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Showing posts with label Occupy Wall Street. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Occupy Wall Street. Show all posts

Saturday, June 9, 2012

Singapore millionaires who don’t feel rich

Singapore, the third richest country in the world on a per capita basis, may be good at accumulating wealth but it fares less well when it comes to distributing it. WHEN I read last week that one in six households in Singapore is a millionaire in investable wealth, it stirred mixed emotions of pride and worry.

Bloomberg had earlier reported that the city state had become the third richest country in the world on a per capita basis.



Many Singaporeans probably share these mixed feelings, if they could take time away from work to think about it. (More on that later.)

The pride, of course, stems from our transformation from a squatter colony to this present level of affluence in only 47 years, and the concern comes from the high cost of living that such wealth brings.

Singapore is the 10th most expensive city in the world. The two factors – wealth and high cost – are related; if cost of living is taken into account Singapore’s wealth ranking drops to 11th in the world.

Inflation clouds everyone’s lives, unless he is among the 188,000 millionaire households, to which it probably matters much less..

A school-teacher commented: “Being told that I am living in one of the world’s richest cities doesn’t profit my life and the resultant high cost is a blow.”

Last year, the number of millionaires (in US dollars) increased by 14%, one of the world’s fastest growth rates. In the previous year – from 2009 to 2010 – it went up by a record one-third.

Their wealth does not include the value of their properties or other fixed assets. If it does, Singaporeans would be even richer.

The question is: how many of the new rich are foreigners who took up permanent residency here? If the number is high, it could distort the picture a little.

Over the past five years, the number of rich mainland Chinese, Indians and Indonesians who took up PR here has risen, pushing up the price of properties.

Two of Facebook billionaire co-founders, Mark Zuckerberg and Eduardo Saverin, have made Singapore their home.

I also noticed that the pro-government media has been playing up stories of rising wealth and the capacity of Singaporeans to spend it. It is understandable because it paints a rosy picture.

Recent tales included the following:

> Singapore’s (resale) public flats are worth more than some expensive villas and islands in Portugal, Greece and Spain, as well as luxurious properties in the United States, reported Business Times.

> Rising property prices – nearly 7,000 “shoe box” condos of 300 sq ft to 500 sq ft have been built. A 463 sq ft condo was sold for S$702,000 (RM1.7mil).

> For sale: a bottle of special edition whisky in Singapore for S$250,000 (RM620,165).

> Singapore girl from a promi­­nent family splurging S$200,000 (RM496,252) on a photo shoot.

> Launch of the Singapore’s most expensive car, priced at S$3.6mil (RM9mil).

> A 23,920 sq ft bungalow at the prestigious Nassim Road was sold for a record S$47.8mil (RM118.6mil).

Such stories will likely continue to happen but so will tales relating to the new poor.

Singapore may be good at accumulating wealth but it fares less well when it comes to distributing it.

In fact, what is rubbing off some of the “wealth” shine is the widening inequality between the rich and the poor, an imbalance that ranks a notorious second in the world next to Hong Kong.

According to the Manpower Ministry, the earnings of the poorest 20% had stagnated in the past 10 years, with real income rising only S$200 (RM496) to S$1,400 (RM3,471), or 0.3%.

Robert Kiyosaki, author of Rich Dad, Poor Dad wrote: “Singapore is rich and happy at the moment, and that’s not good. America was like that at one point in time.”

I know what he means.

A blogger recalled this was what former Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew said years ago. He said he feared affluence was making Singaporeans complacent.

He said the young generation compared badly with the poorer, hard-striving migrants from China and needed “spurs on its side” to drive it on.

Are wealthy Singaporeans happy? Happiness is subjective, but a Twitter reported that only one quarter of the people are happy.

A newspaper for Indians in Singapore, Tabla, wrote: “They are among the world’s wealthiest, ranking sixth highest in net wealth with a mean value of US$284,692 (RM908,737) per adult. But Singaporeans aren’t necessarily a happy lot.”

Most attribute it to the pressure cooker living, the high cost of living and the education system. Despite what Lee said, Singaporeans work the longest hours in a worldwide comparison, beating the Japanese.

But the country has the second lowest job satisfaction in the world, according to an Accenture survey, with some 76% saying they are dissatisfied with their jobs.

Long-time visitor Brian Nelsen wrote last month: “Where are the friendly Singaporeans I used to know?”

He expressed shock and dismay at the abrupt change in the attitude of Singaporeans towards tourists in the last few years. They appear unfriendly and rude nowadays.

“Nobody smiles or returns a greeting any more. Many are now a surly lot,” he said. He probably had not met our richer folks.

Joyce Hooi of The Business Times wrote: “If Singapore had been a person, it would have stood above the unwashed tableau of Occupy Wall Street, watching from its penthouse and laughing into its Cognac.”

The really wealthy are busy buying up luxuries.

Every single day, she added, 25 people had bought a Mercedes-Benz or a BMW, and a Ferrari every four days over the past 11 months.

INSIGHT DOWN SOUTH BY SEAH CHIANG NEE  cnseah@thestar.com.my

Related posts:
Bridging the rich-poor gap in Singapore 
Foreign worker flow choked in Singapore 
Singapore 'warns' US on China bashing 
Singapore warns US on anti-China rhetoric!

Sunday, May 27, 2012

China issues 2011 US human rights record

 


US human rights report is full of distortion & false accusations

China has hit back at the US State Department’s controversial annual human rights report, saying it is full of distortion and false accusations. China says the US should stop pointing its finger at human rights situations in other countries and regions, a notorious practice of interfering in their internal affairs. In a further response, China has released its own report into the US’s Human Rights Record last year.

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China’s report says the US is again pointing a finger at the human rights situation in nearly 200 countries and regions, including China. However, the US turns a blind eye to its own terrible rights situation and seldom mentions it in its controversial annual report. China’s report urges the US to face up to its own human rights violations.

China’s report says the United States has real strength in human, financial and material resources to exert effective control over violent crimes. However, its society suffers chronically from such crimes, and its people’s lives, properties and personal security lack proper protection. The US also has a high incidence of gun related crime.

The report says the violation of people’s civil and political rights by the government is severe. US citizens’ rights and freedom were seriously violated during the "Occupy Wall Street" movement, with tens of thousands of protesters arrested. While advocating media and Internet freedom, the US in fact imposes fairly strict restrictions on the media and cyberspace. The US regards itself as the "beacon of democracy". However, its democracy is largely based on money.

China’s report says the US is the world’s richest country, but Americans’ economic, social and cultural rights are going from bad to worse. Unemployment remains high and the gap between the rich and the poor is continuing to widen. It also notes the number of people classed as poor in the US has hit a record high. More than 46 million Americans were in poverty in 2010, 2.6 million more than a year earlier. The number of American people without health insurance has increased progressively each year.

