Occupy Wall Street Campaign- Is it the dawn of a new era?
"Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very Heaven!"
But to be young was very Heaven!"
These passionate outbursts of British poet William Wordsworth celebrating his jubilation at the unfolding French Revolution of 1789 in his masterpiece 'Prelude' have a parallel in the euphoria of hope and aspiration that the ongoing Occupy Wall Street campaign in the USA and West has generated all over, even among the curious people overseas, whosoever cherish to see a radical shift in the way they are governed. According to Wikipedia, by mid-October last the barely one month old Occupy movement could be echoed in about 900 cities around the world including Auckland, Sydney, Hong Kong, Taipei, Tokyo, São Paulo, Paris, Madrid, Berlin, Hamburg and Leipzig, where tens of thousands of demonstrators staged rallies demanding a systemic change in their respective countries similar to the one voiced by US Occupiers.
However, as irony would have it, the Occupy movement, which has survived, nay forged ahead in USA and beyond braving the thick and thin times that came on its way, professes no manifesto, no leader, no strategy nor any programme of action in conventional sense of the term. As for its credo its spaciously captioned website 'OccupyWallStret- The revolution continues worldwide!' (http://occupywallst.org) candidly proclaims, "Occupy Wall Street is leaderless resistance movement with people of many colours, genders and political persuasions. The one thing we all have in common is that We Are 99% that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1%". As for its strategy, it continues, "We are using the revolutionary Arab Spring tactic to achieve our ends and encourage the use of nonviolence to maximize the safety of all participants". And the day-to-day program of action its supporters are called upon to subscribe to runs as follows, "This OWS movement empowers real people to create real change from the bottom up. We want to see a genera assembly in every backyard, on every street corner because we don't need Wall Street and we don't need politicians to build a better society. The Only solution is 'world revolution'".
Of course, alongside of a little more than two-month old Occupy campaign runs another campaign across USA called Tea Party Movement, which commenced since early 2009. Styling itself after the famous Boston Tea Party of 16 December 1773, whose chief slogan was 'No taxation without representation', the current Tea Party campaign is pretty articulate over its cut-and-dried charter of demands- reduced government spending, opposition to taxation in varying degrees, reduction of the national debt and federal budget deficit and adherence to an originalist interpretation of the United States Constitution. Despite the broad resemblance of their ideological stance to that of the Republican Party, the Tea Party campaigners do also share a major plank in common with their Occupy counterparts i.e. no justification for Government bailout to the banks and corporations deluged in the global meltdown of 2008. On an empirical plane, there is however a striking difference between the two campaigns; while the nascent Occupy Wall-Street soon after its birth emerged to iconize a world-wide resentment against the unholy nexus of Corporate and Government, the 3-year old Tea Party campaign remains to this day a story of USA only. Given the global significance of the Occupy movement, every citizen of the world, wherever one might be placed, needs to weave out a position he or she ought to adopt in the face of its sweeping impact.
Though mainstream media agencies of USA predicted from the day one the inevitable doom of the Occupy movement for the spacious reason of its lack of any charter, leader or organization, multitudes of its self-inspired activists are however proud of the very amorphous and spontaneous genre which the movement presents. One of them blogged thus, in response to a cynic, ". . . Occupy Wall Street isn't a political movement, it's a conversation. It has always been intended as a catalyst to drive the conversation of income inequality. . . Even though you're not a part of the movement, the very fact that you come on these message boards and discuss the issue is a victory for OWS. You're actually supporting the movement even though you don't realize it". Explaining the irresistible appeal of the OWS, David Carr wrote in New York Times, 20 Nov 2011, "Occupy Wall Street is animated by a central, galvanizing idea- that the distribution of wealth is unfair. That struck a very live nerve, grabbing something that was in the air and turning it into simple math: 1 percent should not live at the expense of the other 99 percent".
