In praise of.......the Occupy Wall Street protests

In September 2011 it seemed that the disenfranchised youth of America finally woke up. Over three years after the Neoliberal Economic Crisis plunged America and much of the global economy into recession the downtrodden American people finally began to assert themselves with the occupation of Wall Street.

As with the Arab Spring and the Spanish "indignantes" protests, the Occupy Wall Street campaing is a "grass roots" popular uprising, heavily reliant on social networking due to a mainstream media blackout. The movement is described on occupywalstreet.org as a non-violent "leaderless resistance movement" which was initially proposed by the Adbusters website and organised by a a collective of individuals. The stated aim of the protests is to end the corporatisation of America and restore legitimate democracy.

The origins of the movement can be traced back to the "Credit Crunch", which happened when the reckless gambling of a tiny deregulated financial sector elite caused global money markets to freeze up and created havoc in the stock markets. The US government response was to pour $trillions of taxpayers' money into the financial sector in order to recapitalise the system. the next step was to begin magicking up new money via money printing schemes called "qauntitative easing" in order to pour even more capital into the banks. Instead of using this unprecedented cash flow to support the US economy the financial sector used it to write down many of their toxic debts and continue to pay themselves obscene salaries and bonuses.

Instead of attaching strict lending conditions to these bailout funds and re-regulating the financial sector to discourage further speculative or ponzi style investments the US establishment simply handed over the cash and left responsibility for restabilising the economy with the financial sector elite that created the crisis in the first place.

Thomas Jefferson, still right after more than 200 years.

An interesting historical comparison can be made with the US government's reaction last time an unregulated Laissez-farre financial sector elite drove the US economy into depression; the 1929 Wall Street Crash. The eventual government response was to entirely shut down the banks until they agreed to new regulations designed to get the money markets moving again and prevent similar crashes in the future. Another huge difference in Franklin D. Roosevelt's strategy was that instead of using government funds to prop up the greed stricken financial institutions, he used them to provide direct stimuli to the "real economy" through hugely ambitious state infrastructure projects and housebuilding.

The rise of the neoliberals since the 1970s and the political acceptance of their mantra of "small-statism", privatisation, corporate deregulation and low taxation of the economic elite" eventually led to the destruction of the Roosevelt administration's financial stability reforms in 1999 when the Glass-Steagall 1933 Banking Act was repealed, allowing the banks to engage in dangerously speculative activities using the capital of the high street banks as equity. Another victory for the free-market neoliberals was another piece of Clinton administration legislation; the 2000 Commodity Futures Modernisation Act, which effectively deregulated the derivatives market.

The fault lines in these deregulation policies were clearly demonstrated by the 2001 Enron collapse, which came about after it was discovered that the company had been using complex derivatives to hide their losses and artificially inflate their share prices. The Enron collapse illustrated the dangers of neoliberal deregulation and also exposed a catastrophic failure of the company auditors Arthur Andersen who also collapsed, reducing the global accountancy oligopoly from the big five to the big four.

The neoliberal response to the Enron scandal was as predictable as it was pathetic, instead of reconsidering the decision to deregulate the derivatives market, the authorities concentrated on creating show trials for Enron executives and the introduction of a whitewash response called the Sarbanes-Oxley Act which created Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, to supposedly improve the auditing regimes that had failed. PCAOB was incontestably a huge failure given the subsequent collapses of many larger financial institutions and the exposure of the astonishing levels of reckless speculative and ponzi style investment these institutions had been engaging in.

It is incontestable that post Enron regulation of the US financial sector remained inadequate given the failure of regulators to spot the dangers of a boom in sub-prime lending, Collateralised Debt Obligations and the astonishingly inaccurate AAA+ awards given to these financial products by the Credit Rating Agencies that took vast payments from the creators of these dodgy financial instruments in return for their glowing ratings.

It is not as if the failings of militant neoliberal dogmatism and their inadequate responses to their own crises were limited to the Enron scandal. In the outside world, other countries had suffered the devastating consequences of adhering to neoliberal economic theory imposed on them by the US based International Monetary Fund who imposed tough neoliberalisation conditions on their loans (privatisation, corporate tax cuts, globalisation, deregulation of the banking sector, welfare cuts, relinquishment of fiscal autonomy).

There are too many failings of neoliberalism to cover in the space of a single article but obvious examples can be seen in the Post-Communist neoliberalisation of Russia, the rise of the Oligarchs and the stifling of democracy, the 1997 South-East Asian economic crisis and the Argentine economic meltdown.

