Criticisms of the Occupations of the Financial Districts

I was initially skeptical of Occupy Wall Street when I first heard about it. It seemed like a small gathering of the faithful with yet another pointless short-term expression of protest. But it's inexplicably been allowed to continue and, thanks to the inherent brutality of the NY Pig Department ("Awwww! Some of us ain't all so bad! It hurts to read this anti-cop bigotry! We might get so mad we'll pepper-spray your eyes and then bash your fucking head in!"), it's garnered a lot of publicity. Over half the American public supports Occupy Wall Street. (Contrast that to the 27% that has a favourable impression of the Tea-Bagger Party; essentially tea-baggers liking themselves!) I still wonder what the occupiers in the various cities want to accomplish. I wonder how they imagine that murderous, psychopathic greed-heads will make important concessions to a peaceful sit-in. What I don't wonder about, is whether Occupy Wall Street is right, or whether they're justified. I also don't trouble myself with nonsensical worries as to whether they're violent crazies out to destroy all that is good and true.

"What are they protesting about?" (Asks Glenn Greenwald sarcastically)

Seriously? A massive recession, caused by private greed and criminality, and bailed-out by the public at the cost of education and social programs?

I think becomes clear is that growing wealth and income inequality, by itself, would not spark massive protests if there were a perception that the top 1% (more accurately thought of as the top .1%) had acquired their gains honestly and legitimately. Americans in particular have been inculcated for decades with the belief that even substantial outcome inequality is acceptable (even desirable) provided that it is the by-product of fairly applied rules. What makes this inequality so infuriating (aside from the human suffering it is generating) is precisely that it is illegitimate: it is caused and bolstered by decisively unfair application of laws and rules, by undemocratic control of the political process by the nation’s oligarchs, and by a full-scale shield of immunity that allows them — and only them — to engage in the most egregious corruption and even criminality without any consequence (other than a further entrenching of their prerogatives and ill-gotten gains).

Anyone who expressed difficulty seeing or understanding what motivates these protests revealed many things about themselves. None is flattering.

Speaking of which; here's a comment from a mouth-breathing cretin, "sad but true" at Dr. Dawg's:

An alternative take would be that the occupy movement is just your standard socialist protest rally with limited appeal beyond the usual audience, and that they have generally missed the essential point, that leftist notions of entitlement are themselves largely responsible for the global financial crisis, so that what we see is actually a sort of self-flagellation of the failed offspring of the entitled classes, unable to come to terms with the fact that the promised Obama unicorn was not there waiting for them as a prize for their radical politics. Much of the world will choose to ignore these protests. Each country has its own day of reckoning ahead for the financial arrangements they have tolerated, there may not be much transferability from nation to nation. But a gaggle of incoherent street youth and perennial complainers have no real message and will fade away with the end of the autumn weather. I don't see anyone protesting links between big corporations and the government of the PRC, for example. Why not? Wrong ideology! But that's where the problems really exist, the draining out of wealth to the hive state organized by socialism is what we need to fight against, not wealth itself. In any case, the entitled classes want to be wealthy without working for it. That's a dead end under any kind of political leadership.

I replied to the dunce to the effect that, actually, Wall Street caused the financial crisis, and that millions of US-Americans are angry not because their welfare cheques haven't grown at twice the rate of inflation, but because they're being downsized, they're losing their homes, they're working several shitty jobs at once, they're drowning in medical and student-loan debt, and their whole political class is comprised of the puppets of the same banksters who caused the recession that finally pulled the plug on their ability to survive. (This "sad but true" character would probably fit in quite well with the "53%'rs" whose motto seems to be: "We're chumps, but we haven't yet been destroyed by health care bills so it's all good.")

Here's Chris Hedges asking some more questions to try to help shit-heads such as "sad but true" focus:

What kind of nation is it that spends far more to kill enemy combatants and Afghan and Iraqi civilians than it does to help its own citizens who live below the poverty line? What kind of nation is it that permits corporations to hold sick children hostage while their parents frantically bankrupt themselves to save their sons and daughters? What kind of nation is it that tosses its mentally ill onto urban heating grates? What kind of nation is it that abandons its unemployed while it loots its treasury on behalf of speculators? What kind of nation is it that ignores due process to torture and assassinate its own citizens? What kind of nation is it that refuses to halt the destruction of the ecosystem by the fossil fuel industry, dooming our children and our children’s children?

The present political-economic system has failed and is failing. And it is killing the planet. Even if the OWS protesters are a despised minority (and it appears that they are not), they are still right, and we ignore them at our specie's peril.