What Occupy Wall Street Can Learn From The Arab Spring And Los Indignados

From the far right to the far left, anti-Wall Street activists across the nation have been fodder for equal amounts of primetime praise and condemnation. Many attribute the movement’s accelerated popularity to shared economic suffering and frustrations coupled with the web and mobile-centric social mobilization movement that swept through Egypt in the height of the Arab Spring and drifted north onto Spanish soil the following summer.

Unsurprisingly, as both the media and Occupy Wall Street (OWS) try to derive distinct meaning from the multifarious movement, some misleading comparisons are being made between the 21st century American attempt at national protest and the spring and summertime predecessors in Spain and the Middle East. However, these movements have operated within their own spheres stemming from specific national economic and political contexts. If they continue to falsely analogize many aspects of the Spanish acampadas and the Egyptian protests to what is currently happening in Wall Street without fully understanding and learning from their unique circumstances, the Occupy Wall Street Movement will fail before it can even come to fruition.

While the claim can be made that Egyptians and Americans are both fighting against government corruption, some of the more salient facts pertaining to Egypt suggest more contrasts than comparisons. For example, thirty years of continuous emergency law that allowed for the suspension of constitutional rights, legalized censorship, increased police powers, and sentencing to indefinite imprisonment without reason left many Egyptians suffocating at the hands of the unscrupulous Mubarak regime.

As Mubarak and his National Democratic Party cronies enjoyed Egypt’s wealth (Mubarak and his family’s net worth ranges from $40-$70 billion), approximately 40% of the population lived on around two dollars a day. Furthermore, with the number of new people entering the job force annually at about 4%, a college graduate was ten times likelier to be unemployed than someone who only completed elementary school. Coupled with an absurdly high inflation rate of 12.8%, the outlook was not only grim, it was fatal.

As a result, most Egyptians rightfully distrusted the Mubarak government. In 2010, Transparency International rated Egypt’s Corruption Perceptions Index as 3.1, with a score of “0” being completely corrupt and “10” being very clean (for comparison’s sake, the United States is nestled safely between Belgium and Uruguay with a 2010 score of 7.1). The Egyptian people had enough.

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Occupy Wall Street As Confronting Democratic Crisis

The Article: The Fight for ‘Real Democracy’ at the Heart of Occupy Wall Street by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in Foreign Affairs.

The Text: Demonstrations under the banner of Occupy Wall Street resonate with so many people not only because they give voice to a widespread sense of economic injustice but also, and perhaps more important, because they express political grievances and aspirations. As protests have spread from Lower Manhattan to cities and towns across the country, they have made clear that indignation against corporate greed and economic inequality is real and deep. But at least equally important is the protest against the lack — or failure — of political representation. It is not so much a question of whether this or that politician, or this or that party, is ineffective or corrupt (although that, too, is true) but whether the representational political system more generally is inadequate. This protest movement could, and perhaps must, transform into a genuine, democratic constituent process.

The political face of the Occupy Wall Street protests comes into view when we situate it alongside the other “encampments” of the past year. Together, they form an emerging cycle of struggles. In many cases, the lines of influence are explicit. Occupy Wall Street takes inspiration from the encampments of central squares in Spain, which began on May 15 and followed the occupation of Cairo’s Tahrir Square earlier last spring. To this succession of demonstrations, one should add a series of parallel events, such as the extended protests at the Wisconsin statehouse, the occupation of Syntagma Square in Athens, and the Israeli tent encampments for economic justice. The context of these various protests are very different, of course, and they are not simply iterations of what happened elsewhere. Rather each of these movements has managed to translate a few common elements into their own situation.

In Tahrir Square, the political nature of the encampment and the fact that the protesters could not be represented in any sense by the current regime was obvious. The demand that “Mubarak must go” proved powerful enough to encompass all other issues. In the subsequent encampments of Madrid’s Puerta del Sol and Barcelona’s Plaça Catalunya, the critique of political representation was more complex. The Spanish protests brought together a wide array of social and economic complaints — regarding debt, housing, and education, among others — but their “indignation,” which the Spanish press early on identified as their defining affect, was clearly directed at a political system incapable of addressing these issues. Against the pretense of democracy offered by the current representational system, the protesters posed as one of their central slogans, “Democracia real ya,” or “Real democracy now.”

Occupy Wall Street should be understood, then, as a further development or permutation of these political demands. One obvious and clear message of the protests, of course, is that the bankers and finance industries in no way represent us: What is good for Wall Street is certainly not good for the country (or the world). A more significant failure of representation, though, must be attributed to the politicians and political parties charged with representing the people’s interests but in fact more clearly represent the banks and the creditors. Such a recognition leads to a seemingly naive, basic question: Is democracy not supposed to be the rule of the people over the polis — that is, the entirety of social and economic life? Instead, it seems that politics has become subservient to economic and financial interests.

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I Know Where I Stand

Eskimo Boy by Strange Talk off of Strange Talk.

The Message Of Occupy Wall Street

Bigger Than Left And Right

The Article:

The Text: I was surprised, amused and annoyed all at once when I found out yesterday that some moron-provocateur linked to notorious right-wing cybergoon Andrew Breitbart had infiltrated a series of private e-mail lists – including one that I have been participating in – and was using them to run an exposé on the supposed behind-the-scenes marionetting of the OWS movement by the liberal media.

According to various web reports, what happened was that a private “cyber-security researcher” named Thomas Ryan somehow accessed a series of email threads between various individuals and dumped them all on BigGovernment.com, Breitbart’s site. Gawker is also reporting that Ryan forwarded some of these emails to the FBI and the NYPD.

I have no idea whether those email exchanges are the same as the ones I was involved with. But what is clear is that some private email exchanges between myself and a number of other people – mostly financial journalists and activists who know each other from having covered the crisis from the same angle in the last three years, people like Barry Ritholz, Dylan Ratigan, former regulator William Black, Glenn Greenwald and myself – ended up being made public.

There is nothing terribly interesting in any of these exchanges. Most all of the things written were things all of us ended up saying publicly in our various media forums. In my case, what I wrote was almost an exact copy of my Rolling Stone article last week, suggesting a list of demands for the movement. I said I thought having demands was a good idea and listed a few things I thought demonstrators could focus on. Others disagreed, and there was a friendly back-and-forth.

So I was amazed to wake up this morning and find that various right-wing sites had used these exchanges to build a story about a conspiracy of left-wing journalists. “Busted. Emails Show Liberal Media & Far Left Cranks Conspired With #OWS Protesters to Craft Message,” wrote one.

Breitbart’s site, BigGovernment.com, went further, saying that the Occupy Washington D.C. movement is “working with well-known media members to craft its demands and messaging while these media members report on the movement.”

The list, the site wrote, include:

…well known names such as MSNBC’s Dylan Ratigan, Rolling Stone’s Matt Tiabbi [sic] who both are actively participating; involvement from other listers such as Bill Moyers and Glenn Greenwald plus well-known radicals like Noam Chomsky, remains unclear.

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