John Cavanagh,
director of the Washington-based Institute for Policy Studies spoke to Press
TV's U.S. Desk on Wednesday about the impact of the Occupy movement and its
future as well as the recent pepper spraying of protesters by the police at UC
Davis.
Cavanagh said that in order to understand the current situation, one
has to look back to the late 1970s or 1980s where "what you realize is that a
lot of the framework for the national conversation in the United States over the
past thirty years, was set by the election of Ronald Reagan back in 1980" and
the message that the economy was broken due to too much government and that
"we need to free corporations and the free market in order to create prosperity.
Get government out of the way, get rid of regulations and let the free market
reign and this was the dominant philosophy for thirty years and they also argued
that, they acknowledged that inequality would probably rise."
"A lot of what the Occupy movement did was it
said; partly it was the embodiment of the antithesis of that overall frame. It
was filled with young people who were smart, who'd studied hard, who'd gone to
college ... who were saddled with large debts that they couldn't get out of, and
so the myth that we are an opportunity society and that anyone can rise has
really been destroyed by Occupy … once you break that myth that anyone can rise,
then the fact that we are so grotesquely unequal and our society has become,
over these thirty years, one of the most unequal in the world, but once it's now
clear to most people that you can't rise, then that inequality becomes something
that's really a problem, that it's bad. And so I think the main thing the Occupy
movement has done is it has raised the issue of inequality, of the 99% versus
the 1%, and it has helped people understand why this is bad for most people and
why it's corrosive of our democracy and so that's a huge impact," Cavanagh
added.
With regards to the UC Davis police officers pepper spraying students
who were sitting calmly on the ground, Cavanagh said the impact on the public
was more of a moral response and that "the majority of people who know about
this think it's outrageous that the police would do this. It was clearly an
excessive use of force and it has drawn more sympathy to the protesters."
Cavanagh continued that the Occupy movement was going to be very
important, not just in the weeks to come, but in the months to years to come.
"It really has changed the framework of debate here. It has introduced
inequality and the casino nature of Wall Street into the center of the
conversation, so that will continue … but there is no question now that it will
have a very big impact on public debate and on the future of this country."
SM/SM