As the Occupy Wall Street movement spread across the nation, mistakes and setbacks occurred which are minimal when compared to its success in calling attention to the private domination of America’s wealth by the upper 1% as a major cause of our social problems. Agents of that minority are feverishly at work, whether directly on the payroll or simply acting according to anti-social programming that teaches individualism, selfish egoism and the divisive identity politics that reduce the 99% to splintered minorities and assure continued domination by the richest 1%.
Direct employees of corporate capital in media and politics either downgrade the movement or try to incorporate it, while some supposed progressive critics claim that only their specific problems must be on its agenda. Any attempt to bring down barriers between people and promote unity is labeled racist, sexist, exclusionary, bigoted and other expletives that play well among these agents of division.
Groups that have penetrated the gated communities of political isolation and begun to learn about each others problems and the need for unity in overcoming them are obviously seen as a major threat by the ruling powers. But less obvious are the alleged social critics who operate as a second front for the 1%, exercising their negative judgments of the movement while opting for change in the system, but only the kind which either guarantees their privileged positions in it, or assures their reputations as revolutionaries of the word, if not the deed. These servants of the 1% are often well meaning members of the working class, but just as often from the upper income levels of the 99% and quick to solve America’s problems by maintaining walls between ghettoized citizens and creating progress only for specially affirmed individuals behind those walls. In faithful service to their patrons, they help keep Americans divided, conquered and forced into thinking as minorities rather than acting as a majority.
The movement has to contend with liberals claiming alliance in order to soften its critique and bring it back into affirmative politics for corporate capital that guarantee negative outcomes for most of the 99%. These political hustlers speak out of both sides of their mouths but are exceeded by a conservative lunatic fringe which openly scrapes and bows before that wealth. Many liberals pretend to work for the nation’s majority while maintaining their jobs on the payroll of its tiniest minority, while many conservatives openly grovel at the feet of wealth and unashamedly attribute all American well-being to the generosity of the same earthly deities: rich capitalists.
Some left critics operate from a funky version of the more conventional ivory tower; while professing true belief in their respective subdivisions of the 99%, they insist that minorities—of all diminished labels—must flock to the defense of a Democratic Party owned by the 1%, because the Republicans are even worse. In other words, in the American political tradition, vote for crippling polio or you may get terminal cancer, and don’t even think about a cure for the disease much less being healthy. This earns them credentials as approved radicals with tenured academic positions, best-selling books and op-ed space in establishment gazettes, but they should be seen for what they are: agents of the 1%.
The liberation movement labeled Occupy Wall Street is a local manifestation of a worldwide phenomenon not likely to be destroyed by overt or covert opposition, no matter its temporary setbacks. Its global status is important as political and economic crises grow more dangerous and threatening to humanity’s future. The truly radical democratic practice of Americans coming together over a common systemic problem affecting all and not simply a single issue, however serious, affecting only a few is something new and profoundly important. The call for the 99% to act as a unified majority and not allow itself to be victimized any longer by the divide and conquer politics of the 1% and its agents could not come at a more critical time.
As threats of expanding war, environmental destruction and poverty accelerate, public control over national wealth would mean a giant step towards creating peace and justice. This enrages rulers who have the power to inflict physical and mental violence through their control of weaponry and information. But social media have moved from being simple marketing devices to become democratic tools for change. They help bring human liberation closer to global fulfillment of a democratic ideal: society run by and for all the people, and not just a tiny segment of the wealthiest among them.
Agents of the 1% are desperately trying to muffle humanity’s increasing call for justice by promoting greater paranoia with irrational stories about pending nuclear violence from Iran, which has no nuclear weapons, and deafening silence about the nuclear threat presented by Israel, which has hundreds of nukes and a paranoid narrative of pending extermination to occur at any moment. The United States and NATO act as tools of the global 1% in suppression of the will of the 99% everywhere, and in signs of disintegrating sanity among the paranoid rich present themselves as spreading democracy and freedom among a global population by murdering more of its people.
Occupy Wall Street USA is part of a liberation movement to Occupy All Streets worldwide and create a whole new system, but on the way to that goal, activists and supporters must be wary of agents of the 1% both in and out of established circles. They will stop at nothing to impede the move of the 99% toward democracy, from fearlessly defending the right of millionaires to become billionaires to divisively insisting their issue or group must be the center of attention, to worst of all, the insanity of not only more war, but even nuclear war.
Another world is possible and necessary but in moving forward to reach it, we also need to watch our backs in order to create it.
Copyright © 2011 Frank Scott. All rights reserved.
Frank Scott writes political commentary which appears in print in the Coastal Post and The Independent Monitor and online at the blog Legalienate.
