17 October 2011 Corporate greed was put on the global mat Saturday but the methods adopted by Occupy Wall Street, the movement that wants to bridge the gap between the rich and the poor, took a fork in the path that literally destroys that bridge.
Violence is not the answer to cleaning the grime on the white collar and burning vehicles and property spans nothing. On the contrary, it only widens the gulf between the wealthy and the indigent and places the middle class square in the way of the rage. Indeed, one does not cavil over the need for the economic infrastructures to revisit their policies and their raison d’etre. You cannot have the capacity to antagonise 99 per cent of the world and generate so much hostility across continents simultaneously without having done something wrong and done it with an arrogance and indifference and done it over a period of time. But, is this 
intimidation the solution?

The UN agency IFAD had marked 2015 as the cutoff year for the halving of the world’s population that lived below the poverty line. Poverty, as an institution, was to be drastically cut down. Instead, it seems to have grown rapidly and the mirage of emerging markets is actually projected at the cost of a marginalized majority of the population. Nations like India and China, the new fiscal powers, obtain their liquidity from 15% of the population with the rest stranded midstream between half baked education and the spectre of unemployment. The seething mass of humanity that is thus deprived in the age of technology and grasping possessiveness is now expressing a rage against those it feels exploits them. In a rather Churchillian fashion never has so few had so much and left so little. There is little doubt that targeting banks and financial edifices is very tempting especially when it is linked inexorably to the anguish of the taxpayer. That very word creates such a sense of injury that it is easy to get people to come out on the roads and bloat the ranks of the outraged.

But, at what cost? Once the violence escalates the cost of rebuilding will inevitably be passed on to the same taxpayer. The more the damage to public property the higher the cost. This is why Occupy is taking an issue of unquestioning importance and then allowing it to get out of hand rather than mould it into a forum of world opinion. As the stakes are raised, and law and order become a problem, those who are hurt and wounded and even killed will be the poor, not the banker, not the wealthy, not the financiers and the moneylords but the man on the street.

Being populist does not extend any group the right to encourage destruction. Burning a car is not a symbol of the repressed. And the sooner that message went out the more likely it will be that the global financial infrastructure might find itself accountable. So long as violence is the texture of this protest no changes will occur.