Unless you have been pointedly inattentive lately you may have noticed the minor kerfuffle happening stateside on Wall Street. Initially given no attention at all by domestic media, and garnering more coverage from British institutions like The Guardian, it has since crossed the country and forced a response from political leaders of all stripes.
The Occupy Wall Street movement is difficult to summarise. But in an attempt to make this post neither completely redundant or vastly misinformed, we’ve assembled a potted tour of some of the stories surrounding the protests.
Firstly, a short article by John Cassidy in the New Yorker making some pretty decent sense out of the uncertain data that is available regarding the protests. For the tl;dr, he concludes: “Occupy Wall Street isn’t primarily an anti-Wall Street phenomenon. It is a generalized anti status-quo protest movement, for which Wall Street serves as the convenient focal point. In this sense, the Occupy Wall Street movement is a left-wing version of the Tea Party: an inchoate and self-generated movement, which emerged from outside of, and in opposition to, the ossified political system. Wall Street provided it with its raison d’etre, but it is rapidly moving beyond its origins.”
In that article Cassidy talks about a nationwide movement being the next logical step, and probably the second-largest protest is just up the road in Occupy Boston, where two hundred police officers in riot gear instructed protesters to leave or be arrested. Much of the incident was captured on film and uploaded to youtube, such as the video featured by the Gawker blog. The footage might be upsetting.
After Kanye West’s visit to the protest (wearing a much-ballyhooed Givenchy flannel shirt, gold chain and grill), there were some reasonable concerns about celebrity hijackings. Danny Glover, who is very clearly not too old for this stuff, made his feelings clear.
Perhaps unsurprisingly there is no shortage of the artistically-leaning in New York, one of whom, a filmmaker named Alex Mallis, made this awesome short depicting life on the ground in the middle of a massive peaceful protest.
What happens next? The movement has not only crossed the USA but has popped up on this side of the Atlantic as well. Even mild-mannered Ireland has produced its own version in Occupy Dame Street, the home of Ireland’s central bank. Considering the scale of the protesters’ goals, the rhetoric on the Occupy Wall Street site is refreshingly free of proselytising and preaching and is an well-maintained repository for relevant news stories and videos. If anyone knows, it will likely appear there first.
Have you been keeping up with #OccupyWallStreet? Share your thoughts in the comments.
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October 12, 2023
finance, web