WORLD STUDIES
Year:2012 | Volume:1 | Issue:3|Papers Count:7

“Occupy Wall Street” movement which has aimed the heart of the global financial capitalist system enjoys a special significance in the perspective of social-economic- political, human rights (work force), moral and cultural heritage of nations and can be considered as a symbol of work force economic jihad in national and global level in order to realize justice and socio-economic equality. But considering the Wall Street issue alone, without considering its relationship with some international economic institutions such as IMF or the Washington Consensus, would deteriorate the realization of the depth of this issue. This article tries to consider the issue by emphasizing on factors like the power structure in international financial institutions, the Washington Consensus, the school of originality of money, the prevalent unstrained financial markets called “market self-regulation”, new financial goods engineering and risk business and the mission of the financial sector of the (virtual) economy in actual economy, and will address the issue in brief according to “work force as the most valuable human assets” and economic cultural and financial jihad towards the resurrection of human dignity from the perspective of justice and social equality and preservation of workforce cultural heritage. Finally there will be a brief reference to the side pressures of the movement to the conventional economic discipline which is mainly originated from the financial sector’s function in national and global economy and is considered a kind of economic jihad.

The current economic crisis that plagued the west since 2008 and followed by the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011, were the results of the processes started since the last years of the Cold War and has turned the western capitalist system into an unstrained ideology. The neoliberal economic model, globalization of economy, limitation of the power of the national governments, the emergence of new technologies, abundance of a variety of non-productive jobs such as capitalism relying on finance, resulted in the global power to be belonged to a few global capitalists, and thus class division becomes severe in the west especially in American society. The democratic institutions in the west and the media which often belongs to the capitalist ideology, not only failed to prevent this problem but they intensified it more. In this study, by situation analysis method and by examining the effective institutions and the current political and economic environment and the role of the capitalist system competitors, it has been tried to analyze the process of decision making in the US government as the main agent in pre and post Cold War eras. Finally it is concluded that actually the main reason of the unstrained capitalist system, more than anything, is the loss of the competing ideology in political arena.

In this paper, first the direct role of the banks, financial and credit institutions and the US stock markets in creating the crisis would be analyzed which was famous as the “Occupy Wall Street movement” by the sudden expanding of recession, unemployment and poverty underlying the emergence of people protests; then the reactions, not only passive but in American public opinion biased and supportive of the US politicians (both Republicans and Democrats), relative to the known agents of this crisis will be discussed from political economic perspective. Regarding the characteristics of organizing and managing this movement and controlling it continuously by the industrial countries’ police, the fragile political status of the “Occupy Wall Street movement” in the western democracy claiming countries will be analyzed and studied at the end of this paper, though this social movement enjoys deep economic roots.

Occupy Wall Street was a flag which went to the hands of the American protestors. This flag reflected the simulation of Occupy Wall Street to the occupation of Palestine and the main reference of the protest was aimed at Zionism. The deep roots of this occupation dates back to the occupation of the American Natives’ territories and in fact the same American monopoly in the path of American history in various fields including the US economic and financial system has been reflected. The main question of this paper is why Occupy Wall Street movement emerged as a serious social movement in America. In response to this question, it is discussed that the one percent American society that is a symbol of the minority exclusivism over the majority, is caught in exceptionism in three levels of epistemic, program and institutional. American people’s protest was not merely against the economic situation but against the “exceptionist social system”. This American exceptionism has created a crisis for the ruling majority. This means the realization of minority instead of democracy and in a more accurate interpretation “democracy crisis”. In this paper, various aspects of epistemic, program and institutional exceptionism joined by the Occupy Wall Street movement will be explained.

The Occupy Wall Street movement has presented a series of challenges to local law enforcement agencies. In response, many of them have relied on a variety of aggressive tactics, which in some cases have shocked public opinion, putting the issue of protest policing on the national agenda. Three main narratives have emerged to explain these tactics: 1) there has been a broad “militarization” of the police brought on by the Federal War on Drugs and anti-terrorism spending. 2) There has been a nationally coordinated effort to repress the OWS movement because of the threat it poses to existing political and economic arrangements. 3) Local police have been forced to act because OWS encampments have been a source of permit violations, sanitations problems, and secondary criminality. Each of these explanations holds important truths, but they all fail to capture the underlying nature of the conflict between OWS and the police. Reviewing accounts and videos of police actions and protestor tactics in ten major US cities, journalist commentaries on these actions, and publically available official documents, I conclude that there is a fundamental conflict between the strong orientation of OWS demonstrators in favor of defiant non-violent protest and the current orientation of many US police forces towards zero-tolerance order maintenance policing.

The US, not only failed to predict the occurrence of the Middle East revolutions but also failed to understand the depth and the probability of its spread to other countries. While Washington was engaged in tactical initiatives in confronting the Islamic Awakening, the Islamic republic of Iran took the creativity of a strategic game in hand. This was a three-step profile raised by the supreme leader of the Islamic revolution. In the first phase the dialogue was related to the definition of the identity of the revolutions in the region where Islam was considered as the inspiring factor and Islam-seeking as its wish. The second step focused on the geographic direction of the spread of these revolutions and in the third stage, with emphasis on the common factor of Zionism in the occurrence of the revolutions in the region and the Occupy Wall Street movement, mixed these two movements. By raising the Islamic republic dialogue, the US positioned against Iran and we see a bipolar dialogue on the revolutions of the region between Iran and the US. Washington also tried to undermine this dialogue in the region. Thus both sides, entering a dialogic confront, challenged each other’s soft power. This paper tries to express each side’s understanding of this reality and their attempt to represent it outside, by analyzing the stages of this confrontation.

The cycle of protests that swept the United States beginning in 2010 has its roots in the growing disillusionment of a significant portion of the American populace in the prospects and opportunities for growth and development. Despite the extensive myopia of various sectors of the American public vis a vis the rest of the world, if there is one thing much of the American public holds dear is the belief in the so-called “American Dream”. This involves, in part, a belief in equal opportunity for economic success for those who strive. In the wake of the grossly inequitable distribution of responsibility for the 2008 financial crisis in favor of the banking sector, accompanied by the reduced prospects for today’s youth for economic advances, much of the white middle class has risen up in protest against the government. In this paper, we discuss what has come to be known as the Occupy-Wall-Street (OWS) movement in the lens of an Islamic framework for development. What are the benchmarks for economic injustice? What are the principles for protest against the status quo? From the collective examples of protests by three Companions of the Prophet of Islam, we will explore the beginnings of the construction of an Islamic framework of protest in the 21st century in the United States.