Tariq Ali gives his take on the Occupy Wall Street protests on the
London Review of Books blog, asking “After the hopeful Wisconsin flutter, might this be the beginning of an Egyptian summer in New York”?
Spring has absconded from the heart of political America for far too
long. The frozen winters of the Reagan and Bush years didn't melt with
Clinton or Obama: hollow men who rule over a hollow system where money
overpowers all and the much-maligned state is used mainly to preserve
the financial status quo and fund the wars of the 21st century.
Discussion, serious debate, openness have virtually disappeared from
mainstream political life in the United States and its more extreme
versions in Europe, with Britain as the cock on the dung heap. The
extreme right is small. The extreme left barely exists. It is the
extreme centre that dominates political and financial life.
The Occupy Wall Street protesters are consciously or sub-consciously
demonstrating against a system of despotic finance-capital; a
greed-infected vampire that must suck the blood of the non-rich in order
to survive. The protesters are showing their contempt for bankers, for
financial speculators and for their media hirelings who continue to
insist that there is no alternative.
Visit the
LRB blog to read the article in full.
