‘Arab Spring’ in US Tuesday, 04 October 2011 02:46

Arab Spring has reached US shores. An ongoing leaderless anti-Wall Street crusade is seemingly growing in strength. And with Occupy Wall Street protest entering its third week, it is being taken more seriously. The protesters are united by their anger over what they say is a broken system, a system that serves the wealthy and powerful at the expense of the rest. The protesters bill themselves as the “Other 99 percent,” in contrast to the 1 percent of Americans who account for 25 percent of all income earned in the United States and 40 percent of the country’s wealth. They are protesting a culture which concentrates money and power in the hands of a tiny elite, all while allowing corporate executives of public companies to achieve monumental pay packages.

The Occupy Wall Street demonstration started out last month with less than a dozen college students spending days and nights in Zuccotti Park, a private plaza off Broadway. It has grown sizably, however, both in New York City and elsewhere as people across the country, from Boston to Los Angeles, display their solidarity in similar protests. Three years after Wall Street collapsed in a greed fueled conflagration, people from all classes, all ethnicities, and all generations are camped out at Liberty Square in New York City to protest the continued fleecing of America by big banks and corporate chieftains. Other demonstrations built on the same highly-organised model have sprung up in 70 other American cities, including San Francisco, Portland, Memphis, Louisville, Miami, Sacramento and Boston.

Little has been done since the 2008 financial firebombing of America to change the underlying fundamentals of a recession-hit economy. Americans who pinned their hopes on an stock market to repair the damage to their retirement funds are now plummeting back to earth. The country is wracked by staggering unemployment and more than one in four American homes is deeply underwater. With a newly-elected president who inspired great hope for change, Barack Obama installed a Wall Street-friendly team that resisted fundamental changes in the financial model that caused the collapse and the deep recession that followed. Nobody has gone to prison for the systematic frauds that brought down the economy, consumers are getting gouged by new fees that the banks dream up to compensate for their own losses. And the mortgage foreclosure crisis continues to fester and drag down the rest of the economy.

The demonstration has a lot in common with events around the globe, from the protests that toppled dictators in Egypt and Libya to the street protests in Madrid and Athens. The protesters lack a clear objective, though they speak against corporate greed. But they’re growing in numbers, getting more organised and show no sign of quitting. The largely-ignored demonstration gained renewed attention after a dramatic police showdown on the Brooklyn Bridge that led to 700 arrests. The Wall Street protestors have plenty to be angry about. But how Washington handles its own ‘Arab Spring’ and what kind of reform the protests will deliver remains to be seen in months to come.