Monday, October 31, 2011

For Some Reason, I don't Find Occupy Wall Street Compelling

Good evening, dear friends!  It's been awhile since I have spouted off in an ignorant, uneducated fashion about things going on in the country.  When last we spoke, the country was playing chicken with the debt.  That was averted, and at least the appearance of serious discussion has been set in front of the national political stage, a bit like those plastic transparencies we stuck to the screen of our Vectrex video game system to give it color where none existed in its native format.

This Occupy Wall Street thing has been lingering around the edges of my awareness for a few weeks now.  I must admit, the St. Louis Cardinals making their absurd run since the end of August, when they were 10½ games out of the wild card, to now, as 2011 World Series champions, has been much more compelling in my mind than the Occupy protestors.  Now that baseball season is finally over here in Cardinal Nation, I found myself wondering idly earlier today what this Occupy Wall Street thing was actually all about.  I didn't buy the typical dismissal of the Occupy protests by conservatives, and the mainstream media seemed confused as to how to present them.

So I let myself wonder out loud, via Facebook.  I didn't even really voice an opinion at first.  Rather, I had found an article on Yahoo News suggesting that "1 percent" is a matter of perspective.  The article was titled "Attention Protestors: You're Probably Part of the 1 Percent", and it was originally published on The Motley Fool, a prominent Internet-only financial news site.  The article stated what, if we all sat down and thought rationally for a moment, would be obviously apparent to everyone:  Americans have it pretty good, compared to the abject dirt-and-trash level existence suffered by about 50 percent of the rest of world's population.  Now, one could take this a couple of different ways.  You could take it for what it is, which is an article that puts our real economic situation into perspective.  Kinda like the other web site another friend of mine posted to Facebook that purports to demonstrate how many slaves one has working for them (what portions of your lifestyle products feed actual slavery and bonded servitude around the world, which we'll all agree is way worse than nearly everything in America).

The other way to take my posting of the article is to interpret it as an attack on Occupy Wall Street.  (Gee, defensive much, guys?)  Conservatives, after all, have used the economic state of global citizens as a method for telling liberals and progressives to sit down, shut up, and eat their broccoli.  As Garry Trudeau recently had a character say in his comic strip, Doonesbury, "Eat your heart out, Bangladesh".  In the context of the common conservative trope, it is yet another suggestion that we have the richest poor people in the world.

That's not how I intended it, but I think that's how it came off.  A couple other friends replied suggesting this, and I got to feeling a little defensive, so I reminded them that I was just posting the link to the article, not passing judgment.  They said, 'It's all cool, Dave', and so I said, 'Okay, I'm cool'.

Then I messed up and opined.  Here's what I wrote:

I do think it serves as a reminder that we are, in fact, in the US, where it's pretty much illegal to be as poor as the rest of the world. If some slum lord tried to have people living like that, they'd be fined and/or arrested and their property taken and torn down.
The problem with the whole "1 percent" idea is that it's an easily assailable slogan. All slogans are assailable, ultimately, because real life is complex. What do the Occupy protestors want, if anything? For life to be fair? Heh, good luck. To halt government bailouts? I can get behind that one. To introduce more regulation into the financial industry? I can probably support that too. But what *do* they want? I don't really know, myself. Maybe I'm just not paying close enough attention.

Jon Bernhardt of The Lothars (one of the theremin-oriented bands I play on my Internet radio program, Spellbound) pointed to a couple excellent bits.  One, the aforementioned Doonesbury strip.  Two, a very good blog on Rolling Stone explaining the main issues the Occupy Wall Street crowd have, which relate largely to corporate bailouts, something that as a Libertarian I can get behind.  But in my reply to those, I warned about the self-broadening phenomenon that initially focused protest movements suffer:

I agree, that was very enlightening (except the part about capital gains rates, I agree with all of it). Unfortunately, I think that the majority of the protestors out there don't know about even half of that stuff. That Rolling Stone article illustrates the issues with any protest movement. In a sense, it's the same reason why the Tea Party got switched onto the GGG track so quickly: When you have protests, you can't pick and choose who shows up. The ugly truth is, there *are* a lot of people attaching themselves to Occupy Wall Street who are driven by envy and entitlement. Not *all* of them. Probably not the organizers. But when you're protesting, you want a good turnout, and you're probably not looking too closely at what every individual is saying, just like the racist nutcases who attached themselves to the Tea Party and ended up dragging it off to Uber Conservative World.

As for the *real* core issue, it takes a lot of fortitude and maturity for a Libertarian to say this: Sometimes regulation is necessary. TARP was stupid, and yet it was pulled off as a bipartisan effort. The housing bubble was several corrupt schemes and political pies in the sky that conspired to harm everyone. All those bailouts are scandalous. I don't begrudge investors for taking risks, but I am against whining when the risks don't work out. But then, it's not that simple: where did the money they gambled come from? The problem with banks making risky investments is that there's a lot of the *99 percent's money* in there. Then what?

