New America Media, Op-ed, Behrouz Saba, Posted: Oct 12, 2011

Occupy Wall Street has gone nationwide. Indeed, the movement has become part of a larger protest stretching from Madrid, where Los Indignados have begun a march across Europe, to Athens and ongoing protests there against a bankrupt government’s austerity measures.

Meanwhile the Arab Spring is alive and sick, fomenting deadly religious hatred between Muslims and Christians in Egypt, while sustaining a vicious civil war in Libya. News footage of a three-year-old boy blinded in one eye in the beleaguered city of Sirte – Ghaddafi’s home town -- should leave no doubt that there is nothing “velvet” about Arabs killing and maiming each other.

Yet American marchers betray a misunderstanding of the complex tensions in the Arab world when they proudly proclaim, “Tahrir is Here!”

Americans also run the risk of squandering their momentum with empty sloganeering – a lesson now being learned by Egyptians and Libyans. They cannot, in their endearing naiveté, conceive of the Cairo street element whose aimless, sometimes mercenary rage forces most Egyptians to watch their country’s downward spiral in horror.

Beset by a lack of information, vision and strategy, American activists resort to such shopworn clichés as “corporate greed” and “tax the rich.” Indeed, holding Wall Street responsible for America’s economic plight is tantamount to shouting outside Walgreens, CVS and Rite Aid locations against a pandemic, deadly disease.

Wall Street merely manipulates wealth, reducing it to numbers in a “paper-money” economy that operates on the deepening debt owed by the American government, too-big-to-fail banks, mortgage holders and consumers with maxed-out plastic. “Paper money” is in fact a misnomer, with only three percent of all American liquidity being in actual dollar bills. The rest sits in computer chips, vulnerable to the vagaries of those who can access it.

For decades, Americans were lulled into complacency, believing that their house values, pension plans and stock holdings would ensure their financial security. They looked at the numbers and smiled, not knowing that what they “owned” could be sliced and diced, sold and resold in a mirrored hall of increasingly arcane “financial instruments.”

Wall Street’s digital thievery is merely the symptom of the Federal Reserve System, which allows the government to borrow and print money that is not backed by even an iota of real wealth generation. It is a house of cards that is already falling down.

The occupiers, proud of their Facebook and Twitter prowess, fail to realize that an emerging information economy requires a far deeper technological understanding to create jobs and to promote productivity. While they have a forum, they should underscore the need for aggressive biotechnology and nanotechnology initiatives that hold the promise of a transformation far more profound than the Industrial Revolution itself.

Such initiatives can bypass a do-nothing Congress and president too worried about reelection to address meaningfully America’s dire needs. After all, wasn’t it Silicon Valley that built the information superhighway, demonstrating the private sector’s capacity to institute significant change without waiting for a moribund Washington to act?

The European protests are even more aimless, believing “indignity” to be a sufficient force to upend entrenched yet largely obsolete structures of economy and governance.

In Greece, they are protesting against government austerity after a “socialist” regime employed 40 percent of the workforce in the public sector, offering many full pensions and retirement by the age of 38.

Watching unrest sweep the world from the east to the west is not unlike staring at a magic lantern of history. Egypt’s cross-waving Christians in deadly battle with Muslims revive a medieval spectacle. Greece’s sentiments look nostalgically to a bygone era when “socialism” held the key to progress. American occupiers engage in media theatrics that are built into the system to uphold the status quo in lieu of effecting real change.

Taking it to street is of no avail anywhere on the planet any longer. The world has to think rather than shout and fight its way out of a worsening impasse. The answer is in collaborative communities of scientists, technicians and visionaries, including writers, videographers and musicians. Together, people of diverse talents can articulate a real future in which ever-growing technological capacities can be harnessed to usher in productivity and prosperity on a truly inclusive global scale.