Occupy Wall-Street, 1960’s Redux?

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People are taking to the streets to occupy Wall Street.  I don’t particularly like Wall Street because these guys are a bunch of cheats and lairs.  There is nothing free market about what happens on Wall Street.  Wall Street is the largest benefactor of government largess which I should not have to go into but, I guess I will because it is very important for people to understand.  Wall Street is not the free market.  They get bailed out by the government at every turn and make the public pay for their risky bets when they go bad.  So what happens when the government does this?  Why, Wall Street speculators make even riskier bets because they can’t loose!  You and I will always and forever bail them out!  What a great system!  What about the SEC and other regulator agencies?   Why, once again, they increase Wall Street profits.  The SEC is dominated by Wall Street insiders and give the profiteers on Wall Street the illusion of legitimacy.  After all, people kept giving Madoff money because the SEC said that there was no fraud going on.  What a great way to defraud people?  Just set up a massive ponzi scheme and have the regulators tell people that it is all legit!  Also, let’s not forget the biggest benefactor of money printing, uhh I mean quantitative easing, is Wall Street.   New money created by the Fed goes to Wall Street banks first which then goes into other speculative areas.  Why do you think that the Stock Market went up so much during QE2?  That run up was a government inflated bubble in stocks.  When the Heroin drip was removed, Wall Street crashed (as your humble author predicted).  As you can see Wall Street hand’s are dirtier than hell. DC and New York are just revolving doors for the biggest creeps in the country.

So Wall Street is guilty but, what about these protesters?  What are they all about?  Like most large movements there is not much unity of message.  For that fact alone, it should lose some credibility.  For a movement to succeed it must have a unifying message.  The same was true for the Tea Party, they did not have a clear message either.  Many said that they wanted smaller government but, wanted Social Security, Medicare, and the continuation of the “Forever Wars” to centrally plan backwater countries around the world.

Just like with the Tea Party, the media tries to spin “Occupy Wall Street” to suit their own agenda, with the most obvious examples being Fox News and MSNBC.  The neocon right tries to portray these people as a bunch of young hipster communists.  The modern left tries to portray these people as a wide swath of the population that wants the “Jobs Bill” to be passed or some such nonsense.  I have not been to a protest myself, but, I don’t think that either portrayal is accurate.  There seems to be a hodge podge of different groups at these protests to include libertarians, tea partiers , Ron Paul types, and Alex Jones fans. They have not only marched on Wall Street but, they have marched on Federal Reserve banks and government buildings around the country.  While many might be socialists, it is not everyone by a long shot. This does not make for a good news story. And so the media portrays all these people as the same type.  Here are some videos of the people I was talking about.  Alex Jones, Ron Paul people, Jesse Ventura, and even well spoken Hip-Hop artists that identify with the Tea Party?  There is much more going on here than meets first glance, which is a good thing.

Will this movement be effective at influencing policy and the direction of the country?  I think that has yet to be seen.  Movements like this are usually co-opted by the political elites.  We can see how the Tea Party became co-opted by the Republican establishment.  Will the same thing happen to Occupy Wall Street?  To be honest, it might not even get that far because there are some obvious Marxist influences (at least as it is being portrayed in the media).  People might like talking about socialism at the local coffee shop but, politicians do not loudly proclaim themselves to be socialists.  Rightly or wrongly, there is too much baggage with the term.  For the socialists out there, it will never happen overtly here.  There will never be a $20 minimum wage as expressed by occupywallstreet.org.  If socialism was ever going to come to America, it would have come in the 1930’s when it had its most intellectual merit. Even the labor party in Britain has dropped nationalization of industry as one of its objectives in the 1990s. If Europe no longer has the will for socialism, how do you expect it to happen here? Whether you like it or not, socialism is a dying ideology.  It has been dying for fifty years, it’s just that the socialists have not realized it.  Socialists call themselves progressive because they think history will inevitably move into their ideological direction.  They are wrong.  Socialism as an idea will become like all the other silly ideas of the past: forgotten. Like polytheism, socialism will be a historical curiosity and nothing more.

People like this don’t take over countries. They might scare the hell out of Glen Beck but, the working class will never follow them.  As Murry Rothbard has said, it is when middle age working people leave their shops and stores and take the streets that true revolution happens.  We are a long way from that.

 

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