Occupy Wall Street Goes Global

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- It's been sad to watch Occupy Wall Street since it was ruthlessly evicted from Zuccotti Park. It has seemed aimless, unfocused and only gets attention when its members are arrested. Its gift to the political discourse -- that the "1%" has an unfair advantage over the rest of us -- has been lost amid the static, and I fear that it's slowly fading.

So I was delighted to hear that the Occupy movement is is coming to Davos, where the World Economic Forum has become an annual celebrity thumb-sucking ritual. OWS protesters are setting up "igloos" in the snows of the Swiss town for the Jan. 25-29 event, outside the famously exclusivist forums and panels, where attendance provides more status than getting a white badge at Cannes.

That's good news. OWS introduced a breath of fresh air into the otherwise stale, repetitious and frustratingly trivia-focused U.S. political scene last year. Sure, it's been ignored, brushed aside and cynically exploited by extremists and charlatans. But its central message was accepted by the majority of Americans: The privileges of the 1% need to be curtailed. It was a desperately needed message, three years after a financial crisis that has never been adequately addressed by Washington.

But America's inequities reflected a global phenomenon, of income disparities growing wildly out of whack, and that's why I'm so glad to see OWS focus on Davos. The globalization so eagerly promoted by so many at Davos has had an underside, one that is evident everywhere in the Third World -- in Brazil, China, India and the rest of the developing world -- where capitalism has largely replaced outmoded socialist economic models. A rising middle class has left behind a desperately poor underclass, and the gap between rich and poor is only growing wider.

OWS can serve as a wake-up call to policymakers that fawning over the 1% is not an exclusively American phenomenon -- and that government has a role, working alongside the free markets, in improving conditions of the underclass.

India, I think, provides one of the best examples of how capitalism alone is insufficient to improve the lives of the majority of people. Sure, the growing economy has elevated and expanded a thriving middle class. The totems of economic growth can be seen everywhere in the major cities, in walled-off "colonies" where the rich and upper middle class live in luxury alongside festering slums. It is true that the Indian miracle is an inspiring phenomenon. There are probably more Horatio Algers per square mile in the urban centers of India than there are anywhere else on the planet, certainly including the U.S.