Just like it got too easy to throw rocks at the Tea Party, it's going to get too easy to throw rocks at Occupy Wall Street. And pretty much for the same reasons.
My friend's reaction to this was basically, I didn't know what I was talking about.  He said it in a nice way, of course, saying that unless I'd been to Occupy Wall Street protests to talk to those people, it was improper for me to speculate on what they did or did not know about the supposed reasons for the protest.  That's a fair statement.  No doubt, activist Libertarians are accused of the same type of self-centeredness and self-interest that many attribute to the Occupy Wall Street people. 

Then he ruined it by suggesting the Occupy Wall Street crowd was being slandered by the corporate-controlled media.  I had to consciously let that one pass, because truthfully, the only way you can get a conservative bias out of the mainstream media is if your primary source of news is Mother Jones.

The other suggestion, subconscious or otherwise, is the implication that this movement, Occupy Wall Street, is in no way related or similar to that other "movement".  Everyone at Occupy Wall Street protests are sufficiently educated about the systematic cheating built into the financial sector, and its obscene dance with the government, that there are apparently no hangers-on.  There aren't the "typical" left-wing activists behind it all.  This is a true grassroots movement, no Astroturfing here.

Not like the Tea Party.  Oh no, not at all.

Since I am neither a conservative nor a liberal, I can see the absurdity of this suggestion.  You can't have a protest movement without picking up people around the fringes.  The Tea Party started off noble too, but quickly devolved into ultraconservatism in the guise of a grassroots movement.  The progressives, of course, pointed to the badly-written, frequently racist signs some protestors carried and said that the Tea Party were simply showing their true colors.  I'm not a fan of the Tea Party either.

Although I do find it highly ironic that both the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street came from the same place: anger over the financial sector's coziness with the Feds.

We all know what happened to the Tea Party.  Will the same, but opposite, thing happen to Occupy Wall Street?  Another friend posted a link to a document called "The 99 Percent Declaration".  I have no idea if this document is representative of the Occupy Wall Street movement or not, but it does serve to illustrate my point precisely, which is that no matter what you were protesting about when you started, you don't always have control over who joins and where your movement goes after it's too large for you to control.

This "declaration" contains a proposal for a "national general assembly", with three people representing each Congressional district in the nation, for the purpose of "redressing grievances" (this is, of course, from the 1st Amendment -- they're saying that this group will be the vehicle for presenting their proposals to Congress).  The first three sections of the document explain how all this will work mechanically.

Then there is a list of "suggestions" on what grievances might require redressing.  Libertarians will find this a mixed bag.  They include (with my libertarian answer in (parentheses):
    • Banning all campaign contributions and replacing it with taxpayer funding of elections. (No)
    • Reversal of the Citizens United Supreme Court decision, which held that corporations were people, and therefore had Constitutional rights, and that campaign contributions constituted protected speech (Yes)
    • A "separation of corporation and state" concept, including time mandates on how long public servants must forgo corporate gifts from industries they regulated (Maybe)
    • Term limits for Congress (Maybe)
    • Overhaul of the Federal tax code to be a progressive tax with no loopholes, deductions, credits, and subsidies (Maybe)
So, some of these are things that Libertarians could get behind.  Yes, I know many are likely to chafe at the tax thing, but keep in mind that the tax code is so badly wonked out at the moment that nearly anything would be an improvement, and there have been many thoughtful, well-defended arguments for a progressive income tax, so long as it peaks somewhere reasonable (e.g. 25 percent is reasonable, 70 percent is not). Likewise on the corporation thing:  You can't arrest a corporation, put it in jail, or execute it.  Therefore, it's not a person and doesn't have 1st Amendment rights.  It's made up of people, who individually have rights, but a corporation isn't a person, period.

Then, it just goes off the rails:

    • A single-payer universal health care system
    • Environmental protection
    • Debt forgiveness
    • Jobs for all Americans
    • Student loan forgiveness
    • Illegal immigration amnesty
    • Ending of perpetual war for profit.  That's exactly what is says.  Their words, not mine.
    • Public education reform, including elimination of "tenure"
    • Prohibiting companies from outsourcing jobs
    • A section on banking and securities reform (which actually is germane to the debate), including introducing VAT on financials and taxing capital gains as work income.
    • A moratorium on home foreclosures
    • Abolishing the Federal Reserve
    • Abolishing the Electoral College
    • Ending the War in Afghanistan
What's wrong with these?  Well, except for the bit about banking and securities reform, and possibly the Federal Reserve, these have absolutely nothing to do with what Occupy Wall Street is purportedly about.  Instead, it reads as if someone felt that this "99 percent declaration" looked a bit empty, and copy-pasted the Socialist Party platform into it.

I was told that this doesn't happen.  The Occupy Wall Street protestors are protesting Wall Street cheating.  Perhaps this "declaration" is some rogue document, people using Occupy Wall Street imagery for their own ends.  Which then, alas, proves my point precisely.  Regardless of what the organizers want Occupy Wall Street to be, it will inevitably devolve into a sort of "uber-liberalism". 

Just like the Tea Party, but opposite.  Mark my words.