It was gone, at least in part, because the Justice Department coordinated a nation-wide crackdown on the movement. So, thanks Obama.
Considering how disjointed, unfocused, leaderless and sometimes internally contradictory the Occupy movement was…
I guess it can claim to have been instrumental in everything from income inequality being a topic to helping Trump get within striking distance of being president and you can find someone who was “important” to the movement to back up those claims. None of these things started with Occupy, if anything, Occupy set most of them back.
In the end the “lasting impact” of Occupy Wall Street is a handful of Internet memes and my generation having a grossly overinflated sense of self-importance.
I’m a yellow-dog Dem but there’s no way to justify the shameless Wall St. pass given to it by Eric Holder. He was greatly to blame for the creation of MERS (mortgage electronic registry system) which was at the center of the mortgage meltdown in 2008. He also refused to prosecute the banksters because they were his former clients at Covington & Burling. His job at C&B was waiting for him when he left the DOJ. It’s one of the most blatant “revolving door” examples in US history, If you care to learn a lot more about the mortgage fraud perpetrated on this country, read CHAIN OF TITLE by David Dayen.
Occupiers primed me for empathy with Black Lives Matter, by first opening my eyes to the reality of police power. Contrary to my sheltered, Civics 101 view of Constitutional restraint, I saw middle class, educated, white people arrested for disorderly conduct, obstructing officers, resisting arrest, and every other trumped up misdemeanor in the playbook. Monday morning, after the weekend in jail, they had to choose: spend thousands of dollars on bail and a lawyer, spend weeks in jail awaiting trial with a public defender, or eat the conviction with credit for time served, and go free with a job-hunt killing criminal conviction.
A future BLM activist, at that time, might’ve said, “No shit, Sherlock. Welcome to our world.” But 5 years ago, the abuse of police power was more or less invisible to me. Articles written from that perspective hadn’t made it to my eyeballs before then.
Elizabeth Warren deserves much credit if that is the point of this article. And she is sticking with her advocacy, she is not a one and done specialist.
If it makes you feel any better, it’s far from the first generation to feel that way. O.K, maybe not so much the “Silent Generation,” or the “Baby Bust” generation (not sure if that’s still considered a thing, but it was at one time) but many of the other recent “named” generations seem to involve a hefty dose of “aren’t we so special.”
“The Greatest Generation” pretty much gives it away right in the name, but Baby Boomers are no slouches either, when it comes to overinflated sense of generational self-importance.
And with the name “Millennial Generation,” implying the dawn of a new era, it’s hardly surprising that a lot of folks in this generation may be tempted to see their generation as different and better…but again, that attitude is pretty much par for the course, at least within my lifetime.
And no, I’m not going to bother to say which “generation” I’m part of, because I think the whole concept is so deeply flawed as to be near-meaningless for most purposes.
Thanks for adding your perspective, that makes a lot of sense, and I’ve heard similar things from more than a few thoughtful young folks who “came of age” around the time of Occupy Wall Street. The Civil Rights movement, the Anti-War movement, the Anti-Nuclear movement, the Anti-Apartheid movement and others were all things that they had read about, but Occupy Wall Street was something unfolding right in front of their eyes in real time. And that’s inevitably a very different thing, even for those who never attended one of the “occupations” in person.
It’s lasting importance is yet to be seen in any significant way, since it didn’t try in any serious way to have lasting importance. I look forward to the time when some of those who went through that movement (and Black Lives Matter) draw its lessons and become socialist revolutionaries, as opposed to supporters of that patriotic “socialist” who has been part and parcel of the congressional Democratic caucus for nearly 40 years.
@professorpooypants: It’s important not to confuse the egoism of life, in which young people are apt to think (for awhile at least) that their life cycle and history march in step, with the specific notions that predominate in a generation or for a period. There was a great sense of collectivitism in the 50’s Civil Rights Movement and 1960’s leftism that fairly rapidly (and was intentionally) dissipated with the ending of the Vietnam War, the defeat of militant Black Nationalism and the rise of reform sectoralist movements (e.g., feminism, gay rights, environmentalism). Those soon dovetailed with the beginning of the decline of American industrial capitalism and its narrowing of the job market, the revanche of the American Right, its social-cultural ideology of “Looking out for #1” and the willful ruling class movement to jail or otherwise criminalize a large proportion of Blacks (potential troublemakers). Nearly forty years later, we still inhabit that latter period, although there are glimmers of possibilities of a shift, of which the Occupy movement was at most a half-hearted stab, and the Black Lives Matter movement, which now offers a bit more.
The other problem with the “Millennial Generation” is that it’s too vast. (It is usually listed as “born 1980-2000”)
Up thread it was mentioned that this was a persons first real contact with “white people being arrested for [protesting].” And prepared them for when BLM came along. And that leads me to believe that they were maybe a teen to early adult during Occupy. The only group that Occupy really “resonated” with. To “Millennials” my age (born in the late 70’s to early 80’s) we cut our teeth on protesting Afghanistan and the Second Iraq war 7 years earlier. We endured all the same “being arrested for bullshit” but we had one thing Ocuppy didn’t a clear definable goal… And we lost, we got herded into “free speech zones”, got mocked, and for some of us, sent off to fight.
while Occupy may have been some Millennials first major national protest, it wasn’t all Millennials first national protest. and we wanted a more concrete “what do we want…” Than, “list of grievances from several different groups, some of them contradictory!”
