I've been watching the Occupy Wall Street protest in a kind of
bemused and detached way since it started. They have yet to look
serious or come up with a thoughtful, viable agenda. Their one saving
grace up till now has been, in the words of Paul Krugman of the New
York Times, that 'they are angry at the right people'.
So I like them—this great unwashed rabble of campers and
activists—even though they seem to ricochet from issue to issue
like amped up pinballs without understanding anything fully, or even
adequately. Why do I like them? Because the enemy of my enemy is my
friend. They may not understand what they are doing, but they are
down there in the financial district making trouble and impeding
traffic and generally pissing off the Wall Street establishment.
That's almost enough for me.
Things are beginning to change though. Occupy Wall Street is
gathering momentum as a movement, and in no small measure due to the
over-reaction of the police sent to maintain order and the screeching
condemnations coming from conservative pundits and financial
commentators on the usual cable outlets.
The protestors are still largely an unfocused mob with no clear
agenda, but their persistence, their omnipresence on social media,
and the ridiculous posturing of their detractors have given them an
air of legitimacy. Lately, even Ben Bernanke, Timothy Geithner, and
President Obama have separately expressed philosophical empathy with
the protest, if not in principle, at least with their level of
frustration. '...Who can blame them?' Bernanke quipped. Well,
seemingly a lot of people can blame them, but most of that blame is
apparently going to come from the political right.
Indeed. Bernanke's rhetorical question is doubly curious in that one
of the more consistent calls of the protest is for the complete and
immediate dismantling of the Federal Reserve Bank. Bernanke will be
out of a job if the protestors have their way and, given the timbre
of some of the attendant tweets and rally signs coming out of the
protests, he just might be tarred, feathered, and carried out of town
on a rail in the bargain. Obama's remarks are more obviously
self-serving, and that, to my thinking, is as problematic as the
condemnations from the right because the protest is and ought to stay
apolitical.
The initial Occupy Wall Street narrative went something like this:
Wall Street greed and corruption have robbed us of our future. They
have tanked the economy, cost millions of jobs, stripped us of the
value that used to give us comfort in our homes and our retirement
accounts. They have undermined our worth as individuals and as a
nation. They have made us less secure, less safe, more vulnerable.
When they had brought the whole financial system to the edge of
collapse, they reached into our pockets yet again and got us to
rescue them from their own folly. Now, while the rest of us are still
trying to crawl out of the smoking ruins they left us, they are back
to their old tricks, unchastened, unrepentant, and unrelenting in the
pursuit of the rest of our happiness. This is a huge injustice that
needs to be fixed, and we are going to camp here and raise a ruckus
until somebody does something about it.
This is not a political narrative, although many seem tempted to make
it one. The Wall Street pirates donate almost equally to both major
political parties. There is a reason for this, and the first
Occupiers of Wall Street seemed to understand as much.
Politicians on both sides of the aisle share the blame for the
paucity of regulation and fiscal licentiousness that got us into this
mess. While Democrats are held by Republicans to be the party of
profligate spending, the deficit rose most dramatically under
Republican administrations. And while Republicans are widely thought
to be the party that champions the worst excesses of corporate
America, some of the most egregiously enabling deregulation took
place under Democrats. Our problems are not rooted in political
ideology. They are rooted in a system whose controls were
deliberately broken in exchange for political contributions and
support made to both parties by what Matt Tabbai of Rolling Stone
calls a new Grifter Class.
These thieves are the real enemy, and they have co-opted our
democratic processes and our institutions for their own gain. What
they do is not just greedy, not just larcenous. It is, in my opinion,
treasonous. They have done more damage to this nation than any
terrorist organization. They have undermined our strength, weakened
our influence, stripped us of our freedom, and all without recourse
to any ideological framework. They are not political. They are
criminal. They use politics, to be sure, but only as a means to an
end. The larger political issues of left versus right, progressive versus conservative, the tensioned balance between individual rights and majority rule mean nothing to them. Their only concern is have or have not.
The Occupy Wall Street protestors think this is wrong. They may be a
raucous mob at this point. They may even, as conservative commentator
Michelle Malkin has suggested, smell bad. There's no doubt they have
expressed some crazy notions, some of them self-contradictory, but
this is always a danger when you have deliberately tried to remain
leaderless and organically democratic. One could level many of the
same criticisms against that other infamous grass-roots protest
movement—the Tea Party. Personally I think there is something to
like about both groups. They each have legitimate grievances.
The danger is that all this unfocused frustration is easily co-opted
by politics. Certainly the Tea Party has come to be identified with a
kind of fundamental rebublican libertarianism. Now MoveOn.org is busy
trying to marshal the energy of the Occupy Wall Street groups. This
is a shame, really. There is much to like about the fact that the initial
anger of the movement has been directed at real pirates and
charlatans. The environment that made the piracy legal was created in
Washington by Democrats and Republicans alike. The solutions to the problems are actually quite simple
and even fairly well known, but they will have to be addressed with the same
kind of bi-partisan co-operation that created them in the first
place. Playing us versus them with these movements will just muddy the
waters and delay any chance of real reform.
