‘Occupy Wall Street’ Demonstrations Could Spread – and Spark Backlash
Was that a long ago-echo in my ears? The other day I caught video of a big protest with demonstrators shouting, “The whole world is watching!” as police approached.
Wasn’t that chant from 1968 when Chicago Mayor Richard Daley unleashed his police on anti-war demonstrators at the ill-fated Democratic convention? In the same video, some chanted “Un pueblo unido jamas sera vencido!” a worldwide protesters’ phrase stemming from a slogan used by the equally ill-fated leftist Chilean leader Salvador Allende in 1970 and popularized worldwide in a 1972 recorded song. Wasn’t that the chant I heard covering a demonstration in Franco’s Spain?
Then I heard a young woman explain that wealth is bad. She used more 60s style clichés in a defining moment at the end of the day. But those weren’t echoes. They were from demonstrations by the anti-corporate, pro-fairness Occupy Wall Street protests, which snarled traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge and ended in some 700 arrests. The protests sparked copycat demonstrations in cities such as Los Angeles, Denver Chicago and Boston with future protests being planned in Washington D.C. and elsewhere.
Just as the summer of 2010?s conservative Tea Party protesters screeched “We want our country back!” from the forces that propelled Barack Obama into the White House, Occupy Wall Street protesters are saying “We want our country back!” from corporations, banks and the campaign-donation-greased politicians who kowtow to them.
Many leftists and some centrists yearn for a movement to counterbalance the Tea Partiers who check mated chunks of Barack Obama’s agenda. Progressives are now trying to organize groups to offer better pushback and advocacy. Enter Occupy Wall Street demonstrations which reportedly attract college kids and aging hippies united in their outrage over the kind of country and dreams they see being lost and the political and financial forces that did big damage getting away consequence free.
Protests have often impacted on their times, changed history or sparked backlash. Mahatma Gandhi’s non-violent civil disobedience demonstrations helped free India from the British. Martin Luther King Jr. took a page from his book, successfully using the same tactics in the civil rights battle. The 1960s anti-Vietnam war protests changed public perceptions of the war but also triggered polarization, angry “silent majority” backlash and helped elect Richard Nixon — the first step in undercutting the New Deal, Great Society and Democratic Party dominance of the courts and bureaucracy.
Opposition demonstrations I covered in India in 1974 inspired then-Prime Minister Indira Gandhi to temporarily suspend Indian democracy. Demonstrations I witnessed in post-Franco Spain gave then-young King Juan Carlos the support he needed to help quietly steer Spain into a democratic era. Deep spending cuts by the United Kingdom’s coalition government led to widespread austerity protests in early 2011.
And then there’s the “Arab Spring,” which made Twitter and civil disobedience potent political tools in fomenting revolution in Egypt and Tunisia and inspiring protests in Northern Africa and Middle East Arab majority states aimed at changing or toppling the existing order.
Many commentators on the left now suggest that Occupy Wall Street demonstrations could be the catalyst for a new “Arab Spring” in the United States.
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15 Responses to “‘Occupy Wall Street’ Demonstrations Could Spread – and Spark Backlash”
Let it rain Joe!
Wars are started because of irreconcilable political differences. If the Tea Party cannot compromise THEN WE’LL FIGHT THEM IN THE STREETS!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tz7otJVElcM&feature=related
The interesting part of this is the assumption that the center between the Tea Party and the “Wall Street Occupation Left” doesn’t exist. This is typical of partisan/ideological politics. In fact, for all the complaints about “extremism”, neither side likes the center.
The Tea Party is one faction of a party that overall represents maybe 30-40% of the electorate. So the Tea Party itself is only party of that number. The Tea Party has maybe 25% of the votes in the House and even fewer in the senate.
So the issue would seem to be to seek deals and compromises with others, such as the center. But, in fact, winning over the center would involve compromises that partisans aren’t willing to make. So the answer is to just use lack of compromise on the other side as an excuse for lack of compromise one’s own side and to push for political confrontation.
david-
The Tea Party does not compromise and they hold their mother party hostage. The democrats have ALWAYS compromised and in this particular case have compromised far more than any majority party has EVER compromised.
There is no middle ground. It has been denied by arrogant Tea Party intransigence.
As those before us have done, it is time to fight simply because there is nothing left to give away. We cannot live in slavery. We must; Live Free or Die!
Yeah, if we don’t watch out they’ll start giving Wall Street, Republicans, Banks, and big business:
Oh, that’s right that’s already happened!.. But I’m sure they’ll figure out another way to take even more away from middle America.
Those are wall street ideals Steven. Exactly what they are demonstrating against.
To the OP, every action carries risk. Inaction also carries risk. Could this backlash? Sure. But doing nothing, it seems, is a guaranteed failure.
Bottom line: our government is disinterested in the people. It needs to become interested. It won’t become interested until we make some noise.
It worked for the Tea Party. They manage to hold the national agenda hostage because of their noise. There needs to be a counter to that, the other side needs to start making noise as well.
@ Allen – That’s the point I was trying to make.
What exactly can “THEY” do to the demonstrators (or us… you, me, the neighbor next door) that they’re not doing already?
What kind of “Backlash” is it that we should be worried about?
Totally off topic: Summer (3 1/2 months of 105° – 120°) is officially over, done, and finished in Yuma, AZ! We’re actually having a cold spell (70′s and 80′s) for the rest of the week.
All doors fully open all day today and the 1 1/2″ foam came out of the windows… Life is good!
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You want to see ignorant and sad?
Check out the “Occupy Wall Street: The Largest Gathering Of Fools In The United States « THE ROYCROFT REPORT link above.
Too funny!
There is no question liberals and progressives have not been an effective counterbalance against the right for more than thirty years. They have simply been asleep for that time.
They don’t even seem to understand how we got to where we are now. They see the results, the huge deficit, the massive shift in the income to the wealthy, the instability in the financial markets, the recession caused by the greed of Wall Street followed rapidly by politicians tripping over themselves to bailout Wall Street to save them from their own profitable excesses leaving the rest of society to suffer, but they don’t really understand how we got to this point.
This has left them unable to mount successful arguments against this slow, relentless take over by the wealthy. They have slowly been squeezed out of the nation’s dialog, reduced to a cartoon by the right, the right’s sock puppet to be pulled out for punching.
The liberals have been reduced to a few well worn arguments. The right are racists is the most used. The right are hypocritics. The right doesn’t care about the poor, the aged, the sick, the disabled, the list goes on and on. All of these arguments are probably valid at some point for some of those on the right but they all miss the point. The wealthy are not trying to convince liberals with their arguments, they are trying to keep their conservative base together, happily voting in every election to make themselves poorer.
The main point I’m making is, IMO, illustrated by takling about the Democrats and the Tea Party and then asserting “there is no middle ground”. I can say there are a lot of people who aren’t Democrats _or_ Tea Party supporters. And claims that Democrats always compromise is undermined by a view that doesn’t even seem to be able to see the middle ground.
Of the demands that the Occupy Wall Street poster linked to on a previous article, many of them would be acceptable to libertarians, and even free market conservatives. In other words, the Tea Party and the Occupy Wall Street crowd aren’t polar opposites.
davidpsummers-
Pipe dreams DS, pipe dreams.
You cannot see what does not exist. You cannot support what was never presented. It is not the Democrats whom have destroyed the middle ground, rather it is the Republicans whom are intransigent as a political strategy, as a means to an end. Takes two to tango. Republicans have openly decided that they do not want to dance. No way around this fact.
You can keep telling independents they don’t exist, but that doesn’t make it so. It just alienates them and causes you to, for example, loose Kennedy’s senate seat.
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