Networks of Outrage and Hope by Manuel Castells

Author:Manuel Castells
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780745695792
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2015-06-11T00:00:00+00:00

OCCUPY WALL STREET:

HARVESTING THE SALT OF THE EARTH

THE OUTRAGE, THE THUNDER, THE SPARK

There was outrage in the air. At first, suddenly, the real estate market plunged. Hundreds of thousands lost their homes, and millions lost much of the value they had traded their lives for. Then, the financial system came to the brink of collapse, as a result of the speculation and greed of its managers. Who were bailed out. With taxpayers’ money. They did not forget to collect their millionaire bonuses, rewarding their clumsy performance. Surviving financial companies cut off lending, thus closing down thousands of firms, shredding millions of jobs and sharply reducing pay. No one was held accountable. Both political parties prioritized the rescue of the financial system. Obama was overwhelmed by the depth of the crisis and quickly set aside most of his campaign promises – a campaign that had brought unprecedented hope for a young generation that had re-entered politics to revitalize American democracy. The hardest was the fall. People became discouraged and enraged. Some began to quantify their rage. The share of US income of the top 1 percent of Americans jumped from 9 percent in 1976 to 23.5 percent in 2007. Cumulative productivity growth between 1998 and 2008 reached about 30 percent, but real wages increased only by 2 percent during the decade. The financial industry captured most of the productivity gains, as its share of profits increased from 10 percent in the 1980s to 40 percent in 2007, and the value of its shares increased from 6 percent to 23 percent in spite of employing only 5 percent of the labor force. Indeed, the top 1 percent appropriated 58 percent of the economic growth in this period. In the decade preceding the crisis, hourly real wages increased by 2 percent while the income of the richest 5 percent increased by 42 percent. The pay of a CEO was 50 times higher than that of the average worker in 1980, and 350 times more in 2010. These were no longer abstract figures. There were faces, too: Madoff, Wagoner, Nardelli, Pandit, Lewis, Sullivan. And they were interspersed with politicians and government officials (Bush, Paulsen, Summers, Bernanke, Geithner, and, yes, Obama) who were rationalizing people’s pain and arguing for the need of saving finance to save people’s lives. Moreover, the Republican Party went on a vengeful offensive to bring down a popular president who came to power advocating for an active role of government in improving the welfare of society. The electoral success of this suicidal strategy allowed the Republican dominated Congress to block most reform initiatives, thus aggravating the crisis and increasing its social costs. The first expression of popular outrage was the rise of the Tea Party, a mixture of populism and libertarianism that offered a channel of mobilization to a variety of indignant opposition to government in general and to Obama in particular. Yet, when it became clear that it was bankrolled by Koch Industries, among other corporations, and captured by the

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