are surrounded by the most powerful corporations in the world who have direct intersts in influencing governance and legislature then the political system is bound to be dysfunctional.
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