Courtesy of Pam Martens.
The Poster That Launched Occupy Wall Street, Courtesy of Adbusters
You know there is something different in the air when Rand Paul is railing against “fat cats” and a fat cat is worrying aloud about pitchforks in Politico Magazine.
It all harkens back to one of the greatest grassroots awareness campaigns in history, variously called Occupy Wall Street or “We Are the 99 Percent.” In a messy, tarp-filled outpost in Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan, the message of enforced inequality via the 99 percent brand was plastered across posters, hand-made t-shirts, street puppets, and even flashed onto skyscrapers in a creative blend of marketing savvy and social activism. From there, it tweeted around the world.
This was creative destruction at its finest: calling out a failed system of crony capitalism that was only working for the 1 percent while creatively protesting for change in the streets – the only method left since the system was metastasizing under the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision which opened the spigots to a flood of corporate money in elections.
Capitalists supposedly love creative destruction where failed systems and business models are meant to collapse in order to be replaced with more efficient, innovative ones. But Occupy Wall Street was crushed with the brutality of a wrecking ball and the collaboration of a vast surveillance network.
The Department of Homeland Security funded a high-tech, joint spy center in the heart of Wall Street where the New York Federal Reserve, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and other Wall Street mega banks had their own personnel working alongside NYPD officers to spy on the activities of Occupy Wall Street protesters as well as law abiding citizens on the streets.
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