The report also says racial discrimination is deep-seated in the US. Minority groups regularly confront discrimination at work. They also face inequality in education. Racial discrimination is evident in law enforcement and judicial systems, racial hate crimes are frequent, and immigrants’ rights and interests are not guaranteed.

The rights of women and children rights are suffering. Gender discrimination against women exists widely in the US, and women in the country often experience sexual assault and violence. The report also says many children in the US live in poverty. Violence against children is severe.

The report points out the US has a notorious record of international human rights violations, imposing illegal medical tests on people in other countries. The US-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have caused large numbers of civilian casualties. The report also says the US continues to violate the living and development rights of Cubans.

The report says the US has taken human rights as a political instrument to defame other nations in its own strategic interest. While illustrating a dismal record of the US on its own human rights, China’s report says the US is not justified in posing as the world’s fighter for human justice. It uses double standards in evaluating human rights conditions in other countries. China reiterates its stance of opposing foreign intervention in its internal affairs under the pretext of human rights.

Monday, March 19, 2012

Arrests at New York 'Occupy' protests

Clashes and arrests in Zuccotti Park as 'Occupy' activists mark six months since birth of anti-corporate greed movement.

Critics say the movement lacks demands and direction [GALLO/GETTY] 

Police and activists have clashed at a park in New York where hundreds of people had gathered to mark six months since the beginning of the city's Occupy Wall Street protests.

The clashes, late on Saturday, came as some activists attempted to re-occupy Zuccotti Park, which police had earlier declared closed for the evening.

The Manhattan park, close to Wall Street, was where the anti-corporate greed protest movement began in September last year. Activists spent months camping at the site, prompting similar demonstrations in other US cities and abroad.

Police began making arrests after several hundred protesters had remained there, with some erecting a makeshift tent of cardboard and tarpaulin in contravention of rules banning shelters in the park.

More than 100 police officers pushed through the park, clashing with protesters who attempted to stand their ground, The Associated Press news agency reported.

The Reuters news agency reported that dozens of protesters had been led away in handcuffs, although there has been no official word on the number of arrests.

Earlier in the day, hundreds of protesters had marched on nearby Wall Street, resulting in another unspecified number of arrests, police said.

Organisers vowed that Saturday's rally was the first of several events planned to protest against perceived economic injustice.

'We are going to take it back'

One of the activists taking part in the gathering said he hoped the park would again become a home for protesters, in defiance of a police ban on sleeping there which led to the eviction of the protest camp's occupants after two months.

In-depth coverage of the global movement
"They're hoping we'll all go away because it's cold," said Rob, 28, declining to give his last name. "The park's become the symbol both for us and for them. We are going to take it back."

Protester Paul Sylvester, 24, of Massachusetts said he was "thrilled" to be back at the park but said he hoped the movement would begin to crystallise around specific goals. "We need to be more concrete and specific," he said.

Critics say the Occupy movement lacks demands and direction and has lost momentum.

But warmer spring weather in the US has brought expectations that Occupy leaders will try to regain their momentum.

Protesters seemed invigorated by their relatively large numbers compared to the small turnouts during street demonstrations over the winter.

At the park on Saturday, street theatre troupes performed and guitar players led sing-alongs. Some protesters marched through the streets of the financial district, chanting "bankers are gangsters" and cursing at police.

Liesbeth Rapp, 27, who was performing street theatre about economic injustice, said protesters were ready to make some changes.

"I think we've learned a lot about being strategically and tactically smarter," she said. "We're learning to decentralise, and to work in smaller groups."

Source:
Agencies


Friday, February 10, 2012

'Occupy' protest, inside a revolution

Occupy! Scenes from Occupied Movement  

Books review by Andrew Ross guardian.co.uk, 

Group of protesters dressed as 'corporate zombies' in Wall Street
Occupy Wall Street demonstrators stage a march dressed as corporate zombies. Photograph: EMMANUEL DUNAND/AFP/Getty Images

Occupy Wall Street is wintering. That's not to say its seasoned recruits are taking time off, though there surely are equivalents of the "summer soldier and sunshine patriot" that Tom Paine invoked in his address to the Valley Forge winter encampment of the revolutionary Continental Army 236 years ago. But it's been business as usual at 60 Wall Street, in the cavernous atrium of the Deutsche Bank building, where OWS working groups have been meeting continuously since the early weeks of the occupation. In those well-attended huddles, all sorts of plans are being made for re-occupations in the months to come – an American Spring to rival the Arab one – and the air is thick with proposals for ever bolder actions.
  1. Occupy!: Scenes from Occupied America
  2. by Astra Taylor, Keith Gessen et al
Still, it's not a bad time to take stock of the early months of the movement. The publication of two books is an occasion either to reminisce about, or catch up with the momentous events that originated in Lower Manhattan just one week after the 10th anniversary of 9/11. The respective publishers, Verso and OR Books, are natural allies of the movement, and are to be saluted for delivering the first two book-length treatments – there will be many others in the year ahead.

Both volumes are documentaries of the heady life of the encampment at Zuccotti Park, though each book has a distinct flavour, and they deploy quite different methods of reporting. Occupy! Scenes From Occupied America reads like a series of diary entries – on-the-ground vignettes, testimonials of events, and snap analysis of where it might all be heading. Included are fragments of speeches by visiting luminaries – Angela Davis, Slavoj Žižek, Rebecca Solnit, Judith Butler – but the bulk of the entries are from writers with close ties to New York City's left-wing media organs: n+1, New Inquiry, Triple Canopy and Dissent. By contrast, Occupying Wall Street: The Inside Story of an Action that Changed America by Writers for the 99% (OR Books, £10) takes the form of a more orthodox narrative, quarried out of interviews from a field ethnography of Zuccotti Park undertaken by many hands and then polished by a team of writers.



Most of the contributors to these books are movement participants – not armchair analysts or journos on a short deadline – so the pages of each volume ring with authenticity.

On the face of it, any book about Occupy might have been superfluous. After all, the movement has been so meticulously documented by its own participants through a variety of media–official websites, blogs, tweets, livestreaming and other social media channels, in addition to alternative radio and TV, and a steady flow of pamphlets, gazettes, journals and other print outlets. Never has a protest movement documented and broadcast its doings in real time with such utter transparency and to such a far-flung audience. In some respects, the sheer volume of self-generated media has even pre-empted the need for conventional media coverage. Forging an alternative society – and many occupiers saw Zuccotti Park as a prefiguration, if not a microcosm, of such a society – requires the creation of your own autonomous institutions.

