Kuros
Rookie
- Banned
- #1
A Conservative Defense of Occupy Wall Street
I visited the OWS movement in my own town. I received one leaflet from someone who had come South from across the river. It talked about regulatory capture and how corporations use government regulations to shield themselves from free market competition. At the end it had links to libertarian sites like Reason Magazine.
Anyway, its very easy to sympathize with both the proto-Tea Party and OWS, once you realize the essential overlap.
I'd long suspected the financial crisis, policy foibles, chronic unemployment, and general corruption of our politics would sooner or later fuel a measure of social unrest in this country as it has elsewhere. We are not immune to a deadening of hope fused with deep-seated suspicion of having been essentially swindled via policy decisions resulting from broken politics that denies a sense of genuine progress and possibility.
. . .
With Occupy Wall Street, those protective of the status quo may be more rattled than they had by the Tea Party, which in its aim to minimize government's role, carried an agenda convenient with Wall Street's current mood. This is because OWS are directing their ire squarely towards the real elites of the country, rather than their bought-and-paid marionettes sitting in Washington. These elites are seen to have benefited from emergency large-scale existential rescues -- all necessary exigencies to avoid a second Great Depression, our titular leaders would have it, and remind us often -- with little accountability, genuine gratitude or fundamental change emitting from the financial sector post the Government's ministrations.
The point is not that TARP has been profitable. The point is that the TARP windfall (given the fungible nature of cash) also served to better allow for convenient de-levering on the government's dime. Without tracking of TARP funds, or clarity about the Federal Reserve's policy decisions and generous emergency lending operations, one cannot help feeling something has become well rotten in Denmark. Given this backdrop, Occupy Wall Street, cleverly, is squarely aiming its attentions at the realer powers behind the supposed throne -- that is, where the money is.
Beyond this, they are likely smarter, and with more idealistic energy, than their Tea Party analogues. Ranging from younger near anarchists to older protesters with almost Eisenhowerian politics (repulsed by income disparities reminiscent of the "robber baron" era) they are a disparate bunch, to be sure. They represent the majority of the population wallowing in dire economic straits amidst a materially shrinking middle class, chronically elevated unemployment, dangerously poor career prospects for youths alongside sky-rocketing college tuition, and seemingly endless sums of wasted monies on fundamentally flawed wars of choice. To top it off, you have the perceived injustices of TARP and such banker-welfare largesse.
Speaking to several of these protesters today, I met MBA students who cannot find jobs (one even told me his GPA at business school, a respectable 3.2) and law students in a similar predicament. As money gets wasted in epic fashion overseas for desperately flawed "provincial reconstruction teams" in Iraq and risible Government-in-a-Box initiatives in Afghanistan, these kids are staring at mountains of debt and an equally daunting lack of viable employment prospects (the MBA student was underemployed working as a barista at Starbucks). So there are intelligent faces and voices in these crowds--not just aimless rabble-rousers out for a rise--and I can sense this movement becoming more contagious. For instance, I detected among several of the more junior police officers perhaps some degree of sympathy for the protesters.
These are our young, screaming out in need, meriting not kettling and reprimands, but job prospects and dignity.
I visited the OWS movement in my own town. I received one leaflet from someone who had come South from across the river. It talked about regulatory capture and how corporations use government regulations to shield themselves from free market competition. At the end it had links to libertarian sites like Reason Magazine.
Anyway, its very easy to sympathize with both the proto-Tea Party and OWS, once you realize the essential overlap.