Could It Happen Here? by Michael Adams

Author:Michael Adams
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

CHAPTER SIX

Occupy This—The Politics of Inequality in Canada

The Occupy movement, which percolated to the top of public consciousness when income inequality protesters seized Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan in 2011, never really had a coherent agenda. Philosophically, it was never meant to.

The anarchic protests and public space occupations spread organically all over the world, putting a face to the economic mayhem that ravaged so many countries after the 2008 credit crisis. The Occupiers evoked memories of the mass antiglobalization protests of the late 1990s and anticipated the confrontational civil disobedience of the Black Lives Matter movement that surged across North America in 2014 after a wave of police shootings of young black men in Ferguson, Baltimore, New York and many other places.

These three movements didn’t really overlap and each had its own themes and drivers. But in some important ways, they all highlighted the way current power structures—global, national or local—exclude large segments of the population, sometimes forcibly and sometimes with lethal consequences.

After 2011, “the one percent” became instantly recognizable shorthand for those who sought to highlight the way the lion’s share of a society’s financial capital ends up in the hands of a relatively small number of rich people (although the more interesting statistic focuses on the wealth controlled by the top 0.01 per cent—the bankers and executives and business owners whose eight-figure incomes have achieved, as The Atlantic noted, “escape velocity” since the 1990s1). “The conflict between rich and poor,” the New York Times opined in early 2012, “is now the greatest source of tension in American society.”

The Occupy movement drew the attention of a small army of academics, analysts and pundits who had been warning—in academic journals and dry position papers—about the perils of growing wealth polarization and income inequality for years. Their ranks included the likes of Nobel Prize–winning economists Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz, as well as the eminent British academic Richard Wilkinson, who spent a career explaining the “social epidemiology” of inequality and the myriad ways income polarization not only inflicts social costs but also exacts a psychological and physiological toll on those who find themselves in the bottom quintiles. In his doorstop treatise, Capital, the French economist Thomas Piketty served up hundreds of pages of quantitative proof that in capitalist economies the rich do, in fact, get richer.

The New Yorker’s George Packer, author of The Unwinding, set out to document the lives of those stuck in the mire of a global economy that assigned more importance to cheap plastic products than stable unionized jobs. Matthew Desmond, an ethnographer, went to live with desperately poor families in Cincinnati’s slums and trailer parks to investigate how eviction was playing a deeply corrosive role in low-income communities.2 More recently, J. D. Vance, a San Francisco–based investment banker, added to the genre with Hillbilly Elegy, his memoir of growing up in a violence- and drug-filled white working-class household in an Ohio steel town.3 On the other side of the racial divide, The Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates has powerfully documented the precariousness of black life in twenty-first-century America.

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