Tuesday, September 27, 2011

The Philosophy Behind “Occupy Wall Street”

The Philosophy Behind “Occupy Wall Street” by VIJAY PRASHAD



It is this impulse to challenge Wall Street directly that shows how reasonable and necessary is the Occupy Wall Street protest movement underway in lower Manhattan (not far from where George Washington was inaugurated President). Those who have decided not to leave their tarpaulin homes, and who are being brutally treated by the New York police department, have an instinctively better solution for the country than those who want to throttle demand further by austerity (the GOP) and those who want to call for a stimulus without any challenge to the financial mandarins who would rather send the U. S. economy into a swamp than lose their own power over the world economic system (Obama).

Absent a fight against finance capital: to call for austerity is an act of cruelty; to call for a stimulus is illusionary.

We've tried to cure this 'worst downturn since the Great Depression' with a repeat of Herbert Hoover's policies.  We've given our money to the bankers, and we've cut taxes on the wealthy in the hopes that as in the theory of a b-grade cowboy actor named Reagan that these would 'trickle down' to the rest of us.

Have you been trickled on?


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