Wednesday, October 5, 2011

A Balanced Look At "Occupy Wall Street"

OK, so these protests have managed some impressive numbers, although the 200,000 Kalle Lasn was calling for are still a distant dream. So they’ve managed to display some elements of famine driven-rebellion – forcing the police to force them off the streets, arrest them, and give them tickets, then going right back out there once released. I’m not being sarcastic. Even if the comparisons to Egypt or Yemen where 1000s of people were left dead or permanently disabled at the hands of security forces are downright laughable – it still takes courage to stand up to armed men in uniform and be thrown in jail for a few hours, especially for a lot of these protesters who’ve never been there before (college students, blue-collar workers, domestic journalists, etc.). It’s gone beyond where I predicted, but they still aren’t martyrs, and I’m far from impressed.

Why not? Because I’m impressed by results, not people’s determination or fervor. The latter is what culture teaches us to be impressed by, but I know better. The most sincere and dilligent effort that doesn’t accomplish anything isn’t a “valiant try” – it’s a waste; and usually a good indicator the effortful were as clueless as they were passionate.

With that in mind, let’s examine what these protests and protesters are really capable of accomplishing, as opposed to what they want or claim to want.


The Bad News: The Differences Between A Hippie Autumn and An Arab Spring

Many of the documentations of these events have commented favorably on the event being “leaderless” and not having unifying objectives or demands or even a common enemy except the loosely defined spectre of “Wall Street”. These documentations have also drawn comparisons to the Arab Spring for this reason, where “popular movements” comprised of tribal leaders, intellectuals, workers, religious organizations, and defecting military continue to take down one decayed tyrant after another when they have little in common and diasporas of different, often even conflicting demands. Those movements succeeded despite the lack of a clear unifying agenda and unlikely alliances, so this one will too, right?

Wrong.

These comparisons make a hasty generalization based on commonalities between the protests here and there – which are overstated – and also completely ignore the fundamental differences between both the movements and the societies they are occuring in.


1. There Is No Mubarak

The first problem with comparing these protests to the Arab Spring – or any successful protest really – is the lack of commonality in objectives, even if at first glance they look similar by virtue of diasporous demands and divergent participants. It is true that successful protests are usually united not by common objectives, but a common enemy – divided emphatically what to do after the enemy is, proverbially or literally, dead at their feet, but fervently united in wanting the enemy’s head on a plate. Killing or dethroning said common enemy hence makes a unifying objective, and one that HAS to be accomplished before any of the divergent objectives can be. This leads to myriads of successful revolutions falling apart the moment they succeed – infighting over what to do now that they’ve won leads to massive social and economic turmoil that results in support for a new monopoly on force, instituting a cycle of dictatorship. Occupy Wall Street doesn't need to worry about this happening becase it doesn't even HAVE a common enemy.

I’m slightly impressed with the popular realization of how deeply the corruption on Wall Street cuts into economic prosperity in this country, I’ve been saying it for over a decade. But that mere realization doesn’t equate to a unifying objective. The protesters may agree they dislike Wall Street, but they couldn't be further from agreeing on how to define it or more importantly what to do with it. Most Americans claim to oppose greed, corporate control of politics and the economy, and inequality - including both voters and politicians in both major parties. Where Americans begin to diverge are our ideas of how these terms are defined, and political debates that aren't limited to pre-suppositional insult-slinging ensue over which social policies accomplish these objectives and which ones barricade them.

With that in mind, vaguely defined “Wall Street” and opposition to vaguely defined bad effects it has make a piss poor common objective. Let’s face it; these protests are unlikely to culminate in the torching of the headquarters of Bank of America or Goldman-Sachs. Such acts constitute major felonies and the government would authorize far more brutal force to stop them – not enough Americans are willing to engage in such a risky struggle to overwhelm law enforcement and succeed. And even if by some outworldly turn of events this DID happen, it probably wouldn’t accomplish a thing; I'll explore why shortly. Other than this ill-defined and far-fetched notion of the destruction of Wall Street, these protesters absolutely lack the capacity to reach practical consensus for any objective. There are those who want a bigger but more accountable - stop snickering! - government to regulate banks and make them commoner-friendly; there are those convinced centrist stimulus is actually BAD for Wall Street and who hope to derail the policies that barricade more of it; there are those who want true free market policies that end government aid to banks, abolish or limit the Federal Reserve, and let the banks choke on their own incompetence; there are those who are less concerned with Wall Street and moreso with corporate power and the fall of unions; and there are those just happy to participate in a vaguely defined protest. Each of these groups, or at the least the first 4, fractionate into many more splinters in terms of specific policies and don't fit neatly into any partisan or political affiliation. The more specific these goals become, the more fundamentally incompatible they are with each other, making them unlikely to unite the protesters behind an attainable objective. Recalling from above that what unites successful revolutionaries, the lack of such a common objective presents a significant barricade to the success of these protests.

