Indignation and Wall Street

Leandro Maceo Leyva

THE Occupy Wall Street movement has completed five months of sustained protest in the streets of the United States. And the indignados’ intention is to remain there.

Since the media broke its silence on the subject, headlines such as: Hundreds of occupiers gathered outside…/Occupiers have begun to march on…/Occupiers forcibly removed from…/Occupiers redouble protests… It is therefore worth asking: Who are they? What is the basis of their demands? What will remain of all this in one, two, three years?

There is an undoubted sentiment of anger directed in particular at the financial sector, identified by the movement as principally responsible for the crisis traversing the country.

But, in general terms, people are indignant at the fact that while the rich are becoming richer, the poor have been abandoned to their fate.

To be more precise, one could say that what has fuelled popular clamor is the certainty of the middle class that its future well-being, which once seemed guaranteed in developed societies, is no longer a possibility.

Occupy Wall Street is a cry against growing inequality: 46 million U.S. citizens are living below the poverty line.

The indignados or occupiers are part of a movement without defined leaders. They are simply doing what those in power believed was impossible: waking up and protesting. Meanwhile, anger is growing, and this amalgam of malaise is reserving its greatest indignation for the next action.

It is not enough to read the infinity of placards they raise or listen to the daily chanting of slogans, one has to explore their actions more deeply.

It is clear that the movement has emerged as a result of a fusion of will among men and women who are reclaiming their rights, whose fervor and reach could not be silenced by the news monopolies which dominate the juicy information market at the global level, despite detractors demonizing the movement in order to discredit and weaken it.

More importantly, the Occupy Wall Street movement is expanding. It is entering its fifth month fortified by the generalization of protests and the interest aroused by them, despite the shadow accompanying the demands.

Since September 17, 2011, when the occupation of Zuccotti Park, in the heart of the Wall Street district, began, the movement has spread to more than 250 of the country’s cities, involving thousands of people.

Each and every one of the protests, those initiated in New York and those repeated in other parts of the United States, reveals an energy born of anger provoked by the nation’s economic crisis, with a concrete impact on their own pockets.

As long as the causes of social discontent remain, the marches and protests will not be a passing phenomenon and the system will have more and more recourse to violence against them.

What they are calling for is unacceptable to the system: "Not money, but people" and "It is time we were heard," or when they affirm that they represent the 99% abandoned to their fate against the all-powerful 1%.