A day before, to the charge of the OWS leaning towards dogmatic leftism, an anonymous OWS supporter responded on the campaign's website in an exemplary cool as if propounding a new theory of 'beyond any doctrine'. The response deserves to be quoted at length, "Occupy is not necessarily about Socialist, Communist and Marxists ideologies. It is not something that can be defined by a word or a theory. It is a movement, something that is taking place in each successive day. It is a group experience, which is new and evolving. What it stands up against is not America or capitalism, but rather it stands up against the aspect of human consciousness that perpetuates inequality, war, brutality, duality, and all other human actions that destroy not only human dignity, but the earth as well. The system we live under now is cancerous to the Earth and is only kept in place by big, big corporations and the lobbyists they hire in Washington. Yes, we have things 'better' here in this country, no doubt. Yet, a major reason, if not the biggest reason why other countries are not as prosperous as we are, is the "power nations" of this world [the US, England, etc.] that have employed tactics of economic imperialism throughout this world. One example of this is that "3rd World" countries cannot pay off the loans the big elitist owned banks lent them and thus cannot develop the way we did in America. These transnational banking arrangements, where countries like America loaned money to other developing countries in attempts to boast their infrastructure was analogous to the sub-prime loans that banks gave to home owners whom they knew could never pay them off, thus crashing their markets. This is not a country that is doing fowl things, or banks rather, but it is a sense of human consciousness that perpetuates greed and control. It is all about control. The problem is that the system is rigged. You cannot vote for anyone to make change because, those whom we vote for are backed by big corporate interest [i.e big oil, among others]. Like Albert Einstein said, you cannot find a solution to a problem with the same thinking that created the problem. There is no option left but to defy the current system, for the current system has safeguarded itself from any real fundamental change. . . . You really do not think about the giant stones that make up the pyramids in Egypt which were lifted solely by human hands. . , do you? Think outside the box. The occupy movement is about breaking the bounds of the "box thinking" to which the media conditions us to believe. The occupy movement stands up in the same way that the revolutionaries stood up for their own freedom when the colonists did away with British rule. The occupy movement is the most "American" thing to happen to America since the founding of this great country. Furthermore, and my last point... why do we need to be governed, cannot we not simply cooperate? Only when we get past the point of submitting our autonomy to an elitist controlled government can we really reclaim our dignity and say that we are free Americans again".
The OWS is not a cakewalk story either. Apart from barrage of calumnies being fanned out against the movement by the pro-corporate press, politicians and lobbyists, thousands of its supporters across United States have been subject to arrest and intimidation, baton charge and pepper spray with their belongings and valuables snatched away by the police. To cap it all, the privately owned Zuccotti Park, renamed as Liberty Square by the OWS, which became the venue of the protestors' encampment since 17th September last and also the epicenter of the ensuing worldwide campaign, was forcibly evicted by the New York City Police Department in the wee hours of 15th Nov and all the Occupiers kicked out at the gunpoint. But, soon afterwards, thousands of dauntless OWS activists staged a protest march condemning such brutal action orchestrated by New York's billionaire Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. Their placards carried a message of epochal significance- "You can't evict an idea whose time has come. We are the 99% and we are everywhere." As if turning a disadvantage into an advantage, the evicted OWS protestors in keeping with their determination to Occupy anywhere and everywhere, have ventured into a new ploy i.e. Occupying other squares, vacant public buildings, university campuses, subways and parks. Moreover, spurred on by the NYPD's eviction drive, Occupy Oakland, part of the OWS network, has called for the blockade and disruption of the economic apparatus with a coordinated shutdown of ports on the entire West Coast on December 12th.
In planning such strident moves, the OWS activists, as mentioned by a blogger, derive their rationale from the founding document Declaration of Independence of 4 July 1774 itself, which proclaimed inter alia the Right of the People to alter or to abolish any Form of Government that becomes destructive of inalienable rights of men such as Life, Liberty and Pursuit of Happiness.
(Chitta Behera, 4A Jubilee Tower, Choudhury Bazar, Cuttack-9, Orissa, India, Mobile-9437577546, Email- chittabehera1@yahoo.co.in, Date- 22nd November, 2011)
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