October 6, 2011

By Jim Hightower

http://www.nationofchange.org/something-big-happening-occupy-together-1317788275

To paraphrase one of Bob Dylan’s songs of youthful protest, “Something’s happening here, and you don’t know what it is, do you Ms. Bellafante?”

A New York Times writer, Ginia Bellafante, is but one of many establishment reporters and pundits who’ve been covering the fledgling “Occupy Wall Street ” movement — but completely missing the story. Instead of really digging into what’s “happening here,” they’ve resorted to fuddy-duddy mockery of an important populist protest that has sprouted right in Wall Street’s own neighborhood.

In a September article, Bellafante dismissed the young people’s effort as “fractured and airy,” calling it a “carnival” in an “intellectual vacuum.” Their cause is so “diffuse and leaderless,” she wrote, that its purpose is “virtually impossible to decipher.” No wonder, she concluded, that participation in the movement is “dwindling.”

Whew — so snide! Yet, so wrong.

While the establishment is befuddled by the plethora of issues and slogans within the protest, confused by the absence of hierarchical order and put off by its festive spirit, that’s their problem. The 20- and 30-somethings who are driving this movement know what they’re doing and are far more organized (but much differently organized) than their snarky critics seem able to comprehend.

It’s silly to say that the protestors’ purpose is indecipherable. Hello — they’re encamped next door to Wall Street. Isn’t that a clue? Their cause is the same as the one boiling in the guts of America’s workaday majority: Stop the gross greed of financial and corporate elites, and expel a political class that’s so corrupted by the money of those wealthy elites that it has turned its back on the middle class and the poor.

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/what_do_they_want_justice_20111006/

Posted on Oct 6, 2011

By Robert Scheer

How can anyone possessed of the faintest sense of social justice not thrill to the Occupy Wall Street movement now spreading throughout the country? One need not be religiously doctrinaire to recognize this as a “come to Jesus moment” when the money-changers stand exposed and the victims of their avarice are at long last offered succor.

Not that any of the protesters have gone so far as to overturn the tables of stockbrokers or whip them with cords in imitation of the cleansing of the temple, but the rhetoric of accountability is compelling. “I think a good deal of the bankers should be in jail,” one protester told New York Times columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin. That prospect has evidently aroused concern in an industry that has largely managed to escape judicial opprobrium. 

“Is this Occupy Wall Street thing a big deal?” the CEO of a major bank asked Sorkin. “We’re trying to figure out how much we should be worried about all this. Is this going to turn into a personal safety problem?”

It should pose a threat, not because peaceful demonstrators will suddenly morph into vigilantes fatally damaging their cause with violent action, but rather because government prosecutors should fulfill their obligation to pursue justice and incarcerate some of the obvious perps. As Sorkin conceded, in one of the rare instances of the business press attempting to understand the protesters: “the message was clear: the demonstrators are seeking accountability for Wall Street and corporate America for the financial crisis and the growing economic inequality gap.”