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[credit: Cameron Cardow, Ottawa Citizen]
Wackydoodle axes: Do they serve cake with that? |
In
scenes of policy brutality[video] not witnessed since the Days of Rage and other anti-Vietnam War protests, New York's finest wailed on Occupy Wall Street protestors with pepper spray and batons. If the enfeebled remnants of the American left and the labor movement can coalesce around the youthful
avant guarde, lend organization, funding, and political coherence to a truly grass roots action against the corporatist state, then America will experience a springtime in which democracy is born again. Occupy Wall Street has been accused by the right of being incoherent, self-involved, and a toxic form of "free floating radicalism". All of these condemnations have been heard before since they were hurled at the anti-war movement of the Sixties and Seventies. They are equally inaccurate now. Occupy Wall Street, unlike the TaxedEnoughAlready party, is not a front organization for plutocrats. The ultra-right Koch Brothers, who are the ideological heirs of their father's extremist John Birch Society, are known to have funded and organized their less wealthy extremists. Relentlessly promoted by corporate propaganda organs like Fox Spews, the TEA party managed to rest control of the lower house of Congress proving once again that money wins elections. In contrast, a generation of marginalized Americans are relearning the responsibilities of citizenship in a real democracy on the streets of lower Manhattan, largely without corporate mass media coverage of the process. Give them some time and the demands will be made and perhaps their representatives elected. Their democratic instincts are true. As a first step they have listed their grievances in emulation of the American colonists who declared separation from the Crown of England. Those of us onlookers who are also fed up and can't take it anymore can at least provide the willing with blankets and food.
The moment is right for a new declaration of independence from banker oppression because the edifice of casino capitalism maybe crumbling. Former U.S. Undersecretary of Commerce
Robert Shapiro was interviewed by the BBC.
[video]In it Shapiro said there is a "1 in 3 chance" that a financial meltdown occurs in Europe, which in his view "would be be significantly more serious" than the crisis in 2008, if the sovereign debt crisis is not addressed by a fundamental restructuring of the monetary union. His sentiments were echoed by Mervyn King, Governor of the Bank of England,
who said, "This is the most serious financial crisis we've seen, at least since 1930's, if not ever." The €440 billion bailout fund is already considered to small to handle the crisis, yet it is not even fully approved by European parliaments. And there is fierce opposition in Germany to the ECB using leverage to increase its impact. The Fitch rating agency has cut Italy's credit rating by one level (A+) and Spain's by two(AA-) with a negative outlook for both countries. No one really knows what the
American bank exposure to European banks is in the murky world of derivative trading created by the orgy of financial deregulation at the end of the last century. But what is now becoming undeniable is that the Emperor of Finance wears no clothes.
