In London, the target is the stock exchange, in Frankfurt it’s the European Central Bank, in other cities it may just be a place that symbolizes unchecked financial hubris. The Occupy movement has gone global.
It all started four weeks ago in New York when a small magazine came up with the Occupy Wall Street idea, inspired by the Arab Spring protests that toppled governments in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya. The start was somewhat obscure and it was unclear what the purpose was of trying to occupy the heart of the American financial system. The occupiers ended up in a park five blocks from City Hall in lower Manhattan, without a fixed set of demands or a common ideology. What united the many-colored crowd was the feeling that the Wall Street banks’ bailouts by the federal government in 2008 left banks enjoying huge profits while average Americans suffered under high unemployment and job insecurity with little help from Washington.
I must admit that when I first heard of it, I thought it would be over in a few days. It looked like a marginal event, staged by a small group of radical activists. Sympathetic maybe, but also vague and without any chance of mobilizing more than a couple of thousand local diehards. Or, as the Times from London put it, the protests were “passionate but pointless.”
We were all wrong. After two weeks the demonstrators were still there and their numbers grew. More specific demands were presented such as a tax on the richest 1 percent, a tax on currency trades and a tax on all financial transactions. The last proposal was echoed on the other side of the Atlantic when the European Commission came up with a similar plan. It signaled that the Wall Street occupiers were not totally out of touch with reality. Media from all over the world got interested and sympathizers in other American cities started their own occupations, crying out against the billions of dollars in bank bailouts but, more in general protesting against a system of economic relations that has lost its way and fails to serve the public. And, to the surprise of many skeptics, support is growing.
Time magazine’s latest national poll shows that in the US the Occupy movement has a 54 percent favorable rating. It turns out that some of the Occupy demands, like prosecuting ill-behaving Wall Streeters or raising taxes on wealthy people, are much more popular than expected. Last week, Nobel Prize-winning former US Vice President Al Gore wrote on his blog: “With democracy in crisis a true grassroots movement pointing out the flaws in our system is the first step in the right direction. Count me among those supporting and cheering on the Occupy Wall Street movement.” In four weeks time a small, shady group of activists has gone both global and respectable. Why?
It is not very easy to explain the attraction of the Occupy movement. There is still no common program and there are no leaders or identifiable structures. But there is Facebook, Twitter and YouTube for communication. More importantly, there is a widespread popular intuition that it is not normal for millions of people to be helpless and hopeless during an economic crisis while at the same time a small elite is getting richer every year, as is the case in the US. You don’t need to be a loony liberal or leftist to be outraged when you read, for instance, in the Guardian newspaper this week that nine out of 10 finance professionals in London expect to receive higher bonuses this year than last year while the banks they are working for were only recently rescued from collapse by the taxpayer.
Perhaps the Occupy movement will fade away after some time because its goals are beyond reach. More likely, it will be a wake-up call for political and business elites in Washington and other capitals around the world. The core message: The present system of unlimited corporate greed is unsustainable; we want you to change it and we don’t take no for an answer.
