A note before I begin: For the sake of simplicity, I will refer to the international corporate and financial system that is the target of the movement Occupy Wall Street simply as "Wall Street." The actual, geographical entity Wall Street does not consist entirely of unscrupulous corporate entities, nor does it encompass the entire group of corporate entities in question. However, since it is a common and widely known symbol, I will use it to represent the entire system in this article.
The movement Occupy Wall Street is widely misunderstood in mainstream media today. This is largely a result of intentional attempts, mostly by right−leaning news organizations and commentators, to portray the movement in a negative light in order to delegitimize it. Many people have been told that the movement is an illegal fringe movement of crazed, disorganized anarchists and unpatriotic counterculture rebels. This characterization is entirely untrue. Similarly, many people have portrayed Occupy Wall Street as a left−leaning version of the highly conservative Tea Party Movement. This characterization is also entirely untrue.
The Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street have nothing in common. The Tea Party is a thoroughly astroturfed movement that calls for the removal of fairly and democratically elected government officials, endorsing the use of any extrajudicial means necessary — and in some extreme cases, encouraging the use of violence. Occupy Wall Street, in stark contrast, is a grassroots movement of disenfranchised people who call for the regulation of highly influential yet unelected and largely unsupervised and unregulated individuals using strictly nonviolent methods of civil disobedience. They have not called for the forcible ouster of a single democratically elected official, nor have they ever encouraged the use of violence in any situation. Occupy Wall Street is a true and legitimate popular movement; the Tea Party, while it perceives itself as representative of the will of the American people, is much more representative of the will of the corporate elite that completely saturated and dominated the movement since shortly after it began.
Occupy Wall Street can be much more accurately described as a sister movement to the Arab Spring. In order to fully explain the close relationship and goals of these two movements, however, I must first explain the systems that the two movements oppose.
Wall Street essentially constitutes an authoritarian system in that it is run by an influential oligarchy of unelected entities that exercises vast informal power over the country — and indeed, the world. In principle, the Wall Street system is very similar to the Assad, Mubarak or Qaddafi systems that have been overthrown by the Arab Spring. Wall Street is much more limited than these dictatorial political regimes in the extent and legality of control that they can exercise over people. Although one could argue that the police — particularly the New York Police Department — response to the popular protests has been disproportionately violent and aimed at protecting the interests of the rich, Wall Street is unable to use the police as a baton to suppress opposition on the same scale that Mubarak, Ben Ali or Qaddafi could.
However, in principle the two regimes are essentially indistinguishable. They are not elected democratically, they exercise broad extrajudicial power over politics and society, and they are completely unaccountable to the people. If one defines the regimes of Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Syria and other similar countries as "closed, authoritarian political regimes," then Wall Street is a "closed, authoritarian economic regime." Even though they play an equally important role in the lives of the people as do political regimes, economic regimes are rarely recognized as such in many countries.
This being said, the great similarities between Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring become evident once we examine the regimes that they oppose. Both movements are centered on forcing authoritarian regimes to become democratic and accountable to the people. Both movements advocate using civil disobedience whenever possible. (Only after the Syrian and Libyan dictators dispersed peaceful protests with live ammunition did the protesters resort to violence.) The Wall Street protesters, although they have many means at their disposal to suppress their opposition, cannot reasonably utilize such violent measures, and so it seems extremely unlikely that Occupy Wall Street will ever have to resort to violence.
Many people — particularly far−right−wing commentators and Tea Party sympathizers — have called the Occupy Wall Street movement un−American and unpatriotic because they claim that the movement, among other things, "hates capitalism." This is a completely unjustified label for two reasons: First, Occupy Wall Street does not aim to destroy capitalism, but to democratize it in the same way that the Arab Spring democratized the hegemonic regimes of North Africa. Second, although capitalism has been the dominant economic theory practiced in America for many years, it is not integral to either America or the Constitution. Thus, democratic opposition to capitalism is not at all un−American.
The United States is one of history's best and most stable examples of political democracy, but the economic system cannot possibly be described as democratic. Our corporate and financial system is characterized by a small, closed oligarchy of unelected individuals and entities that are completely unaccountable to the people and that frequently remain in power regardless of gross incompetence, greed, unscrupulous behavior, negligence and blatant abuse of power and influence. These characteristics closely mirror those of an authoritarian political system and cannot exist in a democracy. Thus, what Occupy Wall Street essentially aims to do is to democratize the economic regime of the United States. It is hard to see how this can be described as un−American, and one can even make the case that to oppose such an attempt is in itself un−American.
Occupy Wall Street is a truly original, revolutionary movement in that it is one of the first movements in recent history to attempt to democratize an economic system. However, due to misunderstandings and deliberate propagandistic exaggeration, it is often perceived in a highly negative and factually incorrect light. The real movement is much more disciplined, peaceful, and genuinely revolutionary than the distorted version as seen on the news.
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Thomas Mason is a freshman who has not yet declared a major.
