New York City's "Occupy Wall Street" weeks-long demonstration is getting most of the nation's attention, and I suppose that's fair. What a spectacle it turned out to be. Read Katherine Ernst's lively report from Zuccotti Park at City Journal today--she nicely captures the sights, the sounds and the smells of a hardly working band of protesters.
But, don't forget, the Occupation is a national phenomenon. And here in California, the movement is just as incoherent as it is back east.
The mainstream press here isn't giving the "occupation" quite as much attention as the campout in Lower Manhattan has received, and it's all perfectly straight-laced. For more extensive--and entertaining--on-the-ground coverage, you need to turn to the alternative press, like L.A. Weekly, and local blogs, such as Ron Kaye L.A., Mayor Sam's Sister City, The City Maven, and the irascable Street Hassle. The L.A. Times' "L.A. Now" blog is posting semi-regular updates, of course. Today, for example, "Los Angeles police arrested 10 people Thursday afternoon at a downtown Bank of America branch after they marched in and tried to cash a check for $673 billion, officials said." The giant check was reportedly made out to "The People of California." Clever!
Members of the overpaid, underworked Los Angeles City Council on Tuesday toured the camp surrounding City Hall, where . The Los Angeles Times reports the protesters are talking about staying "through Christmas," although there may be a small matter of several city ordinances prohibiting that sort of thing. Nevertheless, city leaders appear to be in the protesters' corner:
Unlike their counterparts in New York, who have clashed with police during a two-week sit-in on Wall Street, the protesters outside of City Hall have had a peaceful relationship with police, and they have won a surprising degree of institutional support.
Before leaving Tuesday, [Council President Eric] Garcetti told the protesters: "Stay as long as you need, we're here to support you."
Roughly translated: Yes... Yes... Focus your wrath on the "corporate greed" and "Wall Street" and pay no attention to our cozy relationships with downtown developers...
Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa visited the camp yesterday, and the council agreed to consider a lengthy resolution by Councilmen Richard Alarcon and Bill Rosendahl that, among other hyperbolic flights of fancy, compares the motley crew camped out on City Hall's north lawn to the wildly misunderstood Arab Spring:
"Whereas, in cognizance that one of the factors spurring recent violent revolutionary protests in the Middle East is high income inequality, though the sobering reality is that income inequality in the United States is even higher than that of some of the countries torn asunder by violent revolution; for instance, according to the C.I.A. World Fact Book, the United States Gini coefficient, which is used to measure inequality, is higher than that of Egypt's pre-Revolution."
Meantime, one two (!) stalwart USC film students are holding a vigil beneath the statue of Tommy Trojan, announcing they "don't believe in materialism."
Protestors are also occupying perfectly good sidewalk space in front of the Federal Reserve in San Francisco, where police are much less accomodating than they appear to be in L.A. In Sacramento, occupiers--whom the Sacramento Bee describe as "an eclectic collection of union supporters, anti-war and anti-corporate activists and unaffiliated individuals with their own issues"--have been making a scene in and around Cesar Chavez Park, across from City Hall.
What to make of all this? The movement's manifesto (to say nothing of this unofficial list of demands) reads like a Marxist child's letter to a Santa Claus his doctrinaire parents forgot to tell him doesn't exist. Rather than a genuine populist uprising, more accurate to call these demonstrations a novel exercise in the ancient art of political street theater. Nothing against street theater, of course.
But there appears to be a yearning among the left-liberal commentariat to make Occupy Wall Street into something of a Leftist Tea Party. While the two movements may share some superficial similarities, I think there is one big difference. The Tea Party movement that emerged in the early part of 2009 made freedom and limited, constitutional government a rallying cry. That message resonates. Occupy Wall Street may bemoan the evils inequality, joblessness and debt afflicting the "99 percent" (give or take). But ultimately, the movement can only be about empowering the State. Beyond these grubby encampments in New York, L.A., San Francisco, Sacramento, and a handful of other metropoli, where is the appetite for that?
WOW! It must be nice to have a job and not give a damn about all of the people who have lost their jobs, retirement saving, homes and way of life. All because Wall Street decided to support and market all of the crazy loan programs that they came up with and asked lenders to offer to desperate people who were trying to get rich quick from flipping Real Estate. The worst part about the entire melt down is that the American Government made the purchasers of these Securities; like China, Europe and other countries whole by buying back the defaulted securities, but didn't help the American people get whole again. So the small guy in America lost his job, his house, maybe his spouse and worst of all his self respect. So what you call "incoherent" could bite you in the ass, ruin your career and lead you down the road to losing your house, your family and your self respect; think about that before you talk shit about people trying get the governments attention in a peaceful manner.
Exactly what is the purpose of the Wall Street Occupation? The Marxist socialists that are protesting merely want government to step in with authoritarian power to accomplish exactly what? If the protesters believe that corporate America is the problem and that government is the answer, then I suggest the protesters have no clue about how our uniquely American economic system operates nor how our constitutional republic operates.
It is generally agreed that the bursting of the housing bubble was the original cause of the recession we have experienced and the continuing economic malaise we are mired in. Liberals in Congress are singularly responsible for the lowering of mortgage loan standards, which encouraged the banking industry to willingly engage in what Congress mandated. Castigating Wall Street and the financial community without acknowledging government's role in the whole economic debacle is disingenuous at best and filled with hypocrisy, deceit and obfuscation of the facts at worst.