Despite this spate of agit-prop, reflection and analysis, the conventional book formats stand up quite well, and, on certain topics, are indispensable. Occupy! abounds with insights on how the occupiers have dealt with internal challenges to their experiment in direct democracy. A general assembly in full flow is a galvanic prospect; "more than one speaker," it is noted, publicly "expressed love for the general assembly".

But the GA's horizontal culture is also an open invitation to assassins of this kind of joy. Complaints about the neglect of race and gender are the most common, righteous cause of disturbance, and when the outcome reinforces the GA's reliance on the "progressive stack" – whereby speakers of (white, male-identified) privilege are encouraged to "step back" – the interference has an alchemy that is breathtaking.

Manissa Maharawal describes how she and other members of South Asians for Justice stood up to block the GA consensus on the Declaration of the Occupation of Wall Street: she "felt like something important had just happened, that we had just pushed the movement a little bit closer to the movement I would like to see".

GAs also attract their share of people "damaged by capitalism" and further frazzled by brutal policing and the roughneck life of 24/7 activism. Their fractious behaviour is at odds with the smoother, educated norms of civic speech, and they often violate the rules of GA process.

As the Zuccotti Park occupation wore on, the increasing presence of the homeless – the most vulnerable of the 99% – became the acid test of whether OWS was up to the task of heralding a new kind of society based on mutual aid. In the calendar entries of Occupy! this theme comes more and more to the fore. Indeed, Christopher Herring and Zoltán Glück's long meditation, "The Homeless Question" is worth the price of admission alone. Noting that some occupations – in Atlanta, Philadelphia and Oakland – had been more forthright in feeding and servicing the homeless, they faultlessly argue that the burgeoning unhoused population "should not be seen as a liability for the movement" (a not uncommon perception around OWS) "but a reminder of why the protest exists".

Occupying Wall Street offers a detailed rendering of how daily life was organised in the Zuccotti Park encampment. The challenge of accommodating the homeless is also part of its record of how quite different populations came to co-exist in the half-acre space. Most absorbing is the book's account of the social geography of the park, conspicuously visible in the divide between its east end, where ideological open-endedness prevailed, and the west side, or self-styled "ghetto", where the more radical groupings set up shop, along with the drum circle. As one of the westenders, a member of Class War Camp, put it, "This side of the camp isn't for reform. This side's for revolution, you know?" Unlike the east side "liberal college kids", he added, "we have nothing to lose. We don't want to fix the system, we want to fucking burn it to the ground."

Writers for the 99% (the book's collective of writers) do not shy away from pointing out that the less educated, poorer and more precarious sleepers in the "ghetto" were not only underserviced by OWS's support systems, but also lacked ready access to the resources offered by sympathetic residents of Lower Manhattan.

Such observations highlight just how difficult it is to expunge the toxic residue of race and class that poisons our existing society. For those who want Occupy to be a living, breathing alternative, every act of fellow-feeling is an opportunity to set a better norm. As many occupiers say, "the process is the product".

• Andrew Ross's Nice Work If You Can Get It is published by NYUP.

Wednesday, December 21, 2011

2011 was year for the protester



This image released by Time Magazine shows the Person of the Year issue featuring "The Protester." The magazine on Wednesday, Dec. 14, 2011 cited dissent across the Middle East that has spread to Europe and the United States, and says these protesters are reshaping global politics. (AP Photo/Time Magazine) >>

Year that was for the protester

The silly season is already on us and no doubt will be a fractious and prolonged one going into 2012. 
 MUSINGS By MARINA MAHATHIR

IT’S the end of the year and, like everyone else, I’m going to try and summarise what made it an interesting year indeed.

Time magazine named The Protester as its Person of the Year in 2011.

I couldn’t agree more, because really few people have made an impact on society than protesters this year.

From the protesters in Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Libya and Syria to the Occupy Wall Street protesters and its many offshoots, these largely peaceful protests have forced things to change in their societies.

In the Middle East, corrupt and authoritarian leaders have been forced to step down. In some, it’s still an ongoing battle.

Of course, these steps towards democracy are not perfect. Nor are the results. But that’s democracy for you.



Just because people don’t know what they want is no reason to dismiss democracy.

It is the fact that they finally have choices is the triumph, after so many years of not having any.

For those who insist on equating the London riots with the Arab Spring, do get your facts right.

The former was not about changing an authoritarian government for a more democratic one, nor was it meant to be peaceful.

The latter was a peaceful demand for change; the violence came from the government response.

If you want to equate the London riots with the Syrian government’s response, perhaps it would be more accurate.

Time magazine has mostly recognised the Arab, Spanish and American protesters in their essay.

But perhaps they should have also looked eastwards.

I think the Bersih rally goers, protesting peacefully for clean and fair elections, are also deserving of the award.

For the first time, ordinary Malaysians went out to demand what should be their right, to be able to vote fairly.

Young and old of all races and religions, Malaysians marched to protect this basic human right. And were demonised because of it.

While the Government responded to the Bersih demands by establishing the Parliamentary Special Committee on electoral reforms, at the same time the so-called Peaceful Assembly Act – aimed at curbing any other rallies like Bersih – was passed.

In any case, it is delusional to think that curbing protests will curb rebellious thoughts. These will continue to thrive in 2012, that’s for sure.

Perhaps 2011 was also the year of the Strong Woman.

On the international scene, not one but three women won the Nobel Peace Prize this year: President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf of Liberia, Leymah Gbowee, also of Liberia, and Tawakkol Karman of Yemen, the youngest-ever recipient.

It’s interesting that all of these women are rebellious women, who refused to accept the established, and patriarchal, way of doing things.

Instead, they found their own way, and worked for peace in their countries.

Malaysia, too, has its share of strong women. Datuk Ambiga Sreenevasan is the prime example of someone who has had to withstand personal attacks from all quarters like no other person has had to in our country, yet still carries on with her strong principles.

Let it never be said that she lacks courage.

For women to get ahead, it really is imperative that they have the sort of integrity and display the sort of ethical behaviour that we often find lacking in men.

This year is, of course, also the year of the Obedient Wives Club, hardly a great leap forward for womankind.

Nevertheless, the OWC knew exactly how to get publicity for their causes.

And, I suspect, despite the sniggers over their sex manual, there are many who actually agree with their basic premise, that a good wife is one who blindly obeys her husband even when she doesn’t feel like it.

Finally, this year has been a bad year for justice and equality.

Children born less than six months after their parents married are considered illegitimate, thus forcing them to bear the sins of their parents.

Even if legitimate, children can be married off at even 10 years old, surely a blight on our society if we are to consider ourselves progressive.

