Occupying Here & Now puts Occupy Wall Street in the role of the boy who proclaimed amid a seduced and mesmerized crowd that the Emperor indeed had no clothes on, that, here and now in the U.S., a middle class democracy has become a plutocracy and we remain oblivious to this. The results of this are everywhere, from a loss of civility and trust in American life, on our streets and neighborhoods, in our private “compounds,” in all our “public space” as well as in our politics, to the collapse of an economic and social mobility that had supported a belief in “American Exceptionalism.” This short book positions the on-going OWS movement in the history of class warfare, distinguishing it by what seems to be a discursive-free witnessing, by mostly young grievants, of the indisputable conditions of a here and now that affect 99% of the American population. The OWS’s targeting of “Wall Street” is traced to a Reagan-inspired “trickle down” form of capitalism that has benefited, most realistically speaking, about 20% of the U.S. population
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