With Monday marking the one-month anniversary of the "Occupy Wall Street" movement, it seems appropriate to reflect and ask what the protest has accomplished. The short answer is very little. While I don't seek to delegitimize their concerns, the protestors must realize that their continued presence in lower Manhattan is relatively pointless and any real change is unlikely due to the limits of economics and politics.
Occupy Wall Street describes itself as a "leaderless resistance movement with people of many colors, genders and political persuasions." These protestors refer to themselves as the "99 percent that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1 percent" and claim to be employing the "revolutionary Arab Spring tactic" to achieve their ends. All of that is fantastic, except for the fact that we live in America, not Egypt, which demands a drastically different lens for examining the situation. The unrealistic nature of the movement's goals is evident in its sensational rhetoric, as it purports to fight the "corrosive power of major banks and multinational corporations over the democratic process" and protest the imposition of "an agenda of neoliberalism and economic inequality that is foreclosing our future."
Don't get me wrong Wall Street certainly deserves a share of the blame for global economic woes and I would never defend the bankers who gamed the system by betting against mortgage-backed securities before the financial meltdown in 2008. Last week's conviction of Galleon Group co-founder Raj Rajaratnam on charges of conspiracy and securities fraud, is emblematic of the greed and corruption that Wall Street harbors at its worst. But the protestors seem to be expecting hedge fund managers and corporate executives to call a press conference and apologize. They appear to be waiting for some seminal moment in which the "fat cat bankers" are arrested like Hosni Mubarak and sent to prison. Their perceptions are misguided our dire economic situation finds its roots in an overwhelming systemic failure. Nor is there hard evidence that institutions like Goldman Sachs actually broke any laws other than those of moral decency.
Grafting the Arab Spring movement onto protests against the financial system is simply impractical. Resistance to Mubarak's rule in Egypt in early 2011 was the product of decades of repression and economic stagnation. Mubarak finally stepped down because even authoritarian states like Egypt are still accountable to their people on some level. The key issue in Manhattan and elsewhere is that the protests are railing primarily against corporations, which lack political constituencies and answer to no one but their shareholders. They are driven by their bottom lines rather than public opinion and only the government can force them to care about anything else. We live in a capitalist world, in the most capitalist of countries. Fighting the "dictators of our country the Wall Street banks" means taking on the world's dominant economic system. Altering the entrenched global order is probably too tall a task for the "power of the people."
Additionally, if the "power of the people" was as pervasive as the protestors claim, we would have expected some endorsement from their elected representatives. However, in examining official statements from Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., to President Barack Obama himself, it is noteworthy that almost all of them used the word "frustration" but refused to overtly support the protests. They are being realistic they know that the American political system is fundamentally averse to wholesale change. These politicians see the protests in this broader context as a mere blip on the radar and recognize that tougher regulations on banks have no traction in a post-recessionary climate with a Republican-dominated Congress. These systemic limitations are a significant handicap to real reform.
Finally, protests are typical symptoms of economic crises, an endemic feature of American history that dates back to the periodic "panics" of the 1800s. But only following the stock market crash of 1929 did the government intervene to fundamentally alter the system and there has been a trend towards deregulation of financial markets ever since. The most recent crisis leaves no question that the time for another major overhaul has arrived. However, meaningful change will only be achieved through a tectonic political shift, not simply as a product of public outrage.
