BEFORE the baton charge at Zuccotti Park, it was presumed that as soon as winter set about its serious business, a steep drop in temperature would see off the tented demos against the creed of greed.
But for a few hours last week the police crackdown on “Zucco” seemed a greater foe than New York’s weather. Not any more. The NYPD’s pre-dawn raid might have kicked Occupy Wall Street from its dingy sleeping bags _ emboldening authorities elsewhere to try the same – but those denouncing income inequality have no intention of being pushed to the margins. This is the rage of the sub prime homeless and the children of “the squeezed middle.” Main Street versus Wall Street. Why else have donations to the OWS fighting fund reached $500,000 so far?
It’s true that faster than you could fold a bed roll, anti-capitalist camps were trashed by municipal order in Portland, Oregan and Oakland, California. But Thursday’s march on Brooklyn Bridge proved this wasn’t just a youth uprising. In its ranks were activists who last raised banners against the Vietnam war. Meanwhile in London demonstrators rejected the eviction order to remove them from the precincts of St Paul’s, an act of defiance which will send them to the High Court on Wednesday. And in Glasgow Occupiers moved from a defunct putting green in Kelvingrove Park to the hi-vis prospect of Blythswood Square, setting up camp within shouting distance of a five star hotel.
Occupy Wall Street sprang into being in that nondescript downtown plaza on September 17. Within days its anger against a financial sector, which still prospers from the credit crash that has cost millions of people their life savings and jobs, had spread to 900 cities on four continents. Today activists may still assemble in Zuccotti, minus the ragbag paraphernalia of encampment. But that prohibition won’t weaken their resolve to “raise a ruckus and clog up the works” for the money princes around the corner.
This, of course, is where the Occupiers’ aims collide with the rights of increasingly-irritated local residents and traders, and why the battle, in the US and here, will now be even more intensely drawn between the freedom to protest and the rule of law. But this isn’t anarchy as we knew it. In fact the complaint from critics and sympathisers alike is that the movement lacks coherent policies – an omission which might actually account for the universality of its appeal. The Occupiers’ real achievement lies in shifting the debate from an exclusive concentration on plunging markets to one rooted in the moral imperative of economic justice for the mainstream. In which case “anti-capitalist” tags are too narrow a fit.
When I visited Zuccotti Park the other week, the gathering was eclectic: lawyers, war veterans, health workers, unemployed teachers and construction workers on a break from Ground Zero. Standing next to me was a young banker, Karanja Gacuca, sacked days earlier from Wall Street itself; on the other side, a stylish Manhattanite, Beth Bogart whose father was a first cousin of the fabled movie star. Nearby Lee Sennish, a retired psychotherapist aged 84, was distributing copies of a speech made by Franklin D Roosevelt in 1936. Railing against reckless speculators and financiers, the president accused them of regarding “the government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs”.
Seventy-five years later “We are the 99%” is the Occupiers’ incantation, a reference to the study by Joseph Stiglitz in which the Nobel Prize-winning economist maintains that the richest 1% in America controls 40% of its wealth. Statistics from the US Census Bureau reveal that 46.2million Americans now live below the poverty line, the highest figure recorded in the bureau’s 52-year history. So, the point of the Occupiers is that protest is the message. Protest against accelerating downward mobility which swells the numbers of the most vulnerable and may well lead to a jobless generation. And protest against the fact that no-one in government anywhere has bothered to heed this rage at the grassroots. Or listened to the echo of FDR.
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