After a slow start, the liberal media have made up for lost time cheerleading for and promoting Occupy Wall Street demonstrators and their regional spawns, comparing the movement to the Arab Spring and describing it as the Tea Party of the left. Both of these allusions are absurd.
The popular revolutions in Egypt and Libya overthrew dictatorial regimes that repressed freedom and rigged elections. The current crowd of protesters is a hodgepodge of American lefties whose presidential and congressional candidates dominated a free and fair election in 2008. There’s no dictatorship here. And the Obama administration has no need to control the media, most of whom are enthralled with his persona and liberal agenda.
What Occupy Wall Street really opposes is the outcome of democratic elections in 2010 when their side lost and Republicans had the audacity to win a majority in the U.S. House, giving them control of merely one-half of one-third of our federal government.
The Tea Party movement is the exact opposite of Occupy Wall Street. Tea Partyers favor individual liberty, a free-market economy and limited government. The Occupy protesters are fundamentally collectivist, anti-capitalist, committed to unlimited government and cradle-to-grave welfarism.
The Tea Party movement was a spontaneous response to Democrat and Obama overreach. In the 2008 election, the left came to power riding a tide of anti-Bush sentiment compounded by the financial crash just before the election. Since 2010, theleft has been on its heels defending the failed president they elected.
The idea to occupy Wall Street was hatched by “Adbusters,” an anti-consumerist, anti-capitalist Vancouver magazine. The protest is a strategy shift to retake the offensive via a contrived counterattack diverting attention from the Obama disaster. This time the bogeyman isn’t George W. Bush, it’s a cartoonish and nebulous characterization of “Wall Street, corporations and greed.” This is right out of the Saul Alinsky playbook. The short-term goal is to get Obama and Democrats re-elected. The long-term goal is socialist utopia.
Check out the You Tube video featuring Nelini Stamp, a professional community organizer (just like Obama) for the Working Families Party, a front group for ACORN, the SEIU and other labor unions. She brags about her work in organizing, mobilizing and expanding the Occupy Wall Street movement. With recruiting help from and unions joining the show, this is another version of the staged “occupation” of the Wisconsin statehouse earlier this year. In the smart phone/social media era, spontaneity isn’t what it used to be.
Demonstrators claim to speak for “99 percent” of Americans against the wealthy 1 percent. To buy that, you’d have to believe that 99 percent of Americans are Marxists and idiots. As measured by the dramatic GOP victory in 2010 and Obama’s plunging approval numbers, swing-voting independents are abandoning him and Democrats in droves. The Occupy Wall Street collective is confused about what it wants but it wants it now! Some of the loonier demands from its independent thinkers: Striking all existing public and private debt from the books across the “entire planet”; elimination of all international borders; free college education; a guaranteed “living wage” for all regardless of employment; an end to free trade; trillions in additional spending for infrastructure and ecological restoration; and ending the fossil fuel economy.
Much like the violent demonstrations in Greece and London by unionists, government employees and leftist organizations, Occupy Wall Street is demonstrating against the collapse of runaway government spending and the welfare state in the face of economic reality. One of their many insipid signs declares, “We want our voices to be heard.” They will be, along with everyone else’s when the votes are counted in 2012. That’s the way we do it in our constitutional republic, not through mobs engaging in political street theater. And that’s when we’ll find out if they really represent “99 percent” of Americans.
Freelance columnist Mike Rosen’s radio show airs weekdays from 9 a.m. to noon on 850-KOA.
