The email sent will contain a link to this article, the article title, and an article excerpt (if available). For security reasons, your IP address will also be included in the sent email.
Thursday 27 October 2011
The general scorn for the Occupy Wall Street movement (OWS), now spread to hundreds of cities in the U.S., reveals a lot about Wall Street, the press, and the state of economics. I was invited to speak there early in their campaign and found the people eager to learn, courteous and hell-bent for justice, not revenge.
The scorn has subsided somewhat as the movement grows and has withstood the threat of police and Michael Bloomberg’s demand that they should clear out of the park they occupy because the owners of the park wanted to clean it. It is called Zuccotti Park because it is privately owned by the Zuccotti family with the proviso that it is made available to the public at all times. Now it has become available to all America, and arguably all the world.
The unions joined in and this week, OWS has yet another clear victory. President Obama will announce some kind of student loan relief plan [4]. He is also proposing a more aggressive mortgage refinancing [5] scheme for under-water homeowners. This too may be partly the result of OWS.
The attempt to minimize OWS, or at the least deride them, goes on, however. The press was initially very skeptical and is now more respectful. Still, they wonder what these (mostly) young people really want. The Right calls them a mob [6] so as to distinguish them, I suppose, from gun-toting Tea Partiers. The most reprehensible bit of demagoguery I saw was an ad on a major TV network posted by an international issues lobbying organization with shots of anti-Semitic signs. There are in fact almost no such signs at Zuccotti.
Return to Article