Occupy struggle continues worldwide
Egypt Bahrain Kazakhstan London
Oakland Portland San Francisco New Haven
Philadelphia meetings interrupted
Philadelphia street protest
Robert Reich speaks out
This video is on youtube Here
Media corporations are suggesting the occupy movement is over after forcible police evictions.
However public meetings and street protests in Philadelphia tell another story.
Robert Reich, former secretary of labor and now a professor at University of California, was asked by the LA Times:
“You spoke at Occupy events here in L.A. and in the Bay Area. What has the Occupy movement accomplished?
It’s had a huge effect on the national conversation. President Obama’s speech [in Kansas] focused on precisely the themes the Occupiers have been emphasizing: the concentration of income, wealth and political power at the top, the failure of big corporations and Wall Street to keep the economy going for the rest of us. I don’t think this sort of speech would have happened had it not been for the Occupy movement and the change in public debate it’s created.
Polls show most Americans today don’t believe their children are going to live as well as they do. A large percentage feel the game is rigged against them. Upward mobility is now far more difficult to achieve. So the issue of class has emerged as very real and very tangible. For most of us, the America we knew was one in which anyone could make it with enough gumption and guts and drive. We truly believed that America was a place where there were no class distinctions, although we saw the plight of the poor, particularly poor minorities. What’s new is this sense that a relatively small number of people have rigged the game or loaded the dice in such a way that their positions of power and privilege are entrenched.
Essentially, every time the excesses of capitalism threaten to destroy it, we save capitalism from itself. We did it in the Progressive era, we did it in the New Deal, and hopefully we are at least beginning to do it now. The question is how bad things have to get before average people begin mobilizing. Sometimes we revert to third parties. Sometimes we make such a ruckus, as we did with civil rights and Vietnam, that we force change. These movements must always start at the grass-roots, and they always start with moral outrage.