Great Recession Research Paper

When the word “protest” is brought up, everyone gets stereotypical and assumes it is violently, especially when one is protesting war . Some people protest through writing. These writers protest using different literary devices, such as imagery, irony, and structure. War has unique touch to everyone’s life who encounters this. Each individual deals with the effects of war in different ways. The authors Stephen Crane, Wilfred Owen, Tim O’Brien, and Kevin Powers express their feelings by writing.

Craig Calhoun’s article “Occupy Wall Street in perspective” comes into great comparison with Herman Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street". They are both written works about protest and conflict. There is not a various amount of movement in either section, but there does tend to be the statement of “I would prefer not to” (Melville, 55). In “Bartleby the Scrivener” the readers have to try and understand for themselves why Bartleby would prefer not to since the answer is never given in the text. The article, "OWS" clarifies why Bartleby would prefer not to, in “Bartleby the Scrivener", through the setting, the 99% vs. the 1% contrast, and passive resistance.

Occupy Wall Street has been called many things including: unfocused, ungrounded, and silly. Others coin it as “America’s first internet-era movement” (Rushkoff). In quintessence, Occupy Wall Street is a series of protests and demonstrations that oppose the influence that corporate greed has on American Democracy. The protestors manipulate marches and nonviolent demonstrations to express their dissatisfaction with the state of American Politics and economy. This relates to the political science concepts of power, performance democracy, and protective democracy.

Occupy Wall Street symbolizes their frustrations through the various occupying demonstrations, signs, and most notably, their slogan: “We are the 99%” representing the growing inequality of the wealthiest 1% of America’s population and the rest of the country’s citizens. The top 1% has more than doubled their income over the last thirty years according to a Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report. In 2007, the richest 1% owned 34.6% of the country’s total wealth. After the Great Recession and economic crisis the amount of the country’s total wealth owned by the 1% grew from 34.6% to 37.1%.

Social movements of the 1960’s and 1970’s have been interpreted and written about in varying ways. While contemporary scholarship disagrees with past analyses and offer fresh perspectives, past research can also provide a pathway for defining important questions for future research on social movements in America.

Knowledge, of course, is always imperfect, but it seemed to me that when a nation goes to war it must have reasonable confidence in the justice and imperative of its cause” (p 38-39). To some extent our minds have not changed from 62 years ago when Vietnam took place. The Vietnam War created protesters which indeed led to the Civil Rights Movement. Similarly to the Afghanistan War, the belief of many members of society, especially veterans, pushed organizations to share their points of view. The IVAW is a current organization against the Afghanistan War. This organization shares their belief toward the end products of the war and why we should be at peace. In July 2011, protesters from the IVAW, Brock McIntosh and Jacob George, returned to Afghanistan with a U.S. commitment to nonviolence. They were eager to meet with local Afghanistan leaders to find peace and social justice organizations. Their mission came ted down to ”gaining a greater understanding of ordinary Afghans’ needs, fears, and desires for their country, and to discover ways U.S. activists can support indigenous nonviolent efforts to reach those goals.” In contrast to the Afghanistan war the Vietnam War protest related to the Black Power

“If America’s soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read ‘Vietnam’.” Today I invoke the late Martin Luther King Jr’s words with full knowledge of the gravity they carry. My fellow Americans, the Vietnam war is undeniably the greatest moral catastrophe to have ever plagued our beloved nation; it has done nothing but divide us domestically and humiliate us internationally. As a result, for the sake of America’s conscience and dignity, the National Mobilisation Committee implores the Democratic Party to immediately de-escalate or even withdraw America’s military presence in South Vietnam. Yet I understand that the onus is upon me to prove that the National Mobilisation Committee’s path of peace is superior to President Johnson’s path of war. Consequently, I will rebut President Johnson’s attempts to defend the war. Furthermore, it has come to my attention that my pacifism has shaken my fellow protestors’ faith in my ability to bring about positive change. As a result, I will also use this speech to argue in favour of nonviolent protest, as it is the only way for those in power to hear our voices.

