This is the Occupy Wall Street encampment on its 26th day. The usually sensible Mayor Bloomberg has announced his intentions to perform a wholly unnecessary removal of the “creature comforts” of these peaceful protestors–sleeping bags, tarps, etc.–in what is obviously an effort to break up the protest and cause the participants to lose “unit cohesiveness” as they say in the military. It’s a shame: speaking from the fringe, these disaffected Americans have begun to change the terms of the debate. What is Bloomberg’s problem? Is his twitchy inner bourgois businessman taking control of his usually more sophisticated cool? Or is he, at last, revealed as tool of the money regime?
Writing on CNN.com, Douglas Rushkoff has offered a most incisive observation. “We are witnessing America’s first true Internet-era movement, which — unlike civil rights protests, labor marches, or even the Obama campaign — does not take its cue from a charismatic leader, express itself in bumper-sticker-length goals and understand itself as having a particular endpoint. Yes, there are a wide array of complaints, demands, and goals from the Wall Street protesters: the collapsing environment, labor standards, housing policy, government corruption, World Bank lending practices, unemployment, increasing wealth disparity and so on. Different people have been affected by different aspects of the same system — and they believe they are symptoms of the same core problem. . . .Anyone who says he has no idea what these folks are protesting is not being truthful. Whether we agree with them or not, we all know what they are upset about, and we all know that there are investment bankers working on Wall Street getting richer while things for most of the rest of us are getting tougher.”
In The New Yorker, Rick Hertzberg feels a stirring: “[The protestors’] implicit grievances are plain enough: the mass pain of mass unemployment, underemployment, and economic insecurity; the corrupting, pervasive political influence of big money; the outrageous, rapidly growing inequality of wealth and income; the impunity of the financial-industry scammers whose greed and fraud precipitated the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression; a broken political system hobbled by a Republican right willing and usually able to block any measures, however timid and partial, that might relieve the suffering. If Occupy Wall Street can continue to behave with nonviolent restraint, if it can avoid hijack by a flaky fringe, if it can shake the center-left out of its funk, if it can embolden Democratic politicians (very much including President Obama, who, lately and belatedly, has begun to show signs of fight), then preoccupied Main Street will truly owe OWES. Big ifs all. It’s too early to tell, but not too late to hope.” (Below, Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine (at far right, in a cap, with a guitar), leads the crowd in chanting: “I know in my heart, all hell can’t stop us now.”)