Muslim women still don’t have the same rights as their non-Muslim sisters when it comes to marriage, property and inheritance.

And people of different sexual orientations are not regarded as full citizens.

I’d like to be optimistic about 2012 but that does not look likely.

The silly season is already on us and no doubt will be a fractious and prolonged one.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, folks!

Friday, October 28, 2011

David Graeber, the Anti-Leader of Occupy Wall Street



Meet the anthropologist, activist, and anarchist who helped transform a hapless rally into a global protest movement

The Guy Fawkes mask—worn by a ­protester in New York on Oct. 5—has become ­symbolic of the Occupy Wall Street movement 
The Guy Fawkes mask—worn by a ­protester in New York on Oct. 5—has become ­symbolic of the Occupy Wall Street movement Scout Tufankjian/Polaris 
 
By Drake Bennett

David Graeber likes to say that he had three goals for the year: promote his book, learn to drive, and launch a worldwide revolution. The first is going well, the second has proven challenging, and the third is looking up.

Graeber is a 50-year-old anthropologist—among the brightest, some argue, of his generation—who made his name with innovative theories on exchange and value, exploring phenomena such as Iroquois wampum and the Kwakiutl potlatch. An American, he teaches at Goldsmiths, University of London. He’s also an anarchist and radical organizer, a veteran of many of the major left-wing demonstrations of the past decade: Quebec City and Genoa, the Republican National Convention protests in Philadelphia and New York, the World Economic Forum in New York in 2002, the London tuition protests earlier this year. This summer, Graeber was a key member of a small band of activists who quietly planned, then noisily carried out, the occupation of Lower Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park, providing the focal point for what has grown into an amorphous global movement known as Occupy Wall Street.

It would be wrong to call Graeber a leader of the protesters, since their insistently nonhierarchical philosophy makes such a concept heretical. Nor is he a spokesman, since they have refused thus far to outline specific demands. Even in Zuccotti Park, his name isn’t widely known. But he has been one of the group’s most articulate voices, able to frame the movement’s welter of hopes and grievances within a deeper critique of the historical moment. “We are watching the beginnings of the defiant self-assertion of a new generation of Americans, a generation who are looking forward to finishing their education with no jobs, no future, but still saddled with enormous and unforgivable debt,” Graeber wrote in a Sept. 25 editorial published online by the Guardian. “Is it really surprising they would like to have a word with the financial magnates who stole their future?”

Graeber’s politics have been shaped by his experience in global justice protests over the years, but they are also fed by the other half of his life: his work as an anthropologist. Graeber’s latest book, published two months before the start of Occupy Wall Street, is entitled Debt: The First 5,000 Years. It is an alternate history of the rise of money and markets, a sprawling, erudite, provocative work. Looking at societies ranging from the West African Tiv people and ancient Sumer to Medieval Ireland and modern-day America, he explores the ambivalent attitudes people have always had about debt: as obligation and sin, engine of economic growth and tool of oppression. Along the way, he tries to answer questions such as why so many people over the course of history have simultaneously believed that it is a matter of morality to repay debts and that those who lend money for a living are evil.

Graeber’s arguments place him squarely at odds with mainstream economic thought, and the discipline has, for the most part, ignored him. But his timing couldn’t be better to reach a popular audience. His writing provides an intellectual frame and a sort of genealogy for the movement he helped start. The inchoate anger of the Occupy Wall Street protesters tends to cluster around two things. One is the influence of money in politics. The other is debt: mortgages, credit-card debt, student loans, and the difference in how the debts of large financial companies and those of individual borrowers have been treated in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.

“He is a deep thinker. He’s been a student of movements and revolutions,” says Kalle Lasn, the founder of Adbusters, the Vancouver-based anticorporate magazine. “He’s the sort of guy who can say, ‘Is this thing we’re going through like 1968 or is it like the French Revolution?’ ”

As Graeber explains it, it’s all part of a larger story: Throughout history, debt has served as a way for states to control their subjects and extract resources from them (usually to finance wars). And when enough people got in enough debt, there was usually some kind of revolt.



Graeber is small-framed and fidgety, with a pale boyish face and blue eyes. He dresses like a graduate student and speaks fast, in bursts punctuated by long ums, a ragged laugh, or pauses to catch his breath. He doesn’t make much eye contact. When finishing a thought, he has a habit of ducking his head and arching his eyebrows, as if he has just heard a faint but alarming sound.

For several weeks—since the fourth day of Occupy Wall Street—Graeber has been in Austin, Tex., reuniting with his girlfriend, a fellow anthropologist just back from fieldwork in Mexico. While there he has been peripherally involved with Occupy Austin, a small, fractious offshoot of the original Zuccotti Park occupation, one of many around the world.

Graeber began the summer on sabbatical, moving back to New York from London and frequenting an artists’ space called 16Beaver. It was an intellectual activist salon, located near Wall Street, the sort of place where people would discuss topics like semiotics and hacking and the struggles of indigenous peoples. Like many other American activists, Graeber had been deeply moved by the occupation of Cairo’s Tahrir Square and by the “Indignados” who had taken over central Madrid; in mid-July, he published a short piece in Adbusters asking what it would take to trigger a similar uprising in the West. For much of the summer, the discussions at 16Beaver revolved around exactly that question. When a local group called Operation Empire State Rebellion called for a June 14 occupation of Zuccotti Park, four people showed up.

On July 13, Adbusters put out its own call for a Wall Street occupation, to take place two months later, on Sept. 17. Setting the date and publicizing it was the extent of the magazine’s involvement. A group called New Yorkers Against Budget Cuts—student activists and community leaders from some of the city’s poorer neighborhoods—stepped in to execute the rest. For three weeks in June and July, to protest city budget cuts and layoffs, the group had camped out across the street from City Hall in a tent city they called Bloombergville. They liked the idea of trying a similar approach on Wall Street. After talking to Adbusters, the group began advertising a “People’s General Assembly” to “Oppose Cutbacks And Austerity Of Any Kind” and plan the Sept. 17 occupation.

The assembly was to be held in Bowling Green, the downtown Manhattan park with its famous statue of a charging bull pawing the cobblestones. Graeber had heard about the meeting at 16Beaver, and the afternoon of Aug. 2 he went to Bowling Green with two friends, a Greek artist and anarchist named Georgia Sagri and a Japanese activist named Sabu Kohso (who is also the Japanese translator of Graeber’s books).