Au contraire mon fraire…
Social organizing at it’s most basic level.
Here is just one of thousands of grassroots offshoots of Occupy across the nation…
And Strike Debt
From 2014…
After forgiving millions of dollars in medical debt, Occupy Wall Street is tackling a new beast: student loans.
Marking the third anniversary of the Occupy Wall Street movement, the group’s Strike Debt initiative announced Wednesday it has abolished $3.8 million worth of private student loan debt since January. It said it has been buying the debts for pennies on the dollar from debt collectors, and then simply forgiving that money rather than trying to collect it.
In total, the group spent a little more than $100,000 to purchase the $3.8 million in debt.
I don’t have time to list them all.
But they are everywhere.
~OGD~
Well, I can’t prove it of course, but my opinion is that we would not have had such a strong showing from Bernie Sanders in this cycle without the Occupy movement setting the conversation in the direction of recognizing income inequality. Nor would we be discussing an increased minimum wage, or the fixing of the college loan mess. Senator Warren is working to correct some systemic problems which were highlighted by the Occupy movement as well.
Social change takes time, and often the effects of activism filter into society in ways that are not easily connected.
One could also lay the “credit” as it were for those topics taking the forefront on the intransigence of the republican held congress, the sluggish rebounding from the 2008 recession, and with “national security” being not quite as major of a topic than specifically the Occupy Movement. What with Occupy was a thing for about a summer and was already fizzling before the 2012 midterms and we all saw how that went.
College loan reform has been a plank in the democratic platform since as least 2004, same with income inequality.
While Occupy happened, giving it some credit for evergreen topics in the Democratic Party is a bit on the side of generous. So far all Occupy has done is propelled a candidate to losing in a primary that he only did well in the primary because he was the only other choice and was promising things he could never deliver, he then got things on the platform that had already been on it.
I stopped caring about Occupy Wall Street after their bad treatment of John Lewis when he went over there to see them. The movement was a rudderless ship and you should always show respect to the men who stepped into the shoes before you did. Not showing respect to John Lewis made it feel like they thought they were above him and didn’t care about the challenges and adversity he faced.
That’s one way to look at it. But my view is that it also helped defeat Romney in 2012 because the contrast between his 47% comment versus the “we are the 99%” associated with the Occupy protests highlighted the difference between the parties.
In addition, the Occupy movement in the US was only a small part of what was a worldwide movement, which in many ways pushed for financial changes in France, Spain, Britain, and many other countries. I think it is a mistake to underestimate how it changed the discussion.
In my opinion, the Democratic platform which you mention has moved leftward at least partially because of Occupy issues and also because of Sanders strong showing in the primary. Hillary Clinton has also moved leftward for some of those same reasons. Again, changes are incremental and should not be discounted because they don’t happen at the moment of protest. I lived through the Vietnam era, and effects both good and bad are still being felt 45 years later, which arose during that tumult.
Occupy was an eye-opener for many young people in that it acknowledged explicity that the political system does not exist to serve them. Investment banks, commercial banks, as well as other financial institutions were made whole after the Great Recession, and wealth accumulation at the top sped up in the US and many other advanced countries.
Globally, we have an economic system that allows vast trade flows that mostly benefit the countries at the top of the food chain. Certainly, US per capita resource consumption reflects this enviable position, but the results globally are generally pretty lousy. In a few rare cases such as South Korea and Singapore, developing countries have managed to reeducate their workforces and invest in their capital bases so that they “converged” with the techology frontier, allowing them to compete in the global market with the big boys. Most developing countries, however, get stuck in a middle-income trap and never advance beyond a certain point, e.g. Philippines and Russia. Nearly a billion people on the planet have basically nothing.
If anything, Occupy revealed the insanity of “financial stability,” given that it depends on destabilizing everything else. For example, only 25% of the fauna in the seas down to the depth of 500 meters remain compared to 1950 – a period less than a human lifetime. We have transformed the composition of our atmosphere, mainly through combustion, even though we receive a lot of sunlight, and mankind’s overall energy use is rather small. Even today, the bulk of our energy comes still from burning stuff. Our ability to manufacture became so good that by the 1960s we had developed industially manufactured products with engineered obsolescence, so we needed ad agencies just to keep the commodity fetishism alive (often 10–20% of an entire corporate budget, with 40% not unusual for a tech firm). So yes, young people look at this insane system and know not just that we can do a lot better, we have to do a lot better in adjusting our behaviors and economic objectives. It hardly bodes well that the son of a current presidential candidate sees killing an elephant to chop its tail off as “sport.”
I don’t think you can overlook the role of the Media in assassinating Occupy when it started to look like it was a serious populist movement – first they gave it nothing but sad, mocking press, then they strangled it in darkness by refusing to put them on TV or in print, suffocating them in silence.
Our Corporate Overlords decided it was Too Much Of A Threat and put it down.
A bunch of hippies who did nothing
this is why they are all going to that coward johnson