Comment by bfung
20 days ago
Dunno about the website or corp, but the occupy wall st movement was/is true. Happened right after 2008 stock market crash and people camped out on Wall Street in protest of bailing out the banks.
20 days ago
Dunno about the website or corp, but the occupy wall st movement was/is true. Happened right after 2008 stock market crash and people camped out on Wall Street in protest of bailing out the banks.
One can make the argument that trump was elected because of OWS knock-on effects...
> One can make the argument that trump was elected because of OWS knock-on effects...
Absolutely.
And guys like Tim Poole got famous off Occupy, then parlayed that fame into building an audience for themselves.
The libertarians at OWS never went away, they just found new causes.
I was at the HUMONGOUS rally that Obama held in Portland in 2008.
The epicenter of OWS was based a few blocks away, years later, and reflected the optimism of 2008 hardening into frustration over Wall Street excess.
I’m listening—...
Just, like, it was the first populist political movement following the ‘08 crash, and while Obama was supposed to be the liberal technocratic answer to the failure of neoliberalism, he was not able to create policies that restored the social and economic post-war order in the US. After Bernie Sanders lost the 2016 nomination, the populist left, which still retained a hope of a new kind of society, no longer had a political representative, and Trump managed to clinch the nomination by campaigning in states that had been neglected by the Clinton campaign. Biden was another, more radical but still fundamentally liberal technocratic attempt to save the status quo of America politics, but the largest economic gains were for the educated professional class, and many people in the country felt left behind and ignored—-again, now with the backing of popular support, Trump won the 2024 election with a promise to completely reshape the country. And he has at least in part succeeded.
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I would make the correction that the protest movement was not left wing. I think he’s trying to take credit for his favorite team. TARP was opposed by 80% of Americans. It passed legislation anyway. I think there’s a good lesson to be learned in how performative and inconsequential the electoral process is.
Carried over to Europe too, I remember the camps and protests in many cities' financial districts.