A “general assembly” means something specific and special to an anarchist. In a way, it’s the central concept of contemporary anarchist activism, which is premised on the idea that revolutionary movements relying on coercion of any kind only result in repressive societies. A “GA” is a carefully facilitated group discussion through which decisions are made—not by a few leaders, or even by majority rule, but by consensus. Unresolved questions are referred to working groups within the assembly, but eventually everyone has to agree, even in assemblies that swell into the thousands. It can be an arduous process. One of the things Occupy Wall Street has done is introduce the GA to a wider audience, along with the distinctive sign language participants use to raise questions or express support, disapproval, or outright opposition.

When Graeber and his friends showed up on Aug. 2, however, they found out that the event wasn’t, in fact, a general assembly, but a traditional rally, to be followed by a short meeting and a march to Wall Street to deliver a set of predetermined demands (“A massive public-private jobs program” was one, “An end to oppression and war!” was another). In anarchist argot, the event was being run by “verticals”—top-down organizations—rather than “horizontals” such as Graeber and his friends. Sagri and Graeber felt they’d been had, and they were angry.

What happened next sounds like an anarchist parable. Along with Kohso, the two recruited several other people disgruntled with the proceedings, then walked to the south end of the park and began to hold their own GA, getting down to the business of planning the Sept. 17 occupation. The original dozen or so people gradually swelled, despite the efforts of the event’s planners to bring them back to the rally. The tug of war lasted until late in the evening, but eventually all of the 50 or so people remaining at Bowling Green had joined the insurgent general assembly.

“The groups that were organizing the rally, they also came along,” recalls Kohso. “Then everyone stayed very, very late to organize what committees we needed.”

While there were weeks of planning yet to go, the important battle had been won. The show would be run by horizontals, and the choices that would follow—the decision not to have leaders or even designated police liaisons, the daily GAs and myriad working-group meetings that still form the heart of the protests in Zuccotti Park—all flowed from that.

For Graeber the next month and a half was a carousel of meetings. There were the weekly GAs, the first held near the Irish Hunger Memorial in Battery Park City, the rest in Tompkins Square Park in the East Village. He facilitated some of them and spent much of the rest of his time in working group meetings in people’s apartments. (On Aug. 14 he tweeted, “I am so exhausted. My first driving lesson … then had to facilitate an assembly in Tompkins Square Park for like three hours.”) He organized legal and medical training and classes on nonviolent resistance. The group endlessly discussed what demands to make, or whether to have demands at all—a question that months later remains unresolved.

In the Sept. 10 general assembly the group picked the target for their occupation: One Chase Manhattan Plaza. They also picked several backups. So when the police fenced off Chase Plaza the night before the occupation was scheduled to start, the occupiers were prepared. On Sept. 17, barely an hour before the scheduled 3 p.m. start time, the word went out to go to Zuccotti Park instead, and 2,000 people converged on the now famous patch of stone flooring, low benches, and trees. It was a fortunate choice: Zuccotti is a privately owned park, so the city doesn’t have the right to remove the protesters. Graeber helped facilitate the GA that night in which they decided to camp out in the park rather than immediately march on Wall Street. Three days later, when he flew to Austin, the protests were still little more than a local New York story.

Graeber has been an anarchist since the age of 16. He grew up in New York, in a trade-union-sponsored cooperative apartment building in Chelsea suffused with radical politics. A precocious child, he became obsessed at 11 with Mayan hieroglyphics. (The writing had then been only partially deciphered.) He sent some of his original translations to a leading scholar in the field, who was so impressed that he arranged for Graeber to get a scholarship to Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass.

Graeber’s parents were in their 40s when they had him and had come of age in the political left of the 1930s, self-taught working-class intellectuals. Graeber’s mother had been a garment worker and, briefly, a celebrity—the female lead in a musical comedy revue put on by the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union that managed to become a Broadway hit. His father worked as a plate stripper on offset printers. Originally from Kansas, he had fought for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War. Anarchists made up one part of the fragile Republican coalition, and for a brief period they controlled Barcelona.

“Most people don’t think anarchism is a bad idea. They think it’s insane,” says Graeber. “Yeah, sure it would be great not to have prisons and police and hierarchical structures of authority, but everybody would just start killing each other. That wouldn’t work, right?” Graeber’s father, however, had seen it work. “So it wasn’t insane. I was never brought up to think it was insane.”

Years later, Graeber was a graduate student at the University of Chicago, and his field research brought him into contact with another, albeit very different, anarchic community. His dissertation was on Betafo, a rural community in Madagascar made up of the descendants of nobles and their slaves. Because of spending cuts mandated by the International Monetary Fund—the sort of structural-adjustment policies Graeber would later protest—the central government had abandoned the area, leaving the inhabitants to fend for themselves. They did, creating an egalitarian society where 10,000 people made decisions more or less by consensus. When necessary, criminal justice was carried out by a mob, but even there a particular sort of consensus pertained: a lynching required permission from the accused’s parents.

Graeber didn’t become an activist until after the massive 1999 World Trade Organization protests in Seattle. At the time an associate professor at Yale, he realized that the sort of movement he had always wanted to join had come into being while he was concentrating on his academic career. “If you’re really dedicated to this stuff, things can happen very quickly,” he says. “The first action you go to, you’re just a total outsider. You don’t know what’s going on. The second one, you know everything. By the third, you’re effectively part of the leadership if you want to be. Anybody can be if you’re willing to put in the time and energy.”

It was a particularly happy period for Graeber. In New Haven he was a scholar, and in New York, where he spent much of his time, he was an anarchist—he had found a new community among the loose coalition of activists, artists, and pranksters who called themselves the Direct Action Network. There were protests but also elaborately choreographed festivities—“reclaim the streets” parties, or nights when everyone converged on a particular subway train and rode it through the city carousing.

It came to an end in 2005, when Yale terminated his contract before he had a chance to come up for tenure. Graeber appealed, and his case became a cause at Yale and in the broader community of academic anthropology. He maintains he was targeted at least in part because of his political activism. Others saw evidence that the modern university was exactly the sort of hierarchical organization that Graeber was philosophically opposed to and temperamentally unsuited for.

“There was an issue about his personal style, whether he was respectful enough to various senior people both in the department and at the university. He’s not someone who is known to be very pliable,” recalls Thomas Blom Hansen, an anthropology professor at Stanford who was a friend and Yale colleague of Graeber’s at the time. “I don’t think anyone doubts that he’s a major figure in his field,” he adds. “But he’s not really interested in the humdrum daily life of administration that constitutes an increasing part of our life in the academic world.”

