Occupy

OCCUPY LONDON

It's not hard to see why the Occupy Wall Street protests have gone global. What kicked off  in relative obscurity – drawing inspiration from last year's Spanish indignados occupations and the uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia – has now spawned protests in more than 900 cities around the world. The only surprise is it didn't happen sooner.

Three years after the banks that brought the west's economies to their knees were bailed out with vast public funds, nothing has fundamentally changed. Profits and bonuses are booming for financial oligarchs and corporate giants, while most people are paying the price of their reckless speculation with falling living standards, cuts in public services and mounting unemployment.

Coming as this crisis has done – at the end of an era of rampant deregulation that has created huge disparities of income and wealth, concentrated in the hands of the top 1% and secured by politicians bought by corporate interests – a backlash against those actually responsible was well overdue.

The occupation slogan "We are the 99%" exactly reflects the reality in the crisis-hit Anglo-Saxon economies in particular – just as the protesters' call for systemic change has far stronger echoes in US public opinion than its captive political class would have anyone believe. A majority of Americans are sympathetic to the protests while a recent poll found only a narrow majority thought capitalism a better system than socialism – in a country where the term is as good as a political swearword.

That has now shaped the political and corporate response. While the protesters were originally ridiculed as unfocused, or denounced by leading Republicans as "mobs", they are now championed by the media establishment – including the New York Times and Financial Times – on both sides of the Atlantic. Obama has made friendly noises, while his officials say they now plan to "run against Wall Street" in next year's presidential campaign.

Updated from The GUARDIAN        Wednesday 19 October 2011