The New American Revolution: Occupy Wall Street

[Donnachaidh]

http://smirkingchimp.com/thread/bob-burnett/39110/the-new-american-revolution-occupy-wall-street

While the organic Occupy Wall Street movement is similar to the spontaneous Arab Spring uprisings that began last December in Tunisia and Egypt, OWS is eerily reminiscent of the run up to the American revolutionary war.

Three ingredients fueled the original American Revolution. The first was egregious British taxation policy exacerbated by the fact that the colonies had no representation in Parliament. The second was the growth of liberalism and its concepts of natural rights and the social contract. Finally, Americans embraced the values of "republicanism" -- in its original form - which criticized both British corruption and the power of the English aristocracy.

For eighteenth-century American colonists, democracy was a novel idea, whose influence grew from 1763 onward and culminated with the publication of Tom Paine's Common Sense.

For twenty-first-century Americans, democracy is not a novel idea, but rather one that has been dormant since the sixties - when Americans realized that nobody was free until everybody was free. Since then a horrendous series of events -obscene tax cuts for the rich and powerful, a dreadful war with Iraq, and a catastrophic financial meltdown - have shredded the social contract and promoted grinding economic inequality, causing many Americans to wonder if our democracy can survive. That's the fertile ground the seeds of the Occupy Wall Street, aka "Stand up for the 99 percent," movement has fallen on: average Americans fear their families are being left behind while the most fortunate 1 percent grow wealthy.

More at the link --