The Banks Have No Tanks

For those of you wondering why the literal torching of Wall Street wouldn't accomplish any real change - its lack of likelihood notwithstanding - the blunt and simple answer is that Wall Street really ISN'T the problem. Sure, the megabanks are greedy and unaccountable, committing stacks of felonies that Federal enforcement agencies blatantly ignore, and engaging in irresponsible lending then victimizing borrowers and tax-payers to avoid the economic reprisals. But history has demonstrated over and over that this is how corporations will behave when they are shielded from the natural punishing attrition of the free market. Without going again into the details in my previous post of how bailouts and "too big to fail" fairy-tales eliminate any resemblance to a free market, how eliminating competition as the one reliable check on self-interest results in Feudalism and regulations make a piss poor replacement for this check, the problem with Wall Street comes down to not its greed or wealth, but its unhealthy relationship with the US government.

But the protesters have figured that out, right? They aren't protesting profit or greed, they are protesting corporate power! That is what SOME of them are saying, but if that were really their agenda, they'd be occupying Pennsylvania Ave, not Wall Street....

The fundamental difference between the US and Egypt or Yemen that dooms these protests here is our political system that, counter-intuitively enough, doesn't repress these protests. The dictators being overthrown in Arab countries also have unhealthy relationships with powerful wealth interests - many of these foreign. But those dictators rule by force. A mere open forum for dissenting ideas and truly free elections would have had the dictators out on their asses in months, which is why for decades they have raised the costs of dissention with violent repression and barring peaceful opposition from elections. Compliance came from life not being quite bad enough for the average person to risk being mutilated or repressed for challenging the system. Life has worsened sharply by virtue of the economic meltdown, and these costs no longer outweigh the benefits of breaking the system.

The hippies organizing these protests would like to succeed on a similar paradigm; if the police beat them up and scattered them, that may actually precipitate enough rage nationwide to produce overwhelming numbers. But the most they can muster are a few obstructing public thoroughfare and resisting arrest charges - charges that are LEGITIMATE because Lasn and others couldn't shut up about the 'corporatist conspiracy' long enough to go through the proper channels and register their march; proper channels that would have accomodated them like they have 1000s of other protests in NYC.

These protests' fundamental flaw is that, contrary to the Schizophrenia-resembling tirades that compare the US to Egypt or Yemen, our political system is nothing like those countries. Electoral fraud in the US is real - but its impact is so minimal that only the outcomes of the closest elections are thrown by it. The government's unhealthy relationship with special interests is not a conspiracy, but something politicians wave in the faces of their supporters in an attempt to convince us what's good for said special interests is good for us too. As for free expression, the plaintiffs are simply mistaking the general public's lack of desire to hear their psychoses for a centralized squelching of dissention. Large media conglomerates are excessively careful in terms of dissenting expression and limit themselves to views that are mainstream; but this is due to their own self-interest of maintaining a mainstream audience and corporate sponsors rather than some forced centralized agenda. In the United States, you can say anything you want against anyone you want and run for office on any policy agenda you desire - the challenge lies in finding access to an audience and supporters. Any hippie that tells you this is a bad bargain doesn't realize that there simply aren't the resources for forced equal access, and every attempt in history to accomplish such a thing has put a Mubarak in power rather than dethroned one - the person deciding how to define and ration "equal" access becomes a dictator, simple as that.

Proof that Wall Street commands 0 force is evident in that politicians that truly and openly oppose it (Bernie Sanders, Dennis Kucinich, Ron Paul) get elected to the Federal government, no one forcibly squelches these politicians or scholars who agree with them, and mainstream media would gladly give them forum if this were profitable by virtue of accompanying advertisements making comparable revenue to Jersey Shore, Dancing With the Stars, and Monday Night Football - that is, if Americans were willing to give these ideas the time of day. No one needs to get beat up by police to beat Wall Street; all we need is for the costs of complacency to outweight the costs of turning off the mind-numbing garbage we refer to as "popular entertainment" in this country and actually getting involved in politics - giving attentional and financial support to non-mainstream politicians and media. If Americans are too comfortable despite the economic situation to even do THAT, why bother discussing the hypothetical burning of the headquarters of Goldman-Sachs? Even if some group of loons somehow pulls this off; they'd get arrested and tried for terrorism to thunderous applause, and the disastrous banking system would go on unscathed.


The Good News: You Don't Have To Be A Martyr To Win In the US

So, these protests are a waste of time and energy and don't deserve to be taken seriously, right? Well, no, not entirely. I merely present the arguments above to point out that many of the protesters and their fervent supporters are misled, make extremely far-fetched comparisons, and are unaware of what they are likely to accomplish as well as their limitations.

To some extent, the rise of both the right and left fringes in government in recent years in response to the economic situation has represented the very surge in political awareness necessary for ousting Wall Street that I discussed above. These fringes don't agree on much, but they have a clearly defined common objective of derailing economic policy that protects predatory special interests - first and foremost, Wall Street. These protests are merely another manifestation of this surge in awareness - with the participants at least publically acknowledging that Wall Street and its relationship with DC are at the heart of the economic problems we face. Their usefulness lies in their serving as a rallying point - making others aware of the conflict and hopefully motivating them to become less complacent and more active and educated, and hopefully motivated to elect anti-Wall Street politicians of different brands. What isn't going to happen is the fantasy leftist revolution proposed by the more radical of the small band of hippies dancing around Lower Manhattan. These protests deserve to be viewed as a small step in a much larger and more diverse re-alignment than even the diaspora they embody within themselves; particularly, the beginnings of the popular manifestations of a splitting left that I have predicted for over a year now, much like the original Tea Party rallies in 2008-9 were the popular manifestations of the splitting right.