The 1960’s was a happening decade. It was a time when many people came together for a common good and stood against injustice. The 60’s is often recalled as the era of the peace sign, one ridden with hippies, marijuana and pacifism. While true of much of the era, some of the movements calling for immense social change began as non-violent harbingers of change and later became radicals. The reason for this turn to radicalism, as seen in the case of the Students for a Democratic Society, and as suggested by the change between this organizations earlier Port Huron statement and the later Weatherman Manifesto, is due to the gradual escalation of the Vietnam war.

The concerns of the majority Americans have no immediate solution as the answer lies in the separated divisions in government. Political stances of Democrat, Republican and Liberal views about Occupy Wall Street have separate and distinct ideals. But, one unified front from all three is that the movement has gotten out-of-hand; caught between the freedom of speech act, and the health and safety of the public from themselves. Michael Kirby Smith, of The New York Times, commented in an article that because of the anti-Semitism displays during Occupy Wall Street, President Barak Obama and House Representative Nancy Pelosi recanted their support for the Wall Street protests. Yet, recently in an article by Mark Whittington of Yahoo News, writes that even though President Obama

The Occupy Wall Street began in fall of 2011 in response to an email which was sent by online publication Adbusters. In this call-to-arms, those without jobs or other such responsibilities were urged to make their way to Manhattan for a long-term civil protest. The purpose of this gathering would be to decry the prevalence of corruption in the United States government, specifically as it related to Wall Street. (Economic Sociology and Political Economy)The physical movement began in a private New York City Park which was soon dubbed ‘Liberty Square ', and continued to grow until mid-November of 2011 when the protesters were forcibly evicted by the New York police. While many assumed that this would be the end of the organization, they simply moved their protest online, where they still manage to maintain a presence on the political activism scene, and have expanded to include a plethora of other socio-political causes. One of the riskiest methods utilized by the Occupy Wall Street campaign was their use of protestor-created signs and photos, rather than professional advertisements. This personalized approach often proves to be far more productive than a mere print ad. Using the classic method of Logos, Pathos, and Ethos, they succeeded in manipulating the tendency of humanity to believe anything with a statistic attached to it, as well as their emotions and desire to believe in their fellow man, which in turn created an explosive cocktail of a movement and made Occupy

I have to admit that even though the Occupy Wall Street Movement has been all over the news I did not truly understand the stance of it, nor did I really get involved with it. While doing research for this paper I was able to get a better understanding of the basis of the movement as well as the facts pertaining to it. The movement started on Wall Street but has spread across the US. The basis of the movement focuses on social & economic inequality, greed, corruption and the influence of corporations on the US government, primarily from the financial sectors of businesses. The main slogan of Occupy Wall Street (OWS) is we are the

To generate collective action frames, movement organizers participate in what scholars call “frame articulation” (Benford & Snow, 2000: 623). Frame articulation, according to Benford and Snow, “involves the connection and alignment of events and experiences so that they hang together in a relatively unified and compelling fashion” (2000: 623). Benford and Snow further argue: “what gives the resultant collective action frames its novelty is not

Through an hour long video, Buchra Khalili presents a fragmented historical narrative, addressing issues of oppression and reaction as timeless aspects of civil societies. The film begins with the fictional reactivation of a 1970s Parisian theatre company and continues to present several acts of civil disobedience. Reminiscing Howard Zinn’s axiom that all acts of civil disobedience are naturally good, the artist draws parallels between several reactionary acts that occurred in Greece over the last two centuries.

Buechler, Steven M.. Social movements in advanced capitalism: the political economy and cultural construction of social activism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Print.

May 1968 was the most advanced movement of an exceptional year of struggle that remains a high-point of the post-WWII era. Hopes and possibilities were raised high - yet the revolution never came, even though the idea of revolution (though often limited and confused) was a part of the general ferment and atmosphere in a way that seems extraordinary now, looking back from where we