Everyone involved in the creation of Occupy Wall Street, from Graeber to the editors of Adbusters to New Yorkers Against Budget Cuts, has been astonished by its success. The world of American left-wing activism, populated as it is by an unwieldy mix of progressives and pacifists, civil libertarians and Marxists, idealists and pragmatists, is often riven by disputes and mutual misunderstanding. What’s notable about Occupy Wall Street is that it was born not in spite of that tendency but because of it. For his part, Graeber doesn’t attribute the success of the occupation to its planners but to luck, timing, and the pervasive mood of anger and disillusionment in the country: There are few jobs, the political process has ground to a halt, and as individuals and as a nation, we’re drowning in debt.

Graeber’s problem with debt is not just that having too much of it is bad. More fundamental, he writes in his book, is debt’s perversion of the natural instinct for humans to help each other. Economics textbooks tell a story in which money and markets arise out of the human tendency to “truck and barter,” as Adam Smith put it. Before there was money, Smith argued, people would trade seven chickens for a goat, or a bag of grain for a pair of sandals. Then some enterprising merchant realized it would be easier to just price all of them in a common medium of exchange, like silver or wampum. The problem with this story, anthropologists have been arguing for decades, is that it doesn’t seem ever to have happened. “No example of a barter economy, pure and simple, has ever been described, let alone the emergence from it of money,” writes anthropologist Caroline Humphrey, in a passage Graeber quotes.

People in societies without money don’t barter, not unless they’re dealing with a total stranger or an enemy. Instead they give things to each other, sometimes as a form of tribute, sometimes to get something later in return, and sometimes as an outright gift. Money, therefore, wasn’t created by traders trying to make it easier to barter, it was created by states like ancient Egypt or massive temple bureaucracies in Sumer so that people had a more efficient way of paying taxes, or simply to measure property holdings. In the process, they introduced the concept of price and of an impersonal market, and that ate away at all those organic webs of mutual support that had existed before.

That’s ancient history, literally. So why does it matter? Because money, Graeber argues, turns obligations and responsibilities, which are social things, into debt, which is purely financial. The sense we have that it’s important to repay debts corrupts the impulse to take care of each other: Debts are not sacred, human relationships are.

If we understand the social origins of debt, Graeber says, we become much more willing to renegotiate debts when conditions change, whether those are mortgages, credit-card debts, student loans, or the debts of entire nations. And if the desperate response to the ongoing financial crisis has shown anything, he argues, it’s that we’re willing to forgive debts if the institution that has them is important.

“Sovereignty does ultimately belong to the people, at least in theory. You gave the bank the right to make up money that is then lent to you,” he argues. “We collectively create this stuff, and so we could do it differently.”

Graeber’s book is getting glowing praise from his fellow anthropologists, and it has gotten attention beyond that world as well. (Though according to Mandy Henk, a librarian from Indiana minding the library that has sprung up in Zuccotti Park, copies of his work there aren’t seeing a lot of use.) Few mainstream economists are familiar with his ideas. Professor Tyler Cowen of George Mason University, who happens to be a widely read blogger, is one of them. “He whacks a bit of sense into people, and I think he’s right and Adam Smith was wrong,” he says. Yet Cowen, himself a libertarian, isn’t won over to Graeber’s politics. He sees little alternative to the modern state. “Look at Somalia. If there’s a vacuum, something has to fill it.”

He might also point to the drummers of Zuccotti Park. The constant beat from drum circles there has provided the occupation’s soundtrack, but it has also elicited a steady flow of noise complaints, trying the patience of an otherwise supportive community board and elected officials. Through weeks of mediation and discussion in the general assembly, a few drummers have steadfastly defied any limits on when they can play, though organizers are hopeful an agreement hashed out on Oct. 25 will finally solve the problem.

At the end of his book, Graeber does make one policy recommendation: a Biblical-style “jubilee,” a forgiveness of all international and consumer debt. Jubilees are rare in the modern world, but in ancient Babylon, Assyria, and Egypt under the Ptolemies they were a regular occurrence. The alternative, rulers learned, was rioting and chaos in years when poor crop yields left lots of peasants in debt. The very first use in a political document of the word freedom was in a Sumerian king’s debt-cancellation edict. “It would be salutary,” Graeber writes, “not just because it would relieve so much genuine human suffering, but also because it would be our way of reminding ourselves that money is not ineffable, that paying one’s debts is not the essence of morality, that all these things are human arrangements and that if democracy is to mean anything it is the ability to all agree to arrange things in a different way.” —With reporting by Karen Weise

Bennett is a staff writer for Bloomberg Businessweek

Saturday, October 22, 2011

‘Occupy Wall Street’ goes global !

The corner of Wall Street and Broadway, showin...


What Are We To Do By TAN SRI LIN SEE-YAN

Movements against bailouts, cutbacks and inequality picking up stream

SINCE its obscure beginnings, the “Occupy Wall Street” (OWS) movement has spread its wings, joining the “Indignant” of Spain (a movement born on May 15 when a Madrid rally sparked a worldwide campaign focussed on outrage over high unemployment and opposition to the financial elite).



The OWS group which has camped out in lower Manhattan's Zuccotti Park (nearby Wall Street) now in its 5th week, has a valid complaint: its young social-media connected generation is losing faith in traditional structures of government and business, arguing it has been betrayed and denied opportunity. “We got sold out; banks got bailed out” was their chant as thousands marched from Wall Street to Times Square.

Inspired by these movements, rallies rippled across the globe last weekend targeting 951 cities in Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia, and North and South America to take part in the demonstration. It's unclear how long protestors plan to stay. Some fear this could only be the beginning, as the world faces a systemic rise in anger, protest and political volatility that could last for years. With Middle-east unrest stirring again, a winter of discontent looks likely. It's not easy to pinpoint the underlying cause of their woes. Checkout their websites: they seem to demonstrate against corporate greed (bank bailouts and bonuses) and income inequality (government cutbacks). Worldwide they demand for a more fair and equal society.



Since the 2008 financial crisis, US bank profits were up 136%, but bank lending, down 9%. Indeed, bank lending has fallen in 10 of the past 12 quarters. To the OWS demonstrators, banks haven't fulfilled their part of the social bargain: bailouts for Wall Street in exchange for lending on Main Street. While banks now have more capital, they still aren't lending. Lending will continue to shrink. Banks say the demand isn't there. But 73% of small businesses say they are still being affected by the credit crunch. As I see it, banks remain very much risk adverse. Unlike in medicine, banks don't have the ability to quarantine financial contagion. There is a dangerous world out there.

What also irks protestors are Wall Street bonuses which have returned while ordinary workers suffered retrenchment and job insecurity with little help from Washington. A recent New York State report predicted that the financial industry will likely lose another 10,000 jobs by end 2012. That's on top of the 4,100 jobs lost since April and 22,000 since early 2008. Overall, New York area employment in finance and insurance had declined by 8.9% since late 2006.