In the 1990s Argentina were the IMF's poster boys for their enthusiastic embrace of neoliberalism however the economy collapsed in 1999 and didn't recover until 2002 when the IMF neoliberal textbook was torn up and the government engaged in IMF opposed policies of debt restructuring, targeted taxation, reduction in unemployment, improvements to social welfare provision and massive scale infrastructure development projects which rapidly boosted the economy out of depression and gave it the stability to continue prospering throughout the Neoliberal Economic Crisis. Not only can neoliberalism be seen as the cause of the Argentine economic collapse, but the abandonment of IMF neoliberal dogma created the necessary conditions for their economic recovery.

All of these warnings were dismissed by the IMF and the neoliberal elite with contorted post hoc revisionist excuses and explanations. Instead of recognising the fundamental flaws in their favoured economic dogma, they simply covered up and carried on.

The blame doesn't simply lie with greedy and reckless traders
on Wall street, Washington based politicians and technocrats
are responsible for creating the deregulated trading
conditions that Wall Street bankers enjoy.

More of the same can be seen in establishment responses to the Neoliberal Economic Crisis, instead of admitting the failures of neoliberalism they have concocted the Great Neoliberal Lie, to justify the introduction of even more militant neoliberalist policies. Instead of imposing regulation to prevent similar occurrences, large sections of the political elite in the US have actually been calling for further deregulation. The lie goes along the lines that the economic crash was caused by the fact that the state is too large, spending too much money and collecting too many taxes. That that the appropriate response to the crisis is "austerity", which is simply a euphemism for more of the same hardline neoliberalism (cutting welfare and the corporatisation of the state).

These neoliberal austerity measures have actually intensified the effects of the crisis. The "real economy" of the US has stagnated over the last three years, unemployment has risen and the discretionary income of ordinary working people that make up the vast majority of America has been slashed. Against a background of austerity, policies such as quantitative easing and the artificial lowering of interest rates have created stagflation, which hurts ordinary Americans by attacking the value of their wages, their savings and their pension schemes. Instead of stabilising the financial sector, the austerity response has led to increased stock market instability, with ordinary Americans paying the price once again.

One of the most shocking aspects of the neoliberal response to the credit crunch is the huge Tea Party movement, which resembled a "grass roots" movements of stereotypically stupid Americans until it was revealed that the whole thing has been funded and orchestrated by multi -billionaire neoliberal free-marketeers like the Koch brothers. The fact that hundreds of thousands of Americans have been signing up to a "more-of-the-same" movement has been frankly astonishing to outside observers, especially given the rise of genuine "grass roots" populist movements across the Middle-East, Europe and South America to oppose the further entrenchment of defunct neoliberal economic dogma.

Over the last few years coverage of the Tea Party and their harebrained ideologues has flooded the mainstream media of the world, however, now that a genuine grass roots movement has finally awoken, the mainstream media silence is deafening, although entirely predictable.

Coverage of the London Riots exposed
reporting bias in the corporate media.

Events in the UK in 2011 can be seen as another example of how the corporate owned mainstream media has been deliberate selectivity in reporting dissent. The huge London Anti-Cuts protest went virtually uncovered by the corporate mainstream media except for the usual tactic of focusing on the violent activities of a tiny minority of mindless yobs. The protest was estimated to have been attended by half a million people, the largest UK demonstration since the March 2003 Anti-War protests, but people from outside of the UK could be forgiven for not knowing that it had even happened given the stymied media reaction.

In August 2011 a wave of nihilistic riots swept across England, creating a tidal wave of mainstream media coverage despite the fact that in terms of participation these events were absolutely tiny in comparison to the largely peaceful politicised protests. The mindless violence, arson and looting played into the hands of the UK neoliberal establishment elite, allowing them the excuse to openly propose draconian responses to public "disorder" including restrictions on the freedom of speech via the the shutting down of social networks.

The Wall Street protests have suffered an astonishing mainstream media blackout that would have been utterly unthinkable had the people involved been Tea Party campaigners or a bunch of mindless nihilists, however social networks and the blogosphere are alive with coverage and the movement continues to gain momentum.

The Washington based IMF should be another target
for American anti-neoliberal protesters.

The disenfranchised youth of America have suffered the effects of wage stagnation, mass unemployment, disgraceful higher education "aspiration taxes" and welfare cuts and are witnessing the biggest transfer of wealth from ordinary working people to a tiny economic elite in history. The Occupy Wall Street Protests have shown that ordinary Americans have finally found their voice and it is about time too. America is the indisputable capital of the neoliberal system, not only are both of the political parties hugely compromised by the massive corporate donations needed to fund their extravagant election campaigns and the activities of the multi billion Dollar corporate lobbying industry, the US is also home to neoliberal financial institutions like the IMF and the World Bank that are vehicles for exporting their dangerous greed based ideology across the globe.

