OWS – 5 Years Ago Something Big Started
Five years on and what has changed? Some might say nothing. We still have candidates of the 1% – this time one of them proudly running as the king of the Billionaires, the other just your standard SuperPAC funded politico. Transparency in government and in the business world sure as hell hasn’t gotten any better. Wells Fargo defrauds thousands and no one gets in trouble, Clinton runs a private e-mail server to avoid FOIA laws and transparency and she just gets a scolding.
But what did we expect? Did we ever dream that OWS would have changed all that? A bunch of hippy kids hanging out in a park in lower Manhattan changing the world? Or even American politics? Nah. But what they did do is change the conversation. The Democratic Party very nearly elected a socialist from Vermont for their Presidential nominee. Everyone in the US now knows what the 99% – Obama used the language of Occupy in his speeches and many more candidates sprung up from the movement. Black Lives Matter, and other movements have sprung up from the ashes of OWS and made something even larger.
And this is just 5 years on.
Here’s some of the photos I took day one on September 17th, 2011 on Wall Street in Lower Manhattan.
What I remember most was a dead Breitbart protege mixed in a crowd at a DC museum hoping to get the crowd to riot so he could video the chaos and blame OWS. Crowd didn’t react as he hoped and I believe he was charged with some criminal activity.