Wall Street protests deserve support

Call it the American Spring.

The mainstream US press has been slow to report on the Occupy Wall Street protests, and the business media have all but denigrated the protesters as leftists and socialists. But the demonstrations are gaining ground and building momentum. You know they're on to something when local police start rounding up peaceful demonstrators who wouldn't hurt a fly.

Now, teachers, nurses, union workers and Ivy League professors are joining their cause.

They are right to be angry, and true freedom-loving people around the world should share their indignation. They are holding ground on the supposed citadel of capitalism where its occupants have, in reality, subverted capitalism.

Corporate plutocrats in America - and politicians who support them - have created an anti-capitalist system that socialises losses and privatises gains. They have created a system whereby top executives are guaranteed riches and handsome rewards even as they completely destroy shareholder value and run their companies into the ground.

They have created the most extreme inequalities in the industralised world. They have subverted democracy and capitalism, the very twin social-economic systems that America has been trying to sell the world since the collapse of the Berlin Wall.

The responses of the US government and the Federal Reserve to the Western financial crisis have created the greatest transfer of wealth from the poor and middle class to the richest people in human history. The world should support the anti-Wall Street protesters. They need to take back American democracy and restore true capitalism.