Occupy Wall Street Movement
If heavy student loan debt , soaring tuition fee, climbing taxes, plummeting financial aid, nose-diving employment opportunities, exacerbating inequality between common people and wealthy class, are some of the issues that infuriate you and lead you to blame government’s generous bailing out failed banks and other financial institutions then you cannot not know about Occupy Wall Street(OWS) movement.
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Occupy Wall Street is one of the top 10 US protest movements inspired by popular revolts against authority in Egypt and Tunisia which finally led to toppling of their respective presidents. It began on 17th September 2011 in liberty square in Manhattan’s Financial District (occypywallst.org). As per Special news in Times Of India, OWS was initiated by Canadian Activist group, Adbusters. So far, this movement has spread over across 1500 cities globally and around 100 cities in US. According to Drake Benett, David Graeber is an anthropologist, who played a key role in transforming a small rally into global protest movement, this movement is in response to the common people’s frustrations and resentments with two important issues. The first issue is the influence of the corporates on government decision making system. The second issue is the way government treated debt issues of financial industry as opposed to individual borrowers as a consequence of financial crisis in 2008.(Benett,”David Graeber-the Anti Leader of Occupy Wall Street, Oct,20011) According to the protesters, current dismal economic situation is a result of government bailing out the insolvent brokerage firms, banks and corporation in 2008.
OWS has adopted the slogan; we are 99%. Paul...
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...e a leader who is sensitive to issues and sensible enough to direct the movement to achieving its targeted goals and making us realize the dream of living in the utopian world!
Works Cited
Bennet, Drake. “David Graeber-The Anti-Leader Occupy Wall Street.” Business week. Bloomberg L.P, 26 Oct. 2011. Web. 19 Apr. 2012.
Brenac, Sacha. “The Failures of Occupy Wall Street.” The Bullet. The Bullet, 25 Jan. 2012. Web. 19 Apr. 2012.
Gray, Heather. “Occupy Wall Street vs Kingian Methods.” Positive Peace Warrior Network. N.p., 4 Oct. 2011. Web. 19 Apr. 2012.
Krugman, Paul. “We Are the 99%.” New York Times. The New Yorks Time Co, 24 Nov. 2011. Web. 10 Apr. 2012.
“99% vs 1%.” Times Of India. Bennett, Coleman & Co. Ltd, 1 Jan. 2012. Web. 19 Apr. 2012.
Solomomn, Daniel. “Occupy Wall Street’s Failed Revolution.” PolicyMic. Mic Networks Inc., n.d. Web. 10 Apr. 2012.
Some can say that The “Occupy Wall Street” movement had the same underlining premise as people in the Realism era, that the corporations were not fairly compensating their workers. Some disagree with the protesters on the validity of their issues, and the way they
Michael Moore’s film of Capitalism: A Love Story is an examination on how much of a financial impact that corporation has on the lives of Americans. Capitalism seems to emulate a love affair gone wrong, with lies, abuse and betrayal towards the American people. Moore moves the film from Middle America, to the halls of power in Washington, to the global financial epicenter in Manhattan in order to answer the question of what price do Americans pay for the affection of capitalism. There is irony in the title of this film because there is certainly nothing to love about capitalism when families have to pay the price with losing their jobs, their homes and their savings as a result of the risky investments that the rich and powerful have at their disposal. With more than 14,000 jobs being lost, residents being evicted from their homes and banks stealing away families’ savings, one must wonder if there is an upside to capitalism at all. True democracy is the biggest threat to corporate America because of the one person one vote system. In order for this to take place, the growing number of people would have to come together and expose capitalism for what it truly is, a corrupt and greedy system for the wealthy.
In Karen Hos’ Liquidated, she aims to study the relationships between corporate America and the worlds greatest financial center. . . Wall Street. She puts all her three years of research in her ethnography and thus the very first page of chapter one, we can already understand Hos’ determination to understand what Wall Street is all about. The first main theme explained is the relations in Wall Street that are based on a culture of domination of staff members, their irresponsibility dealing with corporate America, and constant changes that occur during this process. Another major theme we see in her ethnography is that Wall Street, first used for the communities wellbeing, is now profit oriented.
Bloom, Alexander and Breines, Wini. Takin' it to the Streets. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1995.
"The Role of Civil Disobedience in Democracy." Civil Liberties Monitoring Project. Web. 01 Oct. 2011. .
Cohen, Daniel. "Chapter 4: Political Success of the Antiliquor Movement." 1 Oct. 1995. eLibrary. 26 Sept. 2013.
6 George Packer, The Unwinding: An Inner History of The New America (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux), 3717 George Packer, The Unwinding: An Inner History of The New America, 3668 McCormack, John. "Gingrich to Occupy Wall Street: "Go Get a Job Right after You Take a Bath"" The Weekly Standard (2011): n. pag. Web.
Kang, Stephanie. Sanders, Peter. "Off the job, Onto the streets." The Wall Street Journal. April 11, 2006.
These protests haven’t been centralized to a single country or region but rather have appeared throughout the globe. Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and Syria emerged in the form of the Arab Spring protests that swept across the Middle East in 2011. Labour movements in North America, economic austerity resistance in Spain, injustice protests in Greece and Israil, and the ‘YoSoy123’ movement in Mexico all sprouted around the same time(Basok, 2014). Then in late 2011 these movements seemed to have blended together and culminated in the Occupy Wall Street movement. Each of these movements share a common goal in the form of increasing the bleak economic situation that plagues the globe. Basok notes that it was the dichotomy between economic classes that motivated the movement and sparked the notorious ‘1% versus 99%’ motto. Causes for such global disparity can be traced to decisions made decades prior. Levine Marc noted in 1996 that since the early 1970’s “there has been an unprecedented surge in income inequality and a polarization of earnings in the United States”. The western middle class had been shrinking for almost four decades but at a rate that, while not
The working class, faced with all the struggles that capitalism puts it through, is bound to revolt against the ruling class. During the 19th century, Marx states that “the workers begin to form combinations (Trades’ Unions) against the bourgeois; they club together in order to keep up the rate of wages; they found permanent associations in order to make provision beforehand for these occasional revolts. Here and there, the contest breaks out into riots.” Today, the working class hosts manifestations and form multiple organizations to help them through their struggles. In New York, the Occupy Wall Street movement organizes marches to demand fairer laws, such as universal health
Wolff, Richard D. (July 23, 2013). "Detroit's decline is a distinctively capitalist failure". The Guardian.
...itner, H., Peck, J. and Sheppard, E.S. (2007) Contesting Neoliberalism Urban Frontiers, New York: Guilford press.
Edwards, Ceri. "STEP UP 2 THE STREETS." TheweekJun 15 2008. ProQuest. Web. 16 Mar. 2014 .
The definition of a leader is a person who influences people to a common purpose. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr are examples of great leaders who brought about social change through alternative means in the 20th century. Their means were through nonviolent protests of freedom. Gandhi fought for freedom from Great Britain, and King fought for freedom from segregation and equal rights for all Americans.
Members have been credited as being extreme liberals, Independents and Libertarians. Income inequality was the issue that triggered the initial protests that began on Wall Street in New York City. The Occupy movement offered few clear goals, instead focusing on messages and demands that were extremely broad and ill-defined (Kavada, 2015). Though the larger issue of income inequality has become an increasingly popular talking point for a number of politicians, few policy outcomes have emerged that can be linked to Occupy. Occupy has largely fallen out of political favor, as politicians initially supportive of the movement have long since ceased to mention the movement publicly (Smith, Gavin, & Sharp,