Wall Street: the protests

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Published on Wednesday, 12 October 2011 11:05

Written by Liam Kruger

Image: flickr.com/eyewashThe past couple of months have seen remarkable acts of protest against governmental institutions; the anti-austerity protests in London earlier this year, the Arab Spring, and most recently the occupation of Wall Street by those dissatisfied by the extent of corporate influence over American politics, and the perceived failure to take responsibility, legal or otherwise, for the economic crisis.

American citizens are taking democratic cues from the Middle East. The use of social media to organize the peaceful protest is a practice borrowed from the Cairo protests in Tahrir Square, which led to the Egyptian revolution. The aims of the Wall Street protestors are not so grand, but calls for structural economic reforms have been made, amid insistence that the disparity of wealth distribution comes largely as a result of Wall Street’s misdeeds.
One of the consequences of the 9/11 attacks in 2001 was the muting of any form of protest in America against the status quo. This is ceasing to be the case and an educated but disenfranchised populace broadcasts its discontent. Around a hundred arrests have been made, and dozens of blog posts and YouTube uploads depict or describe protestors being pepper-sprayed or cuffed without any clear indication as to why; the protests have been largely peaceful, as the protests organizers have been at pains to emphasise on their website and Twitter account.
Police action, of course, is what sparked off the London riots in late August, subsequent to the shooting of Mark Duggan by London Metropolitan police officers – although again, the extent of the riot’s violence can be attributed to a demographic’s collective frustration at being ignored and remotely abused by an authority that seems to govern, rather than represent. To be clear – the riots were violent, needless, and counterproductive, but they came about from poor governance.
These were the same issues which motivated the protest in Cape Town against the unenforceable Secrecy Bill that had been pushed through Parliament. Even more fantastically, the protests were successful, to an extent; the bill was stalled, momentarily. It’s a small victory – the specific implications of the Secrecy Bill aside, surely there is more general discontent with a government less concerned with enacting its electorate’s will than pursuing its own interests.
Whether or not that discontent is actionable remains to be seen; Wall Street is, after all, still doing its thing, three weeks of protest notwithstanding. 700 arrests have been made on the people protesting an oligopoly of financial institutions. This is bad for civil liberties in the short term, but it’s an important wake-up call for a nation that needs to learn to distinguish between the enforcers and the state itself.  
People, for the time being,  remain frustrated, and disenfranchised, but, increasingly, people are voicing
these frustrations.
People are listening. This
is progress.