A group calling itself The Other 99 Percent has been snowballing its effort to “Occupy Wall Street.” In the weeks since it began on Sept. 17, the occupation—an actual campout that’s roughly centered in lower Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park—has been attracting increasing media attention, celebrity clout and, most recently, large and unanimous support from labor unions.
Intellectuals Noam Chomsky, Cornell West and Naomi Klein have endorsed the occupation, and activist group The Yes Men have put up a Kickstarter site to fund printing 50,000 copies of The Occupy Wall Street Journal. Susan Sarandon, Russell Simmons and Michael Moore have all made appearances. Last weekend, more than 700 protesters were arrested during a shutdown of the Brooklyn Bridge.
Initiated by what many would call a loosely organized core of basically disenfranchised youth (is this starting to sound like 1968?), The Other 99 Percent’s takeover of the streets included no specific agenda or list of demands, and at times appears to suffer from message drift—last week, on live streaming video from the park, a well-coiffed college girl was crowing about transgender rights—but its goal is to be inclusive (hence the name), and the participants’ hearts are in the right place.
The overall point is one that many Americans agree on: the rich keep getting richer and the rest of us keep getting poorer, and no one in the establishment is doing anything about it. The group came to include as many hackers as slackers as its ranks swelled, and the most media and tech-savvy generation ever to walk the earth quickly made its cause viral. By last Friday, Occupy Wall Street had inspired “Occupy Boston,” and the New York event has set off protests in almost every major American city, and beyond.
Sporting iconic Guy Fawkes masks popularized by the film V for Vendetta and the hacker group Anonymous, the group rallied around this motto: “Those who profit off the suffering of others will be held accountable. We are the 99 percent, and we are too big to fail.” If the Internet would start supporting olfactory plug-ins, you could almost smell the tangy aroma of well-padded baby boomers slow-cooking on a spit.
Should this expression of outrage be surprising to anyone? According to an Aug. 24, 2011 U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics report, “This year, the share of young people [ages 16-24] who were employed in July was 48.8 percent, the lowest July rate on record for the series, which began in 1948.”
The top 1 percent of Americans owns 50 percent of the wealth, and has all but bought the government, keeping the majority of the population from having any real, meaningful effect on policies that will seriously affect them and their children.
When you can’t win the game no matter how hard you try because it’s been stacked against you from every conceivable direction, you’ve got to change the game, and that’s exactly what these young people are out to do.
Occupy Wall Street also illustrates how important it is to maintain net neutrality and diverse media viewpoints. Because the 1 percent doesn’t own the Web, images of the demonstration have gotten wide exposure. Pictures and video of innocent female protesters being pepper-sprayed by police have helped to gain popular sympathy for the movement, and the organizational power of mobile phones and social networking by the group has proven that revolutions powered by communications technology aren’t just for Egypt anymore.
As James Downie of the Washington Post wrote, “pictures of Wall Streeters doing their best Marie Antoinette impersonations—drinking champagne and mocking a protest march—have been particularly powerful.”
Other pictures that have made the Facebook rounds include signs with simple truths that are catchy and hard to ignore; one held by an African-American woman read, “One day, the poor will have nothing left to eat but the rich.”
