Anti-Wall Street Protests Poorly Organized

Decades of prosperous living have left ordinary Americans without the ability to achieve their goals. The “Occupy Wall Street” protests which took place Saturday in New York and resulted in the arrest of more than 700 people, were very poorly organized, analysts say. The main action occurred on the weekend, so the managers of corporations were not faced with the slogan addressed to them: “Wall Street: the financial Gomorrah of America.”

Hundreds of Americans, disturbed by “financial terrorism,” camped out two weeks ago in the city’s business center. At first, no one paid attention to them. It may have been this lack of attention that prompted them to march on Saturday, but most likely the main role was played by new losses in the American economy, which aggravated pessimism. After trades on Sept. 30, the Dow Jones Index fell by 240.6 points (2.2 percent), falling below the psychologically important 11,000 mark to 10,900, while the price of a barrel of “Texas Light Sweet” oil in New York decreased by $2.94, reaching $79.20. This is the lowest in the last year.

According to Western media, the protesters have long-range plans: to stay on Wall Street all winter. However, they don’t have a leader or a unified plan of action.

“In the United States, in contrast to Greece, people are accustomed to asserting their rights in courts, rather than in demonstrations. I am entirely on the side of the protesters. But they still are unable to put forward constructive slogans to induce the Senate to act. It was necessary to gather on a weekday, during working hours, to hold the protest near the bull, which is the symbol of Wall Street. It turned out to be a parody of a protest,” says the director of the analytic department of Nord-Capital, Vladimir Rozhankovskii. “It is possible, of course, that this is the very beginning, and they will learn from their mistakes.”

This tendency, according to some experts, is dangerous. Demonstrators, trying on Saturday [Oct. 2] to block traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge, didn’t gather just to make noise. “In the U.S. a new movement is beginning, essentially anarchic, using the flash mob as a tool. Its roots lie in the common, almost total indebtedness of Americans,” says a major Russian financier, who asked not to be named.

In his opinion, the organizers of the action “Occupy Wall Street” are drawing on the experience of the Arab revolutions. While they are not rising against power in the same way, they accuse the government of supporting major corporations and financiers, who are guilty, in their opinion, of the crisis, and they also protest against bank loans and reductions in the budget for social services.

“People see that profits are rising for many companies, “fat cats” are paid bonuses, but despite this, benefits are not expanding and pension contributions are devalued,” points out Vladimir Rozhankovskii. “This is largely a problem of those retire and well understand that money which has been saved is not sufficient for a normal existence in their old age. For Americans, begging for help from the government is humiliating. Clearly, this angers citizens, and ripens protest.”

When Barack Obama came to power, he tried to resurrect the separation between investment and commercial banks, so that credit organizations, attracting money from the public, couldn’t engage in speculation.

“But the president was unsuccessful in stepping between the banking lobby and restricting, in particular, the orgy of derivatives. To this day, from a third to half of the structures of income of major corporations are composed of financial operations, and this sphere protects itself. Society is beginning to realize this,” remarks an analyst at Kalita Finance, Alexei Vyazovskii.

One of the employees of Izvestiya does not rule out that the mood of poor Americans can be used in the interests of provocateurs and extremists. “There is emerging a very dangerous trend; anarchism is the shortest path to totalitarianism, disguised as democratic values,” warns a Russian financier.

According to analysts, the movement may spread to other countries, like the United Kingdom, where riots caused by the worsening economic situation are no longer rare. In Russia, protests are likely to be limited to those of defrauded real estate investors; problems of financial markets and monetary policy are still far from the population — like the practice of collecting a pension.