Not only do the disenfranchised youth of America owe it to themselves to agitate for change in the economic system to end the defunct neoliberal heterodoxy, they must also remember that much of the rest of the world needs to be freed from the devastating effects of the ideologically driven, US supported imposition of toxic neoliberal economic dogma.

 

Related articles

The neoliberal crisis in Argentina & the IMF-opposed recovery

The Great Neoliberal Lie

The Mixed Economy vs Neoliberalism

Michael Moore's take on the Occupy Wall Street protests

2011 Stock Market instability

 If you enjoyed reading this post, maybe you could buy me a beer? £1 would get me a can of cheap lager whilst £3 would get me a lovely pint of real ale.

My view on SlutWalk

The SlutWalk movement began in Canada in 2011 and has rapidly spread across the world, I think it is brilliant. Co-founders Sonya Barnett and Heather Jarvis started the campaign after Constable Michael Sanguinetti told students at a crime prevention seminar that "women should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimized".

The idea that women that dress in a particular way are "asking to be raped" is as old as the hills and it is disgusting, not only because it seeks to shift blame from the perpetrator to the victims of sexual assault but also because it relies on the attitude that all men are "potential rapists" who will attack if the victim acts or dresses provocatively enough.

Fighting back against the entrenched caveman mentality that allowed a Canadian high court judge to let a convicted rapist go free with the justification that he was just a "clumsy Don Juan" who had succumbed to "inviting circumstances" is a good thing but it is not the main reason I like the SlutWalk movement.

The main reason is that it SlutWalking is a bold assertion by ordinary women that female sexuality actually belongs to women. Men and the male dominated media have been allowed to control and commodify female sexuality for their own purposes, from male advertising executives who appeal to male audiences by draping images of scantily clad females all over the product they are endorsing, to the male dominated pornography industry and it's predominantly male audience.

The SlutWalk movement is an attempt to reclaim female sexuality through the appropriation of the word "slut", to mean "sexually empowered female" in the same way as the once derogatory word "queer" has been appropriated by the gay community to mean "homosexual and proud of it".

As a Quaker and an egalitarian, I'm a default feminist because I believe in equality of opportunity for everyone. I sometimes hesitate to use the word feminist to describe myself because I feel it has been misappropriated and tainted by a vocal minority of man-hating, female supremacists. It is almost impossible to hold a public discourse on gender politics without one or many of these sad "victim complex" sufferers monopolising the conversation with their shouty "all men are evil", "blame the patriarchy" rhetoric and completely undermining the causes of legitimate feminism.

For the purposes of clarity I'm going to refer to these shouty man-haters as "feminazis" and people who believe in gender equality as "feminists". However SlutWalk doesn't really fall into either category, SlutWalkers are not protesting because they hate men, neither are they protesting for full female equality, they are protesting on the specific subject of female sexual liberation, the right to look beautiful, sexy or even completely slutty without the implication that they are "asking to be raped".

SlutWalk has been heavily criticised by a number of "traditional feminists" but they should be seriously concerned that the baritone in their chorus of criticism is Rod Liddle (a man who described his ex-wife and the mother of two of his kids as a "total slut and slattern" and made vulgar Auschwitz jokes on the Millwall FC website) who compared women dressing provocatively to leaving a window open and your valuables on display when you pop out to buy a packet of cigarettes. The idea that being brutaly violated is in any way comparable to having your laptop nicked if you were silly enough to leave it on display is disproportionate at best and misogynistic at worst. Feminists should really think hard about whether they want to join in with people like Liddle and a host of rabid misogynists (see the comments beneath the Youtube vid at the top of the page) in putting the boot into a female empowerment movement.

For all of their gender politics terminology and lofty anti-patriarchy sentiments, I find it hard to see beyond my impression that these "academic feminists" are opposed to SlutWalk simply because they see it as direct competition. They don't want ordinary women to express views on rape and female sexuality in their own terms because it threatens the authority of feminist academia.

