Wall Street under seige?
from Steve Keen
The Occupy Wall Street campaign is now in its 17th day–making it easily the longest political protest of the Global Financial Crisis. Unfortunately, even I wasn’t aware of it when I was in New York two weeks ago, a few days after it started, since it received very little coverage from the media prior to the arrest of about 700 protesters on the Brooklyn Bridge.
Now it’s entrenched, and growing. Whatever its ultimate outcome, it is an important event in this crisis, as the first glimmer of a popular revolt against the Ponzi culture of Wall Street.
It was initiated by the remarkable magazine AdBusters, which for almost a decade now has turned the practices of advertising against advertising. It would have to be the most visually powerful, image-laden magazine on the stands today–and at the same time it is subversive of advertising itself. Having made a splash in the print media, Adbusters has now shown that it can use the new social media to dramatic effect as well.
I’m not going to make any prognostications on how this might pan out, but it is curious that Wall Street is now surrounded on the outside, as it implodes on the inside.
Check out the Adbusters page on OccupyWallStreet
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—— Ugarteche, Puyana and Madi ——
Gerson Lima / Maria Alejandra Madi
Edward Fullbrook and Jamie Morgan
————— Michael Hudson ————–
Maria Alejandra Madi / Jack Reardon
————- Edward Fullbrook ————-
—————— Steve Keen —————–
————— Richard Smith —————
————– Gustavo Marques————
– Victor Beker and Beniamino Moro –
————– Lars Pålsson Syll ————-
—————– Stuart Birks —————-
Edward Fullbrook and Jamie Morgan
———— Armando Ochangco ———-
Shimshon Bichler / Jonathan Nitzan
————— Mauro Gallegati ————–
————— Herman Daly —————-
————— Asad Zaman —————
—————– C. T. Kurien —————
————— Robert Locke —————-
Thanks Steve, I posted the live feed from New York on my newsblog.
This could build over time and get very interesting.
All those stolen jobs are coming back to bite the bankers in the butt.
It will come to nothing.
Pessmist, Dave! And no wonder. Your blog says “all those who preach submission is autonomy will be pummelled”. That’s naive.
We should persuading those preaching “submission is autonomy” that it is not only true but applies to them. The way out of the mess they have created is not dog-eat-dog competition but cooperation. We don’t want them to go short, but we do need them to free us to cooperate willingly (hence autonomously) by willingly letting go of what they don’t need; otherwise they will kill the goose which used to lay their golden eggs.
Here is something to mull over: “There is nothing more difficult to carry out, nor more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to handle than to initiate a new order of things. For the reformer has enemies in all who profit by the old order, and only lukewarm defenders in all those who would profit by the new order. This lukewarmness arises partly from fear of their adversaries, who have the law in their favor, and partly from the incredulity of mankind, who do not truly believe in anything new until they have had actual experience of it. “ (Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince, 1513)
So let’er rip. J-C Spender and I are trying in our new book: Confronting Managerilism: How The Business Elite & Their Schools Threw Our Lives Out of Balance,” appearing in USA this month at Palgrave Macmillan, right in the middle of the uproar. Maybe, maybe….