An Occupy Wall Street campaign demonstrator stands in Zuccotti Park, near Wall Street in New York Monday. ? Reuters LONDON, Oct 18 (Reuters): Seen from the River Thames, the dome of St Paul's has been a constant in the ever-shifting London skyline, untouched by two world wars and three centuries of social and political change.
Now the cathedral is becoming an unexpected focal point of debate over the future of capitalism.
Blocked from their original target - the stock exchange on the other side of Ludgate Hill - several hundred people have set up camp, promising to emulate their U.S. counterparts and stay for weeks, months, or even longer.
By Monday lunchtime, a handful of officers in fluorescent jackets were simply looking on as tourists, students, and office workers on lunch breaks wandered through the encampment, many stopping to debate with protesters what the right way might be, if any, to move forward after the financial crisis.
Many seemed surprisingly sympathetic.
"I came down for a sandwich and got carried away," said Tim Sanders, a chartered accountant working in the city, drawing a small crowd as he held forth in his navy suit on the need to restore balance and ethics to the financial system.
"You're seeing history right here, it's going to sweep the world. These failing institutions are in the pockets of an elite. It's morally corrupt. "
The protesters themselves appeared a disparate group, a range of veteran campaigners, leftists, environmentalists, students and job seekers. A large proportion said they were in employment and aiming to continue to work in between shifts at the encampment to stop it being cleared by police. Some protesters were recent graduates who had struggled to find jobs. Many of the initial organisers were foreign: German and Spanish in particular.
Like many other protest movements this year, they appear almost completely leaderless, initially co-ordinated via social media platforms, inspired by events overseas and now making decisions through long, consensus-based meetings on issues from sanitation to their wider agenda.
A church warden told the protesters the Corporation of London -- the local government body that represents London's financial district -- was putting the greatest pressure on police to end the occupation.
Late on Monday, a Corporation spokesman denied that was the case and said there were no plans to clear the demonstration "today or tomorrow". But he said the protesters were wrong to try to scapegoat the City of London.
The Church of England was at the forefront of the campaign to write off debt in the developing world. It is also one of Britain's largest landowners.
Exactly what that might mean in terms of policy demands was far from clear, but long term campaigners for greater regulation and accountability in the financial sector say they believe that with events on Wall Street and elsewhere, the global debate is finally beginning to turn their way.
John Christensen, former economic adviser to the government of Jersey and now head of the Tax Justice Network which works to close loopholes, said he had travelled to London to talk to the protesters about London's status as what he calls the "world's largest money launderer". "These protests are hugely symbolically important," he said.
For most of the protesters, however, the target for their outrage remained the bailout of major banks by taxpayers. Even some staff at financial institutions happily told reporters and activists they believed populations were getting a rough deal.
Meanwhile, a commentary by Will Marshall, President of the Progressive Policy Institute and available over the CBS News website adds: For liberals, who have watched the Tea Party's rise in the USA with a mixture of dread, incomprehension, and envy, the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protests seem Heaven-sent. Here at last are our ideological shock troops, come to put the undeserving rich in the dock and reclaim populism from government-bashing conservatives.
An abridged version of the commentary is being reproduced here:
An elated Paul Krugman cheers on the anti-Wall Street demonstrators for scaring the bejesus out of the plutocracy that supposedly runs America. Nevermind if the protesters are "inept, incoherent and hopelessly quixotic," Eugene Robinson tells us, what matters is that the people finally are rearing up to demand economic justice.
Such euphoria is best understood as a measure of how demoralized liberals have been by the popular reaction to the nation's worst economic crisis since the Depression. They figured Americans would blame Wall Street's near meltdown on greedy speculators and turn to government to keep rogue capitalists in check. The last thing they expected was a genuine grass roots uprising on the right, which leveled its pitchforks at "big government" more than malefactors of great wealth.
Liberals also were nonplussed by how quickly the diffuse and leaderless Tea Parties spread across the landscape, took over the Republican Party during the 2010 elections, and used their victories to wrest the political initiative from President Obama. Now they're hoping that the OWS protests will congeal into a progressive counterweight to the Tea Party that can stop the nation's rightward lurch.
Not likely. The protests don't seem to be swelling into a mass movement. And they're being hijacked by the usual congeries of lefty fringe groups, which are diluting the Occupiers' most compelling message--that America is increasingly a land of unequal opportunity where hard work and self-reliance are no longer rewarded. Most important, though, the counterweight theory itself is flawed.
In this political version of the laws of thermodynamics, right-wing extremism provokes an equal and opposite reaction on the left. The center is tugged back to the left, equilibrium is restored, and liberals can compete for votes in the persuadable middle on an equal footing with conservatives.
The nation's economic crisis--which is both structural and cyclical--has hit young Americans especially hard. As Progressive Policy Institute economist Michael Mandel has noted, college costs keep rising, but median wages for college graduates fell by 19 per cent over the past decade. It costs more to get a degree that earns you less -- if you can find a job. When OWS protesters complain that they've worked hard to get a good education, only to face bleak job prospects, they sound more like Bill Clinton than Noam Chomsky.
The Eurozone debt crisis also clouds their future, threatening a relapse into recession. And it's dawning on young Americans that they're getting stuck with the bill for our own government's failure to control its borrowing and spending. Thanks to that bipartisan dereliction of duty, young people face a Hobson's Choice between austerity now, or a rising tax burden in coming decades to pay for the baby boomers' escalating retirement costs.
Another website report adds: It all started innocuously enough with a July 13 blog post urging people to "Occupy Wall Street", as though such a thing (Twitter hashtag and all) were possible.
It turns out, with enough momentum and a keen sense of how to use social media, it actually is.
The Occupy movement, decentralized and leaderless, has mobilized thousands of people around the world almost exclusively via the Internet. To a large degree through Twitter, and also with platforms like Facebook and Meetup, crowds have connected and gathered.
Source: thedailystar.net
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