So true!
Occupy Wall Street: Back, But Does Anyone Care?
Posted By: Jeff Cox | CNBC.com Senior Writer
CNBC.com
| 30 Apr 2012 | 02:13 PM ET
After
spending 2011 near the top of the news headlines, Occupy Wall Street
finds itself in a struggle to regain relevance as a grassroots protest
against corporate greed and Washington corruption.
The
movement hopes to regain some of its mojo Tuesday, when it stages a
nationwide May Day protest and celebration that will focus on a broad
agenda of causes it hopes to push.
But with neither presidential candidate paying
much attention to the OWS faction and the bloody protests in Europe
seemingly quelled for the time being, this is a pivotal moment for the
Occupy movement either to regain its footing, or risk being dismissed as
a non-factor in the national dialogue.
"They
lost relevance a little bit. A lot of people felt like it wasn't going
anywhere," says filmmaker Emil Chiaberi, who wrote, produced and
directed "Murder by Proxy: How America Went Postal," a documentary that
explores the motivations — and extremes — of protest movements that
predated Occupy Wall Street or its conservative twin, the tea party.
"This
whole idea of let's just protest the corporate greed — yeah, but what
are you trying to accomplish?" Chiaberi adds. "How are you going to
affect change?"
Primarily, the group hopes to get noticed again simply by getting busy.
Though
Occupiers have held small demonstrations this Spring around the New
York Stock Exchange, Tuesday's May Day effort marks the year's first
coordinated nationwide event.
In New York,
events include a kickoff at 8 am in Bryant Park of a "Pop-Up
Occupation," followed by a Free University in Madison Square Park at 10
am. At 2 pm, Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello leads a
march from Bryant Park to Union Square.
Later
in the day, there will be a Solidarity Rally in Union Square at 4,
followed at 5:30 pm by another march "into the heart of corporate
corruption on Wall Street," according to the maydayncy.org Web site.
Similar
events last year drew heavy media coverage but not always huge crowds.
Weekend gatherings tended to be more raucous and well-attended, while
weekday protests, such as the Upper East Side march in front of several Wall Street kingpins' homes, attracted noisy but relatively small crowds.
Occupiers
often complained about how the mainstream media covered their protests,
focusing more on arrests and uproar than the actual message being
conveyed.
A group of alternative media outlets has bonded this year to make sure the OWS message is heard without distortion.
"We
were worried that corporate media tends to focus on arrests, on police
action, on violence, because it makes really great TV," says Jo Ellen
Green Kaiser, a spokeswoman for "Media for the 99 Percent," a group that
has coined a popular OWS motto to demonstrate the type of coverage it
plans. OWS claims it represents the 99 percent of Americans not in the
ruling class.
"We
will be tracking arrests, but our interest is really in understanding
why these protests are happening now and what they're trying to
accomplish," she says. "When you have hundreds of people, maybe
thousands of people, who are volunteering their own time to be a part of
a protest movement, who are willing to camp outside, who are willing to
attend mind-numbing General Assemblies, for hours on end — we want to
understand why people are doing that."
The media group entails indie outlets like Yes! Magazine and AlterNet, as well as more recognizable names like The Nation and Mother Jones.
Kaiser said the outlets are undeterred by the notion that adopting the "99 Percent" moniker might betray a bias of their own.
"The
difference isn't that we're taking a side, the difference is we can
offer more perceptive coverage because we are more interested in the
context," she said. "The one place where we are very sympathetic with
Occupy is, honestly, we feel that we're fighting a battle against
corporate media."
OWS also will face some
other constraints with which it is well familiar — the New York Stock
Exchange is planning stepped-up security, while the city police
department also is prepared to make sure the protesters don't get out of
hand.
More than that, though, the movement
confronts the challenge of making sure its message doesn't get lost.
While the OWS message that Wall Street has damaged the national economy
through reckless greed certainly garners sympathy, OWS often is faulted for offering little alternative.
"No
one even thinks about asking the question as to why every country in
the world protects its banking system," banking analyst Dick Bove of
Rochdale Securities said. "The answer, of course, is because the banking
system holds the key to the health of middle to small business and the
people they employ."
May Day, then, provides both an opportunity and a challenge for OWS to show it still matters.
"Even
if the movement itself is losing relevance, what's relevant are the
feelings, emotions and concepts that brought those people together in
the first place," says Chiaberi, the filmmaker. "If Occupy Wall Street
dissipates or loses relevance, something else inevitably will appear in
its stead. I hope it will morph into something more organized."
URL: http://www.cnbc.com/id/47233587/
