2011-11-13

OWS is a social mood driven protest

How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the OWS Protests
Occupy Wall Street was always about something much bigger than a movement against big banks and modern finance. It's about providing a forum for people to show how tired they are not just of Wall Street, but everything. This is a visceral, impassioned, deep-seated rejection of the entire direction of our society, a refusal to take even one more step forward into the shallow commercial abyss of phoniness, short-term calculation, withered idealism and intellectual bankruptcy that American mass society has become. If there is such a thing as going on strike from one's own culture, this is it. And by being so broad in scope and so elemental in its motivation, it's flown over the heads of many on both the right and the left.
The writer of this blog post, Rolling Stone contributing editor Matt Taibbi, who is well known for his Vampire Squid take on Goldman Sachs, also gets into political devolution, which is interesting because he leans left in the ideological sense.
We're a nation that was built on a thousand different utopian ideas, from the Shakers to the Mormons to New Harmony, Indiana. It was possible, once, for communities to experiment with everything from free love to an end to private property. But nowadays even the palest federalism is swiftly crushed. If your state tries to place tariffs on companies doing business with some notorious human-rights-violator state – like Massachusetts did, when it sought to bar state contracts to firms doing business with Myanmar – the decision will be overturned by some distant global bureaucracy like the WTO. Even if 40 million Californians vote tomorrow to allow themselves to smoke a joint, the federal government will never permit it. And the economy is run almost entirely by an unaccountable oligarchy in Lower Manhattan that absolutely will not sanction any innovations in banking or debt forgiveness or anything else that might lessen its predatory influence.
What's coming down the road will not be a purely right phenomena, but the left was in charge of the centralization efforts of the 20th Century. The past 60 years or so were so dominated by the left that even the right-wing was much further left, giving rise to the term "paleocons" to describe those left behind in the political shift. Now we see declining social mood in Europe and the United States expressing far more right-wing sentiments: nationalism in Europe and decentralization in America.

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