The OWS movement has gained widespread support and encouragement, including from economics Nobel Laureates Stiglitz: “We have too many regulations stopping democracy and not enough regulations stopping Wall Street from misbehaving. We are bearing the cost of their misdeeds. There's a system where we have socialised losses and privatised gains”; and Kurgman: “Wall Street pay has rebounded even as ordinary workers continue to suffer from high unemployment and falling real wagesAnd their outrage has found resonance with millions of Americans. No wonder Wall Street is whining.”

Harvard's historian Niall Ferguson regarded the movement “still worth taking seriously” even though he concluded: “So occupying Wall Street is not the answer to this generation's problems. The answer is to occupy the Tea Party Call it the Iced Tea Party. Way cool.” Even the in-coming president of the European Central Bank has expressed support. However, the Times of London labelled the protests “Passionate but Pointless.”



US inequality

By far, the cause of OWS's frustration and outrage is best articulated in my friend Jeffrey Sachs' (Columbia University) latest book: “The Price of Civilisation.” In the US, the top 1% of households accounted for almost 25% of all households' income. The last time this happened was in 1929. In the first 3 decades of the 20th century, rapid industrial development raised income and wealth at the top, while mass immigration set the low bar. Then came the 1929 Great Depression and the New Deal four years later which railed against “a small group (who) had concentrated into their own hands an almost complete control over other people's property, other people's money, other people's labour and other people's lives.”

But, prosperity wasn't always accompanied by large-scale inequality. The 1950s and 1960s brought about rapid economic growth and a narrowing of inequality as a result of a more robust social safety net, fresh New Deal measures, World War II (WWII), and the vigorous post-war recovery which reversed the 1920s inequalities.

Since the 1970s, the United States tasted the fury of globalised competition but failed to grapple effectively with it. The deterioration in Main Street's earning prospects was papered over for the next 20 years by debt mortgage debt and consumer credit. Bear in mind median earnings of male workers peaked way back in 1973. The United States collects less tax as a percentage of national income (25% in 2009) than most advanced European nations (40-50%).

This reflected partly the Republican's one-idea approach: cut taxes permanently and impose fiscal austerity, often at the expense of lost competitiveness (reflecting insufficient public investment in education, infrastructure and human capital). OWS young demonstrators have a valid argument to make: they are frustrated trying to find a place in an economy where there is one job for every five jobseekers, and where youth unemployment is 18%. So much for the clich of Wall Street vs Main Street; “the greedy 1% uses the hard-done-by 99%.” The wider middle-class fears its prosperity has evaporated, demanding for a way to deliver growth once more. It's about time Americans get wise to the source of their economic woes it's a few hundred miles south of Wall Street.

US poverty 

According to the US Census Bureau, there are now more poor persons in America than at any other time in the 52 years records were kept. More than 15% of US families live below the poverty line in 2010. The line is set at US$22,000 a year for a family of four. This reflected the high unemployment of 9.1% 6.5 million jobs were lost in the recent recession. An additional 3 million Americans would fall below the poverty line if not for “doubling-up”, that is, adult children who can't afford life on their own return to live with their parents.



Today marks the first time in 20 years when US employment (as a percentage of population) has fallen below the rate in advanced European nations like UK, Germany and the Netherlands. The average weekly earnings (adjusted for inflation) of a typical US blue-collar worker is lower today than in 1964. Indeed, median inflation adjusted family income rose only about a fifth as much between 1980 and 2007 as it did in the generation following WWII. The US poverty profile is unlikely to change soon. That is why people are protesting. Many believe the current anger against autocrat politicians, bankers and elites is symptomatic of fundamental shifts in the structure of US (and indeed, global) population. Already, there are strains caused by aging populations driving up budget costs, reducing growth and blocking jobs from younger people.

Coincidentally, both the Boomerang generation and the Babyboomers generation are demonstrating together in OWS as they could very well end up in a political battle for dwindling government benefits. That is, the elderly fights to keep their entitlements (social security and medicare) to ward off poverty, and the younger population pushes for spending on education and training to avoid falling into it. Demographic issues are driving much of what we see today. A win-win is to continue pressuring the richest Americans to carry a larger share of the load. Despite congressional resistance, many of the wealthy in the United States do see it's in their interest to foster a less divisive society.

Smart government

While the benefits of globalisation are clear and I think, well appreciated (especially the rapid spread of technology embodied in the Internet and mobile telephony, and reduced poverty in emerging nations), the real problems associated with it are less well understood but nevertheless need to be urgently addressed.

Globalisation has (i) raised the scope for tax evasion; (ii) led to a loss of competitiveness among the less educated in advanced nations, particularly in the United States; and (iii) fuelled contagion, especially in finance.

In his latest book, Jeff Sachs pushed hard for a highly effective government to deal with these problems. Smart public policies are needed to (a) promote high quality education; (b) raise productivity by building modern infrastructure and inculcate science and technology; and (c) co-operate globally to regulate cross-border issues (e.g. finance and environment). His proposal is controversial at this time since it calls for more government not less, especially in the United States where economic inequality has reached a high not seen since the Great Depression.

Sachs also points to growing signs world-wide that people are fed-up with governments that cater for the rich and the powerful, and ignore everyone else. They call for greater social justice (not confined to the Arab Spring; also serious protests from Tel Aviv to London to Santiago to Sydney, and all over Europe, and now, in New York); and also more inclusive politics, rather than corrupt politics.

There are even calls for higher taxes on the very rich across nations (the United States has proposed the rich to pay more taxes; several European governments have talked of a new wealth tax; the European Commission has suggested a new financial transactions tax to raise US$75bil a year). Sachs refers to the most successful well-balanced economies today being in Scandinavia using high taxes to support smart public services, balancing economic prosperity with social justice and environmental sustainability. Sachs bemoaned that for 30 years, the United States has been going “in the wrong direction, cutting the role of government in the domestic economy rather than promoting the investments needed to modernise the economy and workforce.” It all started when President Reagan declared in 1980 that “government is not the solution to our problems it is the problem.”

Today, the solution lies in how the United States is going to fund its future competitiveness through building skills and raising productivity to fight for markets in the 21st century. This is also the way to go for the euro-zone.

Historically, Americans haven't been inclined to be aggressive enough to riot, as the Europeans, over inequality (contrast the protests in Rome, Athens, Madrid and London with those in New York). But the United States is in a new situation now where protestors are getting desperate in the face of intransigency, especially the uncompromising Tea Party. It is hard to rule that out when the American Dream is very much at stake.

