Occupy has changed the
country. People are fighting back. And the developments are
happening faster than anyone could have guessed even a few months ago. The
Occupy movement has gone from a few dozen in Zuccotti park in New York to
thousands of participants in hundreds of cities. Across the country
occupations have become pitched battles between the people’s movement and
municipal police forces.
The speed with which this unfolded, the degree of brutality leveled
against the occupiers, and the resilience of the Occupy movement are all
remarkable. In times like this the movement outstrips the best
expectations of organizers and organizations. And while these
developments defy simple explanation, their impact is undeniable. People
are no longer talking about deficits and budget cuts, but about Wall Street and
the one percent.
So it is with
Occupy. It has bypassed traditional forms of political mobilization,
leaving more established organizations trying to play catch up. And the
movement has changed form, from public occupations, to marches and rallies,
civil disobedience and city-wide strikes – all faster than anyone would have expected.
But the forces opposed to
Occupy are moving fast too. Occupiers have faced serious police repression
around the country, with pepper spray attacks in Seattle and Davis, California, life-threatening injuries in Oakland, and in
Seattle a miscarriage caused by police violence.
Meanwhile, Wall Street’s agenda of austerity for the poor and attacks on
the public sector has not yet been derailed.
In Europe, the bankers and
bondholders are remaking governments and economies in Greece and Italy. But
gutting the public sector and democratic governments may not satisfy the IMF
and German bankers, nor avoid collapse. The euro zone’s whole single-currency
project is approaching a systemic meltdown that threatens to contaminate U.S.
banks and to bring on a rerun of the 2008 crash, perhaps worse this time.
Domestically, Washington
remains focused on debt reduction, attacking the programs that support
working-class people, while the economy slides further into disrepair. The
failure of the Debt Commission to reach an agreement only means that Congress
will now be scrambling to avoid the automatic cuts to the Pentagon budget, cuts
that will supposedly activate in 2013. In the short term it is a victory of
sorts, kicking the can down the road as Congress tries to figure out how to
make the cuts that will be extremely unpopular.
Austerity is also on the
agenda in Europe, where the sovereign debt crisis threatens to collapse the
entire European banking system, and perhaps spread to Asia and the
Americas. Already banks and investors are trying to limit their exposure
and restrict lending in the Euro Zone. Remarkably, mighty Germany had
trouble selling state bonds at a recent auction. Even more remarkable
still, European countries have turned to the BRICs, the developing countries of the
third world as a potential source of capital to extend to troubled member
states. This shift, away from the United States and the European first world,
toward the rising powers of China, Brazil and India, as a source of capital is
significant.
Excerpts from War Times.
War Times/Tiempo de Guerras
P.O. Box 22748
Oakland, California 94609
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