Daily View: Does it matter if Occupy protesters' demands aren't clear?
that the lack of aims may mean slow progress for the Occupy movement:
"A week may be a long time in politics, but it is no time at all in protest. As the inhabitants of Parliament Square have demonstrated, even a decade is as nothing so long as you have a constantly morphing cause, a council with no balls, and a small but steady stream of acolytes."
the Occupy movement to Anna Hazare's anti-corruption protests in India and finds Occupy's anti-politicians stance lacking:
"I understand that it is not the job of a protest to draft legislation, to elect candidates, to agree on a 10-point plan for fixing what ails us. But that does not mean the job of fixing what ails us is any less urgent or admirable. At some point you need the unglamorous business of government, which entails not consensus but hard choices and reasoned compromise. The job of protest is to mobilize a mood - but to mobilize it with purpose."
But the the vagueness of demands and resistance to join panel discussions:
"The alternatives they are looking for are not something written up in a Google doc. They live them, modelling new forms of organisation and democracy. 'Watch us, learn from us, join us' is the tactic. Who knows who is learning what from this experiment, and if that knowledge may feed into radical new ideas five years down the line? If it sounds vague, just consider how concrete literalism has boxed us into a very tight corner of the theory of TINA (There Is No Alternative), for a generation."
that maybe the Occupy protesters may have a point about capitalism's bad points, albeit inarticulately made. And he thinks middle England may be starting to see it as well:
"You can say that regrettably the British public do not really understand capitalism and probably wouldn't approve if they did; and that they go along with market economics only because (and while) it keeps making them richer. But if the market stops making them richer, beware. They may then turn on its unfairnesses, find themselves suddenly indignant at its moral disfigurement and make the market the scapegoat for their woes.
Ìý
"Whichever you prefer, be ready to side with the mob rather than the scapegoat. For every protest junkie in a tent outside St Paul's yelling: 'Down with global capitalism' there are a thousand middle-income householders in Bromley, Bletchley and Barrow, studying directors' pay and muttering: 'It just isn't right.'"
Support for the protesters continues to come from unexpected places. Former investment banker that the City should heed the "discordant voices" at St Paul's:
"When such a wide range of people are singing a tune perhaps discordant to a City worker's ears but seemingly in tune with the global view that the market economy has failed to deliver growth, jobs, and hope, we need to listen. The cure is not more legislation, or increased regulation. It is the pressing need to reconnect the financial with the ethical.
Ìý
"Free markets may be free in the sense that they permit uncoerced transactions between individuals but they do not exist in a moral vacuum. For markets to work freely, they need somehow to be nurtured and sustained by a moral spirit. This is not the box-ticking morality with which we have become familiar but somehow, improbable as it may seem to the many critics of the City, by a desire to do well, by doing good."
Finally, the the protesters may be losing their civil liberties:
"When economies are atrophying, the powerful turn even more hyperactively repressive. Anxieties about jobs and cash produce anger, endanger the settled order, which, however iniquitous, must be protected. The establishment understands that duty. The camp outside St Paul's Cathedral by activists who want a fairer deal for all is winning public sympathy. Can't be allowed. They will be overcome, defeated by any means necessary. What about the right to peaceful protest? Yeah, what of it? Hard times need hard leadership."
