While much of the occupiers’ anger at the “banksters” was typical talk about “greed,” the gripes almost always included something about undue influence. Anthony Hassan, an out-of-work construction worker from Norfolk, Va., sounded a common note, pointing out that bailed-out banks “take some of the money we’ve given them, and they hire lobbyists.” An organic farmer who traveled down from Vermont who called himself Mack (and would not give me his full name) said “we’re at a point where the people with the most money have the most influence.”
They’re right. It does undermine our democracy and harm our economy when hiring a former Senate majority leader, for instance, can be the best investment a company ever makes. Wealthy special interests do dictate policy too much, regardless of which party is in power. I don’t know who made the sign under which I slept Sunday night, but I agreed with its thrust: “Separation of Business & State.” The back read “I can’t afford a lobbyist.”
My agreement with these folks went no further, however, than a common diagnosis of the problem. Their proposed solutions — more campaign finance restrictions and curbs on the freedom of firms to lobby — showed disregard for the freedom of speech. They also don’t seem to understand that getting government more involved in the economy always gets business more involved in government. Outside the small minority of Ron Paul supporters at the park, none of the occupiers saw smaller government as the answer to cronyism and corporatism.
Hard for people who want handouts to be for smaller government. In that, they are diametrically opposed to the Tea Party.
…some useful thoughts. Bottom line, it’s not a distraction from Justice Department scandals, and it’s not really anything new. It’s just part of the war they’ve been waging, and we’ve been pretending isn’t happening, against us for over three decades.
Do you consider the Iranian plot to bomb a U.S. restaurant an act of war? If not, would it have been an act of war had the plot succeeded?
Are you still willing to negotiate with Iran without preconditions? Are you still willing to grant Mahmoud Ahmadinejad entry into the U.S.? Do you maintain that your failure to support the Iranian Green Movement in 2009 was not a significant mistake?
In light of the Iranians’ willingness to plant a bomb in Washington, D.C., do you now consider a nuclear Iran unacceptable? Is a military option to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon off the table?
…it is just not the protesters’ apparent allergy to capitalism and suspicion of normal democratic politics that should raise concerns. It is also their temperament. The protests have made a big deal of the fact that they arrive at their decisions through a deliberative process. But all their talk of “general assemblies” and “communiqués” and “consensus” has an air of group-think about it that is, or should be, troubling to liberals. “We speak as one,” Occupy Wall Street stated in its first communiqué, from September 19. “All of our decisions, from our choices to march on Wall Street to our decision to camp at One Liberty Plaza were decided through a consensus process by the group, for the group.” The air of group-think is only heightened by a technique called the “human microphone” that has become something of a signature for the protesters. When someone speaks, he or she pauses every few words and the crowd repeats what the person has just said in unison. The idea was apparently logistical—to project speeches across a wide area—but the effect when captured on video is genuinely creepy.
True liberals certainly should be. But most people who call themselves that these days aren’t. And of course, it’s hard to take very seriously anyone who thinks that Dodd-Frank is “the best liberal hope for improving democratically regulated capitalism.”
The narrative that came out of these events—largely propagated by government officials and accepted by a credulous media—was that the private sector’s greed and risk-taking caused the financial crisis and the government’s policies were not responsible. This narrative stimulated the punitive Dodd-Frank Act—fittingly named after Congress’s two key supporters of the government’s destructive housing policies. It also gave us the occupiers of Wall Street.