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World systems analyst Immanuel Wallerstein calls OWS "the most important political happening in the United States since the uprisings in 1968...."
Conditions are right. Accurately calculated, not Census data based on a long out-of-date threshold, poverty in America affects 100 million or more and rising. Unemployment's at 23%. Over 26 million Americans wanting work can't find it. Nothing's being done to help them.
Every social measure shows Depression-level human need. America's middle class is its working poor. People everywhere in need are mad. Global protests show it.
"It doesn't really matter" what spark ignited things. They're happening, growing, and inspiring others because real grievances demand addressing responsibly at a time politicians are turning a blind eye.
Asked what they wanted, people said long denied justice. Even the initially dismissive New York Times said "(e)xtreme inequality is the hallmark of a dysfunctional economy, dominated by a financial sector that is driven as much by speculation, gouging and government backing as by productive investment."
It was a remarkable admission by the nation's leading establishment broadsheet - wealth and power's longstanding voice.
According to Wallerstein, "(t)he movement has become respectable," but with that comes "danger." Already, federal, state and local overt and covert counterattacks are apparent.
Success also breeds other problems, including a "diversity of views." At issue is not becoming "the Scylla of being a tight cult....too narrowly based, and the Charybdis of no longer having a political coherence because it is too broad."
No simple way exists to avoid either extreme or other pitfalls. One is lack of leadership, including a national voice like Martin Luther King for civil rights. Another is a coherent, unified message, focusing on what matters most.
It's not enough to denounce Wall Street and corporate greed. Key is demanding real solutions and sustaining long-term struggle. This one's the mother of them all.
Most important is returning money power to public hands where it belongs. Without it, little else is possible long-term.
It's vital to make banking a public utility, break up too-big-to fail giants, close or nationalizing insolvent ones, establish laws and regulations with teeth, and prosecute crooks when they're caught, especially high level ones so everyone knows grand theft won't be tolerated.
Other key issues include ending corporate personhood, getting money out of politics, ending duopoly power and imperial wars, making corporations and the rich pay their fair share, and forcing government, in fact, to be of, by and for everyone, not solely for America's privileged like now.
None of this can happen short-term. Decades perhaps are needed to transform today's America into a socially just new society. In other words, little is accomplished by achieving things part way. Total change is needed. Softening today's system won't work. It never did before and won't now because gains are easily lost.
Wage slavery replaced its chattel antecedent. Hard won labor, civil, and social gains are gone or on the chopping block to disappear. So aren't voting rights when corporate-controlled machines do it for us, yet does it matter under a duopoly money-controlled system offering no choice whatever.
Wallerstein believes "the movement (may go) from strength to strength." Perhaps it can "force short-term restructuring of what the government will actually do to minimize" real pain people experience.
