From Protest to Politics

Bloodied, muddy, and in many quarters evicted, Occupy is anything but beaten.

Two long months ago, a bunch of young people fed up with Wall Street's impunity set up an encampment at New York's Zuccotti Park, a place they occupied until this week when police forcibly cleared them out. The New York Times held a debate between seven thinkers over just what impact the protests have had on American politics, and we recommend you take a second to read them all. Some, like conservative commentator Jonathan S. Tobin, think that the protest "seems like the last gasp of the failed welfare state," and explains why re-election oriented Democrats have been reluctant to throw themselves behind the movement. Michael A. Cohen, on the other hand, sees the Occupy movement as one of the biggest boons for the Obama presidency:

... The Occupy movement has shifted the national political conversation toward terrain that clearly favors Democrats. More than three-quarters of Americans now agree that “the current economic structure of the country ... favors a very small proportion of the rich over the rest of the country.” A similar majority believes not enough has been done to regulate Wall Street and large financial institutions. Above all, these issues are now front and center in the country’s political debates – since the beginning of September there has been a fivefold increase in references to income inequality in the national news media.

Of course, the election is still a year away, and Occupy's staying power has been in question, especially on the right, since the movement began. But barring a major uptick in employment and the locking up of a couple of investment bankers, the problems that sent the Occupiers into the streets in the first place will almost certainly keep their manifold demands in the news cycle.

The Toronto Star's Thomas Walkom wonders if the eviction notices served to Occupy camps across the continent are a blessing in disguise. "There must be an end point at which those involved in the action can say: Yes we won something. Not everything, maybe, but something," writes Walkom. Getting evicted gives the protesters "a way to honourably end stage one of their protest and build on it something more pointed," instead of "spending too much time worrying about where to put the porta-potties." The Occupiers have certainly seized the public's attention, and now Walkom says they can "redirect their energies toward the specific elements of Canadian political economy that encourage such inequalities." Just what form that will take is certainly unclear at this point, but the movement will quickly fade in the memories of politicians, columnists, and the public if it doesn't take this opportunity to solidify some of their considerable gains.

So, just what should the Occupiers do now? The Washington Post's Harold Meyerson offers one suggestion, for the American element of the movement, at least. The Obama administration has been working on a deal that would see the five largest banks pay $25 billion to people whose homes were foreclosed in exchange for the banks avoiding prosecution for their misdeeds. But the attorney generals of New York, California, and New Jersey are stalling the deal so that they can investigate the banks' wrongdoing more thoroughly and get them to fork over even more dough. "As the great organizer Bayard Rustin put it, from protest to politics," remarks Meyerson. If the momentum of the Occupy movement was suddenly thrust behind those attorney generals seeking a greater deal for taxpayers who lost their homes due to reckless bank behaviour, then they could claim an unmitigated success that would truly help the 99 per cent. Even if it stands to take a lot longer than two months, such an achievement would send a message to Wall Street that they are, eventually, beholden to the people whose money they rely upon.