At worst, I think the present situation can result in an economic malaise that lasts for decades. It makes politics most unpredictable. There is already political paralysis. But dramatic shifts in policy are possible. The rise of ideologues in a modern guise is also probable as we saw in the 1930s. I am afraid this is the new reality. We have to deal with it.

> Former banker, Dr Lin is a Harvard educated economist and a British Chartered Scientist who now spends time writing, teaching & promoting the public interest. Feedback is most welcome; email: starbizweek@thestar.com.my 

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Occupy Wall Street booming, now Occupy London Stock Exchange!

Tuesday, October 18, 2011

Occupy Wall Street booming, now Occupy London Stock Exchange!



Occupy Wall Street booming after one month
 AFP 
 
The month-old Occupy Wall Street movement is enjoying new momentum, with nearly $US300,000 ($A296,369) in the bank and the satisfaction of drawing global attention to what it sees as major economic inequalities.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon expressed sympathy with the protesters, and even protest-averse China said some issues raised are worth considering.
 
From a few dozen people camping out in a small Manhattan park near the rising World Trade Centre complex, the movement swelled to hundreds of thousands of people rallying around the world this weekend and numerous encampments springing up in cities large and small.



Hundreds of protesters on Monday mingled with bemused bank workers in a new tent camp outside London's St Paul's Cathedral. But in Seattle, police arrested people who wouldn't move their tents from a park.

The UN leader said the finance chiefs from the Group of 20 rich and developing nations, now meeting in Paris, should listen to the demonstrators. "Business as usual, or just looking at their own internal economic issues, will not give any answers to a very serious international economic crisis," Ban said.

"That is what you are seeing all around the world, starting from Wall Street, people are showing their frustrations, are trying to send a very clear and unambiguous message around the world."

The Wall Street protesters still haven't settled on a specific demand but are intent on building on momentum gained from Saturday's worldwide demonstrations, which drew hundreds of thousands of people, mostly in the US and Europe.

President Barack Obama referred to the protests during Sunday's dedication of a monument for Martin Luther King Jr, saying the civil rights leader "would want us to challenge the excesses of Wall Street without demonising those who work there".

The largest of Saturday's protests were in Europe, linking up with long-running demonstrations against government austerity measures. In Rome, hundreds of rioters infiltrated a march by tens of thousands of demonstrators, causing what the mayor estimated was at least 1 million euros ($A1.36 million) in damage. Hundreds of thousands turned out in peaceful protests across the continent, including in Spain, Germany, Switzerland, Britain, Austria and France.

Around the US, more than 350 people were arrested in a half-dozen cities during protests. On Monday, prosecutors dropped charges against civil rights activist Cornel West and 18 others who were arrested while protesting on the steps of the US Supreme Court in Washington.

Interest in the demonstrations over economic inequality even reached China, where online calls for similar protests did not appear to elicit any responses.

"We feel that there are issues here that are worth pondering," said Liu Weimin, a foreign ministry spokesman during a regular briefing in Beijing on Monday.

In New York, $US300,000 in cash has been donated through the movement's website and by visitors to the park, said Bill Dobbs, a press liaison for Occupy Wall Street.

Donated goods range from blankets and sleeping bags to cans of food and medical and hygienic supplies. Among the items are 20 pairs of swimming goggles, to shield protesters from pepper-spray attacks.

Supporters are shipping about 300 boxes a day, many with notes and letters, said Justin Strekal, a college student and political organiser who travelled from Cleveland to New York to help.

"Some are heartwrenching, beautiful," and come from people who have lost jobs and houses, he said. "So they send what they can, even if it's small."
© 2011 AFP

Occupy London Stock Exchange continues

Updated: 2011-10-17 16:17.By Liu Wei (chinadaily.com.cn)
Occupy London Stock Exchange continues
Occupy London Stock Exchange, a demonstration inspired by the Occupy Wall Street movement to protest against the wealth inequality and financial crisis, continues as more people join in and set up their tents within the vicinity of the St Paul's Cathedral. Picture taken on Oct 16, 2011 [Liu Wei/chinadaily.com.cn]

Occupy London Stock Exchange continues
Occupy London Stock Exchange, a demonstration inspired by the Occupy Wall Street movement to protest against the wealth inequality and financial crisis, continues as more people join in and set up their tents within the vicinity of the St Paul's Cathedral. Picture taken on Oct 16, 2011 [Liu Wei/chinadaily.com.cn]

Occupy London Stock Exchange continues
Occupy London Stock Exchange, a demonstration inspired by the Occupy Wall Street movement to protest against the wealth inequality and financial crisis, continues as more people join in and set up their tents within the vicinity of the St Paul's Cathedral. Picture taken on Oct 16, 2011 [Liu Wei/chinadaily.com.cn]
Occupy London Stock Exchange continues
Occupy London Stock Exchange, a demonstration inspired by the Occupy Wall Street movement to protest against the wealth inequality and financial crisis, continues as more people join in and set up their tents within the vicinity of the St Paul's Cathedral. Picture taken on Oct 16, 2011 [Liu Wei/chinadaily.com.cn]
Occupy London Stock Exchange continues
Occupy London Stock Exchange, a demonstration inspired by the Occupy Wall Street movement to protest against the wealth inequality and financial crisis, continues as more people join in and set up their tents within the vicinity of the St Paul's Cathedral. Picture taken on Oct 16, 2011 [Liu Wei/chinadaily.com.cn]

Occupy London Stock Exchange continues
Occupy London Stock Exchange, a demonstration inspired by the Occupy Wall Street movement to protest against the wealth inequality and financial crisis, continues as more people join in and set up their tents within the vicinity of the St Paul's Cathedral. Picture taken on Oct 16, 2011 [Liu Wei/chinadaily.com.cn]
Occupy London Stock Exchange continues
Occupy London Stock Exchange, a demonstration inspired by the Occupy Wall Street movement to protest against the wealth inequality and financial crisis, continues as more people join in and set up their tents within the vicinity of the St Paul's Cathedral. Picture taken on Oct 16, 2011 [Liu Wei/chinadaily.com.cn]

Occupy London Stock Exchange continues
Occupy London Stock Exchange, a demonstration inspired by the Occupy Wall Street movement to protest against the wealth inequality and financial crisis, continues as more people join in and set up their tents within the vicinity of the St Paul's Cathedral. Picture taken on Oct 16, 2011 [Liu Wei/chinadaily.com.cn]
Occupy London Stock Exchange continues
Occupy London Stock Exchange, a demonstration inspired by the Occupy Wall Street movement to protest against the wealth inequality and financial crisis, continues as more people join in and set up their tents within the vicinity of the St Paul's Cathedral. Picture taken on Oct 16, 2011 [Liu Wei/chinadaily.com.cn]