Occupy Wall Street: A discourse on change

Guest blogger:  As a born and raised Torontonian, former San Franciscan, and new Calgarian, Pamela Karch is a critical and cultural theory junkie with a Masters in Communications, Bachelors in Media Studies, and Diploma in Print and Broadcast Journalism. Spending countless hours questioning the social construction of homogeneity, she is constantly searching for undefined ways of living.

Over the past week Occupy Wall Street has inundated news mediums all over North America with questions of direction, demands, and a clear message in an attempt to define the movement. This urge to focus on who and what the occupation looks like with headlines such as “Occupy Wall Street does not have a clear message”, “Wall St. Protest Isn’t Like Ours, Tea Party says”, “Who Occupies? A Pollster Surveys the Protestors”, and “The Demographics Of Occupy Wall Street” not only fails to investigate the roots of the issues, it also silences the questions about government, politics, capitalism, capital control and power, and social life that we should have been asking for the last 20 years. I use the term silence because many major news outlets have not included in their reports anything about the multitude of academic theorists and publications since the Bush administration that have outlined all the concerns brought to light by the Occupy movements. However, these questions that are now painted on cardboard signs in cities across North America are questions that have been circling the academy for years.

Unlike other news outlets, I for one do not want to jump the gun and assume that every consumer of media understands why this eruption of activism is now taking place. Actually, I would like to rephrase: I cannot make that assumption when more than once I have seen and heard comments about those activist as being unemployed, lazy citizens who want more of the economic pie. To clarify these judgments, we have to start from somewhere much earlier than the movement itself and outline how Occupy Wall Street is a conversation about equality, and an independent politics removed from corporate capitalist practices.

As an example of academic discourse, in his 2008 novel Against the Terror of Neoliberalism: Politics beyond the age of greed, Henry Giroux an American cultural and critical theorist asks his readers:

“Where is the public outrage over a tax “stimulus” package that gives the wealthiest 1 percent of the population 50 percent of the total tax cut while it simultaneously refuses to enact legislation lessening the financial burden for older Americans on Medicare” (p. 132)?x99%,

“Where is the outrage over the Bush administration’s willingness to give billions in tax breaks to the wealthy while at the same time ‘student loans, child-care, food stamps, school lunches, job training, veterans programs, and cash assistance for the elderly and disabled poor are all being cut’” (p. 132)?

“Where is the outrage over a government that will spend up to $900 billion on the cost of waging a war and maintaining postwar control of Iraq at the same time that it cuts veterans’ benefits and gives the rich an exorbitant tax cut” (p. 132)?

“Even more serious is the government’s shameful refusal to address the plight of the 30 million people in the United States who live below the poverty line, the 74 million adults and children who have no health insurance, and the 1.4 million children who are homeless”. (p. 132)

In Giroux’s (2008) words, “…democracy has turned dystopian” (p. 153). These concerns are not a part of an individual plight; it is a struggle for the salvation of a government built on First World values of equality and social justice that should be fought for by all. What is happening is not an ever growing population of so-called lazy or unemployed citizens, what is happening is the ever growing control of the private market over our governments, political processes, and the everyday social conditions where the divide between the extraordinarily wealthy and everyone else grows larger.  

What led the capitalist world on this path is two fold: the growing wealth of corporations and corporate power within legislature has manifested a policy where private interests are more important than social needs.

The government has simultaneously given tax breaks to the wealthiest, while pulling funding from every social program, rendering those in the 99 percent invisible and invaluable within a neo-democracy of profit margins and market relations where money talks.

In 2008 Giroux wrote that in this current social and political condition, “…hope appears foreclosed and progressive social change a distant memory” (p. 130). However, today we have Occupy Wall Street, Occupy San Francisco, Occupy Washington, Occupy Toronto, Occupy Calgary, and many more around the world. In these created public spaces, a new culture is coming together, shifting, and taking its place. One that does not need a specific definition outlining its demographics or demands, but one that needs to question and hold our governments accountable for the inhumane loss of social justice. We want a say in the governing of our economic, social, and community interests, and we do not want to have to pay out millions of dollars just to have a voice.

Even though Giroux’s commentary focuses on American discourse, Canada does not have a hall pass from market-driven politics, corporate capitalism, and war costs that have led to the outbreak of this movement. There are Occupy spaces across this country and to ignore this movement as American is naïve and frankly un-Canadian. However, we can begin to recognize the cracks in our system and move foreword with hopeful and productive discourse on the rebuilding and strengthening of democracy.

The 99 percent may be the ones making the noise, but it is the 100 percent that should be crying out against the current social conditions and standing up for all humanistic rights.

Giroux, H. A. (2008) Against the terror of Neoliberalism: Politics beyond the Age of Greed.  Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers.