The Occupy Wall Street movement has been up and active for just over a month and its impact has been huge.
It has hit the headlines around the world and spawned similar occupations at multiple international venues.
This is despite the very vocal efforts of the right wing press to discredit OWS & 99ers as a bunch of hippy unemployed jealous miscreants who haven’t got a real message.
Well guess what. While those guys and girls in the pay of Fox News and the like don’t get the message and don’t like what they see, the mainstream mums and dads of the world are sure getting the message.
Why? - because the message is loud, clear and obvious.
The 99ers are putting forward two types of message. One addresses the specifics of what is totally flawed right now in our politic/economic setup. The other is a moral message, a message that looks at citizenship and society and what that should be rather than what we are told it should be by the Tea Party spruikers and their Fox “affiliates”.
The 99ers have had enough of a corrupt one-sided economic system that is delivering all the positives to the extremely rich and all the negatives the rest of us.
Basically, the 99ers are getting out the loud, clear message that capitalism is, in direct contradiction to four decades of trickle down propaganda, solely serving the needs of a very small minority of the super rich.
Politicians of both the right and left are not happy about this and the reason is the other message that the 99ers are getting out loud and clear. This message is that corporate capitalism has captured all the political elites to serve its needs and, for the common people, politics has become dysfunctional.
The traditional political process is fundamentally broken. It is under the control of the financial elites and is thoroughly corrupted. The 99ers are making it patently clear that our representatives don't serve us; they serve the people who pay them -- their corporate funders. The 99ers are beginning to focus on ways of taking the reins of democracy out of the hands of the corporate elites and putting them back in the hands of the people. This is scary stuff for the Wall Street elites.
The efforts of the right wing pundits to convince us that all we need to do is have more deregulation, more benefits and tax cuts for the “wealth creators” and more austerity for the rest of the population is falling on deaf ears.
Bringing out police forces to suppress the 99ers isn’t working. Every heavy handed suppression of the free speech and gatherings by New York’s finest for example only serves to energize the 99ers and discredit the nay sayers of both the left and right.
Also the 99ers are side stepping all the usual political avenues and organizing and educating using an inclusive, cooperative and communal approach. Again, your standard run of the mill politician shudders at the thought that they might become irrelevant if this approach is more widely adopted. It strikes at the heart of their power base and makes the 99ers less likely to be co-opted by either left or right wing politics.
So far I have focused on how the OWS’s message relates to the specific operation of money in politics. The other more general underlying message relates to the re-awakening of social consciousness in individuals that has been crippled under capitalism.
OWS is putting forward an alternative world-view that starts with citizens caring about one another and acting responsibly. This is a direct counter to the selfish, individualistic conservative world-view propagated by the ranks of the Tea Party and their mouthpieces.
To effectively carry forward both messages OWS needs to remain positive and eschew excessive vilification and revenge attacks on the corporate greedy. If it continues to frame messages positively it will continue to have a significant impact, avoid being co-opted and go on to contribute to a better future for all, even the wealthy.