Spilt champagne from occupied Wall Street

BY STEVE JANOSKI

I was not paying attention, I admit it. But then again, neither was the rest of the media.

It's not on the New York Times home page, it hasn't been plastered across television screens, and nobody seems to want to speak on it - but it's happening, whether we all want to report on it or not.

These protestors who have been “occupying” Wall Street for the past three weeks, I'm not even sure who they are. The lone common thread appears to be that they are all young, liberal, and… well, that's it.

The few news outlets paying the protest any serious attention have said that some are protesting corporate greed, while others are protesting the undue influence that Wall Street holds over our politicians; recent statements released by the group have added such concerns as police brutality, union busting, and the economy to the list.

Chants have risen up in the concrete valleys of New York, with the refrain of “We are the 99 percent” and “They got bailed out, we got sold out,” and it's clear that the protestors are drawing inspiration from the freedom protests born of the Arab Spring.

For a while, they were easy to dismiss as a few hundred radical hippies trying to make something out of nothing, but as liberal celebrities like Michael Moore and Cornel West joined the fight, it began to garner more attention through, of course, social media outlets.

One particularly inflammatory video on YouTube shows Wall Street's elite dressed in their Sunday finest, drinking champagne and laughing dismissively while watching the protestors; Hunter S. Thompson himself could not have written that script any better.

And so this week, that rag-tag bunch of kids will be joined by the real heavyweights as several prominent unions embrace their cause, and endorsements from the AFL-CIO, the Transport Workers Union Local 100 (representing 38,000 New York city transit workers), and the United Federation of Teachers (amongst others) have come rolling in.

It is a safe bet that other labor organizations will follow their lead. People in other cities certainly have - protests in Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, and Washington, D.C. either have occurred or are being planned.

What this odd combination of old hippies, young hippies, union workers, and anyone else who is out of work and angry about it seems to be tapping into is the silent rage that those of us in the middle class hold because our prospects for the future were left for dead in the ashen wreckage of the “financial crisis.”

They're not socialists, but they don't want every government safety net torn from under them, and don't want corporations to be deregulated to the point of no return.

They're the ones who realize that while American manufacturing lies in hazy ruin, union membership - which helped create the vaunted middle class - has fallen to record lows, and the prodigious wealth disparity is growing every day.

They're the ones who are angry that, unless you're a CEO, there are no jobs, no money, and no raises - not now and, from news reports, it seems not ever.

This is not the first time this happened; a dozen years ago, there was a fight in the streets of Seattle that caught the world by surprise when the nascent anti-globalization movement announced its arrival by bringing tens of thousands into the streets to protest the World Trade Organization and the unbridled power that the massive, multi-national corporations were gathering.

The attacks of September 11 effectively undercut that movement, and the foreign wars of retribution that followed it made citizens focus more on the external threats than the internal.

But now, as those perils begin to fade and America stares down the barrel of yet another recession, it seems that Americans are finally beginning to cast their gaze inward and wonder what happened to the nation that they once knew.

It seems like it was a lifetime ago, but it's only been nine months ago since the now-legendary Mohamed Bouazizi lit himself on fire in the middle of the street in Sidi Bouzid.

His final words before committing that single act of defiance that ignited revolution across the Middle East?

“How do you expect me to make a living?”

Well, give Wall Streeters enough champagne, and I bet they'll come up with an answer for you.

Email: janoski@northjersey.com