Yes, but what are they advocating instead? That question is rapidly becoming the standard rightwing putdown of the Occupy Wall Street movement and the similar demonstrations it has inspired elsewhere, now including London’s #occupylsx.

Hacks penning hatchet jobs on this one have two ways into the story. One option is to start by stressing widespread sympathy for the participants, many of whom are nice boys and girls from good families. It’s just that there is no getting round the fact that the financial sector pays the bills around here, and that the protestors have no coherent alternative to offer. Continue reading →

Two episodes of potentially enormous significance are now beginning to converge. The first, like a slow-burning fuse, is the spontaneous grass-roots anti-globalisation, anti-capitalism movement which has been smouldering for several years and is now gathering force sparked worldwide by austerity measures for the masses while the bankers and financial elite ride out the depression unscathed. This ferment, strengthened by the co-ordination which technology and globalisation now brings, may well, as austerity bites ever deeper over the next decade, have the potential for overturning an increasingly hated worldwide corporate domination on a scale which we have not seen since the upheavals in Europe in 1848. Continue reading →