“De-occupy” Wall Street

“It is no use, it is no use….”

Human beings are so conservative that even when they clearly identify problems, they do not face up to the solution that would bring about radical change; they propose solutions based on the very plans that led to the errors, and so they evolve slowly. As when they propose to end the violence of a dictator by going to war! Of course, the result is that the violence of one dictator is replaced by the violence of another (who is presented as good).

“Rescue the people” (instead of the banks), read one poster of the Occupy Wall Street movement, located in the financial center of Manhattan. And there is something to be said for that. The protestors claim to represent the population, oppressed by the 1 percent that own 25 percent of the nation’s resources, and they protest against “the corrupt banking system.” The problem is that these protestors, or ndignados, do not propose to dismantle the coercive state structure, which oppresses the weak and benefits the powerful, but instead to strengthen it, and bring about more state action.

The Pew Research Center states that, although interest has quadrupled recently, the press has devoted 7 percent of its capacity to the indignados, thus ranking the story below the 2012 presidential elections (17 percent) and the economic crisis (15 percent). The occupants have the support of 67 percent of New Yorkers, according to the University of Quinnipiac, although when it comes to support at national level, according to Pew: “There is less interest than there was in the tea party protests in 2009.” The mayor of New York wants the indignados to dismantle the camp, which is on private property, while Obama says that “he understands their frustrations… that these are not so different from those of the tea party… both feel that their institutions do not look out for them.”

But it has already been explained by the liberal Juan Ramón Rallo, in his article “Perverse Relationship,” what this “endless rescuing of the banks by taxpayers” means. Two and a half years after the banking industry was rescued in the United States, the president of the European Commission requested the recapitalization of financial entities, that would exceed 200 billion euro, some five times the annual spending on education by the Spanish government. This was noted by Rallo days before the biggest German bank, Deutsche Bank, confirmed that it made profits of 4.1 billion euro between January and September, compared to 1.7 billion euro from the same period of the previous year.

Governments have been providing financial institutions with cheap money from central banks, as well as other privileges, in exchange for help with sustaining debt generated by outlandish state spending. So the politicians do not want a free banking system, which acts responsibly in its business activities, because with such a mode of governance (starting with Obama’s White House), it could not sustain the privileges which distances it from the people. This is what occurred with the infamous Argentinean “corralito”: politicians spent brutally, and they took funds from the banks which could not be returned to the people.

The perverse relationship does not finish here. WikiLeaks says that it has suspended operations, because donations dropped 95 percent on account of the banking block that “the United States government has pushed,” a representative of Hosting, the company that hosts WikiLeaks, says. “The block … reveals agreements… between the United State government and … the banking sector” to infringe upon freedom of expression.*

*Editor’s note: The quoted remarks, although accurately translated, could not be independently verified.