Eps 3: Thatcher and Reagan still occupy Wall Street
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Everett Pena
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As a symbol of the American conservative movement of the 1980s, it is hard to find a more unlikely figure than Britain's Margaret Thatcher, who died on Monday after a stroke. Thatcher was a government minister in 1979, a year and a half before Ronald Reagan became president.
Conservative leaders such as US president Ronald Reagan and British prime minister Margaret Thatcher adopted Hayek and Friedman's radical ideas at a time when their political opponents Bill Clinton and Tony Blair were. Britain's Margaret Thatcher, who died on Monday after a stroke, came from a country once considered a hopeless bastion of socialism, while conservatives like Reagan were deeply entangled in the idea of American exceptionalism. In her memoir, Downing Street Years, Thatcher recalled meeting Reagan for the first time in 1975 when she was the Opposition Leader and he was Governor of California.
What took place on 17 September 2011 and two months afterwards became known as Occupy Wall Street, a protest movement against economic inequality and injustice, which spread to 28 other American cities and European capitals and financial centers, including London, Paris, Berlin and parts of South America and the Far East. The failure of President Barack Obama and lawmakers to act left behind a burning sense of injustice that inspired the Tea Party and the Occupy Wall Street movement. As it turned out, Obama was in a clinch with Wall Street and other politicians, and Tina came from the Tea Party movement, which used social values to attack the government and weaken his presidency.
As Congress discusses a $3.5 trillion bill to expand the nation's social safety net and raise taxes on the rich, we look back at the Occupy Wall Street movement and how it shaped the national debate over economic inequality. This timeline of the Occupy movement shows that in July 2011 Adbusters Magazine issued an email on September 17 to demand 20,000 people to occupy Wall Street within a few months in response to growing inequality after 2008 and corporate overreach in government. But all that changed in September 2011, when thousands of people flocked almost spontaneously to Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan, which was declared a "liberated zone" just outside Wall Street.
Imagine a spooky movietic presence in Cannes and the sunny Cote d’Azur, France where economic chaos this week is the G20 of Paris and Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan fit in. By 1979 to 1990, thatcher reshaped Britain as Prime Minister, leaving an ideological legacy that matched that of Marx, Mao Gandhi and Reagan. Since then, several prime ministers have occupied Downing Street 10. One of the foundationstones of the Neoliberal ideology embraced by Thatcher, Reagan, and all Western leaders before them was that they were, as Tina Thatcher used to say, "the alternative to the Neoliberal order".
Occupy Wall Street and its accompanying movements have influenced President Obama to become more populist in his rhetoric and there are signs that it will prove to be the kind of political force the Tea Party movement was. During a recent poll, as the Occupy Wall Street protests in the US grew, a number of Americans expressed a more positive view of the Occupy movement than the Tea Party. The political impact of the movements on the gap between the top and the bottom earners is enormous.
In 1981, Regan opposed the PATCO union, while Thatcher fought the most powerful union in the 1980s, according to the Wall Street Journal. "I think that was partly because there was so much government repression that people didn't come out and do what they were threatened to do at Occupy. The revolutionary movement came about because it was the people who took off and made something of their own.
And I think that that was a really radicalizing moment for many of our white comrades of Occupy Wall Street who had never had to deal with the police and we came from communities of color in the city of New York and our history was very young, and I recall the murder of Amadou Diallo, and that was the only thing that people marched on Brooklyn Bridge. One of the young protesters was from Brooklyn, and there were more people than ever before, which was not a positive development.
He began protesting in Raleigh as part of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Writer and filmmaker Astra Taylor was involved in the movement, edited the Occupy Gazette, a feature on Occupy the World, and is the organizer of Debt Collective, an organization rooted in the Occupy movement.
If the movement grows, as Occupy Irvine has done, the same problems that have arisen there will undoubtedly arise in larger occupations. If the OWS gains foothold, there is a good chance that it will become a powerful force in American politics to compete with the well-funded and highly partisan Tea Party movement.