為什麼精英身處麻煩中

為什麼精英身處麻煩中
Why the Elites Are in Trouble
Posted on Oct 9, 2011
By Chris Hedges
Translation by Autumnson Blog

Illustration by Mr. Fish

Ketchup, a petite 22-year-old from Chicago with wavy red hair and glasses with bright red frames, arrived in Zuccotti Park in New York on Sept. 17. She had a tent, a rolling suitcase, 40 dollars’ worth of food, the graphic version of Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States” and a sleeping bag. She had no return ticket, no idea what she was undertaking, and no acquaintances among the stragglers who joined her that afternoon to begin the Wall Street occupation. She decided to go to New York after reading the Canadian magazine Adbusters, which called for the occupation, although she noted that when she got to the park Adbusters had no discernable presence.
茄汁是一位來自芝加哥22歲大的嬌小女孩，有紅色波浪的頭髮和鮮紅色框的眼鏡，在9月17日抵達紐約的Zuccotti公園。她有一個帳篷、一個滾轆的行李箱、價值 40美元的食物，霍華德博士“美國人民的歷史”的圖形版，和一個睡袋。她沒有回程機票，沒想法自己在進行什麼，及在流浪者之間沒有熟人，他們在當天下午加入她開始了佔領華爾街。她決定了要去紐約，在讀到加拿大雜誌 Adbusters呼龥佔領之後，但她指出當她來到公園， Adbusters並沒有可辨別的存在。
The lords of finance in the looming towers surrounding the park, who toy with money and lives, who make the political class, the press and the judiciary jump at their demands, who destroy the ecosystem for profit and drain the U.S. Treasury to gamble and speculate, took little notice of Ketchup or any of the other scruffy activists on the street below them. The elites consider everyone outside their sphere marginal or invisible. And what significance could an artist who paid her bills by working as a waitress have for the powerful? What could she and the others in Zuccotti Park do to them? What threat can the weak pose to the strong? Those who worship money believe their buckets of cash, like the $4.6 million JPMorgan Chase gave* to the New York City Police Foundation, can buy them perpetual power and security. Masters all, kneeling before the idols of the marketplace, blinded by their self-importance, impervious to human suffering, bloated from unchecked greed and privilege, they were about to be taught a lesson in the folly of hubris.
若隱若現圍繞公園的樓層內的金融主人，他們戲耍金錢和生活，他們製造政治階級、新聞界和司法機關應他們的要求彈跳，他們為盈利目的破壞生態系統和疏導美國財政部來賭博及投機，甚少注意下面街道上的茄汁或任何其他衣衫襤褸的活躍份子。精英考慮每一個在他們領域之外邊際或看不到的人，及且一名藝術家以做女服務員的工作來支付她的賬單，對權勢的人能有什麼意義呢？她和其他在Zuccotti公園的人能對他們做什麼呢？弱勢的能對強勢的構成什麼樣的威脅？那些崇拜金錢的人相信他們桶內的現金，像摩根大通給紐約市警察基金會的460萬美元的，可以為他們買到永久的力量和安全。跪在市場上的偶像面前，大師們全都被自身的重要性蒙蔽，對人類的苦難不為所動，從未經檢查的貪婪和特權變得臃腫，他們即將傲慢的愚蠢被教一課。
Even now, three weeks later, elites, and their mouthpieces in the press, continue to puzzle over what people like Ketchup want. Where is the list of demands? Why don’t they present us with specific goals? Why can’t they articulate an agenda?
即使現在，三星期之後，精英和他們在新聞界的喉舌，繼續在疑惑像茄汁的人想要什麼，要求的清單在哪裡？為什麼他們不向我們介紹具體的目標？為什麼他們不能闡明一項議程？
The goal to people like Ketchup is very, very clear. It can be articulated in one word—REBELLION. These protesters have not come to work within the system. They are not pleading with Congress for electoral reform. They know electoral politics is a farce and have found another way to be heard and exercise power. They have no faith, nor should they, in the political system or the two major political parties. They know the press will not amplify their voices, and so they created a press of their own. They know the economy serves the oligarchs, so they formed their own communal system. This movement is an effort to take our country back.
對茄汁般的人的目標是非常明確的，可用一個字闡明：叛亂。這些示威者在系統內不會發揮作用，他們並不懇求國會的選舉改革。他們知道選舉政治是一場鬧劇，並已發現另一種方式以求聆聽和行使權力。他們在政治體制或兩大政黨中沒有信仰，他們也不應有。他們知道新聞界不會放大他們的聲音，及因此他們創造了自己的記者。他們知道經濟是來服務寡頭們的，所以他們組成自己的公社系統，這場運動是一項努力去取回我們的國家。
This is a goal the power elite cannot comprehend. They cannot envision a day when they will not be in charge of our lives. The elites believe, and seek to make us believe, that globalization and unfettered capitalism are natural law, some kind of permanent and eternal dynamic that can never be altered.
這是一個權力精英無法理解的目標，他們無法想像有一天當他們將不會主管我們的生活。精英相信，並設法使我們相信，全球化和不受約束的資本主義是自然法則，某種永久性和永恆的動力是永遠不能改變的。
What the elites fail to realize is that rebellion will not stop until the corporate state is extinguished. It will not stop until there is an end to the corporate abuse of the poor, the working class, the elderly, the sick, children, those being slaughtered in our imperial wars and tortured in our black sites. It will not stop until foreclosures and bank repossessions stop. It will not stop until students no longer have to go into debt to be educated, and families no longer have to plunge into bankruptcy to pay medical bills. It will not stop until the corporate destruction of the ecosystem stops, and our relationships with each other and the planet are radically reconfigured. And that is why the elites, and the rotted and degenerate system of corporate power they sustain, are in trouble. That is why they keep asking what the demands are. They don’t understand what is happening. They are deaf, dumb and blind.

“The world can’t continue on its current path and survive,” Ketchup told me. “That idea is selfish and blind. It’s not sustainable. People all over the globe are suffering needlessly at our hands.”

The occupation of Wall Street has formed an alternative community that defies the profit-driven hierarchical structures of corporate capitalism. If the police shut down the encampment in New York tonight, the power elite will still lose, for this vision and structure have been imprinted into the thousands of people who have passed through park, renamed Liberty Plaza by the protesters. The greatest gift the occupation has given us is a blueprint for how to fight back. And this blueprint is being transferred to cities and parks across the country.

“We get to the park,” Ketchup says of the first day. “There’s madness for a little while. There were a lot of people. They were using megaphones at first. Nobody could hear. Then someone says we should get into circles and talk about what needed to happen, what we thought we could accomplish. And so that’s what we did. There was a note-taker in each circle. I don’t know what happened with those notes, probably nothing, but it was a good start. One person at a time, airing your ideas. There was one person saying that he wasn’t very hopeful about what we could accomplish here, that he wasn’t very optimistic. And then my response was that, well, we have to be optimistic, because if anybody’s going to get anything done, it’s going be us here. People said different things about what our priorities should be. People were talking about the one-demand idea. Someone called for AIG executives to be prosecuted. There was someone who had come from Spain to be there, saying that she was here to help us avoid the mistakes that were made in Spain. It was a wide spectrum. Some had come because of their own personal suffering or what they saw in the world.”

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/why_the_elites_are_in_trouble_20111009/

華爾街抗議者計劃“百萬富翁遊行”往大享在紐約市的家