Happy 2nd Birthday Occupy Wall Street!
"We're still out here fighting for economic justice. The bankers still have all the power," "They've bought our government and we need a people's movement to do that, and the movement is still here."
- protester Linnea Paton
Happy Second Birthday (9-17) to that rascally band of social engineers, “Occupy.” It was two years ago that the Occupy Wall Street movement semi-spontaneously and irreverently took to the streets of New York, ultimately occupying Zuccotti Park. Occupy began as a peaceful occupation of Wall Street to protest corporate influence on democracy… to address a growing disparity in wealth… and to shed light on the absence of legal repercussions behind the (then) recent global financial crisis. Occupy’s mission and primary goal, then and now, is to make the economic and political relations in all societies less vertically hierarchical and more flatly distributed… share the wealth.
The most valuable contribution that the Occupy movement made to our modern-mediated-world has been to focus attention on the obscene and growing disparities between the ultra-rich and “the rest of us.” Occupy introduced the world to the mimetically brilliant: “we are the 99%” …illustrating the rapidly increasing inequity between the 1% (the ultra-rich) and the 99% (everybody else). They achieved this in a very creative and media friendly way, using those greatest and time-honored tools of the social engineer: Humor & Wit.
The news media is now quick to report that Occupy has “fizzled out” and is no longer relevant. But don’t count Occupy out… for in the words of Victor Hugo: Nothing is so powerful as an idea whose time has come.
Activists Mark 2nd Anniversary of Occupy Wall Street
Activists gathered in New York on Tuesday to mark the second anniversary of Occupy Wall Street, the protest movement against economic inequality. Demonstrators marched near the New York Stock Exchange and the United Nations, highlighting a call for taxing Wall Street transactions (Robin Hood Tax) and directing the funds to public causes. Nellie Bailey of the United National Anti-War Coalition said the anniversary of Occupy is a time to look forward in the struggle for social change.
"And the most important lesson learned is we must continue to fight. We must intensify the fight. We must have more people in the streets. That’s the lesson and then we can (indulge) nostalgia all we want, as to who was there… you remember that day or whatever. But that’s not going to get it. If we want to bring about those fundamental changes as much of a revolutionary fashion as possible. If we move ahead with organizing… educating and hitting the streets… that’s the lessons… those are the lessons."
- Nellie Bailey
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