Former Occupy Wall Street network rally around Bernie Sanders campaign
On 17 September 2011 a group of protesters occupied Wall Street. Their unpolished campaign sought to draw attention to financial inequality. To healthcare issues. And to the problem of student debt.
If that sounds familiar, it is because four years on, Bernie Sanders’ own campaign has highlighted many of the same grievances. It is no coincidence. In 2015 many of the protesters who cut their teeth in the Occupy encampments are now campaigning for the Democratic candidate.
“There’s 50 million people who are impoverished here in America,” said Stan Williams, an Occupy Wall Street stalwart who is now co-organiser of African Americans for Bernie.
“He talks about the 99%. He talks about the 1%. So a lot of the things he talks about resonate with me.”
Occupy Wall Street sparked a nationwide movement in the US. Thousands of people camped in parks, outside capitol buildings and elsewhere while tens of thousands more took part in marches. A central theme was the perceived feather-handed treatment of banks and bankers who had contributed to the financial crisis, while conditions remained the same or worsened for regular citizens.
In New York, hundreds of people camped out in Zuccotti Park, a block away from Wall Street, and thousands took part in a series of marches throughout the city. Police across the US were frequently criticised for their attempts to control protesters. Videos emerged of peaceful demonstrators being teargassed in Seattle, Oakland, at UC Davis in California and in New York City – where one march saw more than 700 people arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge.
The Occupy movement quickly spread to countries across the globe including the UK, Brazil, Hong Kong and Australia, although the majority of the camps shut down towards the end of 2011..............
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http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/sep/17/occupy-wall-street-protesters-bernie-sanders
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Then Occupy Wall Street came along and blew away Obama’s soft talk. Now, candidate Obama has wisely adapted Occupy’s brilliantly succinct message as his own. He does not have the nerve to invoke “the 99 percent,” but his rhetoric of fairness plays to the same music. Occupy likewise became a wake-up call for labor liberals. When people in the streets began shouting what the left had been too shy to broadcast forcefully, unions got a welcome jolt. Soon enough, they began shouting too.
With any luck, this surge of energy and enthusiasm—and the attendant rejection of 1 percent politics, as embodied by Mitt Romney—will propel Obama to a second term. But some activists are already worried about what will happen if Obama wins. Will he abandon his “inner liberal” again and opt for a grand bargain with Republicans that will do brutal damage to the liberal legacy and long-loyal constituencies?
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Jacob Hacker makes the basic point that securing shared prosperity necessarily requires the restoration of democracy. A strategy that gives voice to the people who cannot be heard amid the clamor of big-money politics would not just be about winning elections; it would apply as well to the workplace and financial markets, to corporations and governing institutions. The excluded who need to gain a voice and power might not add up to 99 percent, but they surely represent a majority large enough to change the country.
http://www.thenation.com/article/how-launch-mass-movement-economic-justice/
The People, united, will never be divided.
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