The young revolutionary movement Occupy Wall Street needs to be pushed forward to evolve into a working force that can influence US domestic affairs, believes Immortal Technique, a hip-hop star who has backed the group from the start.
As the demonstrations against the Wall Street corporations enter their fourth week in New York, elsewhere they have grown into a nationwide protest with 45 states and nearly 200 cities now involved in the rally. “The recent movement is the biggest expression of democracy in the past few decades here in America,” states Immortal Technique, who has become one of the spokespersons for the movement. What started out as a peaceful movement has now been plagued by unrest in the Big Apple, where confrontations between demonstrators and police are only becoming tenser. Police brutality has become a tripping point for the escalation of people’s anger, the rapper believes. When the pictures hit the internet, they went viral. “We saw a bunch of defenseless people simply expressing their freedom – and they were penned off, they were sprayed down, being obviously not in danger of harming any police officers. And ‘white shirts’ did not seem to be held responsible for it, as if they were almost above the law,” the artist explains. The reaction from the city authorities is biased and aimed at intensifying the protests, so they can portray them in a dishonest manner in the media, argues Immortal Technique. They want to sow conflict amongst the protesters, attempting to divide them using the issues of sex, religion – anything that can fuel the mobs, he explains. New York mayor Michael R. Bloomberg simply wants to exploit the people who have come here to express their democratic will. It shows that democracy is an alien concept to him, claims Immortal Technique. “He [Mr. Bloomberg] is closer to Wall Street, than America is to Israel,” the rapper says. People must learn to resist this devious game being played by corporate bosses and carry on expressing their will for free speech and democracy. “We love America, we refuse to see it destroyed by the same people that have been corrupting it for the past countless number of years,” stresses the rapper. There is no doubt that the Occupy Wall Street events will have an impact on the upcoming elections in 2012. And the future of the Obama administration is inevitably at stake. “Obama’s campaign for a second term well fail if the president doesn’t listen to protesters’ demands,” insists the activist. “The people now protesting in the streets once supported Mr. Obama, believing he would change things in this country, which actually did not change a lot since he was elected,” he adds. This anger is not directed towards Obama himself, stresses the rapper, “however, Mr. President knows well the systems he’s is the head of and has to do something.” The movement is only in its infancy. It needs to evolve to become an influential group capable of promoting its ideas. For that reason, more spokespeople are needed to go out and spread the actual core message of this group, Immortal Technique told RT. “We have to have a cohesive strategy to pull this together. There’s a lot of real brainstorming that needs to happen. This is a chess game. We have to think ahead of the game,” the rapper urges. These crucial discussions should not be held in public, the rapper insists, as there are a lot of sleeper cells and agents among the group. But most important of all, the young revolutionary movement must not stop its work, the activist urges.“It [revolution] is never going to finish, because we can never stop reforming our democracy. The moment the revolution stops means the revolution has been betrayed,” concludes the artist.