Return of the ‘99 percent’

last updated 8 January 2015

Occupy Wall Street demonstrators took to the streets of Manhattan and other cities this week to commemorate the “99 percent” movement’s first anniversary. About 1,000 protesters marched through New York’s Financial District on Sept. 17, exactly one year after the movement set up camp in Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan. Police arrested 181 people as protesters chanted, “We are the 99 percent,” and attempted to form a human chain surrounding the New York Stock Exchange. Smaller events also took place in Chicago, Seattle, and San Francisco, but none approached the scale of last year’s 30,000-strong demonstrations in New York. The movement has become less visible since Occupiers were cleared out of public spaces, but protesters insisted it had not disappeared. “People are hurting just as much now as they were this time last year,” said Ed Needham, an Occupy Wall Street spokesperson.

What exactly has Occupy Wall Street achieved? said The New York Post in an editorial. It remains “leaderless, purposeless, and embarrassingly irrelevant,” succeeding only in providing some “theater.” Wall Street bonuses remain unreformed, and banking regulations are no stricter than they were a year ago, said Andrew Ross Sorkin in The New York Times. Occupy “will be an asterisk in the history books, if it gets a mention at all.”

To see Occupy Wall Street’s impact, said Stephen Zunes in CNN.com, just look at the presidential election. President Obama is running on a broad, populist platform, “decrying unfair tax laws” and depicting Mitt Romney as “the quintessential representative of the 1 percent.” A year ago, income inequality and tax fairness were absent from the political debate. “But we do have to ask, now what?” said Eliot Spitzer in Slate.com. This week’s muted protests were a reminder that Occupy Wall Street has no concrete agenda for the future. My advice: “Start backing real candidates” who represent the movement’s ethos. Occupy must either directly engage with the democratic system, or fade into irrelevancy.