Crisis in our backyard : Emergence of new social world order ?

By Abhishek Joshi :

Let’s keep this simple for a reading mind. Gordon Gekko euphemized it in 1980’s in the famous movie, Wall Street “Greed for lack of a better word, is good”. The gospel which over rode every fundamental ethical business principle for practitioners and the new generation with wide eyed bated dreams to join them someday, took over the ambitions scaling them beyond the idealistic propounded theories of capital. The spoof on corporate, as perhaps it was a mirror of aspiring conditions prevalent, were in know of this all the time.  The slumber ever to be broken, an unwritten law and game of engagement where the winner claims all leaving no consolation for the one’s following them in competition. Greed indeed has never been so good.

Adbusters Media Foundation, a not for profit entity based in Vancouver Canada, founded by Kalle Lasn and Bill Schmalz in 1989 with a few band of pranksters and absorbed convoluted ideology of pitting socialism against accumulation of capital, aka anti capitalism and its by product, consumerism, begin their movement against rich corporate media institutions through “Media Carta”. They challenged the hegemony of these corporate media institutions by not providing a free access on information and mediums of communications. Through a law suit, they took on almost single handedly the Big 6 of Canadian broadcasting corporations.  They partially won their point following years but their share of glory was to come in year 2011 and some few hundred miles away in geography but within the same conducive business turf. Moving from the back yard of Canada to the front lawn of United States of America “busting” more than the myths they had imagined they would and igniting more corporations on a debate, which the bosses and barons, had conveniently scuttled under the billion dollars dividends paid to the institutional investors and shareholders and the governments in process.

The Central business district of New York known for grandiose offices and head quarters of almost all of the major financial & security market behemoths and the coliseum where these gladiators slug fest to get the bounty, New York Stock Exchange, NASDAQ and NY Mercantile Exchange are all located on a eight block long street, called the Wall Street, a metonym of principle US financial interests, the term which has ever influenced the security exchanges the world over. Zuccoti Park, a private property in this financial district is where the Adbusters emerged and further chose to hold their historic protest, to “Occupy wall street”.

September 17^th, the several hundred protestors emerged with intent to picket the street against the growing share of social and economic inequality which has plagued the US economy for years. Protesting against the harrowing class divide of under subsistence and more than over disposal by  select large corporations driven by corporate greed, unethical accumulation of profits through control of policy institutions, financial markets and influence of this generated capital over the government representatives, as “we are the 99%” calling out for the difference in wealth as against 1% of the top corporations and other citizens of the United States. This ongoing protest has ever then spread across to some 70 major cities and 600 communities in the US alone, with almost 100,000 protestors rallying around on October 15^th on  Wall Street  and yet continues to reverberate across some 900 cities worldwide including Spain, UK, Japan, all major countries in Europe and parts of Australia and South East Asia.

An unprecedented and unimaginative event coming from the nerve center of the largest consumerist society of the world, a renewed social anthropologist of a reputed Indian University commented, when the first innocuous news of protests broke out in September. He added that this perhaps might bear seed to an emerging new social order the world could have ever witnessed since the “Great depression” of 1930’s” and simply cannot be ignored as an internal state problem of the US. Prophetic words indeed.

As the protest gathers steam, whilst one reads, we need not to spend efforts to understand the root of the issue which vents itself in frustration on the streets. The glazed melting pot of civilization has been developing chinks for a longtime however was more evidentially seen in the autumn of 2007, especially after the subprime crisis.  The housing bubble precipitated the crisis to an all out free fall of financial corporations as worldwide phenomena and the smaller nations with over exposure in these economies begun to catch cold with their first sneeze. In US alone between the June of 2007 and November 2008 the Americans lost a quarter of their net worth in US securities and other instruments.  With consumption pattern of 110% over long years on over all income and no recourse other than to depend on an impetus by the US government, the long haul of recovery was fraught with challenges. Coupled with an added responsibility to bail out near bankrupt companies to avoid a near financial meltdown of and collapse of the economy, a plan was brokered by the Treasury department and the 3 largest US banks, Citibank, Bank of America decide to plough back beyond US $ 100 billion to avoid a complete wash out of the markets. Not restricted to US, the world economies got together and the precipice of this entire initiative was to save the large corporations without having a stimulus plan in place to augment social security measures including health, pensions and retirement, reviving domestic jobs opportunities for bringing the focus back on home economy.

What accentuates the matters most is the historic background of these large corporations which have been a regular beneficiary of government dole outs, regained their million dollar bonuses to their executives, where the job unemployment rate numbers on a general average basis kept on steadily increasing. The overall cut on tax expenditures linked and no signs of recovery the general wages across employment sector saw complete erosion with dwindling hours per week. This added with further announcements of cut down of workforce and large sackout announcements to cover up for losses and exposure.

The presidential campaign of 1932 run by Franklin Delano Roosevelt was run against the backdrop of a global recession on a platform of brining the attention back on “the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid”, situations similar though not yet matching with its severity.

These protests are also similar in background with over 9% unemployment rate, high raise in overall consumer prices and an equally high GDP ratio of 400% across all western world economies, the artificial inseminated economic bail outs have miserably failed and the intent of the governments and have come under serious questioning to have sustained it artificially ever since. The people are rallying around asserting what they think has been a rip off by governments in cahoots with the corporate greedy corporations, protecting their interest first rather than of the citizens. This has lead closer to the class struggle between the more than have’s to less than have not’s - 99% versus the 1%.

As the protests have taken global proportions uniting the suffered against what they think is a government sponsored tyranny and continues, the voices remain ever shrill on social inequality, taxing the rich and bridging the income divide across nations. The world’s democratic institutions have a formidable challenge to make amends now or to lay on the sides to witness a new emerging economic world order of socially pregnant capitalist ideology, an idealist center of equilibrium.


Will it, only the future might hold the key to this question.