The Philosophy Behind “Occupy Wall Street”

[steve2470]

http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/09/26/the-philosophy-behind-occupy-wall-street/

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It is this impulse to challenge Wall Street directly that shows how reasonable and necessary is the Occupy Wall Street protest movement underway in lower Manhattan (not far from where George Washington was inaugurated President). Those who have decided not to leave their tarpaulin homes, and who are being brutally treated by the New York police department, have an instinctively better solution for the country than those who want to throttle demand further by austerity (the GOP) and those who want to call for a stimulus without any challenge to the financial mandarins who would rather send the U. S. economy into a swamp than lose their own power over the world economic system (Obama).

Absent a fight against finance capital: to call for austerity is an act of cruelty; to call for a stimulus is illusionary.

The IMF and the U. S. political class do not wish to challenge the financial class. Indeed, the IMF warns against “financial repression,” “With sovereigns under financing stress and economies struggling to deleverage, policymakers may be tempted to suppress or circumvent financial market processes and information.” This is to be avoided, says the IMF. They want the saviors to come from the Global South, which, the IMF notes, “are at a more advanced phase in the credit cycle.” What the IMF would like to see is China and India turn over their surpluses to the North as stimulus, for these countries to export less and import more.

What is so strange about this is that it was the IMF that acted as the spear of international capital when it advocated for India and China to become export-oriented economies and turn away from national-development policies. China is now retro-fitted to export cheap goods to the Atlantic economies, and its own problems with effective demand make it hard for its masses to buy Atlantic-made goods. Instead of having these countries turn their stimulus toward the creation of demand in their own countries (by lifting their populations out of poverty further, by infrastructural spending, by creation of new technological means to prevent ecological catastrophe), the IMF wants them to manage their “financial imbalances” by sending their money North. Nothing of the kind was asked of the North in the 1980s and 1990s, when the financial arrows pointed in the other direction.

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[tama]

1. It was barely "tolerable"

when it was just the thirld world. But when the IMF and banksters showed that Europeans and Americans are same scum to them as people of the South, that we started to really understand - that no, it's not tolerable, and nobody is scum expect those who treat other people like scum.

[leveymg]

2. The more "developed" the economy, the lamer the political response. We are neutered sheep

without the sense to even circle when the wolves come for dinner.