The movement that started from Spain has reached New York, London, Rome, Brussels, Frankfurt, Tokyo, Seoul and all other parts of the world. It has emerged as Occupy Wall Street movement which has shaken the financial capitals of the world. Spain’s Indignados movement was catapulted by mostly young people, who began protesting in May over high unemployment and what they perceive as inequality in society. Occupy Wall Street defines itself as a “leaderless resistance movement with people of many colours, genders and political persuasions.
The one thing we all have in common is that We Are The 99 per cent that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the one per cent.” The protestors have rallied against a number of other issues including unemployment, economic inequality, college tuition rates, police brutality and health care. The opinion polls found that 79 per cent of Americans agree that the middle class was left behind when the big banks were bailed out during the economic meltdown of 2008. The corporate culture termed by the protestors as corporate greed has been juxtaposed next to Arab authoritarianism that has been shaken up. American analyst Lionel Beehner wrote, “These protests also resemble one another in that they are leaderless movements that largely eschew violence, pushing for change. Such subtle expressions of defiance have defined protest behavior for centuries”.
James Scott of Yale University coined the term “weapons of the weak” to describe the forms of resistance popular for centuries among Third World peasants.Every participant has his own story ending on a common note to end inequality. “I am earning less than I was 10 years ago and it’s no fault of mine,” said an angry man who gagged his mouth with a Dollar bill to record his dissent. “Corporate CEOs make more than 400 times what I make and it’s eating our economy … If you don’t make a noise, nothing gets done”, he said. “There has to be some accountability. We’ve been too complacent for too long,” he resented. In London, protesters – including WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange – took part in Occupy London Stock Exchange. “This movement is not about the destruction of law, but the construction of law,” Assange said, according to the Guardian newspaper website, deriding what he called a greedy and corrupt system. The remarks by another demonstrator give an insight into the depth of the problem.”Why are we paying for a crisis the banks caused?” asked Laura Taylor, a supporter of Occupy London Stock Exchange.
“More than a million people have lost their jobs and tens of thousands of homes have been repossessed, while small businesses are struggling to survive.” The poor of the rich countries might have a slight edge over their brethren in the poor countries but the ultimate impact of poverty is the same. It’s a story of the rich getting richer, beyond any and all imagination; while the middle class gets driven into poverty, and the poor into destitution. Daniel Tilson commented on the movement in the following paragraph, “it’s not solely or specifically about blaming Wall Street for the nation’s economic crisis – even though years of unchecked greed and recklessness by the nation’s leading financial firms were central factors in causing the 2008 collapse. It’s about Wall Street as a symbol, a symbol of how impoverished, working, and middle class people – from the right, left, center and could care less positions of the political spectrum – have been equally squeezed and shafted by corporate misbehavior and manipulation for too many years now, at too great a cost”. While it’s still too early for a full demographic map of Occupy Wall Street protesters, the group appears to be more diverse in terms of race, education and socioeconomic status. For now, the protesters appear to be skewing on the younger side, but that is likely to change as they become more organised. It is evident that American income distribution is more unequal than at any time since the 1920s, and for the first time in American history, masses believe that their children will be worse off than they are. The changes in American national scenes are difficult to be ignored by other countries in general and Pakistan in particular.
Wall Street trembling before ‘weapons of the weak’
