just because you manage to control the image doesn't mean you've successfully removed it;

 

 (Inequality.org) As we mark 15 years since Occupy Wall Street, it is worth remembering that the movement against inequality has a long lineage. The Gen Z-led protests flooding the streets of India, Kenya, Bolivia, and Tunisia today have been building for generations.

On the last day of November 1999, tens of thousands of people shut down the World Trade Organization summit in Seattle. Trade unionists marched alongside environmentalists, students locked arms with farmers, and for a few extraordinary days the people who run the global economy could not get into their own meeting.

The press called protesters a rabble with no coherent demand. They were wrong. The demand was simple and it has not changed: an economy that works for the many, not for a handful at the top.

That demand lands differently when you cannot afford the basics of life. In Seattle, the debate centred on trade rules. Today, people are doing the maths as they stand in front of a grocery food shop not knowing what they can afford to buy, tackle rents that consume the entire salary, and face energy bills that arrive like a threat. What was once an abstraction has become a household emergency.

Seattle did not come from nowhere. Five years earlier, the Zapatistas had risen in Southern Mexico on the day a free trade deal took effect, declaring that ordinary people had a right to refuse the terms being set for them from above..........more.........