I know this sounds like an extremely stupid question, but every time I see an article about occupy wall street,\ or something similar, the assumption is that you (the reader) already know what is being referred to by “occupy”.
Can anyone shed light on this?
Thank you.
Thank you. This is a good start. (I don’t know why I didn’t look on wiki first…:smack: )
To use Wall Street for an example, the idea is to get a bunch of like minded people and go sit or clog up wall street until some demands are met?
Has this been successful? who decides what the demands are? And are these folks all organized on the meetup.com site?
Man, I’m behind the times.
If they had any cogent demands, that would be the idea.
It’s been successful at grabbing some attention and annoying lots of people.
Everybody. Nobody. There are no leaders because that would be, like, oppressive, man.
There are probably some there. As far as I know they do most of their organizing via social media.
There are no specific demands. It’s mainly a way to show frustration, and a way to call attention to the issue of economic injustice in this country. It’s been moderately successful in that goal, since people are talking about the movement and the underlying issue.
It’s also somewhat confused by the others on the left who have tried to piggy-back on the publicity and general theme.
It’s been further complicated by media folks like Time Magazine who have tried to boost it to Tea Party and Arab Spring levels.
The point of the Occupy movement is simply to draw attention to problems with class inequality. It’s there to get a dialog started, and force visibility.
On the ground, there’s heirarchies and committees and hand signals and whatnot, but that’s really all tertiary. It’s something for protestors to do to feel like they’re doing something other than standing around.
But what they’re really doing is standing around. There may be some value in that.
I’m having a hard time understanding just what good this movement will have. Will class inequality change because of squatters or protesters?
Many things have changed because of protesters, over the years. I think anyone can think of some with little effort.
Actually what the Occupy movement is about is the unprecedented wealth inequality of the present day. Although there are certainly those who have a classic Left view of what should happen, the majority seem to just want a job, want to be able to go to school without a crushing amount of debt at the end (and no job), to be able to afford health care, and other things which the middle class took for granted as available to those willing to apply themselves, back when I was the same age. Although, not all of the folks involved are young, by a long shot.
The Occupy movement arose out of the above frustrations and also the continued lack of progress in solving the above problems “legitimately” through the political process.
Can’t remember where I read this, but it was a comment more or less saying that the most effective way to create a protest movement was to create a class of educated young people who feel they have no future.
Myself, I believe that the Occupy movement has to make better common cause with other groups within the “99%” – the people of color who have been far more affected by the economic malaise than others, labor unions, retired people whose safety nets are evaporating – and figure out a way to make political change happen for them all. It won’t be easy.
In the 1960’s people would occupy their university, or occupy a government building to try to affect a political change. Sometimes workers on strike block, or occupy the area around their place of business, to try to affect a change. Like its already been said, Wall Street isn’t so much a place as a concept. And you can’t occupy a place and say you’re occupying a concept. You can strike at your place of work, you can protest your government because they’re supposed to represent you, but hanging out in a park drumming was a little too abstract.
So are you saying that protesting is all it takes to change the system?
I can think of many things that DIDN’T change because of protests. The 1960’s had many anti-war protests, but has war been abolished?
If you are protesting disparity between haves and have-nots, will the rich just give to the poor because of a protest? Isn’t a backlash just as likely to have the opposite effect?
Was Martin Luther King a failure? Was Emmeline Pankhurst a failure? Was Lech Walesa a failure?
The point of public protest is to call attention to an issue. Once the general population is aware of the issue then you can start working on making changes.
Thanks for the answers.
So it’s roots are
the large number of unemployed in this country, many of which have been looking for work for years, and
The folks that find themselves in the 99% of this country who are part of the “have nots”. a division based on the wealth distribution of this country.
This is interesting to me… I think that Wall Street is the most visible symbol of the greed of this nation, and that came out during the bailouts and subsequent hearings. The deregulation on the banking industry turned a once fiscally sound nation into one that is build on sand. Add to that the bonuses these wizards gave each other after the taxpayers bailed them out, and I can see why the public in general is seeing red.
I wonder if the seeds of real change in this country have been planted. I never thought there could be a serious threat to our national security from the inside (from the citizens themselves) and I still don’t. But I’ll bet a lot of these folks in this Occupy WHATEVER movement have never participated in anything like this before.
I also think that alot of those who voted for Obama to change the ways of Wall Street are very disappointed in him and his presidency. He’s done virtually nothing to change Wall Street from the deregulated wild west that got us into this mess in the first place. The government has not stepped in and re-regulated an industry that has proven over and over again that it can’t regulate itself.
I wonder, though, how many folks that are “occupying” actually know the issues and problems, the root causes and how to fix them. Or are they simply mad that their 401K is depleted and they’ve lost their retirement nestegg.
If they can’t have real leadership as **friedo **has suggested, then where do they go from here? Could these people be viewed as “terrorists” as defined by our government and be investigated under the Patriot Act?
It seems it has risen from the large unemployment levels in this country, especially educated unemployed. Interesting.
And just how’s that working so far?
The attention getting? Seems to be working for them. There’s this thread for example.
We got out of the war we actually protested.
I read an article that claimed that the Hippies by and large got what they wanted, and I found it very compelling, but, unfortunately, I can’t look it up because of all the bigots out there. It’s as if, on this one issue, people actually think Cartman from South Park is actually someone to emulate, treating hippies like an infection rather than actual people.
Shouldn’t the general population be aware of the issue given that the general population is well within the 99%?
I’d like to know the actual total number of the “Occupy” stand-arounders… I have a feeling that they would end up being actually somewhere around .1%, leaving the 99.9% of us left out of their elitist organization.
Quite well, actually. The notion of income inequality has been moved high up in the list of current hot topics being discussed on the news, in political circles, and even on message boards. That’s entirely due to Occupy making a lot of noise about it. It certainly wasn’t being talked about last summer when the primary political discussion seemed to be how much suffering to inflict on the middle class to balance the budget.
You’d think. But lots of people don’t pay close attention to what’s going on and as a result wind up voting against their own economic self-interest. One of the messages of Occupy is that while the 1% have been very successful in skewing the operation of the country to their benefit, the 99% have the power to reverse that trend if they start voting to protect their interests from the predations of the moneyed elite.