I've been trying to understand what the occupiers of Wall Street are struggling for and what they seek. Even their own websites and statements are not very helpful. A recent blog post by Joel McDurmon over at
American Vision is well-worth reading. McDurmon is fair and judicious in his analysis. A few quotations to whet the appetite...
Steve Wynn’s alleged “big rant” against Occupy Wall Street actually contains a balanced insight into the movement: That group is quite diverse. . . . There are people in there that think that government should give them more just because they are alive. There are people who are opposing government spending. There are people there that are opposing bailouts.
This is more honest than, for example, Ann Coulter’s dismissal of the whole as a parasitic “Flea Party”—though it does have that element in it pretty thick. Her article is certainly not without a good point, and in her latest essay on the topic she exposes a real problem: ideologically-driven ignorance and hypocrisy. There are a lot of simply uninformed people in the movement who have a good idea of corporate corruption and undue influence—yet these people are unequipped (thanks largely to their government education) to express their ideas by anything but the misguided attack on “capitalism” and “greed,” and a call for socialistic remedies. It’s the informed liberals who know better and are trying to leverage this ignorance are the real enemies here. Wynn catches this, too: “But if it’s a politician that does it, or a union leader, then it represents something much more pernicious. It represents a deliberate misleading of the public.” I think it is uncritical of Coulter to ignore this distinction between the mere dupes and the real creeps.
Then there is this on greed and envy...
Yes, of course there is greed, and it can have genuinely negative results in business. But it is nowhere near a socially destructive as its wicked sister Envy. And Envy is what I really see in many of the protesters out there—especially the ones trying to leverage government socialism to “tax the rich” and take for themselves. It is nothing less than envy that says, “This person has more than me, I don’t have as much as I want, therefore I should take from them and give to me. And when I can’t have what I want, I will lash out and destroy.” Thus the calls for violent revolution and the defecating on police cars, etc., which are just glimpses of Envy-bred violence. When Envy grips a political system, it destroys and enslaves societies.
McDurmon looks at how the Occupy movement started and how it has developed. Its beginning was not all bad but it quickly moved to folly.
This is closer to what I first heard the movement had originated as. It was not a mere whine over corporate wealth, but about corporate corruption. It was a group of kids really ticked, and righteously so, because big bank representatives used scare tactics and threats of martial law to frighten Congress into passing bailouts—bailouts to save the banks which had simply done terrible business, should have been closed and led by the nose through bankruptcy court, but instead were deemed “too big to fail.” It was a bailout for absolute failures and frauds. And as soon as the bailout money came in, these same jokers paid themselves tens of millions of dollars in bonuses for having done such great business.
Of course they had. They conned the public out of hundreds of billions. That’s what they always have done; and they did it one more time. Why not pay themselves a handsome bonus for a job well done, once again? It’s business as usual.
If OWS would merely focus on this across the board, and drop the socialistic stuff, it would gain the support of the liberty movement and probably a lot more; and the true causes of the problems—the corrupt corporations, the lobbies, the corrupt politicians, and the Federal Reserve counterfeiters—would shake in their boots. But the message has been corrupted because it was begun by leftists, joined mostly by leftists, and can think of nothing but a leftist answer. Thus, one group amongst them that is trying to create a list of demands has arrived as something like a $1.5 Trillion New Deal package where 25 million people go to work directly for the government. Are you kidding? And how fast did you want to become like Greece? So quickly does liberalism turn justice into envy and all is lost.
