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Indignant a system that decadence
by Thanos Kalamidas
2011-10-07 07:24:08

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So the indignant have moved from the lands of desperation to the lands of hope and equal changes and from the squares of Madrid and Athens to the wide avenues of New York and the Wall Street. Barack Obama in a speech lately said that the people in the streets of Manhattan represent the discontent of the people to the system and the ones who brought the economy into the crisis we all live this moment. But Barack Obama is wrong; these people don’t represent the discontent, they are the discontent. Looking at the latest numbers of unemployed, homeless and under the limits of poverty in the west world people are far beyond discontent, they are indignant against a system that has failed them.

A system supposedly based in equal opportunities that enriches the few and sends the rest into the deepest banks of recession. Barack Obama, just like most of the European leaders the last couple of years try to be political correct in an issue that makes a very dangerous cocktail. Actually the whole idea of the communist manifesto is based into the people indignantly that becomes motivation and force that explodes and destroys the foundations of the capitalist system.

Sadly and I have mention it before, economic globalisation succeeded but not in the profiting part but into globalizing poverty and now indignantly. The people in the streets of Manhattan don’t ask any more they demand, just like the people in the streets of Athens, Madrid, Paris and London their right to dream, hope and live in dignity and that these people are this minute demonstrate in the Wall Street show that it was not the neo-conservative policy of the Bush administration or the neo-labour policy of Tony Blair or even the traditional democratic policy of Barack Obama but the whole system as it is. And the problem is beyond economics and politics but it has become social and that’s where the foundations of our world and contemporary civilization lay.

Civilization; I was very aware when I was writing this word but hasn’t the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st be a huge landmark in human history? Hours since a magnificent mind died, Steve Jobs, all of us agree that his contribution was huge, he actually change communication and information as we knew it and when I say as we knew it I mean that even I find it difficult sometimes to explain to younger people how things were just thirty years ago when mobile phones and personal computers (iPads were science fiction) were just dreams and objects of futuristic films. But please don’t stop in the communications and information world, go to the basics, look what has happen with transportation these last hundred years or what happens with the simple eclectic things that equip nowadays your house and your everyday life simplifying in many ways your days. From mixer and blenders to vacuum cleaners and washing machines and then just check [photos from the beginning of the century or even from the middle of the century and you will understand what I mean. The same time the workers who died in Chicago (and NOT Lenin) brought the right of the forty hours working week. Political movements and inspired leaders in 1960s brought the minimum wage and the welfare state, the magnificence of the Swedish model.

And yet, in the beginning of the 21st century and having succeeded all the above we live the decadence. The man who said, yes we still can is heading to his nemesis due to his idea to establish the welfare state with a medical institution for everybody as its foundation. When the International Monetary Fund, the institution that by definition is there to protect profits and bankers is able to control states and national sovereign forcing measures that widens the gap between the poor and the rich, politicians instruments of interests that have nothing to do with the people they elected to serve and when all these vested rights are disappearing in the name of global economic stability – which translates more profits to the shareholders – then the system has failed and the indignant don’t dispute the economic status quo but the whole system politically and socially and they demand a change. A radical change that will start from the foundations and the fundamentals that hold this system. That’s the common thing between the people who demonstrate in Manhattan with the people who demonstrate in Athens, in Madrid in Paris and London. The system has failed and we need a new one and yes we can as long the Indignant is heard for what it is and not what the system wants to be.

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Emanuel Paparella	2011-10-07 09:59:52
Indeed Thanos, Einstein said once that in the 20th century morality has not kept up with technology and he said a mouthful. Plato would say that the ship is journeying without a competent captain and the symptoms are a basic lack of harmony and moderation. The poet Yeats would say that the center does not hold in our civilization so proud of its technological gadgets. The 21st century presents us with technological wonders together with the obscenity of a widening gap between the very rich and the very poor and a callous attitude toward the billions of human beings who must live on a dollar a day. Here in the US the latest statistics are that 1% of the super-rich own 25% of the county’s wealth, and the gap keeps widening. We rightly acclaim our technology and scientific heroes, but are they true heroes if they cannot raise our consciousness on distributive justice? One wonders. The insensitive Wall Street financial barons who brought a whole civilization to the brink of disaster and were bailed out with people's money, were caught the other day opening champagne while the people protested outside and were pepper sprayed by the police. A scene this redolent of another one in the eighteen century when Marie Antoinette exclaimed: if they have no bread let them eat cake. Things did not turn out so well for the privileged class then. As Lincoln put it: one can fool some of the people all of the times, and all of the people some of the times, but one cannot fool all the people all the times. When the center does not hold the people will eventually rebel. Things are about to get uncomfortable for everybody concerned but especially for the obtuse privileged with a warped sense of justice who feel entitled and advocate capitalism for everybody else and socialism for themselves. They have yet to understand, the reasonable way, that the issue is not class warfare but basic distributive justice.