Not since the 1999 World Trade Organisation protests in Seattle has “capitalism faced such a direct rebuke on the streets of North America”, says Giles Whittell in The Times. Occupy Wall Street, which started as a “thinly attended protest” in New York, has sprouted sister demonstrations in cities including Los Angeles, Boston and Chicago. They are receiving widespread media coverage and President Obama has “realised it could serve his agenda”.
The protests have elicited a tellingly “hysterical reaction” from Wall Street, the super-rich in general, and politicians and pundits who “reliably service the interests of the wealthiest hundredth of a per cent”, says Paul Krugman in The New York Times. The reason, surely, for this defensiveness is that Wall Street’s Masters of the Universe “realise, deep down, how morally indefensible their position is”. They aren’t brilliant individuals justly rewarded, but “people who got rich by peddling complex financial schemes” that helped precipitate a crisis that still blights the lives of millions. “Yet they have paid no price.” Their institutions were bailed out by taxpayers, yet many pay lower rates of tax than middle-class families.
Economic justice “may mean different things to different people, but it’s not an empty phrase”, says Eugene Robinson in The Washington Post. “It captures the sense that somehow… the concept of fairness was deleted from our economic system – and our political lexicon.” The result is “a nation where the rich have become the mega-rich while the middle class has steadily lost ground, where unemployment is stuck at levels once considered unbearable and where our political system is too dysfunctional to take the kind of bold action that would make a real difference”.
The protestors recognised that the place to start protesting was the “epicentre of the financial system”, which over the years has become more preoccupied with channelling capital to itself than to the firms where it could be most effectively used. They have come just at the right time. We don’t need them to become a coherent political force – we have enough politicians already – but we do need “more passion and energy in the service of justice”.
We do, says Robert Samuelson in The Washington Post. Inequality has unarguably increased. But the wealthy resist stereotyping. They aren’t all “hotshot investment bankers”. Many own small and medium-sized companies and “half the wealth of the richest 1% consists of stakes in these firms”. Does it make sense that Obama’s jobs plan should be paid for by taxing the people who are supposed to create jobs? “The backlash against the rich is the start of the debate, not the end.”