Alright, the World's Occupied. What's Next?

New York once again gets into something well before the rest of the world thinks it's cool, even if they did just rip off Spain, Greece, and Egypt.

So this little Occupy Wall Street thingy has gone global, with various Occupy protests springing up over the weekend everywhere from Rome (where things took a turn for the smashy-smashy) to Toronto to London. Needless to say, this flowering of flower children has media minds around the world trying to come up with some overriding explanation of just what's going on. Conrad Black, who until recently was very much a part of the one per cent that the protesters have coalesced against, takes to the National Post to lament everything that's wrong with the U.S. and to conditionally hop aboard the Occupy train. "A great many people probably are guilty of fraud or of negligence on a massive scale, yet have escaped prosecution, let alone conviction and punishment," sighs Black, offering Bill Clinton, his successor, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Bros., and the amorphous mass of Brooks Brothers and greed that is Wall Street as those most worthy of our scorn. While the protesters' chants might come across as "a pretty hackneyed scatter-gun indictment by people who haven’t really thought it through," Black agrees they're "largely justified" in taking to the streets against "the countries' elites [who] have been utterly discredited." Of course, Black's support of the Occupiers might have more to do with the U.S. justice system's fixation on him instead of Wall Street's criminals, but as they say, the enemy of our enemy...

Meanwhile, Paul Krugman goes all "The emperor has no clothes!" in The New York Times, claiming for the first time since the rise of the stock market that the investors of Lower Manhattan have lost their immunity. "Until a few weeks ago it seemed as if Wall Street had effectively bribed and bullied our political system into forgetting about that whole drawing lavish paychecks while destroying the world economy thing," smirks Krugman, who can barely contain himself over the financial industry's belated comeuppance. And now it sounds as though Wall Streeters have suddenly found themselves without much public support from their friends in the White House or on either side of the aisle in Congress, let alone from so-called Main Street. While positive opinion on Wall Street nose dives, they still have one thing in heaps, "thanks to those bailouts, [and] despite [Wall Street's] total loss of credibility: money." And that money, Krugman notes, has been placed firmly behind a certain Republican presidential candidate named Mitt Romney. But when Barack Obama has raised nearly $1 billion in campaign funds with more than a year to go before the election, the loss of a few friends on Wall Street is one the prez is surely not losing too much sleep over.

In Foreign Affairs, professors Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri provide at the most coherent attempt we've seen so far in connecting Tahrir Square to Israel's tent protests to demonstrations in Madrid and Athens and finally to the Occupy movement. If there's one thing uniting those protests, say Hardt and Negri, it's their frustration with a governance system that has failed to represent the public's will. "Young people populating the various encampments are, with an unexpected maturity, beginning to pose a challenging question," the authors write. "If democracy – that is, the democracy we have been given – is staggering under the blows of the economic crisis and is powerless to assert the will and interests of the multitude, then is now perhaps the moment to consider that form of democracy obsolete?" Young Spaniards are demanding "real democracy now"; Egyptians overthrew a dictator who was willfully deaf to their demands; Athenians are outraged over measures imposed by the European Union; and now Americans (and Canadians, and Britons) are mobilizing against governments that appear to be more beholden to the demands of financial managers than the unemployed. The movements might come in different languages, methods, and specific aims, but the underlying message is the same: it's broke. Fix it.