Responding to the call to rally against the inequalities inherent in the global financial system, protesters are planning to gather in Toronto, Montreal, Calgary, Vancouver, and other cities on Oct. 15.
The Vancouver protest will be indefinite, according to the Occupy Vancouver website: “This general occupation of public space is an ongoing event. Bring tent … We will be out there for as long as it takes.”
Base camp will be the lawn of the Vancouver Art Gallery, a stone’s throw from the city’s financial district.
Occupy Vancouver organizer Min Reyes says interest in joining the protest has been huge, with some unions, including the 600,000-strong Canadian Union of Public Employees, showing solidarity.
“Anybody who’s in social media knows that on the 15th we are all going to take part and tell the IMF and our governments and those bankers, ‘No, we come before money. Humanity comes before corporations and banks. Our children come before politicians’ greed.’”
She says it was protesters in Spain, who have been demonstrating against austerity cuts in their country on and off since May, who put out the call for a “global uprising” on Oct. 15.
‘One Simple Demand’
The magazine launched its campaign for a movement in July, issuing a poster saying simply “Occupy Wall Street Sept. 17. Bring tent,” and blogging that “Our one simple demand is: stop the monied corruption at the heart of our democracy!”
Hundreds, then tens of thousands, subsequently flocked to Wall Street, and despite up to 700 arrests in the largely peaceful demonstrations, the momentum has since spread to several other U.S. cities. Major unions and students have joined in, as have celebrities such as Susan Sarandon and Alec Baldwin.
“What we’re witnessing is a kind of a global people’s uprising, a global people’s democracy movement,” says Adbusters senior editor Micah White.
“I think it started with the Arab Spring, it continued onto Spain with the Spanish indignados (indignants), it went around in Europe, and now it’s shooting over to North America. I think that definitely this is kind of a global revolutionary moment that now has come to North America finally.”
Although Canada’s economy is relatively stable, the same can’t be said for the U.S. where 14 million are out of work while Wall Street profits remain stratospheric.
“The situation in America is very dire, more dire than I think most people realize, because at the one hand you have all of the economic problems of unemployment, student loan debt, foreclosures, but at the same time you have a dying culture—you have a corporate-owned, commercialized culture that is killing people on a spiritual level,” White says.
“For 20 years Adbusters has been fighting against the kind of consumerism that is slowly eating away at our spiritual core, and I think that finally people are waking up to just how flat and empty life in America has become.”
Anger and Frustration
Simon Fraser University history professor Mark Leier says that while the timing and form of the Occupy Wall Street movement was not predicted, it was clear some kind of protest would emerge.
“The anger and frustration were entirely predictable,” says Leier, who studies popular movements.
“We’ve seen wages and jobs and living standards leak away for 30 years. Entire generations have been told to suck it up, believe in the market, trust the old political parties, and have received little in return.”
What matters now, he adds, is whether the various protest movements “can make strategic links with organized groups, especially the labour movement, and whether the pressure on business and politicians can be directed to clear ends and means.”
At a news conference in Washington on Oct. 6, President Barack Obama acknowledged the frustration of the Wall Street protesters.
“People are frustrated and, you know, the protesters are giving voice to a more broad-based frustration about how our financial system works,” he said.
Adbusters is calling for a global protest on Oct. 29 ahead of the G20 in France in early November to demand a 1 percent tax on all financial transactions and currency trades.
“Hopefully it will be kind of a global people’s moment to demand the one thing, and we’re hoping that that one thing will be something like a transaction tax, or a Tobin tax, or Robin Hood tax on the financial flows,” says White.
Reyes says she personally plans to remain at the Vancouver Art Gallery until Oct. 29 to show solidarity with the protesters both on Wall Street and around the world.
“Because remember what happened in Toronto at the last G20 meeting—a lot of people, peaceful people, got arrested and got beaten up. We want to show solidarity. We don’t want that kind of violence ever happen to anybody who’s protesting for their livelihood, for their right to survive.”
