Why not gay marriage?
We have a tradition
of religious liberalism
Barbara Millar
Real doctors
The Cafe
I note the smear campaign employed against those involved in the Occupy movement by the commentariat continues apace. Given the movement’s reluctance to engage with a media exclusively owned by the very people they seem to be protesting against, this is perhaps understandable but one term I do wish columnists would eradicate from use is ‘anti-capitalist’.
As protestors have bought coffees from Starbucks and use iPads, for which they have been thoroughly rounded on, I assume they have little problem with capitalism per se. What they seem to be protesting against is the form of neo-liberal capitalism so enthusiastically promoted by governments here and in the United States. Corporations are essentially sociopathic; they exist to make profit and their conscience, such as it is, is governed by the parameters of the law. There is nothing wrong with that of course, for that is their role. We all need to make a profit, we all need to be viable.
Where it has become a problem is that all major political parties are now themselves large corporations, where people can work their way up from making the tea to becoming party leader while never leaving the party bubble for the real world, where donations are routinely harvested in exchange for policy influence and where opinion is curbed for fear it may lead to the withdrawal of support from other corporations. Many corporations don’t just seek viability, they seek exemption from tax liabilities or they threaten to up sticks and move to more accommodating countries, or they desire an influence upon society far in excess of their contribution.
Witness those who attended Rupert Murdoch’s infamous Oxo Tower party this summer. Prime ministers, newspaper proprietors, pop impresarios, film producers and business tycoons all mingled and partied. I wasn’t there, but I’ll bet none of them attended because they actually liked one another. They wanted something else.
Politics once was the art of governing and implicitly improving people’s lives. We no longer have that, for we are now governed by a desire to improve the lot of the corporation. The sociopathic entities are dictating society’s agenda. Whether this is to the detriment of the individual seems immaterial.
Personally, I think that’s got something to do with why people are camping in tents in city centres across the world. So far they’ve been relatively passive. I hope that continues to be the case. It won’t serve them well to push the conscienceless too far.
Alex Cox
SR Extra
A lecturer who was ‘only for the gifted few’
Barbara Millar’s
Person of the Week
Among the leaderless
young in Zuccotti Park,
a glimmer of hope
Leonard Quart
Maybe I have been looking so hard for a glimmer of political hope that I’m overestimating the potential of the ever-growing Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement. But going down to Zuccotti Park, I get a rush of positive political energy, and a flashback to the theatricality-painted faces, drummers, guitarists, and assorted spontaneous street performances, though this time no pot or alcohol, of the 60s protests that I once took part in.
I recall demonstrations, sit-ins, and countless organisational meetings that tended to be at times foolish and self-destructively chaotic, and at other times idealistic and deeply stirring. In those days my sense of political and social possibility was much greater than my wariness and unease with some of our more infantile actions.
Occupy Wall Street may be leaderless and without a coherent set of demands, except for the emotionally resonant, and over-simplified assertion that ‘one thing we all have in common is that We Are The 99% that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1%’. They also make a point of affirming that they are believers in non-violent resistance.
But at the encampment itself, the protesters have been sufficiently effective and disciplined that they have taken on the responsibility through democratic group decisions – a general assembly meeting once a day – for: keeping the park reasonably neat and clean (even the multi-coloured mums have been left intact), despite many of them having to – or choosing to – bed down in sleeping bags with few places to bathe.
They also take responsibility for providing food, accepting donations, publishing a paper – the Occupied Wall Street Journal – and – being children of the internet – keeping up connections with other protesting groups and the media by Twitter, Facebook, and Livestream. One of the many placards I saw there aptly declared that, ‘Whoever controls the media messages, controls the culture’. And one placard carried a trenchant quotation from G K Chesterton, that read: ‘An enormous amount of ingenuity is expended in finding defences for the indefensible conduct of the powerful’.
Most of the people in the park were under 30, and white, though black and Hispanic participation is increasing. The young people I spoke to (albeit a small sample) were all clear-eyed, articulate, and free from political cant or programmatic absolutes, though I assume many of them lean left.
One impressive young man from a conservative small city, Virginia Beach, Virginia, who had quit his job, spoke to me about his ‘aversion to an economy that normalises the disempowerment of the majority of people’. And he saw no answer in establishment politics, given ‘corruption of this magnitude,’ and the pernicious activities of the ‘kleptoplutocracy’. He also mentioned he sees the country’s problems in structural not personal terms – a system that is out of whack, not just avaricious individuals who callously serve their own interests. Another slightly older man, a medical student from Bismarck, North Dakota, had done two tours of duty in Iraq, and was there to ‘simply raise political awareness, and bring about some change’.
They aren’t looters or arsonists, spreading mayhem for its own sake, but young people responding with more heart and outrage than the rest of us
to a society totally dominated by corporate interests.
Leonard Quart is a professor emeritus of American studies