I think that this threat to academic feminism is a great thing. For far too long feminism has been the preserve of bookish academics and self-interested careerist businesswomen hoping to break into male dominated company boardrooms or political parties. So many high profile feminists are so badly out of touch with real women's issues that their pontifications on the subject belittle the whole concept of feminism. A classic example of out-of-touch feminism is former leader of the UK Labour party Harriet Harman, who was utterly preoccupied with things that wouldn't make a jot of difference to the vast majority of ordinary women, stuff like complaining about the glass-ceiling for high flying businesswomen and re-balancing the number of female MPs in Parliament using undemocratic measures like all-female shortlists. The vast majority of actually oppressed women wouldn't give a damn about whether a complete stranger was overlooked for a place on the board of directors at Acme Inc or worry over the percentage of highly paid politicians that have a penis, but like the rest of the Neo-Labour party, Harman was so surrounded with privilege that she began to believe that feminism would be best imposed from the top echelons of society downwards.

Feminists that actually care about the really important issues that effect millions of women around the world should be much more concerned with opposing religious organisations that attempt to restrict access to contraception or engage in child genital mutilation, demanding equal pay for equal work, helping to protect women from domestic violence and fighting to eradicate cavemen mentalities about what women should be allowed to do or wear.

One of the recurring criticisms of SlutWalk from traditional "academic feminists" and high profile politicians is that "slut" is such a pejorative term it should never be used by anyone. They claim that by using the word "slut", SlutWalk contributes to the "pornification" of everything, "puts pressure pressure on young girls to look like Barbie dolls" and according to the dreadful Tory MP Louise Mensch "lionises promiscuity".

I'd argue that SlutWalk does not do any of these things. SlutWalk is an attempt to take back ownership of female sexuality from the pornographers of the world. It doesn't pressurise anyone to dress sexy, it simply defends their right to dress as they like. If that means little girls can dress in the way that they enjoy without criticism, that's fine, and if feminists really care about little girls dressing like Barbies, perhaps Mattel Inc (the producers of Barbie) would be a more appropriate target for their criticism than a parallel feminist movement.

As for Mensch's "lionising promiscuity" complaint, this says a hell of a lot more about her inability to grasp the basics of the subject than it does about the number of sexual partners the average SlutWalker would deem appropriate. Even if the SlutWalk movement was about fighting for a woman's right to have as many sexual partners as she liked, Mensch would still be wrong, it would be better for everyone if puritanical Victorian moralists like Mensch who deem the private sexual preferences of others to be "harmful" would just keep their outdated opinions to themselves.

I think that feminists that are considering public criticism of SlutWalk should carefully consider what it is that SlutWalkers are actually protesting about. To me it is the concept of "rapeability", the idea that a woman should consider how "rapeable" she looks before she goes out of the house. Surely any objection to the use of the word "slut" or concerns that the SlutWalker hasn't properly understood "feminism" should be secondary to the protest against the normalisation of the concept of "rapeability", based on the scaremongering, absolute worst case scenario assumption that all men are potential rapists.

It is easy to see how the primitive "women are asking for it" mentality is harmful to women, but it is also harmful to men. It assumes that we are all rapists at heart, and that sexual assault is something that can be mitigated by "provocation". The majority of men are quite capable of restraining their sexual desires and behaving in an appropriate manner most of the time. It doesn't matter how scantly clad a woman is, or how beautiful he finds her body, the normal bloke doesn't consider rape as a viable option. Tarring all men with the crimes of a tiny minority of rapists is as wrong as binning the whole concept of feminism because of the witless shouting of a few man-hating "feminazis".

Many societies accept this bogus "men can't control themselves and are therefore potential rapists" reasoning as a truism about human nature. Some Islamic cultures end up forcing women to dress in oppressive clothing like the Burqa in case their hair, their lips, the curve of their shoulder or the shape of their legs "force" men that are not their husbands to sexually assault them. I'm much happier living in a free and liberal society where women can expose their breasts on the beach without fear that they are going to be gang raped by a hoard of sexual predators or lynched by a bunch of religious puritans. The advantages of topless sunbathing are numerous, women don't end up with silly strap lines on their skin, men on the beach learn to control their basic sexual urges and everyone gets to enjoy the beauty of the female body in a non-sexualised, non-pornographic environment.

Not only has the assumption that all men are "potential rapists" been the foundation of oppressive cultural practices it is also one of the principle weapons in the "feminazi" armoury. Just as the misogynist uses the word "slut" as a pejorative term to imply that the woman is asking to be raped, the misandrist uses the word "creep" to imply that the man is a potential rapist.

It is interesting to compare the fact that extremists at either end of the women's rights spectrum rely on this "potential rapist" fallacy to support their warped ideologies, with the fact that misogynistic male journalists and academic feminists have queued up alongside one another to give the SlutWalk movement a public kicking.

See Also

The Mensch Fallacy

The Sentient Concept fallacy

The Occupy Wall Street movement

The contrasting fates of Alan Turing and Lord Sempill