Editorial, "YOU ARE THE 99%, OCCUPY THE WORLD!," in the 31 October 2011 (Vol. 7, Pt. 2, No. 20) issue of LAW ANIMATED WORLD

You are the 99%, Occupy the World!

The message is loud, clear and bold. People are really fed up with the things as they are now, making their lives miserable. While 1% of the world population enjoys nearly half the cake, the lower 50-60% does not have even 10% of the bread to make both ends meet. It is the capitalist Kleptocracy of the modern times that is ruining the fortunes of the people and the environment of our planet. It is heartening to see the American people in large numbers taking to streets under the inspiration of the ‘Arab Spring’, claiming their inalienable rights on the resources of the society. Calling 2011 the year of revolutions, inspired by the saying ‘No Army can stop an Idea, whose Time has come’ (Victor Hugo), they occupy the Wall Street and several squares in other cities too. The movement has now spread to several European cities also, though despite Anna Hazare’s anti-corruption movement that raged here in India, perhaps the ‘world’s largest kleptocracy’, Dalal Street is somehow still safe from the ire of the demonstrators. The organizers pithily claim: “Occupy Wall Street is leaderless resistance movement with people of many colors, genders and political persuasions. The one thing we all have in common is that ‘We Are The 99%’ that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1%. We are using the revolutionary Arab Spring tactic to achieve our ends and encourage the use of nonviolence to maximize the safety of all participants. This OWS movement empowers real people to create real change from the bottom up. We want to see a general assembly in every backyard, on every street corner because we don't need Wall Street and we don't need politicians to build a better society.” Radical intellectuals like Noam Chomsky and John Bellamy Foster have declared their solidarity, with the former strongly condemning the ‘gangsterism’ of the Wall Street “that has set in motion a vicious cycle that has concentrated immense wealth, and with it political power, in a tiny sector of the population, a fraction of 1%, while the rest increasingly become … "a precariat" -- seeking to survive in a precarious existence.” And he commends: “The courageous and honorable protests underway in Wall Street should serve to bring this calamity to public attention, and to lead to dedicated efforts to overcome it and set the society on a more healthy course” – We can’t agree more. §§§