ON Friday, Occupy Wall Street (OWS), the other September event America wants to forget, will be 10 years old. Many, especially those afflicted by corporate greed and politicians kept alive by it, have tried to downplay the event of Sept 17, 2011, in Zuccotti Park, New York.
Let's not forget that OWS spurred "Occupy" movements in Europe, Africa and the Far East. True, the promised 20,000 people didn't turn up in New York to stay for months as hoped, but a thousand did and stayed for a while.
True, too, OWS is no longer a single movement, having splintered into many. But let's not forget a critical gift of OWS: the global debate on the one per cent versus 99 per cent, which may one day change capitalism and politics.
Thanks to OWS, the world is better placed to appreciate the immorality of the race to space between billionaires Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson.
Trust these corporate types to choose the worst of times to outdo one another. Greed often does this to people, billionaires or otherwise.
But the ills are not just about the times. It is more systemic. It is about the chokehold of corporate power over political power. OWS started in the United States for a reason. It is there where the chokehold is the clearest.
Make no mistake. It isn't just a Washington disease. Global variants of the chokehold have been spotted elsewhere. And they are variants of concern. Hence, the occupy movements beyond America. Start with America.
A good majority of Americans are deeply troubled by the ease with which corporations and the elite rich are able to "purchase" political power.
This is despite the campaigns of movements like Common Cause to change the course of democracy to tilt away from corporations and special interest groups towards the people.
The 2010 US Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United vs Federal Election Commission didn't help. As one political theorist told the Los Angeles Times, Citizens United put elections up for sale. He may be right.
According to the newspaper, the ruling unleashed "a torrent of new money into politics in the form of contributions from wealthy individuals".
Overall, individual donors grew in just over two years from US$299 million in 2014 to US$1.1 billion in 2016. Small wonder, Common Cause is fighting to slow the revolving door between government officials and lobbyists through a "For The People Act".
Corporate capture is a threat, too, in Europe. In a September 2018 report, titled "Corporate Capture in EU", the Alliance for Lobbying Transparency and Ethics Regulation in the EU (ALTER-EU), a coalition of 200 civil society groups and trade unions, had this to say: Big Business is dominating policy-making in the European Union and threatening the rights of the people there.
"Citizens expect decision-makers to regulate in their interests, to be ambitious and to achieve the best possible outcomes, but the reality often fails to live up to expectations, with weak or disappointing laws benefiting mainly big business interests."
The report, which examines the extreme and undue influence on the EU and member state decision-making processes, notes numerous distortions in policy and law-making across the region.
Is this why financial crises refuse to go away? The EU, too, may need a "For The People Act". So may, too, those similarly troubled elsewhere.